of the lines.

In general, it should be frankly understood by students of the theatre that
an audience is not capable of hearing whether the dialogue of a play is
well or badly written. Such a critical discrimination would require an
extraordinary nicety of ear, and might easily be led astray, in one
direction or the other, by the reading of the actors. The rhetoric of
Massinger must have sounded like poetry to an Elizabethan audience that had
heard the same performers, the afternoon before, speaking lines of
Shakespeare's. If Mr. Forbes-Robertson is reading a poorly-written part, it
is hard to hear that the lines are, in themselves, not musical. Literary
style is, even for accomplished critics, very difficult to judge in the
theatre. Some years ago, Mrs. Fiske presented in New York an English
adaptation of Paul Heyse's _Mary of Magdala_. After the first
performance--at which I did not happen to be present--I asked several
cultivated people who had heard the play whether the English version was
written in verse or in prose; and though these people were themselves
actors and men of letters, not one of them could tell me. Yet, as appeared
later, when the play was published, the English dialogue was written in
blank verse by no less a poet than Mr. William Winter. If such an
elementary distinction as that between verse and prose was in this case
inaudible to cultivated ears, how much harder must it be for the average
audience to distinguish between a good phrase and a bad! The fact is that
literary style is, for the most part, wasted on an audience. The average
auditor is moved mainly by the emotional content of a sentence spoken on
the stage, and pays very little attention to the form of words in which the
meaning is set forth. At Hamlet's line, "Absent thee from felicity a
while"--which Matthew Arnold, with impeccable taste, selected as one of his
touchstones of literary style--the thing that really moves the audience in
the theatre is not the perfectness of the phrase but the pathos of Hamlet's
plea for his best friend to outlive him and explain his motives to a world
grown harsh.

That the content rather than the literary turn of dialogue is the thing
that counts most in the theatre will be felt emphatically if we compare
the mere writing of Moliere with that of his successor and imitator,
Regnard. Moliere is certainly a great writer, in the sense that he
expresses clearly and precisely the thing he has to say; his ver