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 I
 
 THE AMERICAN STAGE 
 OF TO-DAY
 
 THE 
 
 AMERICAN STAGE 
 
 OF 
 
 TO-DAY 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER PRICHARD EATON 
 
 • • ; •: 
 
 BOSTON 
 SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 
 
 1908
 
 Copyright, 1908 
 
 By Small, Maynard and Company 
 
 (Incorporated) 
 
 Entered at Stationers' Hall 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
 
 
 
 
 to 
 
 CO 
 
 CD 
 
 
 To THE Memory of my Father 
 
 WARREN E. EATON 
 
 who first taught me to be humble 
 
 before the great problem 
 
 of our speech
 
 MOST of the papers in this volume 
 are reprinted, though with numerous 
 changes and additions, from the " New York 
 Sun." I wish to acknowledge my debt to the 
 editors of that paper for their permission to 
 reprint. The first and last long papers, and 
 some other portions of the book, are new. If, 
 in a work on the current stage in America, I 
 have said nothing about the so-called Theatri- 
 cal Syndicate, it is not because I am indifferent 
 to its considerable though sometimes exag- 
 gerated evils. It is a subject that does not 
 belong to the critic of aesthetics. It is but a 
 part of a vaster economic condition. The com- 
 petitor in theatrical management will after all 
 fare quite as well as the competitor in oil — if 
 not better. 
 
 W. P. E. 
 
 80 Washington Square, New York 
 July, 1908
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 By Way of Apology i 
 
 Our Infant Industry 6 
 
 " The Witching Hour " 27 
 
 " Paid in Full " 45 
 
 Parnassus vs. the Public 58 
 
 Rhyme and Unreason 72 
 
 Sophocles in the Back Yard 83 
 
 Mr. Jones's Revival 96 
 
 Bunyan Persecuted Again no 
 
 "The Servant in the House" 120 
 
 Harps in the Air 132 
 
 Nazimova as the Lady Lisa 150 
 
 Of Justifiable Homicide 161 
 
 Our Leading Actor 174 
 
 Falling in Love with One's Wife 186 
 
 Curing a Pessimist 191 
 
 Kisses and David Belasco 203 
 
 The Castles vs. Mr. Pollock 215 
 
 The Rough Diamond as Hero 225
 
 X CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 On Taking Cohan Seriously 234 
 
 " The Honor of the Family " 240 
 
 Crane as a Six Cylinder Kid 245 
 
 " Toddles " as a Text 249 
 
 Where is our Drama of '76? 259 
 
 Audiences — A Spring Grouch 270 
 
 Crowds and Mr. Hamilton 282 
 
 Observation in the Drama 291 
 
 The Graphomania Mimetica 303 
 
 The Confessions of a Critic 312
 
 THE AMERICAN STAGE 
 OF TO-DAY
 
 THE AMERICAN STAGE 
 OF TO-DAY 
 
 BY WAY OF APOLOGY 
 
 ONCE upon a time my Boston-bred 
 mother startled me by announcing that 
 the New York Tribune is the finest 
 newspaper pubHshed. " Why? " I asked. " Be- 
 cause," said she, " it is so soft under the 
 carpets." I was then a member of the Trib- 
 une's staff, supplying my modest daily share 
 of the great thoughts which found an igno- 
 minious and dusty end beneath my mother's 
 mattings. But I could not honestly be offended. 
 The speedy oblivion which overtakes our mul- 
 titudinous newspapers is as desirable as it is 
 inevitable. If we were pursued by the conse- 
 quences of our every slightest act, if our mem- 
 ories were crammed with recollection of every 
 minute occurrence of our lives, existence would 
 soon become an impossible burden. Man's 
 greatest accomplishment is the ability to for- 
 get, and the daily destruction of yesterday's 
 newspapers is an indispensable aid. Most 
 that the newspapers chronicle is best forgot-
 
 2 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 ten. And the newspapers chronicle many 
 things about the stage. 
 
 The perspicacious reader is now prepared to 
 inquire why, holding these estimable senti- 
 ments, the author is putting forward a book 
 made up in large measure of theatrical re- 
 views rescued from newspaper oblivion for the 
 immortality of covers. (A pleasant little fic- 
 tion, this about the immortality of covers, that 
 authors are permitted to indulge in while writ- 
 ing their books !) And the perspicacious reader 
 shall be answered. 
 
 His question has the more point as several 
 of the reviews which follow are notices of plays 
 that failed. A play that has failed is in ninety- 
 nine cases out of a hundred about the deadest 
 thing imaginable, much deader than a doornail 
 or Mr. Scrooge's partner. It is so dead that to 
 reprint the funeral oration seems almost an im- 
 pertinence, if not downright brutality. What 
 good can it possibly do? But, on the other 
 hand, why reprint the review of a play that has 
 succeeded? A good play needs no critic. It 
 goes on delivering its own message, and the 
 wise man will prefer to see it, not read about 
 it. The reason why the author reprints such 
 of the following papers as are reprints has 
 nothing to do with the success or failure of the 
 plays reviewed. It is because he came to the 
 Broadway Theater filled with an ardent desire
 
 BY WAY OF APOLOGY S 
 
 to find there truth and passion — not the pas- 
 sion of a Zaza smashing the bric-a-brac to ex- 
 press thwarted amorous desire, but the passion 
 of Hfe and Hving, the glow of intellectual ex- 
 CK- ^ent, the thousand zests of daily existence; 
 and he ^ound there, instead of truth and pas- 
 sion, too often a stale conventionality that none 
 but the most childish can possibly believe in, 
 can possibly be aroused by, into thought or emo- 
 tion. And in varying, sometimes in contrary, 
 moods he wrote about what he saw, — always, 
 however, with the single underlying purpose 
 of considering the stage as a possible reality 
 in American life, not a toyshop nor an Eliza- 
 bethan relic. 
 
