You mean there are no limits to it? That is a strange remark for you to make.
W. P. E.
No. I do not mean that. I mean that every art, until recent times, has proposed certain limitations, under which it had to work. Goethe—a poet whom you have yet to introduce to your spectators—once wrote, “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister!” And these limitations must be more than physical. There is no reason why a poem should rhyme abbaabbacdcdcd, but the sonnet must rhyme in some such manner, or it will not be perfect. There may be greater poems than these sonnets—that is a matter of taste—but the art of the sonnet has its own perfection because those limitations have been accepted joyously by those who chose to write. You have proposed no limitations to yourself. Your art is chaos.
D. G.
Didn’t I confess as much when I said it was vulgar? It must have its appeal to the very lowest. But because our roots are in the dung and the mire, do you think there shall be no lovely blossoms on the trees in spring and no fruit? If I make a fortune in raw melodrama, shall I not spend it on Helen of Troy?
W. P. E.
Helen of Troy?
D. G.
Why not? The moving picture is always elemental, but it can be grand. What are the essentials of a story: love, beauty, pursuit, coincidence, rescue—
W. P. E.