Page:The thirty-six dramatic situations (1921).djvu/120

 118 THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUATIONS D - Relapse into Primitive Baseness, through Despair on Learning of the Death of a Loved One: - "La Fille Sauvage" (Curel, 1902). But embody, in a human figure, the wrong, the mur- der, which is abstract in most of these examples. Still bound by his helplessness, how the unfortunate who is made a spectator of the agony will struggle, appeal, and vainly implore the heavens - the Victim, meantime, humbly beseeching him who thus looks on in despair, as though he had power to save. The haughty sar- donic silhouette of the Executioner dominates the scene, intensifying the keenness of the grief by his cynical pleasure in it. . . Dante has conceived of no sharper sorrow in the circles of his Inferno.