It is a mistake to suppose that “literary merit” can be imparted to drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have not yet outgrown that superstition.  Let the playwright take to heart an anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his Inquiries and Opinions—­an anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect of his house, replied:  “Oh, I built that house myself; but there’s a man coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture.”  Better no style at all than style thus plastered on.

* * * * *

What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic medium?  This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution.  One can say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.

To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into the realm of pure aesthetics.  For my own part, I doubt it.  I suspect that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the simple reason that verse is easier to make—­and to memorize—­than prose.  Primitive peoples felt with Goethe—­though not quite in the same sense—­that “art is art because it is not nature.”  Not merely for emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life.  The drama “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”  Even of so modern a writer (comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he “chose” verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose prose.  He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and methods of the theatre of his time.  In familiar passages he broke away from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of the modern stage.

And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an overwhelming prestige.  It was extremely easy to write blank verse after a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans.  Just after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was too difficult to establish itself in general use.  Tragedy soon fell back upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy mediocrity set in.  There is nothing drearier in literature than the century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.  One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who