 And because the stage in America, especially 
 in that dominant and domineering strip of 
 America known as Broadway, is not yet so 
 widely regarded as a reality that any season 
 can boast of more than two or three native 
 dramas out of fifty which take rank above the 
 mere conventional rehashes of threadbare the- 
 atrical tricks, it seems worth while to give as 
 wide publicity as possible to any words of pro- 
 test, however feeble. We are as a people tre- 
 mendously given to theater going. Yet as a 
 people we read few books about the stage, 
 much as we read other books; we have but a 
 bowing acquaintance with printed plays. We 
 want what we want when we want it, but to tell
 
 4 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 why we want it would be too often beyond us. 
 Herein follow a few attempts to discover why, 
 in the space of a theatrical season, we wanted 
 certain things and why we did not want others 
 — which is no less significant. The number of 
 such attempts is not so great that the field is 
 overcrowded; and, in this day of the printed 
 page, there is something, perhaps, for which 
 to be grateful. 
 
 I make no pretense to a hard and fast theory 
 of the theater. Personally, I doubt if any hard 
 and fast theory of the theater is possible. It 
 is wisest to be *' tough minded," as the Prag- 
 matists would say. No sooner would you have 
 your theory nicely joined and dovetailed than 
 along would come some Charles Rann Ken- 
 nedy with a blunderbuss of a new play and 
 blow it higher than the Singer tower. Thank 
 Heaven for that ! The theater lags behind life 
 and even the other arts always, dragged back 
 by a dead weight of convention. The bold 
 actor, the bold dramatist, and, oh! above all, 
 that perhaps not impossible He, the bold man- 
 ager, are needed. The innovator is the real 
 hero; the idol smasher is on God's side. Born 
 a Puritan, I have an ingrained reverence for 
 idols — intellectual idols ; I am a pretty feeble 
 smasher. But I am ashamed of my weakness, 
 and I firmly trust that I shall never be charged 
 with consistency, and that if I ever do achieve
 
 BY WAY OF APOLOGY 6 
 
 a theory of the theater I shall not keep it with- 
 out change for more than two weeks. Life 
 changes, and the theater must change with it. 
 When it does not, there is a divorce between 
 the drama and life, which is very bad for the 
 former, though life manages to worry along 
 pretty comfortably, being something of a Mor- 
 mon. I could wish only for this little book 
 that it might aid in maintaining domestic har- 
 mony. In that purpose alone I insist on being 
 consistent. 
 
 At any rate, I have foiled my mother. She 
 cannot put a book under the carpet.
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 
 
 I ONCE asked James Huneker what the 
 new book he was then writing was about. 
 " About the drama," he rephed. " Amer- 
 ican? " I inquired. " I said about the drama," 
 Mr. Huneker retorted, with a Monahsacal 
 smile. Yet he has always been among the 
 first to encourage American effort towards 
 self-expression in all the arts, writing with 
 equal facility and always breast forward about 
 drama, music, and painting; he has a right 
 to his somewhat bitter jest. It is only those of 
 us who have played the Jeremiah; who have 
 raised our voices in loud lamentation over the 
 lost art of acting as exemplified by Booth and 
 Barrett, Warren and Gilbert; who have sighed 
 for the grandeur that was the Boston Museum 
 stock company and the glory that was Augus- 
 tin Daly; who scorn Clyde Fitch because he 
 is n't Pinero and George Ade because he is n't 
 Ibsen — it is those of us who have not the right 
 to elevate our noses at that struggling little 
 provincial, the American drama. Philip Hale 
 has said that Emma Eames sings ** Who is 
 Sylvia ? " as if Sylvia were not on her calling 
 list. That is the attitude of some of us toward
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 7 
 
 American plays, the attitude, too, in high places. 
 It is not the attitude to foster a native art. 
 
 And it is not justified by the facts. 
 
 In years not remote there was, to be sure, 
 no such thing as American drama. In the 
 theater the good men do lives after them; the 
 evil is fortunately oft interred with their bones. 
 The winnowing winds of time separate the 
 chaff, and if there is any wheat it lies finally 
 plain to the sight. But the floor of our theater 
 in past generations lay bare. What did our 
 great actors of the past play, in what roles did 
 they make their mighty reputations, which the 
 graybeards of to-day use like clubs to whack 
 the head of each aspiring actor of the present 
 who tries to push himself up? Shakespeare, 
 Sheridan, Goldsmith, Robertson, Morton (he of 
 ** Box and Cox"), Buckstone, Scribe, Dumas 
 — these are typical names of the dramatists 
 who furnished the dramatic fare for our 
 fathers in the theater. The less said about the 
 native drama, perhaps, the better. 
 
 Mrs. Mowatt's " Fashion," produced in New 
 York in 1845, was perhaps the first native 
 drama of any considerable merit. Epes Sar- 
 gent furnished a prologue which contained 
 these significant lines: 
 
 Bah ! homemade calicoes are well enough, 
 But homemade dramas must be stupid stuff: 
 Had it the London stamp 't would do; but then, 
 For plays we lack the manners and the men !
 
