Whereas, our classical tradition opposed moral ugliness or weakness to moral beauty or strength, the new mode is not certain that there are any such dividing lines in our experience. It finds in life, rather, a mêlée of impulses in which there intermingles more or less policing that imagines itself to be of superior quality but is actually part and parcel of the mêlée. In the instincts a literary bonanza has been discovered. Pit them against one another; tangle them up; make them intense and ruthless to the point of savagery or beastliness, or make them crafty and adroitly unscrupulous; ignore the presence in the world of religious aspiration, or, better still, expose it as a self-deceived servitor of the powers that it would rule--in short, play irrationality against irrationality, some of it deceiving itself by its own camouflage, and you will be up to date. If this literature cannot paint with epic strokes because its theme, man, lacks heroic proportions, it does create a complicated and many-patterned chiaroscuro that, I am ready to believe, is a real contribution to literary technic. But whatever virtues or vices of technical art one may find here (which is not my concern), the inlooks are disillusioning. Even if the lines do not say so, you will find it between the lines. It permeates the assumptions of the characters or, if it does not, it suffuses the plot, governing the choice of characters, situations, incidents, developments; it is testified to by atmosphere, perspective, and very effectively by silences. If, as sometimes happens in current plots as well as in classic tragedy, Fate is the chief actor, it is not sublimely grand or even mysterious, giving the spectator a feeling that even the irremediable ills of life are a tribute to the greatness and dignity of existence, but a mean Fate (rather, fate), a mere mechanical determinism in the sphere of desire. The spectator goes away unawed, unadmiring, untrustful toward his species. Life is a mole that burrows under the garden of our ideals, nipping off at the roots one plant after another. Or, life is a firecracker; a glittering splutter, then an explosion or a fizzle, then fragments of smoking refuse--nothing but combustion.