There is nothing, accordingly, for which our
actors and actresses do not rely upon time.
For humour even, when the humour occurs
in tragedy, they appeal to time. They give
blanks to their audiences to be filled up.

It might be possible to have tragedies
written from beginning to end for the ser-
vice of the present kind of "art." But the
tragedies we have are not so written. And
being what they are, it is not vivacity that
they lose by this length of pause, this length
of phrasing, this illimitable tiresomeness; it is
life itself. For the life of a scene conceived
directly is its directness; the life of a scene
created simply is its simplicity. And sim-
plicity, directness, impetus, emotion, nature
fall out of the trailing, loose, long dialogue,
like fish from the loose meshes of a net --
they fall out, they drift off, they are lost.

The universal slowness, moreover, is not
good for metre. Even when an actress speaks
her lines as lines, and does not drop into
prose by slipping here and there a syllable,
she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of
pronunciation. Verse cannot keep upon the
wing without a certain measure in the move-
ment of the pinion. Verse is a flight.

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