In all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the speech of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the rapidity of dialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement passions, he is scious of the presence of the chorus, men before whom he must keep up appearances children latest born of Cadmus line who do not share his passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We listen to reports and discuss them, taking part as it were in a cil of state. Nothing happens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama, and in a lesser degree of that of eille and Rae depends, as trasted with the troubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost even speed of dialogue, and on a so tinuous exclusion of the animation of on life, that thought remains lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, upon whose stage everything may happen, even the blinding of Gloster, and who has no formal check except what is implied in the slow, elaborate structure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by an often encumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as will give his characters the leisure to look at life from without. Maeterlinck, to he first modern of the old way who es to mind??reaches the same end, by choosing instead of human beings persons who are as faint as a breath upon a looking?glass, symbols who speak a language slow and heavy with dreams because their own life is but a dream. Modern drama, oher hand, which accepts the tightness of the classic plot, while expressing life directly, has been driven to make i its expression of the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some on?place sentence esture as we i in ordinary life; and this is, I believe, the cause of the perpetual disappoi of the hope imagihis hundred years that France or Spain ermany or Sdinavia will at last produce the master we await.
The divisions is are almost all in the first instaeical, and the great schools of drama have been divided from one another by the form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen for the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his temperament in an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The ce is long aative, as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who when they meet in one anothers houses??as their way is at the days end??listen patiently, each man speaking in turn and for some little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sound. Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full of traditional wisdom aravagant pictures as that of some Aeschylean chorus, and no matter what the topic is, it is as though the present were held at arms length. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for the speaker serves his own delight, though doubtless he would tell you that like Rafterys whiskey? drinking it was but for the panys sake. A medial manner of speech too, for it could not even express, so little abstract it is and so rammed with life, those weneralizations of national propaganda. Ill be telling you the fi story youd hear any place from Dundalk to Ballinacree with great queens in it, making themselves matches from the start to the end, and they with shiny silks on them ... Ive a grand story of the great queens of Ireland, with white necks ohe like of Sarah Casey, and fine arms would hit you a slap.... What good am I this night, God help me? What good are the grand stories I have when its few would listen to an old woman, few but a girl maybe woul