Yeats’s tragedies, like Maeterlinck’s, belong to the _drame intime_, the _théâtre statique_. The popular drama—what Yeats calls the “theatre of commerce”—is dynamic. The true theatre is the human will. Brunetière shows by an analysis of any one of Racine’s plays—say “_Andromaque_”—how the action moves forward by a series of decisions. But Maeterlinck’s people are completely passive: they suffer: they do not act, but are acted upon by the unearthly powers of which they are the sport. Yeats’s plays, too, are “plays for marionettes,” spectral puppet-shows of the Celtic twilight. True, his characters do make choices: the young wife in “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” the bridegroom in “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan” make choices, but their apparently free will is supernaturally influenced. The action is in two worlds. In antique tragedy, too, man is notoriously the puppet of fate; but, though he acts in ignorance of the end to which destiny is shaping his deed, he acts with vigorous self-determination. There is nothing dreamlike about Orestes or Oedipus or Antigone. It is said that the plays of another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, are now great favorites in Germany: “Salome,” in particular, and “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “A Woman of No Importance” (“_Eine unbedeutende Frau_”). This is rather surprising in the case of the last two, which are society dramas with little action and an excess of cynical wit in the dialogue. It is hard to understand how the unremitting fire of repartee, paradox, and “reversed epigram” in such a piece as “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” the nearest recent equivalent of Congreve comedy—can survive translation or please the German public. This “new drama” is very new indeed. In 1882, William Archer, the translator of Ibsen, published his book, “English Dramatists of To-day,” in the introduction to which he acknowledged that the English literary drama did not exist. “I should like to see in England,” he wrote, “a body of playwrights whose works are not only acted, but printed and _read_.” Nine years later, Henry Arthur Jones, in the preface to his printed play, “Saints and Sinners,” denied that there was any relation between English literature and the modern English drama. A few years later still, in his introduction to the English translation of M. Filon’s book, “The English Stage” (1897), Mr. Jones is more hopeful. “If any one will take the trouble,” he writes, “to examine the leading English plays of the last ten years, and will compare them with the serious plays of our country during the last three centuries, I shall be mistaken if he will not find evidence of the beginnings of an English drama of greater import and vitality, and of wider aim, than any school of drama the English theatre has known since the Elizabethans.”