 8 THE .\MERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe said the play resembled " The 
 School for Scandal " " as the shell resembles 
 the living locust." But the play had a great 
 success, even in England. It must have con- 
 tained some truth of observation in its satire 
 of New York society. But even the memory 
 of it has passed away; nor did it even then 
 stem the tide of importations or inspire native 
 successors. Twenty-two years later Augustin 
 Daly wrote " Under the Gaslight," and shortly 
 after " A Flash of Lightning," supposedly real- 
 istic dramas of the day. Apparently their 
 realism was all of the '* real pump " variety, 
 not much above the level of present-day melo- 
 drama. The rescue of the hero who had been 
 bound to the railroad track by the heroine who 
 had been locked in the station was the feature 
 of ** Under the Gaslight " ! Bronson Howard's 
 farce, " Saratoga," produced in 1870, some- 
 what more deserved Mr. Daly's catch phrase 
 for his new theater, " contemporaneous human 
 interest." But even that play was antiquated 
 in a few years. Mr. Daly's ov n play, " Di- 
 vorce," remotely based on a novel by Trollope, 
 produced in 1871, was described as a " satire on 
 the raw, pretentious, and wealth-worshiping 
 society of the young republic." It was very 
 popular, running for almost a season. But it 
 led to nothing — at least it led Mr. Daly to 
 nothing. For twenty years the stage at his
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 9 
 
 theater continued to show the same endless Hst 
 of adaptations from the French or German, 
 the classic comedies, Shakespeare (rudely muti- 
 lated in text and clumsily encumbered with 
 scenery), with now and then a new play from 
 London. " Rip van Winkle " and " Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin " were the only American plays 
 that endured, for reasons other than their 
 dramatic merit, though Frank Mayo's " Davy 
 Crockett " was picturesque and sentimentally 
 effective. Twenty-five or thirty years ago Jan- 
 auschek was playing " Meg Merrilies," Booth 
 was playing " Hamlet " and his " classic " rep- 
 ertoire, Sothern was playing " Dundreary," 
 John T. Raymond was amusing audiences as 
 Micawber, for dramatizations of Dickens were 
 then the vogue. It was all quite innocent and 
 edifying, no doubt, and almighty artistic, but 
 just what it was accomplishing toward the de- 
 velopment of an American drama, or how in 
 its endless repetitions of the same old thing it 
 was leading the theater toward anything new 
 or better, is rather hard to see. When the old 
 folks say to us youngsters, " Alas, the actors 
 are all dead now! " let us reply, " Yes? Well, 
 so are most of their plays. There has been 
 some gain, anyhow. You gloried in your actors 
 then? Of course you did; you had to have 
 something of your own to glory in ! " 
 
 But, curiously coincident with the rise of
 
 10 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Pinero and Jones in England and keeping step 
 with the sudden spread of Continental influ- 
 ence, especially the influence of Ibsen, over 
 the English-speaking stage, a native American 
 drama began to struggle up that was not mere 
 sentimental treacle or feeble apings of out- 
 worn models, but something like an adult art, 
 something with the tingle of reality about it. 
 American writers began to seize hold of Amer- 
 ican subjects with more than an infantile grip. 
 Along the path blazed by the comedies of 
 Bronson Howard and his " Shenandoah " came 
 Gillette's "Held by the Enemy," and then his 
 splendid " Secret Service," and finally James 
 A. Heme's two pieces of pioneer realism, 
 " Shore Acres " and " Griffith Davenport," the 
 latter produced not quite ten years ago. Clyde 
 Fitch, meanwhile, had laid hold on Nathan 
 Hale for a dramatic hero and lanced contem- 
 poraneous frivolous society, and Augustus 
 Thomas had dramatized various states of the 
 Union. With the exception of " Griffith Dav- 
 enport " (which was very uneven in quality) 
 these plays were accepted by the public; 
 and, having accepted them, the public could 
 not retreat into the past, nor could the play- 
 wright. When a child has learned that he can 
 walk, he refuses to crawl. The American play- 
 wright had found his legs. 
 
 And the problem now is, what use is he
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 11 
 
 making of his legs, whither is he walking? 
 For the road that the American dramatist took 
 when his work was serious work, work that 
 strove for, if it did not always attain, dignity 
 and truth, was the road of realism. And there 
 are many who always wonder, a little need- 
 lessly, perhaps, where realism will lead, what 
 beauty or satisfaction it can give to us when 
 its " photographic fidelity " has ceased to be a 
 novelty. 
 
 Very few of us, I fancy, who saw James A. 
 Heme play " Shore Acres " fifteen years ago 
 have forgotten the final moments of that play. 
 Old Nathan' el Berry, his troubles laid, his heart 
 at rest, sent every one to bed, walked to the 
 kitchen window and, scratching off a little 
 frost, peered out into the winter night a mo- 
 ment, then made fast the doors, banked the 
 fire, blew out the lamps, and, his candle held 
 high, climbed with slow, aged steps up the 
 stairs to his chamber. At the landing he 
 turned and paused for a last look at the room 
 below, quite dim save for the glow from the 
 fire and the faint flicker of his candle flame. 
 Everything in the old New England kitchen 
 where so much of joy and tragedy had come to 
 fruition, where his life had been lived and his 
 heart almost broken, rested peaceful and still 
 in the red glow, under the benediction of his 
 eye. Then he passed across the bedroom
 
 12 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 threshold and the stage grew still darker. 
 Through a mist of cleansing tears you beheld 
 for a hushed moment the deserted kitchen and 
 knew the power of silence, the still soul of an 
 empty room. Then the curtain sank. It was 
 pantomime raised to poetry, it was the realism 
 of fact doing the work of language, and doing 
 it for once quite as well. The play is still pre- 
 sented every season, though it was written 
 fifteen years ago. How much deeper or more 
 poetically, you ask, have our playwrights 
 wrought since? How far has the prose drama 
 of contemporary life advanced beyond the point 
 where Heme left it? How much nearer is it 
 to the ideal goal of literature? For surely a 
 domestic pantomime, depending for its effect 
 absolutely on a stage and actors, cannot be con- 
 sidered as literature, for it cannot be printed. 
 
