"Now, this is it. 'If the spirit was just, why did the maid weep?' If our standard of morality is right, why do our hearts go out for Paula Tanqueray, for Nora Helmer, for Mad Agnes? Is it because we have become so humane as to be far ahead of our morality? What does it mean, anyway? We are told that the contents of the plays seen here last week, are not fit subjects for the drama. Well, art might as well go out of business, if it is not going to look life squarely in the face, if it is not going to sound the very depths of things, and mirror conditions as they are to-day, for modern humanity. The play in particular, it is clear, must deal with the intense efforts, the dramatic essences of life; the play in particular will have nothing to do unless it takes up the crucial conditions, the large realities, the stirring struggles, the sterling aspirations of the clashing life of to-day under the new and as yet unadjusted surroundings. The drama must take up shame and crime, error and suffering, or there is no plot for a great play anywhere. The few pretty, romantic, silly stories have been told over and over again. Now we have grown. There is a larger life before us, and we want something stronger. We must have plays to educate our critics,--if that is possible. "'He who is without sin among ye, let him cast the first stone.' If Christ had said nothing else, would not this have made him a great man? Yet after eighteen hundred years it is necessary for another Jew, a Portuguese Jew named Pinero, to say the same thing through the medium of a play, because the Christians say that Christ's teachings are immoral. And then the stones of the critics are thrown at Pinero." Here I said something about the relation between art and morality, but Keidansky protested. "Art has nothing to do with morality," he said, "and therefore it teaches such great moral lessons. It re-creates and reproduces Nature and life in forms of beauty and power. And because it approaches elementary conditions without bias and preconceived notions, and illumines its material with the touch of human genius, it shows us life in its largeness, right in its relativeness, and raises us above our established moralities. Because art is the spontaneous expression of the humane, the true, the good and the beautiful in our souls, it helps us to see the larger rights, the greater justice, and helps us to make, change and advance our morality. Art touches the commonplace and makes it divine. It makes a saint out of a sinner by showing causes, and casting a kindly light over human weakness.