THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS 25

gress of his inward struggle with conflicting motives of ego-
tism and communal fidelity, the motives which guide his course
in the infinite field given for his action. He is no longer per-
mitted to come to grip with the profound paradox resulting
from Prometheus’ crime. He merely engages a problem cr-
thodox communal humanity, with time and understanding,
will ostensibly solve through its inquisitorial prerogatives.
It will simply wash the paradox from its body with confes-
sed streams of words. Therefore the problem presented in a
modern drama cries each time for re-solution because it can-
not, like the Prometheus tragedy, undertake the real fact of
crime and human crisis.

For, of what gain is it to confess the crime—if the crime
is no gain?

Our human scene is defaced by the babbling confessings
of bad actors and our language traduced.

Our human scene is now overrun by the Titan brother-
hood of Prometheus’ cycle, and his Nemesis, the Modern Spirit
of our times, has taken over the rubble of Dionysus’altar for
the purpose of obverting the one crime he could not digest—
the return of Greek drama’s sacramental hero to unseat him.
Sterily he presides over the modern scene, leading his vo-
taries inexorably towards the path where Prometheus found
them “rushing headlong into death.” Under his guidance men,
as if entranced with their own extinction, race feverishly
toward their doom, perverting the arts and sciences bestowed
by Greek religion, to the and that Prometheus must lie so
heavily chained that only universal destruction will put him
out of his agony. Thus the paradoxical dogma which holds that
the brotherhood of man in its perfectible spatial and temporal
totality is the true sacramental body has resulted inintol-
erable crisis as the brothers, in love’s name, pursue the dark
and bloodthirsty division of their inheritance, each finding
his portion to be only a progress, a bridge leading into the
endless, enticing landscape of their common ground.

This drama directed by the Promethean Nemesis