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 service 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 simplicity, 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 movement of the pinion. Verse is a flight.
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