L30 THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUATIONS purely technical, and of infinitely varied creations, that all our literary tendencies seem to me to be con- verging. In that direction proceed Flaubert and Zola, those rugged pinoeers, Ibsen, Strindberg, and all writers deliberately unmindful of their libraries, as the Hellenes were of barbarian literature; there moves Maeterlinck, having reduced action to the development of a single idea; Verlaine, delivering from conventional rules true rhythm, which makes for itself its own rules; Mallarm£, prince of ellipse, clarifying syntax and expelling clouds of our little parasite words and tattered formulae; in that direction Moreas calls us, but without freeing himself, unfortunately, from the Italianism of our so- called Renaissance; all these, and others not less glorious, a whole new generation springing up, futurists, "loups," cubists, seem to me to be seeking the same goal, the final abolition of all absolute authority, even that of Nature and of our sciences her interpreters; and the erection upon its debris of simple logic, of an art solely technical, and thus capable of revealing an unknown system of harmony; in brief, an artists' art. In literature, in dramatic literature which is the special subject of our consideration, the investigation of Proportion of which I have above spoken will show us the various "general methods" of presenting any situation whatever. Each one of these "general methods," containing a sort of canon applicable to all situations, will constitute for us an "order" analogous to the orders of architecture, and which, like them, will take its place with other orders, in a dramatic "system." But the systems, in their turn, will come together under certain rubrics yet more general, com- parisons of which will furnish us many a subject for reflection. In that which we might call Enchantment, there meet, oddly enough, systems as far apart in origin as Indian drama; certain comedies of Shakespeare ("A Midsummer Night's Dream;" "The Tempest"), the "fiabesque" genre of Gozzi, and "Faust;" the Mystery brings together the works of Persia, Thespis and the pre-Aeschyleans, "Prometheus," the book of "Job,"
