roism-The age of prose-The microscope versus PAGE CHAPTER X THE NEWER TENDENCIES The new age-Evolution in form-Revolution 291 "The critic will be a small genius, the artist a great genius; the one will have the strength of ten, the other of a hundred; the former, in order to raise himself to the altitude of the latter, will have need of his assistance; but the nature of both must be the same. In order to judge Dante, we must raise ourselves to his level: let it be well understood that empirically we are not Dante, nor Dante we; but in that moment of judgment and contemplation, our spirit is one with that of the poet, and in that moment we and he are one single thing. In this identity alone resides the possibility that our little souls can unite with the great souls, and become great with them, in the universality of the spirit."-BENEDETTO CROCE. "What is the problem of culture? To live and to work in the noblest strivings of one's nation and of humanity. Not only, therefore, to receive and to learn, but to live. To free one's age and people from wrong tendencies, to have one's ideal before one's eyes."-FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. "Art knows the true ideal of our times, and tends towards it."-LYOF TOLSTOY. THE contemplation of any period of human activity at first sight reveals a vast network of intersecting interests. We observe a web interwoven with apparently independent threads of ideas and passions, of ideals and sentiments. This is especially the case in the domain of esthetics, where evolutionary process is continually retarded, arrested, or accelerated by the pristine energy of the human factor. Every artist imparts the illusion of individuality. The ego, conditioned by race, place, and moment, seems to operate within the prescribed circle of his immediate limitation. Yet viewed in historical perspective, the work of art inevitably falls into definite position in the creation of the cosmic pattern of world literature. The tragi-comedy of Ibsen, the symbolist drama of Maeterlinck, the sociologic comedy of Shaw, the motionless pictures of Tchekhov, the lyric romances of D'Annunzio, the thesismelodramas of Echegaray, the temperamental comediettas of Schnitzler, significant as illustrations, co-operate in bodying forth the variegated design of the contemporary drama. A work of literary criticism is a true work of art only on the condition that it disclose in full illumination the guiding and shaping principles which express the true spiritual meaning of the epoch. Beneath the welter and confusion of conflicting and apparently dissociate literary phenomena, criticism must reveal the life forces pulsing through the literature of to-day. Only thus may the critic render intelligible and coherent the contemporary epoch in human consciousness. Only thus may the critic truly appraise literature as an organic expression of the growth of the human spirit. A critical survey of the literature of the past three-quarters of a century or less projects into the light the vast debt that literature viewed as a factor in national culture and world civilization owes to science and the doctrine of evolution. To give precision to our ideas, let us especially direct our attention to the contemporary drama, that branch of literature which is the subject of our inquiry. In the world of industry, the barriers |