followed, but nothing that has equalled the original. The diction required days of practice to get identity of cadence between the spoken phrase and the music, without chaunting or breaking the sense-rhythms.

Whenever such an experiment has been made with adequate study and rehearsal it has resulted in a great popular success. The work required is not beyond the reach of anyone who has had some training in music and song. The words must be taught from the beginning by someone who is completely familiar with the music. The music must be written to spoken words, and must follow the natural cadences of the speaking voice. At a sufficient number of points or resolutions the note of speech and of the music must harmonise, without destroying the sense-inflections.

As soon as possible, the speaker must go away from the instrument and music, and speak freely, till the two threads seem to run on independently and twine together as if each were woven into the other. If the music is orchestral it will need several full rehearsals, for the timbre of certain instruments, particularly that of the 'cello, the clarionet, and the oboe, is so near to the quality of the speaking voice that they drown it very easily-and in this case the instruments should be below or behind the speaker, if he is to be audible.

The last and, in some ways, the most interesting experiment, is that made by modern poets, who deliberately reject all ordinary dramatic effects and give us a pure lyric tragedy, which is best described in the preface to Yeats' Plays for an Irish Theatre:

It was only by watching my own plays that I came to understand that this reverie, this twilight between sleep and waking, this bout of fencing, alike on the stage and in the mind, between man and phantom, this perilous path as on the edge of a sword, is the condition of tragic

pleasure, and to understand why it is so rare and so brief. If an actor becomes over-emphatic, picking out what he believes to be the important words with violence, and running up and down the scale, or if he stresses his lines in wrong places, or even if an electric lamp that should have cast but a reflected light from sky or sea, shows from behind the post of a door, I discover at once the proud fragility of dreams.

At first I was driven into teaching too statuesque a pose, too monotonous a delivery, that I might not put "vitality" in the place of the sleep-walking of passion, and for the rest became a little deaf and blind.

But alas! it is often my own words that break the dream. Then I take the play from the stage and write it over again, perhaps many times. At first I always believed it must be something in the management of events, in all that is the same in prose or verse, that was wrong, but after I had reconstructed a scene with the messenger in Deirdre in many ways, I discovered that my language must keep at all times a certain even richness. I had used "traitor,' "sword," "suborned," words of a too traditional usage, without plunging them into personal thought and metaphor, and I had forgotten in a moment of melodrama that tragic drama must be carved out of speech as a statue is out of stone.

"

But train our players and mechanists as we will, and if we have not thought out the art of stage decoration afresh every brush-stroke of our scene-painter will mix into the reverie the meretricious or the irrelevant. We shall have hired some journeyman to accompany the poet's description with a painted landscape which, because it must give all to the first glance and yet copy nature, will alone copy what is obvious, and which even if it could keep the attention and give it pleasure could but keep it to the poet's loss.

YEATS' Preface to Plays for an Irish Theatre (Shakespeare Head Press).

The earlier plays of Maeterlinck and Synge belong to this tradition. They escaped the danger which lies

in wait for all English verse-drama: the overpowering force of the Shakespearean tradition; beautiful and penetrating as they are, they do, nevertheless, illustrate a dangerous tendency. They grow rhetorical. The monotone delivery required by the Irish producers is beautiful only for a very brief time, and under conditions of perfect and artistic simplicity.

Are these methods really of the theatre? Characterisation must be reduced to a minimum, circumstance is too inexorably limited. Many to whom they appeal beyond all other forms of dramatic art will be inclined to answer, "If not, so much the worse for the theatre"; but rhetorical drama has a disturbing history. It is true these things stand far from the arid period of Seneca; indeed, the delight they give is too fragile and almost too exquisite to endure. But at least they may claim to have restored a great simplicity and dignity to the art of acting, and to have added new chords to the instrument of the human voice.

Many modern prose plays need for their true delivery the qualities of poetic speech. The association of verse-speaking with the bombast of old “elocutionary" methods has left us without a tradition for such work. The horror of any speech-training whatever, which is openly expressed by nearly all our greatest actors and producers, is a result of the bad old methods. As an example of the results to be aimed at, one may instance the longer speeches of Bernard Shaw's plays, especially the last act of Major Barbara, and of Heartbreak House. Those who have spoken best in these plays have nearly all been trained in some measure of metric diction, but we need to purge our dramatic verse-speaking of every trace of artifice and unreality before we can serve the needs of the contemporary stage as they should be served in this respect.

X

CHAPTER IX

SATYRIC VERSE

It must be apparent to anyone reading the general account of poetic form in Chapter IV., that any hard and fast rules dividing the great poetic forms, and, more especially, definitions limiting English lyric poetry, are difficult to maintain.

Where should we place Browning's Dramatic Romances? Byron's Childe Harold? Shelley's Queen Mab or Keats' Endymion?

It is also clear that a very large category of true poetry, and all that is more commonly called verse, stands outside the scope of the three great forms.

Narrative poetry, didactic verse, occasional verse, comic verse, parody, burlesque,-the list recalls Polonius' exposition of the Players' repertory. It is with the intention of giving more precision to the definite divisions and finding more justification for certain critical rejections and inclusions that the term "satyric verse" has come to be used.

To the Greeks a satyric play meant primarily a work in which the accidents, and not the essentials, of poetry were stressed. Or, from another point of view, a play in which the action was allowed to dominate the true form of tragedy. The Alkestis was a satyric play because its central idea was too composite for tragedy; because passing circumstance and accident played a greater part in it than over-ruling fate. Because the centre of interest shifted from Alkestis to Admetos, and from Admetos again to Herakles; because Herakles became mildly intoxicated, because characters of lower rank

a slave woman, a steward, and a child-brought pathos, or fleeting and personal emotion, into the action instead of the ethos, the heroic devotion of the wife who died for her lord. The play had in addition a happy ending outside the true logic of its circumstances, an accidental thing without bearing on the principle of the play.

Lack of proportion between content and force-the true harmony of poetry-and transient or topical interest, were included in the idea of a satyric drama; or the formal mocking of serious things which we call burlesque or parody.

The same conception seems valid for satyric verse today. It would include, first, formal verse, where form is the only object; and its opposite-neglect of form for some slight and topical preoccupation with subjectmatter only. Among the first would rank the rondeau, the villanelle and other formal poems; the second gives us the pleasant little anecdote in verse, or even the words of a "drawing-room ballad." When these things are beautifully done, they attain to the level of satyric verse; when they fail they relapse into doggerel.

The parody, where form is impeccably preserved, but inharmoniously used for a trivial, ridiculous or incongruous content, is the most purely formal of all verse, and finds a place in this category.

Poetry limited by topical interest, or dated by the fashion of a period, is among the most beautiful of satyric poetry.

Pope's Rape of the Lock whose "merum sal" has acted as a preservative for over two hundred years; or Austin Dobson's exquisite reincarnation of the eighteenth century and the

Glorious days of the Hanover line,

are perfect examples.