In the same place the question is raised: What is the conception of religion or fate from which our tragic drama has emanated? Wienbarg skips over the question, or at least takes the answers to it too lightly. Nevertheless here is the root of the whole tree. Human nature and human destiny, these are the two riddles that the drama strives to solve. The difference between the drama of the ancients and the drama of the moderns lies in this: the ancients sought to illumine the labyrinths of fate by means of the torch of poetry; we moderns try to refer human nature, in whatever form or contortion it presents itself before us, to certain eternal and changeless principles, as to an immovable foundation. What to us is the means, was to them the end, and _vice versa._ With the ancients the suffering results from the action; their tragedy was really a triumph of instinct. The first bold lightning flash of half-awakened consciousness illuminated the empty Olympus, and because man found the halls of the gods deserted, he sought in his own breast a centre for the circle of his existence. But when, revolving around himself and thereby denying the pole of the world, he stood, in his stubborn isolation, in the way of the great whole, the invisible fly-wheel which drives the universe seized him with tremendous power and flung him mockingly into an abyss. He felt that he had sinned, and did not know in what way. He found himself justified in his earthly relations and yet could not shake off the oppressive nightmare of a secret monstrous guilt. Then he shudderingly divined that sin can go further than knowledge, that in things and in events, as well as in human thought and feeling, there lies a mysterious final something, which, of whatever nature it may be and whatever its effect, must be regarded as holy. Let us remember Oedipus and the way in which in this drama one riddle is always solved by another riddle. In the modern drama, on the contrary, the suffering as a rule first begets action. The hero gets into the whirlpool, he does not himself know how, but when near destruction he shows himself to be a brave, fearless swimmer. This comes from the attempt, not so much to reconcile, as to compare the idea of Freedom with the idea of Necessity. Modern tragedy has, therefore, when placed beside the ancient, a sickly hue, which is still further intensified by the circumstance that its point of departure is the individual. I should like to have time to indicate all the consequences of these opposite conceptions. If I should be asked to express in brief the fundamental idea of modern tragedy I should find it in the harsh fetters that bind the highest nobility of human nature, in suffering and death, and in the resistance of the world--occasioned thereby, nay presupposed as a necessity--which the world offers to all greatness as it strives for self-realization.