C URRENT LITERAT [IRE.
NERO.
Nero. By Stephen Phillips. (Macmillan and Co. 4s. 6d. net.) —We have already discussed the dramatic merits of Mr. Stephen Phillips's new work in our notice of its appearance at His Majesty's Theatre. On the whole, it is more suited for declamation behind the footlights than for reading in volume form. It is admirable verse to accompany gorgeous dresses and splendid scenery, for it is full of rhetoric and sound and bravura ; but in the sober printed page it is disappointing. There are isolated fine lines, and there are one or two passages which show a certain delicacy of imagination ; but the whole play has the air of being written for the stage with the effect of the stage accompaniments always before the writer's mind. Everything is sacrificed to produce gorgeousness, and the result is often turgid. A quieter and more restrained art would no doubt have been ineffective amid the heady splendours of Mr. Tree's staging. Epithets are sought not for their truth but for their sonorousness, and the constant euphuism wearies the reader's mind. Sometimes it results in pure parody. The first line of -all, for example- " These meteors flame the dazzling doom of Kings "—
might have been part of Bottom's prologue. The versification
has the grave fault of a lack of organic strength. The lines too often form separate sentences, and their effect is staccato and monotonous. Rarely we find the swing and roll of a great move- ment. This, again, seems to us a result of writing dramas for acting, since the modern method of speaking poetry, while excel- lent in isolated lines, rarely does justice to the subtler effect of blank verse. The play, as we said before, has many merits, but these lie in the dramatic structure and the elaboration of character. On the purely poetical side Mr. Phillips's art shows in Nero, not an advance, but deterioration.
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