[23]

A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: "Fitch was often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried to make them do certain things: they did others."

[24]

This account of the matter seems to find support in a statement, by M. François de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is "clearly conscious of creating," but that gradually he gets "into the skin" of his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his more instinctive mental processes. See L'Année Psychologique, 1894. p. 120.

[25]

Sir Arthur Pinero says: "The beginning of a play to me is a little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and they tell me the story." This may sound not unlike the remark of the novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: "When you have a character or several characters you haven't a play. You may keep these in your mind and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven't got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in fact it is really dreaming while you are awake."

[26]

"Here," says a well-known playwright, "is a common experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. 'Ha!' you say. 'What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will under the sofa! If that doesn't make them sit up, what will?' You begin the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won't go at all. You battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you, 'Why, I see what's wrong! It's that confounded scene where the man finds the will under the sofa! Out it must come!' You cut it out, and at once all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect that first tempted you."

[27]

The manuscripts of Dumas fils are said to contain, as a rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot: Génie et Métier, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most playwrights destroy as they go along.

[28]

Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple phenomenon known as a fair copy.

[29]

Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays.

[30]

See Chapters XIII and XVI.

[31]

This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas fils in the preface to La Princesse Georges. "You should not begin your work," he says, "until you have your concluding scene, movement and speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take until you know where you are going?" It is perhaps a more apparent than real contradiction of this rule that, until Iris was three parts finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though Iris is not actually killed.

[32]

See Chapter XVIII.

[33]

See Chapter XX.

[34]

Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed to the principle of "roughing out" the big scenes first, and then imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the length of saying: "I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page 1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back upon it." Mr. Alfred Sutro says: "I write a play straight ahead from beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over the last three." And Mr. Granville Barker: "I always write the beginning of a play first and the end last: but as to writing 'straight ahead'--it sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven." But almost all dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.

[35]

One is not surprised to learn that Sardou "did his stage-management as he went along," and always knew exactly the position of his characters from moment to moment.

[36]

And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the impossibility of a scene in Zola's Pot Bouille in which the so-called "lovers," Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.

[37]

Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity; but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names. Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called Onesimus, "useful," or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function; but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.

[38]

Writing of Le Supplice d'une Femme, Alexandre Dumas fils said: "This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea, has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in untying the knot."

[39]

This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen. There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, dramatizes the narration.

[40]

See Chapter XII.

[41]

This must not be taken to imply that, in a good stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr. Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention of one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies.

[42]

I omit all speculation as to the form which the story assumed in the Ur-Hamlet. We have no evidence on the point; and, as the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit, even in following his original he was making a deliberate artistic choice.

[43]

Shakespeare committed it in Romeo and Juliet, where he made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs, not to the "intelligence department," but to the department of analysis.

[44]

I say "variety" rather than complexity because I take it that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.

[45]

This excludes Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean.

[46]

See, for example, King Henry VIII, Act IV, and the opening scene of Tennyson's Queen Mary.

[47]

This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group of characters performing something like the function of the antique Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less disinterested point of view. The function of Kaffee-Klatsch in Pillars of Society is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.

[48]

It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in La Gioconda, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention, by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.

[49]

Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, represents this method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you." Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by "the rule of time."

[50]

It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one cannot help wondering how he would have planned A Doll's House had he written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced. Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation to another woman.

[51]

See Chapter XXIII.

[52]

Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two types of opening. In Les Corbeaux we have almost an entire act of calm domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In La Parisienne Clotilde and Lafont are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, "Prenez garde, voilà mon mari!"--and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but wife and lover.

[53]

Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") opened her very successful play, The Ambassador, with a scene between Juliet Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent specially to hear her sister's confession, and then returned to it for ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it was not unsuited to the type of play.

[54]

In that charming comedy, Rosemary, by Messrs. Parker and Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an "epi-monologue."

[55]

Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance, a husband and wife.

[56]

There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few minutes. See, for example, the Supplices of Euripides.

[57]

So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.

[58]

I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.

[59]

This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether the author does or does not want to give the audience time for reflection--time to return to the real world--between two episodes. If it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended; but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries, dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.

[60]

He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a distant relative of Bernick's.

[61]

The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a word to express that combination of qualities--the word eusynopton.

[62]

The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing himself is elsewhere dealt with.

[63]

Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim at this passage. The one says, "No, no!" the other asks, "Why?" I can only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not the place either for the production of documents or for historical exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased, the dramatist's hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might, in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging "scandal about Queen Elizabeth." Historical criticism, I understand, does not accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in Chapter XIII.

[64]

A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the early days of Sir Henry Irving's career. It was said that at Bristol one night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, "took his call" after the first act, a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, "Can you tell me, sir, does that young man appear much in this play?" His neighbour informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action, whereupon the inquirer remarked, "Oh! Then I'm off!"

