EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 33 



unconscious that the decadence has already arrived. This, 

 too, is inevitable and natural, because life is by no means 

 exhausted when maturity is past, and the type still contains 

 a wealth of parts to be eliminated. Less deeply interested 

 in the great ideas by which they have been educated, and of 

 which they are in no sense the creators, incapable of com- 

 peting on the same ground with their elders, the artists of 

 this third period are forced to go afield for striking situations, 

 to strain sentiment and pathos, to accentuate realism, to 

 subordinate the harmony of the whole to the melody of 

 details, to sink the prophet in the artist, the hierophant in 

 the charmer. There yet remains another stage of decadence, 

 when even these resources latent in the perfect type have 

 been exhausted. Then formality and affectation succeed to 

 spontaneous and genial handling ; technical skill declines ; 

 the meaning of the type, projected from the nation's heart 

 and soul in its origin, comes to be forgotten. Art has ful- 

 filled the round of its existence in that specific manifestation, 

 and sinks into the dotage of decrepitude, the sleep of winter. 



Ill 



A familiar example shall first be chosen from the history 

 of English literature. It is what we know as the Elizabethan 

 Drama, a type of art which completed its evolution in little 

 more than half a century. When Miracle-plays, which England 

 possessed in common with other European nations, though in 

 a form specific to herself, had been developed to the utmost, 

 certain episodes from the semi- epical dramatic cycle detached 

 themselves from the unwieldy mass. Comedy found its germ 

 in those lighter scenes which had always been conceded to 

 the popular appetite for entertainment. Realistic drama 

 emerged from the story of the woman taken in adultery, and 

 from the biography of Magdalen. The History-play had its 

 origin in subsidiary pieces adapted from the Apocrypha, of 

 which the ' Story of Godly Queen Esther ' may serve as an 

 example. 



