It was an Irish colleen, accepting matrimony as a complete submergence of individuality, who replied to a friend dwelling on the dangers of a long ocean trip to be taken by the new bride and groom: “And why should I be afraid, sure ’tis his loss if anything happen to me now!” She was the counterpart of the Irish lad who sang under similar circumstances, “I’m not myself at all.” There you have the complete altruism resulting from the perfect union of matrimony. There is the antithesis of individualism, and such matrimonial communism is far better for every one than any cry of “wife for wife’s sake” or “husband for husband’s sake.” It is quite evident that no artist can exempt himself from responsibility as though his art were a deity. If a picture or statue or poem would be an incentive to murder or suicide, the artist must stay his hand. He may not manufacture bombs for soul destruction, no matter how artistic the container, even if someone else is to supply the detonator. A lie in beautiful language is a more ugly lie. Recent pretended upholders of the Volstead law have printed an emphatic warning on compounds of their manufacture: “Do not add such an ingredient or this compound will violate the law.” May an artist naïvely dissociate himself from responsibility by stating: “Do not add human nature to my art-product or you will violate the law”? Were the artist a real creator, he would have to forecast results and be dominated by a purpose. Nor may the artist, like God, permit evil, because no artist has omnipotence and infinite wisdom and justice and mercy, governing the permission of evil and guaranteeing good as the final result. May a man who owns a wild tiger of surpassing beauty, trusting in the right of property, parade down a crowded thoroughfare with his jungle pet tethered to a thread? But why all these truisms? Because individualism in art aims in principle and production not only to free art from restrictions but even to exempt the artist from responsibility. The artist may not talk to himself unless he can find a South Sea island where there is neither man nor God. Nor is it a deadening of his artistic impulse for the artist to be ruled by high purposes, but rather it is a stimulus and an inspiration. Eschylus and Sophocles have a sublimer beauty than Euripides because the earlier dramatists recognized more fully and kept better in view the religious purposes of Athenian drama. Euripides, wishing to cater more to theatric effects, succeeded in being more emotional and in achieving a realistic but transient interest, the hectic flush that marks decay and death in twilight and autumn and sinister disease. Is the marked revival of Euripides within recent years a sign of decadence?