n England, nothing on the
same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results.
Are we capable of realising the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe and
Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.

A THEORY OF THE STAGE

Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama. Mix the two as you
will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance. But
let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry,
and comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been
scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action. The greatest
plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which
clothes that skeleton.

The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be
represented in dumb show. Only the essential parts of action can be
represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work
on any material but that which is common to humanity. The permanence of
a drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its
appeal when played silently in gestures. I have seen the test applied.
Companies of marionette players still go about the villages of Kent,
and among their stock pieces is "Arden of Feversham," the play which
Shakespeare is not too great to have written, at some moment when his
right hand knew not what his left hand was doing. Well, that great
little play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as the
puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after three
centuries. Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is
inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words. When words come,
there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse
can we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty. Nothing
but beauty should exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the
ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama
begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell
its secret. Because poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can
let out more of that secret than prose, the great drama of the past has
been mainly drama in verse. The modern desire to escape from form, and
to get at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside
of nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to
verse, which indeed is more within their limits. It is Ibsen who has
seemed to do most to justif