lent than Terence's, but quite as robust and wilful as Shakspere's; and the Spanish playwright made the best of the situation, disclosing his marvelous inventiveness and his splendid productivity in countless pieces of the widest variety. In his apologetic poem on the "New Art of Making Plays," he pretended that he composed these pieces against his own better knowledge of the so-called "rules of the drama," and that before he sat down to write, he was careful to put Terence and Plautus out of the room; but he was probably too completely his own contemporary, too much a man of his time and of his race, to have been forced to any great sacrifices of his artistic code. In reality, he seems to have felt no awkward restraint as a result of his desire to please his public; and apparently he was able to express himself freely and fully in his plays, even if he also took care to have them conform to the likings of the populace of Madrid. So Shakspere was careful to have his plays conform to the likings of the populace of London; and he also was able to use his dramas for the amplest self-expression. Here we may observe once more that the true artist unhesitatingly accepts the conditions imposed on him, whatever they may be, and that he is often able to turn the stumblingblock in his path into a stepping-stone to higher things.

Even if a Greek dramatic poet could by his prophetic power have foreseen the potency of modern romantic love, he could never have dared a "Romeo and Juliet," because the contemporary spectators would have failed to understand the swift and sudden emotion which is its mainspring. And, on the other hand, the Greek dramatic poets dealt with many a motive with which the modern audience can have no sym

pathy. For us the beautiful pathos of the "Alcestis" of Euripides is spoilt by the contemptible alacrity with which the husband allows his devoted wife to die for him, although his conduct did not seem at all reprehensible to the Greeks, who held so exalted an opinion of the value of the young male citizen to the state, that they saw no impropriety in his accepting his wife's lovely sacrifice of herself. The "Antigone" of Sophocles turns also on a Greek sentiment very remote from our modern feeling, a sentiment which has to be explained to us before we can grasp its significance or understand its importance to the noble heroine. And again, in the "Medea" of Euripides, the wrathful heroine's slaughter of her children to revenge herself for their father's abject desertion of her seems to us unendurably repugnant.

At the period when the Homeric poems were composed, there still survived among the Greeks a belief that the sacrifice of a virgin before a fleet set sail would bring favorable winds. At the period when the Attic tragedies were written, this superstition had probably passed away; but the memory of it lingered. The Athenian spectators who sat in the theater of Dionysus were well aware that their ancestors had held this belief; and therefore they were not unwilling to accept the legend of Iphigenia, when it was presented in a play by Euripides. But we moderns can have no sympathy with a superstition like this; and we do not easily understand how it could ever have been accepted. And as a result, Racine and Goethe have wasted their efforts trying to interest us in a subject which is to us inconceivable, not to say, abhorrent.

Shakspere may not himself have had any belief

either in witches or in ghosts, but he knew that his contemporaries had no doubt about these weird creatures and these spectral beings. And he had therefore no hesitation in making effective use of them whenever occasion served. No modern dramatist dealing with a modern theme would dare to invoke the aid of a ghost or of a witch, because the belief in them is no longer a common possession of his contemporaries. Nowadays, we may be willing to accept stranger things, telepathy, for example, mental healing, and the like; but we are not willing to believe that the slaying of a maiden will have any influence upon the storms of the sea, or that a sheeted ghost will walk the earth to bid his son avenge his taking off or to fright his murderer with his gory locks.

It would not be difficult to adduce examples of the effect exerted on the dramatist, not by the lapse of time, but by the change of country, by the divergence of racial points of view even in the same period. For instance, in Sudermann's strong drama, "Heimat," known to us by the name of the heroine Magda, the unbending rigor of the aged father and his violent harshness are almost repulsive to us in America, where we are not accustomed to yield so blind a deference to the head of the family as the old colonel insists upon in Germany. But there is no need to multiply these examples, since we all know the divergent attitudes of different peoples toward the social organization. In this divergence we can find the explanation why more than one excellent play is little known outside the land of its birth. The finest of French comedies of the nineteenth century is the "Gendre de M. Poirier" of Augier and Sandeau; and although it has been trans