* * * * *

[Footnote 1:  So, too, with the style of Congreve.  It is much, and justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in such a passage as this?—­

MILLAMANT:  “...  Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together; but let us be very strange and well-bred:  let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.”

  MIRABELL:  “Have you any more conditions to offer?  Hitherto your
  demands are pretty reasonable.”

MILLAMANT:  “Trifles!—­as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please; and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like because they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because they may be your relatives....  These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.”

This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature, not of life.]

[Footnote 2:  From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of The Blot in the Scutcheon or Stratford, I must leave the reader to draw what inference he pleases.  On the other hand, I believe that a reconstruction of Tennyson’s Queen Mary, with a few connecting links written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.]

[Footnote 3:  Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success.  He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction.  He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called “stichomythy,” and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine.  Mr. Zangwill’s practice is in absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical.  His verse is a product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent.  It is measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails.  I think, then, that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama.  But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as he does.]

[Footnote 4:  Not quite.  The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.]

[Footnote 5:  A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient which ought not to be abused.]