deep subjectivizing of the mere fact-anecdote. Only one who feels this is able to admire the grand naïveté of the entrances of Lear and Macbeth. Now, Hebbel is the exact opposite, he destroys the depth of the anecdote by a system of cause and effect. The arbitrary and abstract character of his plots, which everyone feels instinctively, comes from the fact that the causal scheme of his spiritual conflicts is in contradiction with the historically-motived world-feeling and the quite other logic proper to that feeling. These people do not live, they _prove_ something by coming on. One feels the presence of a great understanding, not that of a deep life. Instead of the Incident we get a Problem. Further, this _Western_ species of the Incidental is entirely alien to the Classical world-feeling and therefore to its drama. Antigone has no incidental character to affect her fortunes in any way. What happened to Œdipus—unlike the fate of Lear—might just as well have happened to anyone else. This is the Classical “Destiny,” the _Fatum_ which is common to all mankind, which affects the “body” and in no wise depends upon incidents of personality. The kind of history that is commonly written must, even if it does not lose itself in compilation of data, come to a halt before the _superficially_ incidental—that is the ... destiny of its authors, who, spiritually, remain more or less in the ruck. In their eyes nature and history mingle in a cheap unity, and incident or accident, “sa sacrée majesté le Hazard,” is for the man of the ruck the easiest thing in the world to understand. For him the secret logic of history ‘which he does not feel’ is replaced by a causal that is only waiting behind the scene to come on and prove itself. It is entirely appropriate that the anecdotal foreground of history should be the arena of all the scientific causality-hunters and all the novelists and sketch-writers of the common stamp. How many wars have been begun when they were because some jealous courtier wished to remove some general from the proximity of his wife! How many battles have been won and lost through ridiculous incidents! Only think how Roman history was written in the 18th Century and how Chinese history is written even to-day! Think of the Dey smacking the Consul with his fly-flap[159] and other such incidents that enliven the historical scene with comic-opera motives! Do not the deaths of Gustavus Adolphus and of Alexander seem like expedients of a nonplussed playwright; Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise intrusion in Classical history; or Napoleon’s “transit” more or less of a melodrama? Anyone who looks for the inner form of history in any causal succession of its visible detail-events must always, if he is honest, find a comedy of burlesque inconsequence, and I can well imagine that the dance-scene of the drunken Triumvirs in “Antony and Cleopatra” (almost overlooked, but one of the most powerful in that immensely deep