 And the answer is to be found, of course, in 
 the native dramas which have been written 
 since. Side by side with an increasing readi- 
 ness on the part of the American public to 
 patronize and enjoy the more advanced drama 
 of Europe, especially the plays of Ibsen, there 
 has come over the native writers an increasing 
 desire to comment on contemporary life as well 
 as to reflect it; we are beginning to find ideas 
 in our drama. And ideas breed style, for they 
 cannot be expressed without language and 
 form, and language cannot express intellectual
 
 #UR INFANT INDUSTRY 13 
 
 processes unless it is carefully chosen, or form 
 unless it is nicely adjusted. 
 
 But what is an idea ? Heine's coachman said, 
 " An idea ? Nu, nu, an idea 's an idea ! An 
 idea 's any damn nonsense a man gets in his 
 head! " It is in this sense that critics are sup- 
 posed to use the word when they speak of the 
 drama of ideas, especially by those people who 
 "know what they like." (Incidentally, the 
 trouble with such people is that they very sel- 
 dom do know what they like.) An idea in the 
 drama may be defined as rather more a matter 
 of purpose than content. It is a thesis, to be 
 sure, an appeal to the head as well as to the 
 emotions. But in the best dramas it is rather 
 felt than seen, fused, as it should be, with the 
 dramatic action; it tells as dignity, giving a 
 weight and purpose to the play beyond the 
 moment's amusement. It is the author's sym- 
 bol in his play that a stage story has its mean- 
 ings and its problems, too, no less than life; 
 for the modern author regards his story as a 
 piece of life. So the idea in " Hamlet " is the 
 tragedy, not of accident and bodily death, but 
 of the irresolute will, of the mind " sicklied o'er 
 with the pale cast of thought"; and " Hamlet" 
 can be fully enjoyed only by stern, intellectual 
 effort. The idea in " The School for Scandal " 
 is plain enough, and it is not expounded in the 
 screen scene, which is all some later play-
 
 14 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF •TO-DAY 
 
 Wrights have copied from the play. The idea 
 in Sudermann's " Magda " is individuahsm. 
 The idea in each and every one of Ibsen's 
 plays shapes the story, is interwoven in the 
 action, rises like strange vapor into symbols. 
 Yet "Hamlet," "The School for Scandal," 
 "Magda," "A Doll's House," are generally 
 accepted, even by those who know what they 
 like, as absorbing stage stories. Perhaps an 
 idea in a drama is after all but a sign that the 
 author has brains. 
 
 Well, our American playwrights, since the 
 Twentieth Century put on its baby shoes and 
 began to toddle toward boyhood, have been 
 acquiring brains. And if there have been but 
 one or two native dramas written since " Shore 
 Acres " with so much of real poetic value, there 
 have been many written with equal natural- 
 ness of detail and greater naturalness of plot 
 and deeper intellectual appeal. Without for- 
 saking that truth to contemporary life, that 
 realism of speech and character and incident 
 which was blazed as the path the new Amer- 
 ican drama should take, our authors have 
 shown undoubted signs of a growing desire 
 and ability to go farther, to reflect on what 
 they portray, to make the facts of life illus- 
 trate some truth of conduct, to fashion their 
 dramas, not with the outworn blocks of stage 
 story, but with the living problems of the hour.
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 15 
 
 We too, in our modest little way, are begin- 
 ning to have a drama of ideas. And, in one 
 instance at least, a playwright has gone far- 
 ther still down the rich road of realism and 
 has found poetry at the end. William Vaughn 
 Moody has written " The Great Divide." 
 
 Since the century began we have had three 
 plays from Clyde Fitch that have illustrated 
 not only his femininely facile observation of 
 the surface aspects of fashionable life, but a 
 preoccupation with an idea as well. " The 
 Climbers," " The Girl with the Green Eyes," 
 and " The Truth," all had a sincerity of pur- 
 pose and more than a passing interest as mere 
 stage stories. Unfortunately, Mr. Fitch seems 
 destined never quite to keep a play on a con- 
 sistent level, if that level is high or seriou's. 
 Theatricalness marred one play, lack of inevi- 
 tableness the second, and a gross intrusion of 
 buffoonery the third. For two acts " Tl'ie 
 Truth " is written with a naturalness of dia- 
 logue, a quiet, economic, inevitable develojo- 
 ment, a grasp of character that rival the best 
 prose drama of modern France. Then farc«e 
 intrudes ; or, if Mr. Fitch objects, as he is said 
 to do, that the characters of the father a^nd 
 the Baltimore boarding-house lady are drawn 
 from life, something so like farce that the 
 effect is the same. The atmosphere of reality 
 is gone, at any rate, the unity of the play
 
 16 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 is shattered. Yet, with every shortcoming 
 allowed for, these three plays by Mr. Fitch 
 mark an advance in American drama along 
 the road of realism toward literature, toward 
 the drama that can be printed and read, be- 
 cause behind the actors and the painted scene 
 is the idea, the appeal to the intelligence, the 
 firm basis of dignity and purpose. 
 
