as is popularly supposed.

Chiefest among the misconceptions of primitive life, which make
difficult any dramatic presentation of it, is the notion that all
human contacts are accompanied by the degree of emotional stress that
obtains only in the most complex social organizations. We are always
hearing, from the people farthest removed from them, of "great
primitive passions," when in fact what distinguishes the passions of
the tribesmen from our own is their greater liability to the pacific
influences of nature, and their greater freedom from the stimulus of
imagination. What among us makes for the immensity of emotion, is the
great weight of accumulated emotional tradition stored up in
literature and art, almost entirely wanting in the camps of the
aboriginals. There the two greatest themes of modern drama, love and
ambition, are modified, the one by the more or less communal nature
of tribal labor, the other by the plain fact that in the simple,
open-air life of the Indian the physical stress of sex is actually
much less than in conditions called civilized.

When the critics are heard talking of "drama of great primitive
passions," what they mean is great barbaric passions, passions far
enough along in the process of socialization to be subject to the
interactions of wealth, caste, and established religion, and still
free from the obligation of politeness. But the life of the American
Indian provides no such conditions, and, moreover, in the factor
which makes conspicuously for the degree of complication called Plot,
is notably wanting,--I mean in the factor of Privacy. Where all the
functions of living are carried on in the presence of the community,
or at the best behind the thin-walled, leafy huts, human relations
become simplified to a degree difficult for our complexer habit to
comprehend. The only really great passions--great, I mean, in the
sense of being dramatically possible--are communal, and find their
expression in the dance which is the normal vehicle of emotional
stress.

In _The Arrow-Maker_ the author, without dwelling too much on tribal
peculiarities, has attempted the explication of this primitive
attitude toward a human type common to all conditions of society. The
particular mould in which the story is cast takes shape from the
manner of aboriginal life in the Southwest, anywhere between the
Klamath River and the Painted Desert; but it has been written in vain
if the situation has not also wor