self-sacrifice as a panacea. The next generation, especially the
women, wake up at the age of forty or thereabouts to the fact
that their lives have been wasted in the worship of this ideal,
and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who imposed
it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments
in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at
the mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the
alternative panacea of love, their deprivation of which seems to
them to have been the most cruel and mischievous feature of their
slavery to duty. It is useless to warn them that this reaction,
if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as great a failure as all
the other reactions have done; for they do not recognize its
identity with any reaction that ever occurred before. Take for
instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of the
Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration.
You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure
oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks
upon the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist
he regards it as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil
worship and starvation of the affections. The Puritan is ready
to try the Commonwealth again with a few modern improvements:
the Amateur is equally ready to try the Restoration with modern
enlightenments. And so for the present we must be content to
proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some
permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that
will survive the correction of its excesses by the next reaction.

DRAMATIC ORIGIN OF WOTAN

We can now see how a single drama in which Wotan does not appear,