acts; dramatic poetry therefore involves both lyric and epic elements.

The most primitive, most natural, and simplest means by which a living
being can utter itself is gesture--action. It is not necessary to
speculate on prehistoric conditions. We need only observe the world
around us, the behaviour of our friends and acquaintances,
particularly those of South-European blood, to recognize how direct
and eloquent is the expression of gesture. On the stage a simple
series of dramatic actions can be fully represented by gesture and
scenery alone with a very high intensity of emotional expression.

All movement in nature is rhythmic. I need not trouble my readers with
the evidences of a fact which is well known in science, but will refer
them to the lucid demonstration in Herbert Spencer's _First
Principles_, Pt. II., ch. 10.

Rhythmic gesture then, or dancing, is the most primitive art, and it
is purely lyric, i.e. subjective. It is very important to bear this
fact of dancing, of which acting is only a species, as the primitive
form of art before our minds. It is common to men and animals. I have
often wondered whether the extraordinary development of Wagner's
histrionic faculty did not stand in some mysterious relation to the
close sympathy which existed between him and that most consummate of
all actors--the dog.

The vital activity of the throat and vocal cords becomes sound; song
may therefore be considered as a peculiarly specialized form of
gesture, but with the radical difference that as a vehicle of
expression it addresses the ear, not the eye. The fact that it enters
the brain through a different channel gives the art of sound an