momentary attack of the shivers to his audience. In serious drama it abides in every detail, swaying the action step by step.

Dramatic fate has two aspects in accordance with the type of drama in which it operates. In that class of dramas in which the chief matter of interest is the concatenation of events-i. e., the external action or story-"fate" is the collective name of all the supreme external and mechanical forces of existence. In the psychological drama, on the other hand, it embraces all the internal, psychological forces-that is, the forces guiding, transforming, controlling, the minds of men. External fate always appears in the guise of extraneous violence opposing and thwarting the wills and purposes of men, whereas psychological fate, being of the very warp and woof of these wills and purposes, of the innermost essence of personality, does not appear as a supervening force, but as the abiding inner cogency, the inevitable intrinsic logic of things, thrusting the conscious will which supposes itself ensconced in the heart of personality, be it good or evil, outside the citadel whence to make its valiant but futile assaults upon the Invincible. This is the dramatic significance of the supreme Romantic article of faith, "Personality is Fate," which combines in a paradoxical conception of ultimate irresponsibility the opposites of absolute freedom of the will and of an absolute subjective fatalism.

In Gyges und sein Ring both these forms of fate appear side by side; the preordained destruction of Gyges and his wife being the external manifestation of fate, and its psychological operation directing the course of Kandaulus.

At present we are concerned in detail only with external fate. Representing, as it does, the external forces of life it must appear, not directly, in propria persona, so to speak, as "fate," "Schicksal,” but as something implied in external events and circumstances. It is by this immanency of fate that the facts of reality become symbolic. Only what is fraught with fate, and as far as it is so, is symbolic. Symbolism is an abiding consciousness of inherent structural or organic relations between the details of reality and

1 The only fundamental distinction between "symbol" and "allegory" compatible with historical usage seems to me this, that a symbol appears vested with the authority of fate. From the "Storm-and-Stress" movement until the Romanticism of the present day, usage has never wavered in this respect.

fate. The bald word "fate," "Schicksal," frequently repeated as in Schiller's Wallenstein (over twenty times), causes not so much suspense as rather a weary sense of poetic self-consciousness and self-interpretation overdone. It is far more effective, in a dramatic sense, in indirect, symbolic presentation.

The differences in the dramatic use of fate mark an important line of development in the history of the German drama from Lessing to Romanticism. In Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm the word, or rather the object, "Ring," repeated about as frequently as in Hebbel's drama, bears a relation to the external action of Lessing's play analogous to that of "Ring" in Gyges. It serves as a bond connecting different phases in the progress of the story. In Lessing's play its function ends there; in Hebbel's it serves the further purpose of giving the awful authority of fate to the dramatic events and passions. Before the symbolic possibilities of external circumstances had been rediscovered and their uses exploited anew by the Romanticists, dramatists had no means of enforcing the fate-begotten sweep and validity of their actions upon their audiences, except by baldly giving them a name—a proceeding too direct, too obvious, too devoid of suggestiveness, and too monotonous to have much dramatic value. Schiller, who greatly lacked the power of symbolizing, produced a strong, though clumsy, symbol only once, in the Black Knight in Die Jungfrau von Orleans; but he made almost no use of symbolizing words. He rode, therefore, the word "Schicksal" nearly to death, not because he "trieb das Schicksal," as Caroline Schlegel wittily said of him—for every dramatist does that-but because, on account of his deficient symbolic vision, his conception of fate lacked variety and organic relation to reality.

Fate-symbolism was carried to its extreme limit, and to the point of absurdity, in the so-called “fate drama” holding sway in German literature during the decade beginning about 1815. In Zacharias Werner's short play, Der vierundzwanzigste Februar, the word "Fluch" is repeated about fifty-two times, in order to drive home to the shuddering sense of the audience the demoniac power dominating the course of events. In the same play the words, "Messer," "Sense," "Hund," "Sohn," occur for a similar

purpose. In Müllner's Die Schuld the words tellingly repeated are "Schuld," "Rache," "Stahl," "Blut," "Tod," and "Mord." In Kleist's Familie Schroffenstein, though not a fate drama proper, in which the passion of hatred becomes a demoniac possession taking the function of fate, the word "Rache" is repeated, at the outset, about twenty-six times, and "Mord" about forty times. In Grillparzer's drama Die Ahnfrau the words "Ahnfrau" and "Dolch" are used in a similar manner as in the fate dramas proper, though in a somewhat less lurid manner. There is one instance of this romantic use of words in the repetition of "Traum" in Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson (I, 4 and 7). The same word, endowed with greater superstitious power, is repeated in Kleist's Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, where it is associated with the words "Engel," "Marianne," and "eines Kaisers Tochter," likewise repeated.

