the following pages is not so much philosophical or even esthetic as it is technical; it is concerned less with the poetry which illumines the masterpieces of the great dramatists than it is with the sheer craftsmanship of the most skilful play.. wrights. The desire of the author has been to bring out the essential unity of the history of the drama and to make plain the permanence of the principles underlying the art of the stage. As it has seemed best to leave the book unencumbered with foot-notes, it may be recorded here that the conventions of the drama have been considered (at greater length than was here possible) in a paper published in a volume entitled 'The Historical Novel, and Other Essays'- a volume which also contains an essay on 'The Relation of the Drama to Literature.' In the third edition of another volume, 'Aspects of Fiction,' there was included a paper on 'The Importance of the Folk-Theater.' Of the ten lectures which make up the present volume, one or more have been delivered during the past two or three years at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, at the Brooklyn Institute, at Columbia University, and before the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Columbia University in the City of New York. B. M. I. THE ART OF THE DRAMATIST I RITICISM nowadays is franker than ever before in acknowledging the kinship of the various arts-painting and sculpture, music and poetry and the drama. As an American poet once made an Italian painter say, It seems to me All arts are one,-all branches on one tree,- And yet at the same time criticism is ever revealing an increasing appreciation of the special characteristics of each of the arts, a keener relish for the qualities peculiar to that art alone and absent from all the others. While every art can make us see and feel and think, each in its own way, the means of each are as different as may be; and whenever their methods are confused there is at once loss of power and misdirection of energy. It is a part of the duty of the epic poet to tell us a story; of the painter to give us an impression of the visible world; of the sculptor to fill our eyes with the beauty of form alone; and of the musician to charm our ears with rhythm and with harmony. But when the painter puts his chief reliance upon story-telling, and when the poet seeks to rival the musician, then of a certainty will they fail to attain the higher summits of possible achievement in their own arts. It is in their technical processes that the arts are strangers, in the methods by which the artist expresses himself; and this is why technic is again coming into the high esteem in which it was held during the Renascence, the most glorious epoch for all the allied arts since the day when Pericles ceased to rule over Athens. Craftsmanship, the mastery of his tools-this is what we are now demanding of the practitioner of every Craftsmanship can be his for the asking; he can have it if he will pay the price in toil and care and time. The message he may have to deliver is the gift of God, after all; but the artist himself is responsible for the clearness and the eloquence of its delivery. The prime duty of the craftsman is to know his trade, that he may give a fitting form to whatsoever ideas may hereafter possess him. His second obligation is to understand the possibilities of his art, its limitations, its boundaries, so that he may conquer all temptation to try |