the theatre correspond to what humanity asks from the theatre. Certainly these methods have proved to be astonishingly elastic. Mr. Shaw, that marvellous though uninventive juggler, has managed within them to write Heartbreak House, and Mr. Granville-Barker has managed to write The Marrying of Anne Leete, which remains his best, though not his most nearly perfect, play. But the methods of realism are methods devised for the presentation of the ordinary; and the fact that they can be used for other purposes does not answer the question whether other methods ought not to be devised. If I am clever enough to put a sufficiently good edge on it, I can shave with a carving-knife; but probably I should do better to buy a razor. What need have we of the conventions of the old poetic drama?

The poetic drama does not present people as they are nor yet an illusion of people as they are. It does not give the literal transcript from reality, which is the special gift of Mr. Galsworthy, nor the abridged and modified transcript by which Ibsen creates his illusion. It shows such persons as never existed talking as no human being ever talked; and, whether they talk in verse like the persons of Webster and Shakespeare or in heavily rhythmical prose like the persons of M. Claudel, the effect is the same. They are removed from ordinary life: they are idealisations of what is important in it. Mr. Shaw, hard-driven to account for one of the characters in Man and Superman, said: "Every woman is not Anne, but Anne is Everywoman. It may have been a pity that he did not make Anne, and the rest of the abstractions who surrounded her, talk in verse. For verse is a method, and a method commonly understood, of proclaiming that one's

representations are ideally, not literally, true to life. Thus the adoption of verse, or of some equivalent to it, is a matter of the first importance, of far more than merely technical importance. A preponderance at any time, or even a large number, of plays in verse is a certain indication that at that time realism is not the prevailing spirit.

Now, is it fanciful to suppose that a revival of the poetic drama might conquer the commercial theatre and reform it throughout as the drama of Ibsen has failed to do? We have seen that the revolution of the nineties was successful in so far as it established a secure place for itself. It did so much because it appealed immediately to intelligent persons who liked the theatre, but were driven away from it by the corruption of greater days, which was all that they could find there. Yet it remained strictly unpopular; and does not one feel, with the art of the drama, that what is unpopular is proportionately unsatisfactory? And is this not because its realistic basis, which the new drama has often transcended but never forgotten, is too narrow for genuine public appreciation? Is the modern public quite incapable of appreciating good art in the theatre, or is it merely not moved by the particular form of good art at present offered to it? In this connection we ought to observe that among those productions which have recently attained, by more or less common consent, both artistic and commercial success are The Beggar's Opera and the Russian Ballet. These have received popular support in a measure denied to works which have been, perhaps, equally good, but in a different way.

Of the possibilities and probabilities of such an extensive movement there is at present little to say. Verse is not an essential, though it is hard not to

believe that were a revival of the essentially poetic drama to take place it would not bring verse with it. But verse has its drawbacks as well as its merits. Our common dramatic blank verse is haunted. For a long time hardly any one has been able to use it without producing a million reverberating echoes which blurr what he himself has to say; and no one has yet evolved any formal rhythm which can satisfactorily take its place.

But speculations on such details as these are, no doubt, out of place and unprofitable. What we have to consider is whether the "artistic" drama was not limited at the outset in its range and its appeal by the circumstances in which it received its new life; whether it is not, in virtue of these limitations, a thing only for the few, not a thing which only a few as yet enjoy, though all should do so.

Folk-Song as Poetry

THE great mass of folk poetry in the English language, with the exception of the Scottish and Border ballads and the Scottish songs rehandled by Burns, has been rescued only during the last twenty years or so from a fast-decaying oral tradition. The work of collection has been carried out almost entirely by musicians, who have found the verses in a highly corrupt state and have accepted the corruption with a regret that is soon assuaged by the extreme beauty of the tunes. Mr. Cecil Sharp has been the most industrious worker in the musical field, and his judgment on the poetic side of the subject is expressed in one sentence in his excellent book, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. "The truth is,' he says, in his brief chapter on folk-poetry, "that the twentieth century collector is a hundred years too late." It is plain that he expects no answer to his final question: "Who will do for our English ballads and songs what Scott and Burns did for the Scottish?" But if it is not likely that any one can ever do so much as this, it is still possible that the few pieces of unspoilt folk-song that are left may come into English poetry as an enlivening and simplifying influence.

If this does happen, it will be to the musicians and in a very high degree to Mr. Sharp that we shall owe it; and now more than ever, since he has added to his exhaustive collection of Somerset songs a new and very rich collection from America. It

1English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians. Collected by Oliver Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp. (Putnam.)

has long been known that certain English ballads survived in the United States, and The Hangman's Tree, a version of The Maid Freed from the Gallows, sung in Virginia with traces of Yorkshire dialect, has often been quoted as the classical example. But Mrs. Campbell and Mr. Sharp have done more than discover a few isolated survivals. His introduction to their book transcends its purpose and reads like a narrative of the discovery of the Earthly Paradise, or one of those adventure-stories in which lucky hunters stumble on a secluded abundance of rare game. The mountain country which they explored extends from the borders of Pennsylvania half-way into Alabama, is bounded roughly by the thousand-feet contour line, and contains some three million inhabitants, exclusive of city-dwellers. The district is inaccessible, and it is in consequence largely unspoilt. Its inhabitants are economically independent, their wants are few, they do not produce for sale, and therefore they have much leisure and a highly developed social sense. obvious that Mr. Sharp thought himself in a sort of Earthly Paradise; and indeed he cannot prevent a certain note of the fabulous from creeping into his description. "I found myself," he says, for the first time in my life in a community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a practice as speaking." And the following passage would sound more at home in Utopia or Erewhon or Morris's Nowhere than in the United States:

It is

They have an easy unaffected bearing and the unselfconscious manners of the well-bred. I have received salutations upon introduction or on bidding farewell, dignified and restrained, such as a courtier might make to his Sovereign. Our work