could infuse life and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality.  The worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new life into the outworn form.  It may almost be called an appalling fact that for at least two centuries—­from 1700 to 1900—­not a single blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on the stage of to-day.

I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a great school of rhetorical acting.  The playwright who sets forth with the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase.  The great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised.  It was because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in Paolo and Francesca the dawn of a new art.  Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak in the lyric quarter of the heavens.  The very summits of Shakespeare’s achievement are his glorious lyrical passages.  Think of the exquisite elegiacs of Macbeth!  Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra!  If verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric beauty to passionate speech.  For the mere rhetorical “elevation” of blank verse we have no use whatever.  It consists in saying simple things with verbose pomposity.  But should there arise a man who combines highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our idealists are sighing.  He will choose his themes, I take it, from legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy—­themes which can be steeped from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as Tristan und Isolde is steeped in an atmosphere of music.  Of historic themes, I would counsel this hypothetical genius to beware.  If there are any which can fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and legend.  The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula of Chapman or of Rowe.  That a new historic drama awaits us in the future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose.  The idea that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D’Annunzio and Synge.  But there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who discovers and develops them.