The whole universe lies open to the poet who is also a dramatist, affording him an incomparable choice of subject.  Ibsen, the greatest of the playwrights of modern life, narrowed his stage, for ingenious plausible reasons of his own, to the four walls of a house, and, at his best, constrained his people to talk of nothing above their daily occupations.  He got the illusion of everyday life, but at a cruel expense.  These people, until they began to turn crazy, had no vision beyond their eyesight, and their thoughts never went deep enough to need a better form for expression than they could find in their newspapers.  They discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed the entries in their ledger.  Think for a moment how the peasants speak in that play of Tolstoi’s which I have called the only modern play in prose which contains poetry.  They speak as Russians speak, with a certain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more civilised peasants.  But the speech comes from deeper than they are aware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul.  A drunken man in Tolstoi has more wisdom in his cups than all Ibsen’s strange ladies who fumble at their lips for sea-magic.

And as Tolstoi found in this sordid chaos material for tragedy which is as noble as the Greeks’ (a like horror at the root of both, a like radiance at both summits), so the poet will find stories, as modern as this if he chooses, from which he can take the same ingredients for his art.  The ingredients are unchanging since “Prometheus”; no human agony has ever grown old or lost its pity and terror.  The great plays of the past were made out of great stories, and the great stories are repeated in our days and can be heard wherever an old man tells us a little of what has come to him in living.  Verse lends itself to the lifting and adequate treatment of the primary emotions, because it can render them more as they are in the soul, not being tied down to probable words, as prose talk is.  The probable words of prose talk can only render a part of what goes on among the obscure imageries of the inner life; for who, in a moment of crisis, responds to circumstances or destiny with an adequate answer?  Poetry, which is spoken thought, or the speech of something deeper than thought, may let loose some part of that answer which would justify the soul, if it did not lie dumb upon its lips.

THE SICILIAN ACTORS

I

I have been seeing the Sicilian actors in London.  They came here from Paris, where, I read, “la passion parait decidement,” to a dramatic critic, “avoir partout ses inconvenients,” especially on the stage.  We are supposed to think so here, but for once London has applauded an acting which is more primitively passionate than anything we are accustomed to on our moderate stage.  Some of it was spoken in Italian, some in the Sicilian dialect, and not many in the English part of the audience could follow very closely the words as they were spoken.  Yet so marvellously real were these stage peasants, so clear and poignant their gestures and actions, that words seemed a hardly needless accompaniment to so evident, exciting, and absorbing a form of drama.  It was a new intoxication, and people went, I am afraid, as to a wild-beast show.