Gesture being a part of a picture, how should it but be
settled as definitely, for that pictorial effect which all action on the
stage is (more or less unconsciously) striving after, as if it were the
time of a song, or the stage direction: "Cross stage to right"? Also,
every gesture is slow; even despair having its artistic limits, its
reticence. It is difficult to express the delight with which one sees,
for the first time, people really motionless on the stage. After all,
action, as it has been said, is only a way of spoiling something. The
aim of the modern stage, of all drama, since the drama of the Greeks,
is to give a vast impression of bustle, of people who, like most people
in real life, are in a hurry about things; and our actors, when they are
not making irrelevant speeches, are engaged in frantically trying to
make us see that they are feeling acute emotion, by I know not what
restlessness, contortion, and ineffectual excitement. If it were once
realised how infinitely more important are the lines in the picture than
these staccato extravagances which do but aim at tearing it out of its
frame, breaking violently through it, we should have learnt a little, at
least, of what the art of the stage should be, of what Wagner has shown
us that it can be.
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