 William Gillette has produced nothing of 
 consequence since " Sherlock Holmes," a wildly 
 improbable melodrama made marvelously prob- 
 able in the theater, not alone by the ingenuity 
 of its construction, but by the naturalness of 
 its method in the writing and the acting. 
 James A. Heme is dead. Bronson Howard 
 js also dead. Besides Mr. Fitch, Augustus 
 T Thomas is alone of the important men of 
 the nineties still contributing to our stage 
 aU^ng the lines then laid down, and his latest 
 ac hievement, " The Witching Hour," reviewed 
 af length elsewhere in this volume, is at once 
 the most natural, the most thoughtful, and the 
 m\ost interesting of all his works. It is, in fact, 
 one of the best plays yet produced in America. 
 I Jut chiefly it is to the new writers who have 
 ai'isen that we must look for our native drama 
 in the immediate future. Of them all — alas, 
 not too numerous a band ! — William Vaughn 
 Moody .seems easily the leader; a judgment one 
 does not hesitate to make, though it is based
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 17 
 
 on a single play. Mr. Moody sprang full- 
 armed out of the University of Chicago, where 
 he was a professor of English, like Minerva 
 from the brow of Jove; and "The Great 
 Divide," which Margaret Anglin and Henry 
 Miller had brought East from Chicago with- 
 out attracting any attention by the way, swam 
 into our ken at the Princess Theater, New 
 York, on October 3, 1906, like a new planet. 
 Its success was instantaneous with critics and 
 public. Written in a nervous, highly wrought, 
 imaginative prose that flashed out similes 
 worthy of Shelley and yet did no violence to 
 dramatic propriety, the new play gave the be- 
 holder a sense of style and literary distinction 
 as rare as it was refreshing. Discussion 
 waged, and will no doubt wage as long as the 
 play is given, regarding the probability of the 
 incident on which the scheme of the action is 
 based, — the continued acceptance of Stephen, 
 a rough miner, who had come to her cabin 
 bent on rape, by Ruth, a girl of Puritan New 
 England. But, this premise once granted, the 
 action moves with utter naturalness, with 
 speed, directness, and a fine economy of 
 method to the end. Personally, I find no diffi- 
 culty in granting Mr. Moody his premise; I 
 am willing to grant nearly anything as pos- 
 sible in the ways of a woman with a man. But 
 if I did find difficulty, that would not affect
 
 18 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 the value of the play, which is a drama of two 
 souls clashing each on each. The external 
 means used to bring them into conflict does 
 not matter much, for the interest is not there. 
 As a painter falsifies the light on his landscape 
 to throw some salient object, the soul of it, 
 into high relief, and thus wins perhaps a deeper 
 truth, so Mr. Moody might forgivably have 
 been more careless about probability than he 
 was — if he was careless at all, which I do not 
 for a moment admit. 
 
 A drama of two souls, that is " The Great 
 Divide," a struggle between the old Puritan 
 formalism of conscience and Pragmatism, be- 
 tween what William James would call the 
 tender-minded and the tough-minded tempera- 
 ments. In certain moods Ruth and Stephen 
 seem to me very real human beings; in other 
 moods they are but abstractions transcending 
 the personal, symbols of those inborn tenden- 
 cies of soul that underlie all our emotions, all 
 our reasonings, that are the deepest, the most 
 powerful forces in human life. No other 
 American play has ever gone so deep, has ever 
 seized hold of so powerful an idea; and no 
 other American play has ever wrought an idea 
 into a dramatic story with such dignity and 
 grace of language, such poetry of image and 
 emotion. One is almost tempted to say that 
 no other American play has ever found the
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 19 
 
 soul. From a drunken impulse to rape, 
 Stephen rises step by step to nobility, because 
 for him the rightness of an action is in its 
 result, moral truth is found in his own na- 
 ture's shrinking or expansion. Sin may be a 
 stepping-stone to salvation, not because of any 
 evangelistic " repentence," but because it shows 
 him the good which he takes, letting the rest 
 go forgotten. Ruth, on the other hand, though 
 a dim, primitive impulse urged her at first to 
 Stephen, — an impulse so deep that by most of 
 us, perhaps, it is never felt, lying far down 
 in our souls, and we say Ruth's action is 
 " grossly improbable," — was fettered by con- 
 science, that composite of a thousand years of 
 religious and social formalism. The chain of 
 nuggets Stephen paid to the other ruffian to 
 buy her for himself was to her a burning badge 
 of shame, and with true New England chop- 
 logic she felt that she had in some way atoned 
 when by her own toil she had bought it back. 
 It was her scarlet letter, no less scarlet for 
 the formality of a marriage ceremony. It is 
 surprising, in an American play, how little the 
 marriage ceremony figures in " The Great 
 Divide." Mr. Moody has gone behind it. In 
 this soul-drama externals are burned away, 
 and primal things, becoming naked, become 
 decent, become wonderful. Ruth finally left 
 Stephen for her staid New England home, not
 
 20 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 able to see the new Stephen who had risen 
 from the old, not able to forget the drunken 
 ruffian who had burst into her cabin bent on 
 rape, not able to win out of error the precious 
 good, but demanding a truth perfect from the 
 beginning, an absolute perfection. And thus 
 she would have wrecked two lives for a tradi- 
 tion and violated the mystic impulse deep in 
 her heart that drove her still toward Stephen. 
 But he would not have it so. He followed her 
 East. He won her fully for himself at last. 
 The soul that faces morning and the rising 
 sun, that sees good and evil, sin and righteous- 
 ness, as alike but rungs on the ladder of hap- 
 piness, was finally triumphant. And the poet 
 who wrote this play, his first, is still a young 
 man, promising many new dramas for our 
 stage. He is the most thoughtful, imagina- 
 tive, and cultured playwright we now boast, 
 and his substantial success should encourage 
 more men of Hterary training and high ideals 
 to write for the theater. There is plenty of 
 room for them. 
 
