ngwill, in his symbolic play, _The War-God_,
has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
"stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then,
that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic
drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as
he does.]

[Footnote 4: Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes
conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.]

[Footnote 5: A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient
and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient
which ought not to be abused.]

[Footnote 6: The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous
and unnecessary slovenliness. In _Les Corbeaux_, by Henry Becque,
produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,
Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either
or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The
latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which
might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been
conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his
day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.]

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