And the other of these two main channels
will, I think, be a twisting and delicious stream, which will bear on its
breast new barques of poetry, shaped, it may be, like prose, but a prose
incarnating through its fantasy and symbolism all the deeper aspirations,
yearning, doubts, and mysterious stirrings of the human spirit; a poetic
prose-drama, emotionalising us by its diversity and purity of form and
invention, and whose province will be to disclose the elemental soul of
man and the forces of Nature, not perhaps as the old tragedies disclosed
them, not necessarily in the epic mood, but always with beauty and in the
spirit of discovery.
Such will, I think, be the two vital forms of our drama in the coming
generation. And between these two forms there must be no crude unions;
they are too far apart, the cross is too violent. For, where there is a
seeming blend of lyricism and naturalism, it will on examination be
found, I think, to exist only in plays whose subjects or settings--as in
Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan"--are
so removed from our ken that we cannot really tell, and therefore do not
care, whether an absolute illusion is maintained. The poetry which may
and should exist in naturalistic drama, can only be that of perfect
rightness of proportion, rhythm, shape--the poetry, in fact, that lies in
all vital things.
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