commands:  duty calls, and we have to obey the summons.  Under this dual influence has perforce been formed an outward layer of feelings and ideas which make for permanence, aim at becoming common to all men, and cover, when they are not strong enough to extinguish it, the inner fire of individual passions.  The slow progress of mankind in the direction of an increasingly peaceful social life has gradually consolidated this layer, just as the life of our planet itself has been one long effort to cover over with a cool and solid crust the fiery mass of seething metals.  But volcanic eruptions occur.  And if the earth were a living being, as mythology has feigned, most likely when in repose it would take delight in dreaming of these sudden explosions, whereby it suddenly resumes possession of its innermost nature.  Such is just the kind of pleasure that is provided for us by drama.  Beneath the quiet humdrum life that reason and society have fashioned for us, it stirs something within us which luckily does not explode, but which it makes us feel in its inner tension.  It offers nature her revenge upon society.  Sometimes it makes straight for the goal, summoning up to the surface, from the depths below, passions that produce a general upheaval.  Sometimes it effects a flank movement, as is often the case in contemporary drama; with a skill that is frequently sophistical, it shows up the inconsistencies of society; it exaggerates the shams and shibboleths of the social law; and so indirectly, by merely dissolving or corroding the outer crust, it again brings us back to the inner core.  But, in both cases, whether it weakens society or strengthens nature, it has the same end in view:  that of laying bare a secret portion of ourselves,—­what might be called the tragic element in our character.

This is indeed the impression we get after seeing a stirring drama.  What has just interested us is not so much what we have been told about others as the glimpse we have caught of ourselves—­a whole host of ghostly feelings, emotions and events that would fain have come into real existence, but, fortunately for us, did not.  It also seems as if an appeal had been made within us to certain ancestral memories belonging to a far-away past—­memories so deep-seated and so foreign to our present life that this latter, for a moment, seems something unreal and conventional, for which we shall have to serve a fresh apprenticeship.  So it is indeed a deeper reality that drama draws up from beneath our superficial and utilitarian attainments, and this art has the same end in view as all the others.