I doubt if anyone in the country is more grateful than I am to the managers of the New Theatre. They have begun a great work. The whole country is in debt to them already. They are showing a spirit which will make their future work continually improve; and their efforts have, on the whole, been received with that lack of intelligent gratitude with which society always receives its benefactors. Nevertheless their work and their position seem to illustrate so many points in the subject, that a little incidental criticism of them is unavoidable. If I find fault with the New Theatre for not being sufficiently academic, it is only to illustrate how completely academic standards have been vanishing in America. For instance, the art of reciting Shakespeare has been all but lost, and the New Theatre proved this quite unconsciously by a plunge, upon some occasions, into a sort of household naturalism in its method of reciting romantic drama. An epoch like the present, in which the current new plays are naturalistic, will tend to recite Shakespeare in a naturalistic way. But only the abeyance of good tradition could have led to the attempt to give Shakespeare’s lines in a conversational manner. We have forgotten how effective the lines are when conventionally given, or we should resent this experiment in taking the starch out of them. Indeed upon certain other occasions the old standards of speech were last winter brought back in magnificent triumph at the New Theatre. If it was chiefly to the Englishmen and Englishwomen of the New Theatre Company that we in America owed this beautiful lesson in speech, let us none the less be grateful for the lesson and draw from it what profit we may. There are people who believe that verse is merely a decorated sort of prose; and that in connection with the drama, verse is a foolish superfluity. The people who think this have not heard verse well recited. The delivery of metrical language in an elevated manner is the noblest tradition of the stage. It is a thing at the same time completely artificial and completely beautiful. It lifts the play into a region native to great thoughts, where lightnings strike, as in their element, and music like a natural thunder rolls across the scene. To-day the secret of this majestic convention of verse is lost to the stage. Neither in the writing of it by the poet nor in the delivery of it by the actor, nor in the reception and enjoyment of it by the audience can the thing come off happily except under rare conditions, when all are prepared for it and when the right planets are in the ascendant. We live under an eclipse; yet is not the sun extinguished. Verse will return to the drama as soon as those themes return which only verse can carry.