mendous dramatic stress is intensely felt. It puts one there—in ancient not modern Palestine. I am there—with Judas, with Peter, with Lazarus. I feel within myself the suspicious spleen of the high priest, the impotent deprecation of Pilate, the anguish of Procla, the nonchalance of the Roman soldiers gambling for the seamless garment, all the troubled confusion of blind men, lepers, and possessed men healed, the mocking scoffs and panic blood-lust of the rabble—and the stark solitude of one crying: "It is finished." As for the question whether this was indeed the Son of God who was crucified, at the end of the play one is facing it again with freshly astonished mind and senses, like the centurion standing there aghast at the foot of the cross. I believe this to be a great tragedy, greatly conceived and written with austere sincerity. When it is adequately produced, as I hope it may be, it should affect us as the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles affected the Greeks—religiously.
Socrates argued all night on one occasion to prove that the type of mind best adapted for tragedy is also the type of mind best adapted for comedy. If you reflect just a little about "The Dark Hours" you recover from your first surprise at the thought of its coming out of a mind which had just produced "The Old Soak's History of the World." In a sense which Charles Lamb understood when he shocked Carlyle by expressing regret that the Royalists didn't hang Milton, the Crucifixion, the execution of Socrates—all such incidents in history may be conceived of as tragic and stupendous jokes. In order fully to appreciate them one must be endowed with a comic poet's comprehension of the immensity of human folly, which is the prime source of all tragedy. To put the matter
