a foreign language, which we may not understand. The
acting, by the Sicilian actors, of "La Figlia di Jorio," seemed to me to
do something towards the solution of part at least of this problem.

The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty
which d'Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech. It is, on the other
hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants
of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore. The story on
which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in
reading, the effect of a melodrama. Now see it on the stage, acted with
the speed and fury of these actors. Imagine oneself ignorant of the
language and of the play. Suddenly the words have become unnecessary;
the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion;
the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and
this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly
contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as we
read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction. The
beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not
understand it, the desire to know what was being said: the playwright
and his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out
the calculated cadences of the verse. And the play, from the point of
view of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its
aim.

And still the question remains: how much of this success is due to the
playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? How is it that in
this play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than
in their realistic Sicilian tragedies? D'Annunzio is no doubt a better
writer than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than
"Cavalleria Rusticana" or "Malia." But is it great poetry or great
drama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors
like these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order to
bring the men and women of his pages to life? Can it be said of him that
he has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge
said, "dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion--not
thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?"

That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer. Perhaps I
have already answered it. Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of
a performance of Shakespe