It was an amazing and unsettling revelation, and liberalism never quite knew what to do with it. In a theater in Moscow a certain M. Yevreynoff carried the revelation to one of its logical conclusions. He produced the monodrama.[30] This is a play in which the action, the setting and all the characters are seen by the audience through the eyes of one character only, as the hero sees them, and they take on the quality which his mind imagines they possess. Thus in the old theater, if the hero drank too much, he reeled in the midst of a sober environment. But in M. Yevreynoff’s supremely liberal theater, if I understand Mr. Macgowan’s account of it correctly, the drunkard will not reel about the lamppost; two lampposts will reel about him, and he will be dressed, because that is the way he feels, like Napoleon Bonaparte. M. Yevreynoff has troubled me a good deal, for he seemed to have finished off the liberal with a fool’s cap, and left him sitting in a world that does not exist, except as so many crazy mirrors reflecting his own follies one upon the other. But then I recalled that M. Yevreynoff’s logic was defective and make-believe. He had all the time stood soberly outside his own drunken hero, and so had his audience; the universe had not after all gone up in the smoke of one fantasy; the drunken hero had his point of view, but, after all, there were others, just as authentic, with which in the course of his career he might collide. There might be a policeman, for example, with fantasies to be sure, but his own, who would break in upon the monodrama and remind the hero, and us, that when we submit the shadows of things to the desires of the mind we do not submit the things themselves. But while all this does vindicate the sanity of the liberal criticism, it does not answer the question: since every action has to be taken by somebody, since everybody is in some degree a drunken hero with two lampposts teetering about him, how can any common good be furthered by this creature who is dominated by his special purposes? The answer was that it could be furthered by taming his purposes, enlightening them and fitting them into each other as the violin and the drum are fitted together into the orchestra. The answer was not acceptable in the nineteenth century, when men, in spite of all their iconoclasm, were still haunted by the phantom of identity. So liberals refused to write harmonious but separate parts for the violinist and the drummer. They made, instead, a noble appeal to their highest instincts. They spoke over the heads of men to man. These general appeals were as vague as they were broad. They gave particular men no clue as to how to behave sincerely, but they furnished them with an excellent masquerade when they behaved arbitrarily. Thus the trappings of liberalism came into the service of commercial exploiters, of profiteers and prohibitionists and jingoes, of charlatans and the makers of buncombe.