phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing. None act, none speak, as
though there were such a thing as impulse in a play. To drop behind is
the only idea of arriving. The nurse ceases to be absurd, for there is
no one readier with a reply than she. Or, rather, her delays are so
altered by exaggeration as to lose touch with Nature. If it is ill
enough to hear haste drawled out, it is ill, too, to hear slowness out-
tarried. The true nurse of Shakespeare lags with her news because her
ignorant wits are easily astray, as lightly caught as though they were
light, which they are not; but the nurse of the stage is never simply
astray: she knows beforehand how long she means to be, and never, never
forgets what kind of race is the race she is riding. The Juliet of the
stage seems to consider that there is plenty of time for her to discover
which is slain--Tybalt or her husband; she is sure to know some time; it
can wait.

A London success, when you know where it lies, is not difficult to
achieve. Of all things that can be gained by men or women about their
business, there is one thing that can be gained without fear of failure.
This is time. To gain time requires so little wit that, except for
competition, every one could be first at the game. In fact, time gains
itself. The actor is really not called upon to do anything. There is
nothing, accordingly, for which our actors and actresses do not rely upon
time. 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