Page:They Knew What They Wanted.pdf/21

Rh glorious tragedy of New England farmers and their Puritan philosophy. Of the second alleged source and kinship I cannot speak with authority because I am not sure that I know all the dirtiest French anecdotes. The first relationship I hotly deny.

The story of this play, in its noblest form, served Richard Wagner as the libretto for the greatest of all romantic operas. It is shamelessly, consciously, and even proudly derived from the legend of Tristram and Yseult, and the difference between the legend of Tristram and Yseult and that of Paolo and Francesca is simply that the Italian wronged husband killed everybody in sight while his northern counterpart forgave everybody—which amounts to the monumental difference between a bad temper and tolerance.

I don’t myself, I insist, think that the age and service stripes of a story have anything much to do with its eligibility for present purposes, and I advise all other young writers, who need plots and can’t make up good ones of their own, to pick a good one out of the classics. No story is any older than its applicability to life. No story is any younger than the motives of its characters, and human motives have a singularly enduring and permanent quality. I don’t at all intend to write a criticism or analysis of my play. I should not have said so much, except that I do so sympathize with it for being thrust, so, into print, without any of the tender and beautifully in-