Er, thunder, and the separations of death, is the nature of his guess at the causes of these things. The issues of life do not vary so much with the conditions of civilization as is popularly supposed. Chiefest
among the misconceptions of primitive life, which make difficult any dramatic

presentation of it, is
the notion that all human contacts are accompanied by the degree of emotional stress that obtains only in the most complex social organizations. We are always hearing, from
the people farthest removed from them, of "great primitive passions," when in fact what distinguishes the passions of the tribesmen from our own is their

greater liability to the pacific influences of nature, and their greater freedom from the stimulus of imagination. What among us makes for the immensity of emotion,
is the great weight of accumulated emotional tradition stored up in literature and art, almost entirely wanting in
the camps of the aboriginals. There the two greatest themes of modern drama,
love and ambition, are modified, the one by the more or less communal nature of tribal labor,
the other by the plain fact that in