he
Psaltery, if one is sufficiently practised to speak on it without
thinking about it one can get an endless variety of expression. All art
is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior
variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of
the imagination. But this new art, new in modern life I mean, will have to
train its hearers as well as its speakers, for it takes time to surrender
gladly the gross efforts one is accustomed to, and one may well find mere
monotony at first where one soon learns to find a variety as incalculable
as in the outline of faces or in the expression of eyes. Modern acting and
recitation have taught us to fix our attention on the gross effects till
we have come to think gesture and the intonation that copies the
accidental surface of life more important than the rhythm; and yet we
understand theoretically that it is precisely this rhythm that separates
good writing from bad, that is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of
all intense literature. I do not say that we should speak our plays to
musical notes, for dramatic verse will need its own method, and I have
hitherto experimented with short lyric poems alone; but I am certain that,
if people would listen for a while to lyrical verse spoken to notes, they
would soon find it impossible to listen without indignation to verse as it
is spoken in our leading theatres. They would get a subtlety of hearing
that would demand new effects from actors and even from public speakers,
and they might, it may be, begin even to notice one another's voices till
poetry and rhythm had come nearer to common life.

I cannot tell what changes this new art is to go through, or to what
greatness or littleness of fortune; but I can imagine little stories in
prose with their dialogues in metre going pleasantly to the strings. I am
not certain that I shall not see some Order naming itself from the Golden
Violet of the Troubadours or the like, and having among its members none
but well-taught and well-mannered speakers who will keep the new art from
disrepute. They will know how to keep from singing notes and from prosaic
lifeless intonations, and they will always understand, however far they
push their experiments, that poetry and not music is their object; and
they will have by heart, like the Irish _File_, so many poems and
notations that they will never have to bend their heads over the book to
the ruin of dramatic expr