employing it is obviously to create such an illusion of actual life
passing on the stage as to compel the spectator to pass through an
experience of his own, to think, and talk, and move with the people he
sees thinking, talking, and moving in front of him. A false phrase, a
single word out of tune or time, will destroy that illusion and spoil the
surface as surely as a stone heaved into a still pool shatters the image
seen there. But this is only the beginning of the reason why the
naturalistic is the most exacting and difficult of all techniques. It is
easy enough to reproduce the exact conversation and movements of persons
in a room; it is desperately hard to produce the perfectly natural
conversation and movements of those persons, when each natural phrase
spoken and each natural movement made has not only to contribute toward
the growth and perfection of a drama's soul, but also to be a revelation,
phrase by phrase, movement by movement, of essential traits of character.
To put it another way, naturalistic art, when alive, indeed to be alive
at all, is simply the art of manipulating a procession of most delicate
symbols. Its service is the swaying and focussing of men's feelings and
thoughts in the various departments of human life. It will be like a
steady lamp, held up from time to time, in whose light things will be
seen for a space clearly and in due proportion, freed from the mists of
prejudice and partisanship. 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.