In Richard Wagner's dramas the repeated words frequently are the names of symbolic objects-objects endowed with superstitious, demoniac, or generally animistic powers. Some of these are "Gold" in Rheingold, (about twenty times); "Schwert" in Die Walküre (about twenty-five times), and in Siegfried (about thirty times); "Ring" in Siegfried (about twenty times), and in Die Götterdämmerung (about forty-four times); "Speer" in Parsifal.

SOUND-SYMBOLISM

In many of these cases of sensational repetition the mere sound of the emphatic word, aside from the relation of its meaning or the object designated by it to the dramatic action, is of considerable significance. Words like "Fluch" "Rache," "Stahl," "Messer," produce, and are by the sensational writers intended to produce, strong emotional effects. Nor is this sound symbolism,' if properly used, illegitimate in aiding and intensifying suspense. Wagner in joining the meaning and sound of the

1 The Romanticists made much of this symbolism, as: A. W. Schlegel's Briefe über Poesie, Silbenmaas, etc. (S. W., Vol. VII); Fr. Schlegel's Alarkos; Tieck's "U" Romance of Sir Wulf; Tieck's symphony prefacing his comedy, Die verkehrte Welt; Hoffman's Kreisleriana and Kater Murr. In lyrical poetry this sound-symbolism has, especially in the last century, been a very prominent means, often overdone, of creating "atmosphere," Stimmung in German as well as in English literature, and in the French Symbolists of the second half of the nineteenth century.

words with musical symbolism has in his Leitmotive made a masterly use of repetition for the purpose partly of intelligibility and partly of suspense. It is sufficient to refer to Brunhilde's oath on the spear in Götterdämmerung, where meaning and sound of the word "Spitze," emphasized by the sharp rise to the musical pitch given the first syllable of the word, unite in startling dramatic significance.

FATE SYMBOLISM BY ANALOGY

There is a still subtler, but no less powerful, use of repetition to accomplish fate symbolism, the typical example of which is found throughout Grillparzer's Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, in the constant recurrence of the words "Meer" and "Wellen." This case is peculiar in being even less direct than those of the fate dramas. In the latter the symbols of fate have a direct causal connection with fate, being its tools. In Grillparzer's drama, however, while the "Meer" ultimately brings about the catastrophe, its more important function lies in a different direction. It was Grillparzer's express purpose to eliminate any guilt, or at least any consciousness of it, in Hero. Her passion is to take its course with the same elemental simplicity, directness, inherent rightness, with which the sea follows every fluctuation of natural forces. The admission of consciousness of moral issues, of any self-consciousness whatever, in Hero would have thwarted his purpose. He chose the title, overlong and sentimental though it is, to suggest his purpose-as Goethe, in Wahlverwandtschaften, used a simile taken from physical science to emphasize the character of the passion depicted. The repetitions of "Meer" and "Wellen" serve the purpose of reminding us again and again of this idea, pointing the unswerving way of destiny through all the tangle of individual initiative and psychological reaction. The intended effect of suspense upon the spectator is produced through association by analogy. We anticipate the course and issue of the master-passion, because we are made to feel that the force which drives the waves of the sea shattering upon the rocks by Hero's tower is similar to that which dashes the lovers upon the battlements of settled conventions.

DRAMATIC "STIMMUNG"

Symbolic repetition, through its indeterminateness and suggestiveness, produces, when properly used, an effect of general atmosphere, a dramatic Stimmung, which at times, as in Hero, is as potent, as mesmeric, as Stimmung in lyrical poetry. It is worth while to draw the conclusion that Stimmung is not, as generally supposed, intrinsically lyrical, and that scenes of Stimmung in a drama therefore are not to be set aside as lyrical, but that, whenever in a drama it contains suspense, it is genuinely dramatic. This is the melodramatic element which within certain limits is indispensable to the drama, as Shakespeare shows. Without it the drama lacks richness, color, atmosphere, and the necessary warmth. It is chiefly through the want of it that Schiller's dramas are "thin," or threadbare. It may, however, degenerate, as in the fate drama, into mere sensationalism, analogous to the scare headlines of the yellow press, arousing wild forebodings unsupported in the context by any additional detailed evidence giving distinct significance to the alarming shriek of nondescript emotionalism.

III. PSYCHOLOGICAL MOTIVATION

In the cases so far discussed repetition is used to direct attention to the story, the sequence of events, and the issue of the dramatic action. It is in these cases an instrument both for knitting different events together and for calling our attention to what is essential in them. It is an important part of the structure of the drama, and at the same time of the evidence from which the spectator draws inferences as to the issue of the action before him. It is part of external, mechanical motivation, and is therefore found most frequently in the drama of action, the highest form of which is the so-called historical drama. It has also appeared in a very important passional function, derived from the psychological skill of dramatists trained in the school of Romanticism-the function of engaging the emotions of the spectator.

We turn now to its use in affecting the relations of the dramatic characters to each other-i. e., to repetition as part of psychological motivation. The psychological drama was rediscovered by Romanticism, and its modern uses were developed