acting, that is content
with the sympathy of our nerves; until at last those who love poetry found
it better to read alone in their rooms what they had once delighted to
hear sitting friend by friend, lover by beloved. I once asked Mr. William
Morris if he had thought of writing a play, and he answered that he had,
but would not write one, because actors did not know how to speak poetry
with the half-chant men spoke it with in old times. Mr. Swinburne's
_Locrine_ was acted a month ago, and it was not badly acted, but nobody
could tell whether it was fit for the stage or not, for not one rhythm,
not one cry of passion, was spoken with a musical emphasis, and verse
spoken without a musical emphasis seems but an artificial and cumbersome
way of saying what might be said naturally and simply in prose.

As audiences and actors changed, managers learned to substitute
meretricious landscapes, painted upon wood and canvas, for the
descriptions of poetry, until the painted scenery, which had in Greece
been a charming explanation of what was least important in the story,
became as important as the story. It needed some imagination, some gift
for day-dreams, to see the horses and the fields and flowers of Colonus as
one listened to the elders gathered about OEdipus, or to see 'the
pendent bed and procreant cradle' of the 'martlet' as one listened to
Duncan before the castle of Macbeth; but it needs no imagination to admire
a painting of one of the more obvious effects of nature painted by
somebody who understands how to show everything to the most hurried
glance. At the same time the managers made the costumes of the actors more
and more magnificent, that the mind might sleep in peace, while the eye
took pleasure in the magnificence of velvet and silk and in the physical
beauty of women. These changes gradually perfected the theatre of
commerce, the masterpiece of that movement towards externality in life and
thought and Art, against which the criticism of our day is learning to
protest.

Even if poetry were spoken as poetry, it would still seem out of place in
many of its highest moments upon a stage, where the superficial
appearances of nature are so closely copied; for poetry is founded upon
convention, and becomes incredible the moment painting or gesture remind
us that people do not speak verse when they meet upon the highway. The
theatre of Art, when it comes to exist, must therefore discover grave and
decorative gestures,