The drama, then, is the goal to which everything in modern poetry leads. Paradise Lost is a drama before it is an epic.  As we know, it first presented itself to the poet’s imagination in the first of these forms, and as a drama it always remains in the reader’s memory, so prominent is the old dramatic framework still beneath Milton’s epic structure!  When Dante had finished his terrible Inferno, when he had closed its doors and nought remained save to give his work a name, the unerring instinct of his genius showed him that that multiform poem was an emanation of the drama, not of the epic; and on the front of that gigantic monument, he wrote with his pen of bronze:  Divina Commedia.

Thus we see that the only two poets of modern times who are of Shakespeare’s stature follow him in unity of design They coincide with him in imparting a dramatic tinge to all our poetry, like him, they blend the grotesque with the sublime, and, far from standing by themselves in the great literary ensemble that rests upon Shakespeare, Dante and Milton are, in some sort, the two supporting abutments of the edifice of which he is the central pillar, the buttresses of the arch of which he is the keystone.

Permit us, at this point, to recur to certain ideas already suggested, which, however, it is necessary to emphasize.  We have arrived, and now we must set out again.

On the day when Christianity said to man “Thou art twofold, thou art made up of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal, one carnal, the other ethereal, one enslaved by appetites, cravings and passions, the other borne aloft on the wings of enthusiasm and reverie—­in a word, the one always stooping toward the earth, its mother, the other always darting up toward heaven, its fatherland”—­on that day the drama was created.  Is it in truth, anything other than that contrast of every day, that struggle of every moment, between two opposing principles which are ever face to face in life, and which dispute possession of man from the cradle to the tomb?

The poetry born of Christianity, the poetry of our time, is, therefore, the drama, the real results from the wholly natural combination of two types, the sublime and the grotesque, which meet in the drama, as they meet in life and in creation.  For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries.  Hence, it is time to say aloud—­and it is here above all that exceptions prove the rule—­that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

On taking one’s stand at this point of view, to pass judgment on our petty conventional rules, to disentangle all those scholastic labyrinths, to solve all those trivial problems which the critics of the last two centuries have laboriously built up about the art, one is struck by the promptitude with which the question of the modern stage is made clear and distinct.  The drama has but to take a step to break all the spider’s webs with which the militia of Lilliput have attempted to fetter its sleep.