]
[Footnote 3: Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, _The War-God_,
has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
"stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails.
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