 Two plays that in the seasons just past have 
 had tremendous vogue are " The Lion and the 
 Mouse," by Charles Klein, and " The Man of 
 the Hour," by George Broadhurst. Neither 
 play can take high rank as a finished drama, 
 and neither author is a newcomer to our the- 
 ater, but both plays illustrate the increasing
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 21 
 
 intellectual drift of the stage. In the former 
 the overshadowing problem of the trusts finds 
 a steady, if feeble and distorted, reflection; in 
 the latter, graft in municipal politics is the 
 theme. In the former Mr. Klein defeats a 
 billionaire magnate by a woman's wit; in the 
 latter Mr. Broadhurst combats graft by find- 
 ing an honest candidate and electing him. 
 Neither solution, perhaps, is wholly convinc- 
 ing! But fifteen years ago no manager would 
 have dared to set either problem on the stage, 
 nor would it have occurred to Mr. Klein or Mr. 
 Broadhurst to ask him to do so. Realism is 
 pulling even our weaker writers into line with 
 life and stirring up their mental machinery. 
 
 To speak of " Ben Hur " or " The Music 
 Master," the two most popular plays, if the 
 number of performances be taken as a stand- 
 ard, that have gone forth from Broadway in 
 the last decade, as examples of American or 
 any other kind of realism would be to laugh. 
 Why " Ben Hur " has been so enormously pat- 
 ronized, a thing of bombastic rhetoric, inflated 
 scenery, pasteboard piety, and mechanical ex- 
 citement, one cannot explain without being 
 branded a hopeless cynic. " The Music Mas- 
 ter," a piece of mid-Victorian sentimentality 
 for all the external truthfulness of its setting, 
 of course won its way into all hearts by virtue 
 of the exquisite and compelling art of David
 
 22 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Warfield. Public discernment in the theater is 
 a slow growth and starts at the top. Down 
 through each layer of the public you come 
 upon other layers still, to revel in the paste- 
 board piety of '* Ben Hur " or to hail " Way 
 Down East " as a masterpiece in the same 
 breath with " Shore Acres." The success of 
 such plays at any period is not significant. 
 The critic of the theater, on the watch for new 
 tendencies, for signs of growth, will find sig- 
 nificant the success of those plays written by 
 men who have something new to say. Among 
 such writers, besides Mr. Moody, the seasons 
 immediately past have produced Miss Rachel 
 Crothers and Eugene Walter. The former, in 
 ** The Three of Us," displayed a rare feeling 
 for quiet, significant naturalism, even though 
 her third-act scene was the inevitable bach- 
 elor's apartment, her villain the inevitable 
 woman's villain who never drew the breath of 
 life. It is Miss Crother's promise some day, 
 perhaps, in stage stories to bring a woman's 
 tact and insight to bear on our vexed domestic 
 problems. Mr. Walter's talent is essentially, 
 almost scornfully, masculine. Sometimes one 
 very nearly accuses him of belonging to the 
 " good red blood " school. His merits are a 
 strong, if untutored, grasp on dramatic efifects, 
 and apparently a desire, not always controlled 
 as yet, to tear the fourth wall out of every
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 23 
 
 room, to get life upon the stage even if he has 
 to be rude about it. He has shown us two 
 plays, both in the season of 1907-8, " The 
 Wolf " and " Paid in Full." The former is a 
 stilted melodrama of the Canadian north woods, 
 but with something of the forest gloom so 
 haunting it that you feel the author's inten- 
 tion to have been greater than his achieve- 
 ment. The latter, reviewed elsewhere in this 
 volume, comes near to being a social study of 
 New York life, realistic, dramatic, informed 
 with a valuable idea. 
 
 Other playwrights we have also, and one of 
 them, at least, George Ade, has reflected cer- 
 tain phases of American life as truthfully as 
 could be asked. " The College Widow " was 
 a genre picture of triumphant skill, executed 
 with exuberant yet loving humor. But Mr. 
 Ade has no power of dramatic development. 
 He cannot penetrate the surface. Percy Mac- 
 Kaye, a young playwright of unusual scholar- 
 ship and unbending idealism, is the only one 
 of our newer dramatic authors to wrlite in 
 verse for the practical theater. Two of his 
 plays, " The Canterbury Pilgrims," a poetic 
 comedy with Chaucer and the Wife of Bath 
 as the leading characters, and " Fenris the 
 Wolf," a Wagnerian libretto, have not been 
 produced, but Miss Marlowe has played his 
 " Jeanne d'Arc " both here and in London, and
 
 24 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Bertha Kalisch produced his " Sappho and 
 Phaon," a tragedy. Neither was successful 
 enough to warrant the assertion that Mr. 
 MacKaye is the dramatic poet to lead the 
 wandering tribes of the Twentieth Century 
 into the promised land of blank verse. Mr. 
 MacKaye's prose drama, " The Scarecrow," 
 based on Hawthorne's " Feathertop," seems at 
 present his most effective work, though it has 
 not yet been shown save between covers. Its 
 demands on the scenic artist and on the lead- 
 ing actor are severe, but there is an uncanny 
 suggestion of the supernatural in it and a 
 pathos cross shot with the grim humor of 
 Hawthorne which ought to place it on the 
 stage. It is the least conventional in theme 
 and treatment of its author's plays, and the 
 most directly wrought. Mr. MacKaye has also 
 written a prose comedy of character, " Mater," 
 which will be produced by Henry Miller. 
 Here, with light and graceful touch, the au- 
 thor has a little fun with the unbending Social- 
 ists and political reformers, and in the person 
 of Mater herself, a lyrical child-woman who 
 impersonates her own daughter to aid her son, 
 to the disgust of the daughter and the rage of 
 the son, but who in reality is the most sensible 
 and efficient person in the play, he has created a 
 character of charm and originality. The moral 
 of " Mater " is not, perhaps, quite clear — if
 
 OUR INFANT INDUSTRY 26 
 
 that is a fault. The satire is too gentle to 
 point a purpose, save the purpose to show a 
 curious type of New England woman. Mr. 
 MacKaye as dramatist lacks a certain clarity 
 and incisiveness. His plays do not quite bite. 
 But no one can spend an hour in his presence 
 without feeling the tonic of his fine spirit, of 
 his sincerity and idealism. Like Mr. Moody, 
 he has the grace of culture and of lyric speech. 
 He will surely find his honorable place on our 
 stage, though it will hardly be by fleeing to 
 Greek or Norse mythology. 
 
