ture, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea
that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long
ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But
there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to
lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who
discovers and develops them.

One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a
blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript
rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive
ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the
monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved
even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from
monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now!
I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a
dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]

* * * * *

We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
to defend them. "The stage is the realm of convention," they argue. "If
you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
through his mind?"

It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
as n