R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

170 Harley Granville-Barkerwhich wanders. The function of rhythm and rhyme is toabsorb this marginal attention so that we may be whollysurrendered to the spell of the poet. He quotes Bergson:The object of art is to lull to sleep the active, or rather the resistingpowers of our personality, and thus to bring us to a stateof perfect docility, in which we realise the idea suggested to us,and sympathise with the sentiment expressed (to us).And very appositely, Mr Middleton Murry:Rhythm and metre... have the power of throwing the readerinto a state of heightened susceptibility to emotional suggestion...the recurrence of a regular rhythmical beat has an almost hypnoticeffect; it completely detaches our attention from the world ofevery day.. .and if it is regular and monotonous enough, actuallysends us to sleep... .The poet's business is to take advantage ofthe tendency, and instead of letting it reach its logical physicalconclusion, by an infinite rhythmical variation of the metricalbasis, to keep us intensely aware. There is a background of metricalsameness separating us like a curtain from the practical world;there is a richness of the rhythmical variation to make the worldin which we are worthy of our most delighted attention.Yet, strangely enough, he does not cite poetic drama andthe common experience of the theatre as the most patentpossible evidence in his favour 1 . Moreover, in the suggestion(but Sir Philip dissents from this) that it isrhythmical variation which keeps us intensely aware andprovokes our ' delighted attention' lies one of the chief,though more recondite, secrets of the writing of dramaticverse; and ignorance of these simple, fundamental factsof the art of speech and command of attention (the ABCof the theatre) is a chief cause of the literary dramatist'sfailure.What is wrong, from a dramatic point of view, withthis verse of Tennyson's? It is not, presumably, badverse in itself (I do not pretend to know what good verse,in the abstract, is, or if there be any such thing. But I1 Perhaps Mr Middleton Murry does; I cannot refer to his book asI write.