at its expense to an extent that must make musicians, for instance, disciplined to a hard technical training, simply green with envy. They profit-though Heaven knows the theatre does not-by the public's ignorance of an art which it sets out nevertheless to enjoy. A pity that there should be no more encouragement of true experimenting, by the art's masters, not its 'prentices. For, of all the arts, drama can live least in the light of theory. The dramatist may project his play in imagination pretty completely; the individual actor can at best say what he means his performance to be; few will be rash enough to forecast an exact result for any free and fruitful collaboration of a whole company of actors with the dramatist and among themselves.

We are back to our first admission that this final process of the putting of the play on the stage is a very incalculable thing. And incalculable it must to some extent remain if its chief aim is to be the endowing of the play with anything we are to call life; for the term will escape aesthetic definition. We must join company with the musical critic who, in similar case, disposed of all argument by saying, 'I know a good tune when I hear it.' But no one who-with critical faculties equipped against mere fraud-has seen a play brought fully and freely to life on the stage, will ever again mistake the sham thing for the real; or ever again, one would suppose, be content with the sham; or, it is to be hoped, ever again, knowing the difference between the two, begrudge the actor his full share in the credit of the life-giving process.

What, then, is the actor's case; what should he claim from the modern drama; what has he to offer? The dramatist's chief gain from the theatre of the new illusion and the conventions which belong to it, has been -at the price of some limitation of his power to project things in the doing-a great extension of resource in picturing things as they are. There was more need, as well as more scope, for physical action upon the older stage, even as there was for the spell-binding sway of verse. But by the new illusion the attention of an audience can be focussed upon the smallest details without either words or action being used to mark them, light, darkness, and silence can be made eloquent in

themselves, a whole gamut of effectiveness has been added. It has brought new obligations-of accuracy, of sincerity, of verisimilitude in general, as we have noted. Then gain and loss both must be reflected in the actor's opportunity. His chances of doing are curtailed; in their stead new obligations of being are laid upon him. Can he not turn them to his profit?

One is tempted to imagine a play-to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle-from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors of it would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do; to set up, that is to say, the relation by which all important human intimacies exist. If the art of the theatre could achieve this it would stand alone in a great achievement.

Plays of an approximate intention do indeed exist; but in England at least, they have never come to their own-even to such limited popularity as might be ex pected for them. There are reasons for this; the best being that the plays are mostly not English products. And while an English actor may reproduce the doings of a Frenchman or a Russian with sufficient fidelity, we cannot expect him to make real to us such an abstraction as his being.' So we have usually had the plays with the best part of them left out.

This opens up a line of inquiry worth pursuing for our present purpose. The dramatist must allow for the means of expression that come naturally to the people he is picturing. And expression is a racial thing. But when the influence of a technic of play construction spreads abroad, it is apt to affect plots, characterdrawing and dialogue as well, everything but the actual language in which the derivative play may be written. For an instance, take the influence of French drama on English during the last century. We may rightly welcome for their good effect upon our native product French plays acted by Frenchmen, or even their translation; but a century's crowding of our theatre with adaptations has left the English drama full of plots, situations, and figures that may or may not-have some relation to life in France, but in England must rank as mechanism merely. The average farcical comedy

with its rooms with four doors (French rooms, as well is French stages, do as often as not have four doors), peopled by distorted shadows from the world of the Trench provinces and the half-world of Paris, the grande lame, the père noble, the raisonneur! Now even when n Englishman passes fifty and it grows hard to stop him alking, he seldom becomes a raisonneur. The word and he habit are equally French.

One result of all this, and not the least harmful, is hat Englishmen have come to be thought of as a race of ad actors. Naturally they must seem so, when they are ncouraged to deny their race in the practice of this most acial of all the arts. It is a nuisance for the English Iramatist, no doubt, that his countrymen do not in the rdinary business—even in the extraordinary moments— of life express themselves with fluency. Well, it presents im with a difficulty he must learn to surmount.

