is the actor’s first duty to his author, if he is to remember that a play is acted, not for the exhibition of the actor, but for the realisation of the play.  We should think little of the “dramatic effect” of a symphony, in which every individual note had not been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra.  When do we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of even the “solo” players, to give its precise value to every word of that poetry which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?

The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the sound.  I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard a lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Comedie Francaise, on the art of speaking on the stage.

The method of M. Silvain (who, besides being an actor, is Professor of Declamation at the Conservatoire) is the method of the elocutionist, but of the elocutionist at his best.  He has a large, round, vibrating voice, over which he has perfect command.  “M.  Silvain,” says M. Catulle Mendes, “est de ceux, bien rares au Theatre Francais, qu’on entend meme lorsqu’ils par lent bas.”  He has trained his voice to do everything that he wants it to do; his whole body is full of life, energy, sensitiveness to the emotion of every word; his gestures seem to be at once spontaneous and calculated.  He adores verse, for its own sake, as a brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt for prose, as an inferior form.  In all his renderings of verse, he never forgot that it was at the same time speech, the direct expression of character, and also poetry, a thing with its own reasons for existence.  He gave La Fontaine in one way, Moliere in another, Victor Hugo in another, some poor modern verse in yet another.  But in all there was the same attempt:  to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect.  In a tirade from Corneille’s “Cinna,” he followed the angry reasoning of the lines by counting on his fingers:  one, two, three, as if he were underlining the important words of each clause.  The danger of this method is that it is apt to turn poetry into a kind of bad logic.  There, precisely, is the danger of the French conception of poetry, and M. Silvain’s method brings out the worst faults of that conception.

Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats would have us do, we are at least safe from this danger.  Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knows that verse is first of all song.  In purely lyrical verse, with which he is at present chiefly concerned, the verse itself has a melody which demands expression by the voice, not only when it is “set to music,” but when it is said aloud.  Every poet, when he reads his own verse, reads it with certain inflections of the voice, in what is often called a “sing-song”