.[7]

The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or
historical themes, which are--rightly or wrongly--considered suitable
for treatment in blank verse. Whether, and how far, the blank verse
drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question
to be considered later. In the meantime it is sufficient to say that
whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern
prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. The
verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the
prose-poet. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more
excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are
ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than
the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he
renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to
produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not
speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form
which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described
by the sailor, "cannot live on land and dies in the water"?

To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic
composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,
or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce
willy-nilly a "closet drama." Let him beware of saying to himself, "I
will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a
Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a
Savanarola, or a Cromwell?" A drama conceived in this reach-me-down
fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other
hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading,
some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be
interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting
on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means
yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The
real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it
with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical
anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: For instance, _Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une
porte soit ouverte ou fermee. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu._ There is
als