He can, of course, call convention to his help. But he nust honestly develop the convention and not try to orrow one ready made. There lies one to his hand; nd the well-developed use of it might provide at least partial solution of our problem, might do much to help the actor to his heritage again. Englishmen are hot glib, but the essential strength of poetic speech is tradition with them. By which one does not mean, of ourse, that they lisp in numbers, or imply that on ormal occasions they cannot be academically dull. But in the natural speech of the people there is often hat power of expression and concentration of meanng which is the essence of poetry, even though the form De prose. And great English writers, from Shakespeare o Hardy, have known how to sublimate it and make it memorable. The speech of the Wessex peasant is not Mr Hardy's invention, nor did Dickens conjure Sam Weller and Mr Peggotty out of the void. And for as forceful a passage as any in 'Cymbeline,' turn to the gaoler's philosophy of hanging and his 'O the charity of a penny cord!' Indeed, whether it be in form of verse or prose, Shakespeare (once he shook free of the fashionable affectations of his time and but for falling later into some affectations of his own) did but take the common speech of the people of one class and another as material for his magic.

And this seems certain. All dramatic dialogue needs to have something of this particular quality of poetry in it. It must be dynamic speech. Poetry and drama are organically akin even when they seem sundered both by subject and method. They are notably alike in this, for instance, that they call for economy of effect. Consider how short is even the longest play in comparison with a novel. The mere words of many an excellent part could be written with a fine pen on a postcard. The literary man's failure at playwriting is due, nine times out of ten, to his dialogue being so obviously but a convenient means by which he tells his story and of no further value to the play; it is therefore of no value to the actor at all. If dialogue does not serve three purposes at least, to advance the story, to exhibit the one character and provoke the exhibition of another, it fails of its primary purpose, and the play will go floundering. Further, and most importantly, it must be charged with emotion. This lacking, the actor-unless he take matters so into his own hands that the play disappears in the process-is helpless.

And one may hazard an assertion that the modern. dramatist's failure to provide due opportunity for his actors is oftenest this: he has discovered no sufficient substitute for the poetry and rhetoric in which lay the acting strength of the old plays. He may write excellent sense, and the audience, hearing it, will yet remain profoundly uninterested. Is the actor to blame? No; dramatic dialogue needs other qualities before it can be made to carry conviction. There is no solution, needless to say, in the dressing up of the play in poetic phrasing or the provision of a purple patch here and there. One must choose a medium and stick to it; only so can illusion be sustained. But the old dramatists did put into the hands-or, rather, into the mouths-of their actors a weapon of great, of magical power, by which, with little else to aid them, they could subdue their hearers to every illusion of a mimic world. Useless to-day to imitate its form, to fancy the strength lay in that The essentials of it must be sought and somehow found. When found they are recognisable enough. Take any play and read two pages aloud. There can be no mistake. Tested by the living voice, either the language

1

T

has life in it or it has not. A difficult medium, no doubt, to master, the prose of common speech which shall yet have the power of poetry. But it is what the actor asks if he is to command belief in his world of make-believe.

To put it in a phrase then; if the actor is to come to his own in the new drama, something the dynamic equivalent of poetry must be given to him as material for his share of the work. Nor is this too hard a saying. The dramatist's task-and the actor's coming after him --is the building up and exhibition of human character, the picturing of men's natures in the intimacies of their working. To this extent it is essentially a poet's task and the means to it are essentially those a poet seeks. A play's content may be what you will, matter for nothing but laughter; its dialogue may take any form whatever, from poetical imagery to the cracking of jokes. But it will be a good play or a poor one, a living thing or dead, in so far as we are brought to accept its inhabitants as fellow-creatures or left indifferent to them. This is true of high tragedy, and even the clown in the pantomime appeals to some innocent knavery in our hearts that would find it great fun to steal sausages, and to wield a red-hot poker that was not too hot.

And magic is needed; the power of the spoken word is a magic power. But the art of the theatre is not a reasonable art. A play's dialogue is an incantation, and the actors must bewitch us with it. They must seem, now to be the commonest sort of folk, now superhuman, and the form of their talk must fit them. But, for all appearance, it must ever be of a trebly-distilled strength. It must have this power of poetry in it. It must be alive with more than the mere meaning of words. In content and in form the modern dramatist has much advanced his art. But still, too often, the worthiest plays will leave us cold, respectful, when we should be deeply moved, or paying them instead of laughter a tolerant smile. What is wrong? This, for one thing, I suggest. The dramatist of the new dispensation has yet, as a rule, to learn both what to ask of his actors and how best to help them to answer the demand.

HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER.