Pride is most virulent, indeed, when it wears plain clothes, when it hides itself from itself. Self-blindness, not dramatic display, is and always has been the very heart of it. Precisely when pride is most insidious is it least dramatic. Recognition of itself, which is the preliminary step toward cure, is also the preliminary step toward dramatic manifestation. Pride was very dramatic in old literature just because it was unearthed from its very _un_dramatic lair in old human nature. Discovery is the essence of drama. Life is intensely dramatic as soon as its least discoverable motive is discovered, as soon as its “last infirmity,” its most hidden pride of spirit, is shown in action. Therefore if a superficial glance persuades us, as I said at the beginning, that pride has faded in modern literature because modern life is non-dramatic, a deeper search informs us that modern life _seems_ non-dramatic because the meaning of pride has faded in our thought. We need to rediscover the truth of the truism that pride is the most insidious and blinding of all human qualities. Then we may discover the way of modern pride. We must see how utterly non-dramatic pride can be before our poets may show us how intensely dramatic modern life is. We cannot envisage the drama of modern life in its full reality, we cannot touch the very heart of its tragedy, until we realise the peculiar blindness of modern pride. II For example. Some twelve years ago President Wilson announced on behalf of the United States, or was quoted as announcing, that we were “too proud to fight.” Soon afterwards we were fighting, not without martial pride, in the greatest war of all time. The irony of this sequence was too broad to escape notice. Yet the notice was comparatively slight. And the whole matter has faded with ominous speed from the imagination of a public debauched with the most adulterous mixture of pacific and pugnacious prides that the world has ever known. The Wilsonian remark was easily smiled into oblivion. The full dramatic irony of the situation, and the tragedy behind it, cannot appear until that proud utterance is recognised, not as the passing whimsy of a single person or party or nation, but as a vivid symbol of the modern spirit at large. It may fairly be regarded, indeed, as the verbal apex of the whole bad pyramid of modern pride--the pride of quick and direct solutions, the pride of immediacy.