[65]

If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick in Raffles was none the less amusing because every one was on the look-out for it.

[66]

The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of surprise.

[67]

The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our attention.

[68]

I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly ten years ago. "Curiosity," I said, "is the accidental relish of a single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre, we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness. There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game of blind-man's-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our neighbours."

[69]

Here an acute critic writes: "On the whole I agree; but I do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised, rather than an interest of actual curiosity."

[70]

That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas pere, those a straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the first act of Henri III et sa Cour. The Due de Guise, insulted by Saint-Mégrin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls, "Qu'on me cherche les mèmes hommes qui ont assassiné Dugast!"

[71]

There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters XVII and XXI.

[72]

This method of heightening the tension would have been somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.

[73]

Dryden (Of Dramatic Poesy, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says: "Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments, of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled about by the motion of the primum mobile, in which they are contained." This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar with and weaken each other.

[74]

Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.

[75]

The World, December 20, 1899.

[76]

At the end of the first act of Lady Inger of Ostraat, Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.

[77]

The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.

[78]

See pp. 118, 240.

[79]

There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.

[80]

This might be said of the scene of the second act of The Benefit of the Doubt; but here the actual stage-topography is natural enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the acoustic relations of the two rooms.

[81]

For example, in his criticism of Becque's La Parisienne (Quarante Ans de Théâtre, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end o£ the second act, one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh! bien, vous voilà bien attrapé! O est la scène à faire?" "I freely admit," he continues, "that there is no scène à faire; if there had been no third act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your business to recite on the stage articles from the Vie Parisienne, it makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or at the end of the third." This clearly implies that a play in which there is no scène à faire is nothing but a series of newspaper sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely the scène à faire demanded by the logic of his cynicism.

[82]

I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr. Gilbert Murray's noble renderings of these speeches.

[83]

Such a scene occurs in that very able play, The Way the Money Goes, by Lady Bell.

[84]

In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.

[85]

And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon "in their well-known attitudes": only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered into them.

[86]

That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens, after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of peripeties.

[87]

The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray's Carlyon Sahib contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.

[88]

For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her own name.

[89]

M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.

[90]

One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.

[91]

The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills' Charles I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a representation of Cromwell as

  "A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,
  In one hand menace, in the other greed."

[92]

It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction between antecedent events and what he calls "postulates of character." He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the picture. See Quarante Ans de Théâtre, vii, p. 395.

[93]

This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers's romantic melodrama, Captain Swift, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a particularly luminous phrase: "the three or four arms of coincidence" would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most accurate expression that is fittest to survive.

[94]

The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much smaller than it is to-day, when "thalassic" has grown into "oceanic" civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus such a plot as that of the Menaechmi was by no means the sheer impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing children, on which the Oedipus, and many plays of Menander, are founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children were generally provided with identification-tokens gnorismata.

[95]

I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain a copy of The City; but my memory is pretty clear.

[96]

For instance: "If you can get a word with him by pretending that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; that will give me all the start I need."

[97]

In The Idyll, by Herr Egge, of which some account is given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with Ringve were quite innocent.

[98]

The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of D'Annunzio's La Gioconda.

[99]

Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.

[100]

In Mr. Somerset Maugham's Grace the heroine undergoes a somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate, partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has never realized her previous contempt for him.

[101]

I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition. Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!

[102]

Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license Monna Vanna; but I think there is more to be said for his action in this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly to the higher instincts of the public.

[103]

I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this play to the same author's Beau Brummel. D'Orsay's death scene was certainly a repetition of Brummel's.

[104]

The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy.

[105]

It is true that in A Doll's House, Dr. Rank announces his approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an essential part of the action of the play.

[106]

The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas fils, in his preface to Héloïse Paranquet, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. "Not to mention," he says, "the fact that it has been much over-done, we are bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind, sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my young colleagues," he proceeds, "never to end a piece which pretends to reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance." The recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in L'Etrangère, had disposed of his "vibrion," the Duc de Septmonts, by making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon L'Etrangère as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.

[107]

I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own aesthetic principles were less truculent.

[108]

This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate momentary--relaxation.

[109]

If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not otherwise.

[110]

Chapter XIX.

[111]

So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in such a passage as this?--

  MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
  together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
  strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
  if we were not married at all."


  MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
  demands are pretty reasonable."


  MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
  from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
  interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
  and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
  obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because
  they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
  they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
  continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
  into a wife."


This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature, not of life.

[112]

From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of The Blot in the Scutcheon or Stratford, I must leave the reader to draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a reconstruction of Tennyson's Queen Mary, with a few connecting links written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.

[113]

Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called "stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then, that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as he does.

[114]

Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.

[115]

A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient which ought not to be abused.

[116]

The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous and unnecessary slovenliness. In Les Corbeaux, by Henry Becque, produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii, Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.