they are, his plays are beautiful in
ideas and words, and striking in a lyric and decorative way, if not all
of them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificed
poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric
and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats
highest when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a
redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric
poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us
not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and
another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of
a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a
success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to
remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the
success of a new sort of drama, whether it be a "static" drama, as M.
Maeterlinck has called his early drama, or whether it be the kind of
drama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other than
what we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter how
great may be the success of an author in a form he has invented, he will
almost invariably attempt also the accepted form from which he has
diverged. Impelled by a desire to see his wife in a drama of his own but
of the old dramatic sort, M. Maeterlinck made "Monna Vanna" in accord
with the usual rules of the theatre, but to find it fall far short of
the strange new beauty of his earlier plays. As yet Mr. Yeats has not
compromised with the current taste in drama, but it may be that a desire
to see some such actress as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a part of his may
lead to such compromise, as the thought of her acting his Deirdre
inspired him to rewrite that part for Mrs. Campbell.

Mr. Yeats has not yet passed beyond the danger of falling between two
stools. If it prove that he has really attained in a drama in which the
verse is true dramatic speech and not lyric ecstasy or decoration, the
success of such drama will be worth the sacrifice of the lyric poetry
that he has not written because of the absorption of all of his energy
in his dramatic writing. If it prove he has not so attained, we shall
have no adequate compensation for the lost lyrics that he is now too old
to write. I say no "adequate compensation," for compensation there is in
the lyrical passages that no play of his is without, lyrical p