"Do not believe that the multitude is right, that a lie stated by a hundred mouths ceases to be a lie, that an error proclaimed by a band of blind men becomes a truth which nature will sanction. Do not believe, either, that, by setting yourselves to the number of ten thousand who do not know against one who knows, you will come to know anything, or that you will compel the humblest of the eternal laws to follow you, to abandon him who recognized it. No, the law will remain in its place, with the wise man who discovered it, and so much the worse for you if you go away without accepting it! You will one day come across it on your road, and all that you have done while you thought that you were avoiding it will turn and rise up against you." Such words as these, addressed to the crowd, are very true; but it is no less true that all this becomes efficacious only after it has been experienced and lived through. In those problems in which all life's enigmas converge, the crowd which is wrong is almost always justified as against the wise man who is right. It refuses to believe him on his word. It feels dimly that behind the most evident abstract truths there are numberless living truths which no brain can foresee, for they need time, reality and men's passions to develop their work. That is why, whatever warning we may give it, whatever prediction we may make to it, the crowd insists before all that the experiment shall be tried. Can we say that, in cases where the crowd has obtained the experiment, it was wrong to insist upon it? A special study would be needed to examine all that universal suffrage has added to the general intelligence, to the civic conscience, dignity and solidarity of the nations that have practised it; but, even if it had done no more than to create, as in America and France, that sense of real equality which is there breathed as a more human and purer atmosphere and which seems new and almost prodigious to those who come from elsewhere, that in itself would be a boon that would cause its gravest errors to be forgiven. In any case, it is the best preparation for that which must inevitably come. THE MODERN DRAMA[1] I When I speak of the modern drama, I naturally refer only to those regions of dramatic literature that, sparsely inhabited as they may be, are yet essentially new. Down below, in the ordinary theatre, ordinary and traditional drama is doubtless yielding slowly to the influence of the vanguard; but it were idle to wait for the laggards when we have the pioneers at our call. The first thing that strikes us in the drama of the day is the decay, one might almost say the creeping paralysis, of external action. Next we note a very pronounced desire to penetrate deeper and deeper into human consciousness, and place moral problems upon a high pedestal; and finally the search, still very timid and halting, for a kind of new beauty, that shall be less abstract than was the old.