mostly undramatic speeches that overload the present commencement of _Pandora’s Box_. The pessimism of the last act is terrific and leads straight to the mood of _Damnation!_--a sort of satyr-play, concluding the three tragedies. In it, quite unrealistically, is passionately expressed what _Pandora’s Box_ implies--the hopelessness, the impossibility of happiness (for one, that is, whose conception of happiness is physical) from life as at present organized. This was the mission--this and the various remedies that Wedekind proposed--which the world persistently, unshakably condemned. Wedekind writhed. Between _Pandora’s Box_ and _Damnation!_ (1905) appeared two scarcely disguised subjective plays, _King Nicolo_, or _Such is Life_, which is very largely autobiography transferred to fourteenth-century Italy, a swift, dramatic and pathetic tale genuinely engaging our sympathies; and _Hidalla_, or _The Giant Dwarf_, which partly by satire, partly by outright propaganda, sets forth the Wedekindian point of view--the necessity for a new morality, for those who are rich enough to afford it: a morality that puts beauty, not material welfare, first among its objects, and especially revolutionizes sexual life. The worthlessness, for Wedekind, of intellectual concepts, theories, spirituality and all other abstractions--his utter absorption in the darker, inner world of feeling, will and instinct, especially the world of his own jarring soul, unheeding others or society at large, robs this one-sided drama of true tragic force. He tried again to justify himself in his next two plays: _Music_, a quite objective study of the havoc artistic education, seduction, abortion, the punishment of abortion, etc., etc., may cause; and _Censorship_, a wholly subjective one-act written after the lawsuits over _Pandora’s Box_ had been settled, and striving, not too transparently, to show the world his truly self-sacrificial and missionary spirit. By this time disciples were beginning to come to him; he married; and the force of his irritation spent itself. His last period begins.