ic of _Atalanta in Calydon_, but we
are often arrested by grim echoes from the actual Greek, apt
translations, as they might be, from an existing original.

But though Mr. Hewlett has been clever enough to adapt the technique
of Greek poets to his own purpose in poetical drama, nevertheless in
his treatment of subject, in thought and feeling, we may see, rather
by his defects than by his excellences, how entirely modern he is. In
_Minos, King of Crete_, the first play in his trilogy _The Agonists_,
we may find ourselves at the outset not a little irritated by his
habit of stage-managing with a view to a public that likes sensational
and scenic effects. Shakespeare used thunder and lightning at the
beginning of _The Tempest_, but only a very modern modern poet could
use these devices as an introduction to tragedy. But it is more to the
point that his treatment of Pasiphae is not only one that would have
been impossible to the Greeks, but would have been impossible to any
literary age which had not been so led away by modern theories of
realism as to believe that any sort of monstrosity, being conceived as
actual, might be made also an object of sympathetic emotion. Pasiphae
is a creature of monstrous, unnatural lust, so vile, and so inhuman in
its vileness, that it is impossible to conceive that human sympathy
should be enlisted in her affair, as if it were a normal and humanly
pitiable lapse from virtue. No Greek tragedian ever did attempt, or
ever would have attempted, to arouse pity for a creature whose
grotesque story expressed the Greek abomination for Phoenician
barbarism. Nothing but the Philistine, or in this case Phoenician,
realism of the twentieth century, can account for Mr. Hewlett's
attempt to elicit fine feeling from an abnormal and nauseous incident.

It has always seemed to me that the transition from the Victorian Age
to the experimental age which followed it was marked by the South
African War. For a dozen years before that war there had been restless
movements in the very heart of the nation; the men who were to be most
conspicuous at the close of the century were leavening the nation or
being leavened themselves. Joseph Chamberlain appeared as the
embodiment of the transitional spirit in the political arena. In
journalism the movement took shape in the person of Alfred Harmsworth.
In literature the man of the moment was Rudyard Kipling. These three
fateful embodiments of the Time-Spirit seemed to do