The failure, the comparative failure, of every contemporary dramatist, however far he may go in one direction or another, comes from his neglect of one or another of these two primary and essential requirements.  There is, at this time, a more serious dramatic movement in Germany than in any other country; with mechanicians, like Sudermann, as accomplished as the best of ours, and dramatists who are also poets, like Hauptmann.  I do not know them well enough to bring them into my argument, but I can see that in Germany, whatever the actual result, the endeavour is in the right direction.  Elsewhere, how often do we find even so much as this, in more than a single writer here and there?  Consider Ibsen, who is the subtlest master of the stage since Sophocles.  At his best he has a firm hold on structural melodrama, he is a marvellous analyst of life, he is the most ingenious of all the playwrights; but ask him for beauty and he will give you a phrase, “vine-leaves in the hair” or its equivalent; one of the cliches of the minor poet.  In the end beauty revenged itself upon him by bringing him to a no-man’s land where there were clouds and phantasms that he could no longer direct.

Maeterlinck began by a marvellous instinct, with plays “for marionettes,” and, having discovered a forgotten secret, grew tired of limiting himself within its narrow circle, and came outside his magic.  “Monna Vanna” is an attempt to be broadly human on the part of a man whose gift is of another kind:  a visionary of the moods.  His later speech, like his later dramatic material, is diluted; he becomes, in the conventional sense, eloquent, which poetry never is.  But he has brought back mystery to the stage, which has been banished, or retained in exile, among phantasmagoric Faust-lights.  The dramatist of the future will have more to learn from Maeterlinck than from any other playwright of our time.  He has seen his puppets against the permanent darkness, which we had cloaked with light; he has given them supreme silences.

In d’Annunzio we have an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital passions.  The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in “Francesca,” and in “The Dead City” the whole action arises out of the glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon.  Speech and drama are there, clothing but not revealing one another; the speech always a lovely veil, never a human outline.

We have in England one man, and one only, who has some public claim to be named with these artists, though his aim is the negation of art.  Mr. Shaw is a mind without a body, a whimsical intelligence without a soul.  He is one of those tragic buffoons who play with eternal things, not only for the amusement of the crowd, but because an uneasy devil capers in their own brains.  He is a merry preacher, a petulant critic, a great talker.  It is partly because