A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and
elaborately worked-up "messenger-speech," a pathetic recitation. That
was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called
the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it
was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.
But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating
attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere
event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,
with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the
dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing
anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.
The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and
tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace
ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them
might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches
the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the
height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father
and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the
confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them
with terrible distinctness, "The crutch is floating!" It would be hard
to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is
concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the
original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this
incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each
case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in
doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.
Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the
"fingering of the dramatist"; and I know not how better to express the
common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched
with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has