In the Spanish drama only one of the requisite conditions was fulfilled--activity. Before they began to write plays the Spaniards had expelled the Moors, discovered the New World, and raised themselves to the first place among European nations. But there was not the same free audience in Spain as in England. Papal despotism and the tyranny of the court checked and coerced the drama, so that, with all its richness and imaginative splendor, the Spanish theatre is inferior to the English. The French drama suffered still more from the same kind of restriction. Subject to the canons of scholastic pedants, tied down to an imitation of the antique, made to reflect the manners and sentiments of a highly artificial court, animated by the sympathies of no large national audience, the French playwrights became courtiers, artists obedient to the pleasures of a king--not, like the dramatists of Greece and England, the prophets of the people, the leaders of a chorus triumphant and rejoicing in its mighty deeds. Italy has no real theatre. In Italy there has been no stirring of a national, united spirit; no supreme and central audience; no sudden consciousness of innate force and freedom in the sovereign people. The requisite conditions have always failed. The German drama, both by its successes and shortcomings, illustrates the same position. Such greatness as it achieved in Goethe and Schiller it owed to the fermentation of German nationality, to the so-called period of "storm and stress" which electrified the intellects of Germany and made the Germans eager to assert their manhood among nations. But listen to Goethe complaining that there was no public to receive his works; study the petty cabals of Weimar; estimate the imitative and laborious spirit of German art, and it is clear why Germany produced but scattered and imperfect results in the drama.