I share your unconditional admiration of the Sophoclean tragedy, but it was a phenomenon of its time, which cannot come again. It was the living product of a definite, individual present; to force it as a standard and a pattern upon an entirely different epoch would be to kill rather than to quicken art, which must always come into being and do its work as a living dynamic influence. Our tragedy, if we had such a thing, has to wrestle with the time's impotence, laziness and lack of character, and with a vulgar mental habit. It must therefore exhibit force and character. It must endeavor to stir and uplift the feelings, but not to resolve them into calm. Beauty is for a happy race; an unhappy race one must seek to move by sublimity. These words, which contain implicitly the whole Romantic confession of faith, give the right point of view from which to judge 'The Maid of Orleans'. Schiller felt that the need of the hour was to escape from the banality of conventional ideas and feel the thrill of sympathy with great, overmastering emotions. To-day this seems a very simple and obvious matter, because we have learned to think of the imaginative appeal of poetry as the corner-stone of the temple. But a hundred years ago the outlook was different. Notwithstanding the revolt which Goethe and Schiller had themselves led against the self-complacent rationalism of the century, the old spirit was still potent even in Germany, where the reaction first gathered force. Among the intellectual classes religion had well-nigh ceased to be reckoned with as a mystic passion of the soul. Several decades of tolerance,--practically an excellent method for keeping the sectaries from one another's throats,--had produced a public sentiment which looked with mild contempt upon all religious fervors. When Schleiermacher published his famous 'Discourses on Religion', in the year 1799, he addressed them 'to the cultivated among its despisers',--which was only his phrase for what we should call the general public.