But since pathos skirts the gulf of sentimentality, the “hard-boiled” generation since the war have turned from it. Those of the younger group who cannot laugh have as a result begun to explore another emotion, which lies even deeper in our nature, and which is also compatible with disillusionment. The savage in all of us finds a fierce and hard delight in torture. Significantly the word “sadism” has become fashionable. We may name the emotion “cruelty,” though the word is perhaps inadequate. In the drama an important forerunner of contemporary exploitations of cruelty and sex, as well as of expressionism, was Frank Wedekind. Cruelty is manifest in James Joyce. In D. H. Lawrence it accompanies a pathological exaltation of sexuality, and thus gives him greater hardness than his American parallel, Sherwood Anderson. A very interesting instance of it is the work of a contemporary American poet whose fame is still unequal to his remarkable achievements. I speak of Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers’ long narrative poems spread a more than Thyestian banquet of horrors. With surprise we learn that in private life the author is so unwilling to inflict pain that “he never picks a flower wantonly.” But in his art he more than compensates for such sensibilities. _Roan Stallion_, for example, depicts the passion of a modern Pasiphaë. The unlucky husband is trampled by the stallion, and the woman shoots the animal. _Tamar_ deals with incest between brother and sister, and ends with a fire which burns down the house and its more or less crazy inmates. _The Tower Beyond Tragedy_, though treating the Clytemnestra legend with great power, ends in the incest motive between Orestes and Electra. The perversity of theme, however, is partly compensated by elevation of treatment, for Jeffers has a certain grandeur of style, drawing as he does upon Greek literature, the Bible, modern psychology, and physical science for thought, and the beauty of natural scenery for description. A passage which illustrates at once his power of style and his drift toward cruelty is found in preparation for the crucial scene of _Roan Stallion_.