The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I by Gerhart Hauptmann
page 115 of 756 (15%)
page 115 of 756 (15%)
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Your conflict, after all, can only be one for your personal happiness. And, so far as is humanly speaking possible, the individual can attain this. My struggle is a struggle for the happiness of all men. The condition of my happiness would be the happiness of all; nothing could content me until I saw an end of sickness and poverty, of servitude and spiritual meanness. I could take my place at the banquet table of life only as the last of its guests. HELEN [_With deep conviction._] Ah, then you are a truly, truly good, man! LOTH [_Somewhat embarrassed._] There is no merit in my attitude: it is an inborn one. And I must also confess that my struggle in the interest of progress affords me the highest satisfaction. And the kind of happiness I thus win is one that I estimate far more highly than the happiness which contents the ordinary self-seeker. HELEN Still there are very few people in whom such a taste is inborn. LOTH Perhaps it isn't wholly inborn. I think that we are constrained to it by the essential wrongness of the conditions of life. Of course, one must have a sense for that wrongness. There is the point. Now if one has that |
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