Aha? Is that so? Where did you pick up that banality?
SPITTA
[Without permitting himself to be disconcerted.] The truth of that saying has become my second nature. In believing it I probably find myself at variance with Schiller and Gustav Freytag, but not at all with Lessing and Diderot. I have spent the past two semesters in the study of these two great dramaturgic critics, and the whole stilted French pseudo-classicism is, as far as I'm concerned, utterly destroyed—not only in creative art itself but in such manifestations as the boundless folly of the directions for acting which Goethe prescribed in his old age. These are mere superannuated nonsense.
HASSENREUTER
You don't mean it?
SPITTA
And if the German stage is ever to recuperate it must go back to the young Schiller, the young Goethe—the author of "Götz"—and ever again to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing! There you will find set down principles of dramatic art which are adapted to the rich complexity of life in all its fullness, and which are potent to cope with Nature itself!
HASSENREUTER
Walburga! I'm afraid Mr. Spitta is taking us for each other. Mr. Spitta, you're about to give a lesson! Walburga, you and your teacher are free to retire to the library.—If human arrogance and especially that of very young people could be crystallised into one formation—humanity would be buried under that rock like an ant under the granite masses of an antediluvian mountain range!