interpreting the honest genius of the heroic Bourgeoisie of the Revolution, it is an excellent popular play for the Germans. This was proved to me at various times, by productions at Altorf : the parts were played by the Bourgeoisie and the people of the Canton; the public gathers to witness the spectacle, participates in the action, and echoes as it were the burning words of liberty. I believe that popular art can show no nobler figure than Tell, the German Hercules, the athletic dreamer, slow to make up his mind, possessed with a great but silent power, in whose mind thoughts and emotions sleep as in a majestic lake, the surface of which the winds can hardly ruffle, but which, once aroused, is like the sea. But the German elements in the play—the cold dissertations, the stolidity of character in the people, the sentiment, and romantic simplicity—would have to be deleted. And what remains? The other plays of Schiller would be of no use to us.
Among the men a little nearer our own time, some have attempted to write directly for the people: Raimund and Anzengruber in Austria, Tolstoy and Gorki in Russia, and Hauptmann in Germany. But even among the plays of these dramatists, such works as The Weavers and The Power of Darkness, long-drawn-out cries of misery and spectacles of abject horror, seem intended rather to awaken the consciences of the rich than to encourage and amuse the poor, who are already sore pressed under the burden of their existence. Or, at most, they
