The play, as one reads it, has perhaps less than usual of the beauty which d’Annunzio elaborates in his dramatic speech.  It is, on the other hand, closer to nature, carefully copied from the speech of the peasants of the Abruzzi, and from what remains of their folk-lore.  The story on which it is founded is a striking one, and the action has, even in reading, the effect of a melodrama.  Now see it on the stage, acted with the speed and fury of these actors.  Imagine oneself ignorant of the language and of the play.  Suddenly the words have become unnecessary; the bare outlines stand out, perfectly explicit in gesture and motion; the scene passes before you as if you were watching it in real life; and this primitively passionate acting, working on an action so cunningly contrived for its co-operation, gives us at last what the play, as we read it, had suggested to us, but without complete conviction.  The beauty of the speech had become a secondary matter, or, if we did not understand it, the desire to know what was being said:  the playwright and his players had eclipsed the poet, the visible action had put out the calculated cadences of the verse.  And the play, from the point of view of the stage, had fulfilled every requirement, had achieved its aim.

And still the question remains:  how much of this success is due to the playwright’s skill or to the skill of the actors?  How is it that in this play the actors obtain a fine result, act on a higher level, than in their realistic Sicilian tragedies?  D’Annunzio is no doubt a better writer than Capuana or Verga, and his play is finer as literature than “Cavalleria Rusticana” or “Malia.”  But is it great poetry or great drama, and has the skilful playwright need of the stage and of actors like these, who come with their own life and ways upon it, in order to bring the men and women of his pages to life?  Can it be said of him that he has fulfilled the great condition of poetic drama, that, as Coleridge said, “dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion—­not thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry?”

That is a question which I am not here concerned to answer.  Perhaps I have already answered it.  Perhaps Lamb had answered it when he said, of a performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that “it seemed to embody and realise conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape,” but that, “when the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realising an idea, we have only materialised and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood.”  If that is true of Shakespeare, the greatest of dramatic poets, how far is it from the impression which I have described in speaking of d’Annunzio.  What fine vision was there to bring down? what poetry hid in thought or passion was lost to us in its passage across the stage?