etry only secondarily. Mr. Mackaye, like a great
many other aspirants, began at the wrong end: he made his piece poetry
first and foremost, and drama only incidentally. And I think that the only
way to prepare the public for true poetic drama is to educate the public's
faith in its right to be bored in the theatre by poetry that is not
dramatic. Performances of _Pippa Passes_ and _The Sunken Bell_ exert a very
unpropitious influence upon the mood of the average theatre-goer. These
poems are not plays; and the innocent spectator, being told that they are,
is made to believe that poetic drama must be necessarily a soporific thing.
And when this belief is once lodged in his uncritical mind, it is difficult
to dispel it, even with a long course of _Othello_ and _Hamlet_. _Paolo
and Francesca_ was a good poem, but a bad play; and its weakness as a play
was not excusable by its beauty as a poem. _Cyrano de Bergerac_ was a good
play, first of all, and a good poem also; and even a public that fears to
seem Philistine knew the difference instinctively.

Mme. Nazimova has been quoted as saying that she would never act a play in
verse, because in speaking verse she could not be natural. But whether an
actor may be natural or not depends entirely upon the kind of verse the
author has given him to speak. Three kinds of blank verse are known in
English literature,--lyric, narrative, and dramatic. By lyric blank verse I
mean verse like that of Tennyson's _Tears, Idle Tears_; by narrative, verse
like that of Mr. Stephen Phillips's _Marpessa_ or Tennyson's _Idylls of the
King_; by dramatic, verse like that of the murder scene in _Macbeth_. The
Elizabethan playwrights wrote all three kinds of blank verse, because their
drama was a platform drama and admitted narrative and lyric as well as
dramatic elements. But because of the development in modern times of the
physical conditions of the theatre, we have grown to exclude from the drama
all non-dramatic elements. Narrative and lyric, for their own sakes, have
no place upon the modern stage; they may be introduced only for a definite
dramatic purpose. Only one of the three kinds of blank verse that the
Elizabethan playwrights used is, therefore, serviceable on the modern
stage. But our poets, because of inexperience in the theatre, insist on
writing the other two. For this reason, and for this reason only, do modern
actors like Mme. Nazimova complain of plays in verse.

Mr. Percy Mackaye's v