MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS AS A WRITER OF TRAGEDY 1 23 



origin. The great new play may be no better; but it will be funda- 

 mentally different. If we are honest, we must admit that the sage 

 of Weimar, despite his efforts to convince us that Faust worked out 

 his own salvation, is ultimately driven to "salvation by grace.". 

 This solution was proper enough at one stage in occidental develop- 

 ment; but it will hardly be acceptable much longer. It is too mediae- 

 val and formal. In our Faust of the future, the problem will be the 

 same; but the solution must be along the lines the younger Goethe 

 doubtless intended. On earth the skein is tangled, and on earth, not 

 in heaven, must it be unraveled. This is no presumptuous arraign- 

 ment of one of the world's greatest classics; it is simply an obvious 

 assertion that man's attitude toward the fundamental moral prob- 

 lems of the universe is not fixed beyond the possibility of movement. 

 In the months intervening since the announcement of Mr. Phillips' 

 new play, I had hoped that he might essay the Olympian task of 

 treating this inexhaustible theme in a new spirit; but he and Mr, 

 Carr have preferred the lowlier, easier work of adding to the innu- 

 merable adaptations of the greatest drama in German literature. 



Utilizing this brief review to recall the tragedies, we can hardly 

 fail to conclude that in the first three outhned above Mr. Phillips 

 has chosen thoroughly suitable material, unless we are all to desert 

 to Mr. Bernard Shaw and allow the "sentimentalists" to weep alone. 

 In the story of Ulysses there is appropriate and even beautiful material 

 for a tragic masque, which is practically what Mr. Phillips has given 

 us. In Nero, I think, there is stuff for a certain sort of tragedy, 

 although not for the sort our author has written; but of this I shall 

 speak again. The Faust treats an undying theme with unlimited 

 possibilities. 



Ill 



With this dramatic material our author's treatment of plot is 

 naturally connected very closely. In Paolo and Francesca^ for 

 instance, in view of the long precedent Hterary tradition attaching 

 to these names, Mr. Phillips had little room left for choice save as 

 between so-called ideahzing and realistic treatments. That he is 



