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Besides, and this is perhaps the most complete answer to Lord Lytton's theory, it must be remembered that neither in costume nor in dialogue is beauty the dramatist's primary aim at all.
There he forecast the schemes of dramas yet to be, dramas no longer neo-classic. And as his genius foresaw the approach of its maturity, it purified and emptied itself of the personal passion that obscures the dramatist's vision of the world. This it did in a sequence of Nine and Twenty sonnets, a golden chain that bound Lucia's name to his whether she would or no.
Entrances, exits, the indication of "business," the animation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters, were things delightful in themselves while I panted toward the canvas on which I should fling my figures; which it took me longer to fill than it had taken me to write what went with it, but which had on the other hand something of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his personæ, and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject.
The first is: To definitely set before the public that which it wishes to have set before it, the views and codes of life by which the public lives and in which it believes. This way is the most common, successful, and popular. It makes the dramatist's position sure, and not too obviously authoritative.
For, in present-day America at least, production in the theatre is the dramatist's sole means of publication, his only medium for conveying to the public those truths of life he wishes to express. Very few plays are printed nowadays, and those few are rarely read: seldom, therefore, do they receive as careful critical consideration as even third-class novels.
The manager reads the play, and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads quite a different play from that which the dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular the manager reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed indeed, a play against whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.
There was a rather bitter discussion some time ago between an author and a critic; the latter had remarked that the language of the dramatist's people did not sound true, that it seemed composed of scraps from the stage, that he generally could guess from the cue the words of the answering speech.
She laughed at him quite good-naturedly, and yet in such a way that a less sensitive man than Mr. Raymond Greene might well have been conscious of the note of ridicule. "No wonder you are such a great success in your profession!" she observed. "You carry the melodramatic instinct with you, day by day. You see everything through the dramatist's spectacles." "That's all very well," Mr.
Such an attitude did not commend itself to Euripides; he clearly states the problem in a prologue, solving it in an appearance of Artemis by the device known as the Deus ex machina. It is sometimes said this trick is a confession of the dramatist's inability to untie the knot he has twisted.
This, perhaps, was what Emerson had in mind; and if he had it in mind of Shakespeare, who gave us, with his histories and comedies and problems, such a searching homily as "Macbeth," one feels that he scarcely recognized the limitations of the dramatist's art.
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