muffled or dulled during performance. I have simplified scenery, having
'The Hour Glass' for instance played now before green curtains, now among
those admirable ivory-coloured screens invented by Gordon Craig. With
every simplification the voice has recovered something of its importance
and yet when verse has approached in temper to let us say 'Kubla Khan,'
or 'The Ode to the West Wind,' the most typical modern verse, I have
still felt as if the sound came to me from behind a veil. The stage-
opening, the powerful light and shade, the number of feet between
myself and the players have destroyed intimacy. I have found myself
thinking of players who needed perhaps but to unroll a mat in some
Eastern garden. Nor have I felt this only when I listened to
speech, but even more when I have watched the movement of a player or
heard singing in a play. I love all the arts that can still remind me of
their origin among the common people, and my ears are only comfortable
when the singer sings as if mere speech had taken fire, when he appears
to have passed into song almost imperceptibly. I am bored and wretched,
a limitation I greatly regret, when he seems no longer a human being but
an invention of science. To explain him to myself I say that he has
become a wind instrument and sings no longer like active men, sailor or
camel driver, because he has had to compete with an orchestra, where the
loudest instrument has always survived. The human voice can only become
louder by becoming less articulate, by discovering some new musical sort
of roar or scream. As poetry can do neither, the voice must be freed
from this competition and find itself among little instruments, only
heard at their best perhaps when we are close about them. It should be
again possible for a few poets to write as all did once, not for the
printed page but to be sung. But movement also has grown less expressive,
more declamatory, less intimate. When I called the other day upon a
friend I found myself among some dozen people who were watching a group
of Spanish boys and girls, professional dancers, dancing some national