y claims
that the hierarchy of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan
to Ruskin, should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from
Herrick to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the
devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving factitious
prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing the dramatic style
of the genuine poet of its full natural endowment of variety, force and
simplicity.

This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in musical
art, since music can be written in prose themes or in versified tunes;
only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater difficulty of the prose
forms, and the comparative triviality of versification. Yet in dramatic
music, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clings
with the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is
conventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be
in all things the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in
art.

Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic element
in both literature and music is maintained by the example of great
masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression can be combined
with decorative symmetry of versification when the artist happens to
possess both the decorative and dramatic gifts, and to have cultivated
both hand in hand. Shakespeare and Shelley, for instance, far from being
hampered by the conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse,
found it much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if
Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in prose, all
his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the first scene of As
You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine as "What a piece of
work is Man!", thus sparing us a great deal of blank verse in which the
thought is commonplace, and the expression, though catchingly turned,
absurdly pompous. The Cent might either have been a serious drama or
might never have been written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to
carry off its unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both
poets have achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic
qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one another to a
pitch otherwise unattainable.

Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a prodigiously
gifted and arduously trained musician who is also, by a happy a