drama in verse.  The modern desire to escape from form, and to get at a raw thing which shall seem like what we know of the outside of nature, has led our latest dramatists to use prose in preference to verse, which indeed is more within their limits.  It is Ibsen who has seemed to do most to justify the use of prose, for he carries his psychology far with it.  Yet it remains prose, a meaner method, a limiting restraint, and his drama a thing less fundamental than the drama of the poets.  Only one modern writer has brought something which is almost the equivalent of poetry out of prose speech:  Tolstoi, in “The Powers of Darkness.”  The play is horrible and uncouth, but it is illuminated by a great inner light.  There is not a beautiful word in it, but it is filled with beauty.  And that is because Tolstoi has the vision which may be equally that of the poet and of the prophet.  It is often said that the age of poetry is over, and that the great forms of the future must be in prose.  That is the “exquisite reason” of those whom the gods have not made poetical.  It is like saying that there will be no more music, or that love is out of date.  Forms change, but not essence; and Whitman points the way, not to prose, but to a poetry which shall take in wider regions of the mind.

Yet, though it is by its poetry that, as Lamb pointed out, a play of Shakespeare differs from a play of Banks or Lillo, the poetry is not more essential to its making than the living substance, the melodrama.  Poets who have written plays for reading have wasted their best opportunities.  Why wear chains for dancing?  The limitations necessary to the drama before it can be fitted to the stage are but hindrances and disabilities to the writer of a book.  Where can we find more spilt wealth than in the plays of Swinburne, where all the magnificent speech builds up no structure, but wavers in orchestral floods, without beginning or ending?  It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice his drama to his poetry, and even “Hamlet” has been quoted against him.  But let “Hamlet” be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere lingering meditation will be recognised as a part of that thought which makes or waits on action.  If poetry in Shakespeare may sometimes seem to delay action, it does but deepen it.  The poetry is the life blood, or runs through it.  Only bad actors and managers think that by stripping the flesh from the skeleton they can show us a more living body.  The outlines of “Hamlet” are crude, irresistible melodrama, still irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though it comes to us by means of the poetry, comes to us legitimately, as a growth out of melodrama.