 These authors, then, who are bringing to 
 bear on the problem of creating an American 
 drama the largest amount of dramatic skill, 
 truthful observation, intelligent reflection, and 
 passion for reality are the ones who are keep- 
 ing our drama connected with life, who are 
 leading our stage on toward better things by 
 making it a vital force in the community. Only 
 two of them, it will be noted, are poets. They 
 alone have the sense of literary style to strike 
 out beautiful language. " The Great Divide " 
 and Mr. MacKaye's dramas alone perhaps 
 fully bear the test of print. We need not 
 worry, however. Our stage is not yet so 
 flooded with reality that we need alarm our- 
 selves about the drift of realism. We shall 
 need more of it before we need less, and it is 
 not by fleeing reality but by plunging through
 
 26 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 it that, for the modern mind, the deeper truth 
 is found. Already the intellectual thesis is 
 creeping into our plays of contemporary life. 
 The mere scenic fidelity of Belasco seems tame, 
 old-fashioned. Already Mr. Moody has broken 
 through into spiritual poetry, and Mr. Thomas 
 has brought the occult home to daily life. The 
 realists may very well be left to themselves. 
 They w^ill v^^ork out their own dramatic salva- 
 tion — and ours. They are on the one inevi- 
 table road to-day. Let us leave them with the 
 words of T. E. Brown, the Manx poet, who, 
 in one of those wonderful letters of his, wrote : 
 
 " You comfort me much by kind words of 
 sympathy. I hope you don't often find me in 
 a melancholic mood. But now and then I dare 
 say I 'm rather like an old cat ; ' slickin' mee- 
 self with mee own slaver.' You Ve seen the 
 like? You stroke them a bit, and they're 
 pleased enough with that for a change. But 
 they go on, slick, slick, slick, till the melan- 
 choly is gone, and behould ye ! they 're out in 
 the bushes after them blackbirds, ' as bowl' as 
 bowl'.' " 
 
 There still are blackbirds and there still is 
 blank verse. But just now we must slick, slick, 
 slick.
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 
 
 (Hackett, November i8, 1907) 
 
 IT is only too easy to write of Augus- 
 tus Thomas's new play, " The Witching 
 Hour," produced with John Mason in the 
 leading part. From no matter what point of 
 view you survey this drama it repays you with 
 humor, or emotion, or subject for debate, or 
 wonder at Mr. Thomas's protean personality, 
 or, if you are a psychic researcher, a disci- 
 ple's joy. It was not many weeks before its 
 production that Mr. Thomas exhibited " The 
 Ranger " at Wallack's Theatre, which, if it is 
 remembered at all, will be recalled as a clumsy, 
 trivial, and ineffective melodrama, devoid alike 
 of style and idea. " The Witching Hour," on 
 the other hand, is instinct with dramatic style, 
 and finely and firmly wrought into its texture, 
 suspended in every act and almost every situa- 
 tion, is an idea. The two plays are as far 
 apart as the poles — almost as far apart as 
 Ibsen and Theodore Kremer. It seems almost 
 incredible that the same man could have written 
 them at the same period of his career. Per- 
 haps he did n't. Perhaps " The Ranger " was
 
 28 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 a skeleton fished up from that trunk all au- 
 thors keep under their beds, and its bones 
 decked out to fill an order. Which is another 
 argument for keeping the lid down ! Certainly, 
 however, " The Witching Hour " was written 
 C071 amove, and represents on the whole the 
 ripest work Mr. Thomas has yet put forth. It 
 represents work so ripe, indeed, that it bears 
 about it in every line traces of the most mod- 
 ern influences; its appeal is ever half to the 
 intellect, though its grip on the mere theatrical 
 ''story" is firm and sure; it is a successful 
 venture by the author of '* Arizona " into the 
 drama of ideas. With the most humble apolo- 
 gies to Mr. Thomas, whose prejudices on the 
 subject have been expressed, one even ventures 
 to say it is an example of Ibsen in America. 
 
 There is something so slyly comical in that 
 last idea that one is tempted to pause and dally 
 with it. Unless a none too trustworthy mem- 
 ory has entirely forsaken us, Mr. Thomas has 
 on more than one occasion repudiated any in- 
 terest in Ibsen; he has scorned his subject 
 matter and spelled America large, after the 
 fashion of speakers full of baked meats. Yet 
 here he is writing a drama where " the ghost 
 of a woman influenced a decision of the Su- 
 preme Court of the United States"; where 
 telepathy and hypnotism play leading roles; 
 where the mental attitude of five hundred thou-
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 29 
 
 sand excited Kentuckians influences a jury 
 shut up in a room ; where, in short, the things 
 which abide " below the threshold " of human 
 consciousness, the dim, unproved, disturbing 
 facts of life — if facts they be — are the ghostly 
 protagonists of the play. Does Mr. Thomas 
 suppose he could have done this if Ibsen had 
 not shown him how, — yes, and shown the pub- 
 lic how to understand him ? Does he suppose — 
 granting that he could have written the play 
 fifteen years ago — the Hackett Theater would 
 have been packed at every performance to see 
 it? If he likes, let us just attribute the influ- 
 ence to telepathy. Let us say he never saw an 
 Ibsen play performed, never read one, never 
 heard of "The Master Builder." Let us con- 
 ceive of him as shut up in New Rochelle, far 
 from the madding drama, where news from 
 the outer world does not penetrate. But five 
 hundred thousand of his fellow countrymen 
 have been whipped into reluctant attendance 
 on the Ibsen drama, and there has dawned on 
 them a great light, on them and on certain 
 men who write plays for them. They have 
 become dissatisfied with the artificial, the con- 
 ventional, the old trite repetitions of stage for- 
 mulas. They have come to look for a tech- 
 nique that should go below the mere tricks of 
 climax and surprise, for a picture of life that 
 should go deeper than theatrical convention,
 
