minds. To have even perfectly the thoughts that can be
weighed, the knowledge that can be got from books, the precision that can
be learned at school, to belong to any aristocracy, is to be a little pool
that will soon dry up. A people alone are a great river; and that is why I
am persuaded that where a people has died, a nation is about to die.

1903.

EMOTION OF MULTITUDE

I have been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been
wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems
necessary if one is to succeed on the Modern Stage. It came into my head
the other day that this construction, which all the world has learnt from
France, has everything of high literature except the emotion of multitude.
The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude from its chorus, which
called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy, much-enduring Odysseus, and
all the gods and heroes to witness, as it were, some well-ordered fable,
some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play
delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus it has
created an art where poetry and imagination, always the children of
far-off multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than
the mere will. This is why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is
so often a little rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the
work of the imagination. The Shakespearean Drama gets the emotion of
multitude out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow
upon the wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of King Lear
less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a
whole evil time. Lear's shadow is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful
children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond
shadow till it has pictured the world. In _Hamlet_, one hardly notices, so
subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet's father and the sorrow
of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes,
whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the plays, or in all
but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main plot working itself
out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly calling up before us
the image of multitude. Ibsen and Maeterlinck have on the other hand
created a new form, for they get multitude from the Wild Duck in the
Attic, or from the Crown at the bottom of the Fountain