Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/177

Rh bethans give birth to a new form of drama, unless, indeed, you cling to the belief that to have culture we must have long periods without culture, a theory which is difficult to rebut, for the fact that the world was without art from the sixth to the thirteenth century is the thought of everybody who thinks about art seriously. Your face, Mr Deacon, is very readable. I gather from it that you were about to ask me if I had attended all the performances, and to my great regret I answer that I have missed two or three; and of the performances I missed the one I regret the least is a certain play by John Dryden, though I am told that Athene Seyler's genius was even brighter in Marriage la Mode than it was in Love for Love, an appreciation that betrays a certain insensibility of eye and ear to the shades which divide good verse from bad. For in reading the Elizabethans we are in salt water always; the verse is buoyant. Dryden's verse may be compared to a brackish lake, languid and muddy, and the rough words that rise to our lips express the change; the kick has gone out of it.

Dryden, then, in your opinion, was the last of the Elizabethans?


 * Rather the beginning of Grub Street, and that is why I cannot believe that Athene Seyler showed to greater advantage in Dryden than in Congreve. Whilst trying to collect my thoughts for this interview which you have been kind enough to come to report, I rose suddenly from my chair, saying: An actress' charm in a play cannot be put into words, at least not by me. And then stopping, I added: It's all clear enough till I try to write it to-morrow the commonplace awaits me; and I went up-stairs to dress myself for dinner. I was dining with Mr Arnold Bennett, and after dinner a lady played Mozart's Sonata in D-Major, and the gaiety and the instinctive elegance of the music recalling my memories of Athene in Congreve's comedy, I said to myself: She was to the play what Mozart's music is to his librettist, incessant, always at it. She alights and breaks into song abruptly, like a bird. She listens, and we sit amused, enchanted by the sallies of her witty eyes, by the beat of her feet. Her very clothes catch inspiration, and she adapts her gait to the character and every gesture, each adding an accent. Any omission would be a loss, any addition an excess.

If Athene be in reality what she is in your memory, she is an actress comparable to Sarah or Aimée Desclée (I think her name was Aimée).