You prove it yourself every time you open your mouth! You deny the whole art of elocution, the value of the voice in acting! You want to substitute for both the art of toneless squeaking! Further you deny the importance of action in the drama and assert it to be a worthless accident, a sop for the groundlings! You deny the validity of poetic justice, of guilt and its necessary expiation. You call all that a vulgar invention--an assertion by means of which the whole moral order of the world is abrogated by the learned and crooked understanding of your single magnificent self! Of the heights of humanity you know nothing! You asserted the other day that, in certain circumstances, a barber or a scrubwoman might as fittingly be the protagonist of a tragedy as Lady Macbeth or King Lear! SPITTA [_Still pale, polishing his spectacles._] Before art as before the law all men are equal, sir. HASSENREUTER Aha? Is that so? Where did you pick up that banality? SPITTA [_Without permitting himself to be disconcerted._] The truth of that saying has become my second nature. In believing it I probably find myself at variance with Schiller and Gustav Freytag, but not at all with Lessing and Diderot. I have spent the past two semesters in the study of these two great dramaturgic critics, and the whole stilted French pseudo-classicism is, as far as I'm concerned, utterly destroyed--not only in creative art itself but in such manifestations as the boundless folly of the directions for acting which Goethe prescribed in his old age. These are mere superannuated nonsense. HASSENREUTER You don't mean it? SPITTA And if the German stage is ever to recuperate it must go back to the young Schiller, the young Goethe--the author of "Goetz"--and ever again to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing! There you will find set down principles of dramatic art which are adapted to the rich complexity of life in all its fullness, and which are potent to cope with Nature itself! HASSENREUTER Walburga! I'm afraid Mr. Spitta is taking us for each other. Mr. Spitta, you're about to give a lesson! Walburga, you and your teacher are free to retire to the library.--If human arrogance and especially that of very young people could be crystallised into one formation--humanity would be buried under that rock like an ant under the granite masses of an antediluvian mountain range! SPITTA But I wouldn't in any wise be refuted thereby. HASSENREUTER Man, I tell you that I've not only passed through two semesters of formal study, but I have grown grey in the practice of the actor's art! And I tell you that Goethe's catechism for actors is the alpha and the omega of my artistic convictions! If you don't like that--get another teacher! SPITTA