 30 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 for realism that should be real and situations 
 that should call not alone for the easy laugh 
 or tear, but for those doubts and puzzles and 
 searching speculations that make life at once 
 so strange and so worth while. And the com- 
 bined thoughts about the drama of these five 
 hundred thousand did beat upon New Rochelle 
 and upon the brain of Mr. Thomas, and, lo! 
 he did write " The Witching Hour." And 
 when he surveyed his work and saw that it 
 was good, did he parody Frank Hardmuth in 
 Act III and say, " I wonder how in hell I did 
 that ? " Or did he communicate at once with 
 Professor Hyslop? Perhaps he even made the 
 forty-five minute trip to Broadway and saw 
 " The Master Builder." Who knows? 
 
 Which brings us down to the serious busi- 
 ness at hand: What is there in telepathy? It 
 may be said at once that with the theatrical 
 efifectiveness of " The Witching Hour " there 
 is no quarrel, nor with the acting of it. As 
 the copper wire is in a sense the first essential 
 to the transmission of a telephone message, so 
 a well made, well told story is the first essential 
 to the transmission of such a message as Mr. 
 Thomas speaks in this play. And that essen- 
 tial he has in the main admirably supplied, and 
 has been uncommonly well aided by his players. 
 In spite of the unusual quality of so many 
 causes — telepathy and hypnotism — the efifects
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 81 
 
 are handled with quiet, truthful reahsm, the 
 story progresses with the smoothness and pre- 
 cision of machinery, there is no violence done 
 to probabilities either of incident or character, 
 excepting, for the time being, such violences 
 as may inhere in the telepathic and hypnotic 
 premises. And even these are so handled that 
 while the play is in action they carry you, how- 
 ever skeptic, to a kind of momentary belief. 
 
 The story is not intricate. The scene opens 
 in Louisville, in the richly furnished home of 
 Jack Brookfield, a professional gambler and art 
 connoisseur, a figure suggested, perhaps, by 
 Richard Canfield. The game in Jack Brook- 
 field's house is always '' on the square." He 
 is, according to his lights, a man of honor, 
 with a warm, affectionate nature. But twenty 
 years before, he says, he found wild oats so 
 profitable that he stayed in that branch of the 
 grain business. He has a niece, his ward, who 
 is his pet. She has two suitors, Frank JJard- 
 muth, assistant prosecuting attorney, a " prac- 
 tical politician " and rather too savory of 
 stage villainy to be wholly convincing, and 
 Clay Whipple, a charming youth, son of a 
 woman who years before would have married 
 Brookfield but for his profession. (She is prov- 
 identially a widow when the play begins, so 
 that Jack can win her in the end.) The time 
 is after midnight when the first-act curtain
 
 32 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 rises — the witching hour. Brookfield is en- 
 tertaining Mrs. Whipple, Clay, and others. 
 There is no game while they are there. Jus- 
 tice Prentice, of the United States Supreme 
 Court, a stranger to Brookfield, calls to see a 
 certain Corot, a genuine Corot — the play- 
 wright must be granted some license! Here 
 is the first hint of the underlying idea of the 
 drama. For as the Justice looks at the picture 
 he says, ** No, I could n't pay six thousand five 
 hundred dollars." Brookfield is amazed. He 
 has not spoken, but that was the price he was 
 thinking to himself. He speaks of it to the 
 Justice, who tells him that such phenomena of 
 thought transference are acknowledged by sci- 
 ence, and that he is apparently a man of excep- 
 tional powers in such direction. The Justice 
 departs, promising to send Jack books on the 
 subject. Jack's puzzled musings are rudely 
 interrupted by the entrance of a drunken young 
 man who has been forcing Clay to look at his 
 scarf pin, a cat's-eye. Clay has an inherited 
 neurasthenic aversion to that stone. As the 
 other man shoves it under his face, in a fit of 
 blind panic he strikes his tormentor with a 
 huge ivory paper knife, felling him to the 
 floor, dead. 
 
 The second act shifts the scene to Justice 
 Prentice's rooms in Washington, one year later. 
 Again it is midnight. Justice Prentice and
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 83 
 
 Justice Henderson are sitting together. The 
 one is a lover of poetry and pictures, a beHever 
 in the occult, sweetly, lovably sentimental ; the 
 other is dry, matter-of-fact, shrewdly humor- 
 ous. The scene between them, delicately 
 wrought, written in language that differenti- 
 ates the two and yet brands both of them as 
 men of long legal training, quietly comic and 
 yet informing of the events of the play, is one 
 of the most nearly flawless passages in modern 
 American drama. Clay, it seems, was sen- 
 tenced to be hanged, but the case has been 
 carried on appeal to the Supreme Court on a 
 constitutional point. Justice Prentice refuses 
 to agree with his bench-mate that a new trial 
 should be granted. The latter departs as 
 Brookfield enters. Jack tells the Justice of his 
 development in telepathic and hypnotic powers. 
 He is quite evidently disturbed, and the Justice 
 still further disturbs him by suggesting that 
 such powers carry grave responsibilities of 
 right living and thinking. Then Clay's mother 
 and his sweetheart — Jack's niece — come in. 
 Here Mr. Thomas perhaps stretches the 
 long arm of coincidence pretty far. Yet it is 
 not an impossible circumstance. Mrs. Whipple, 
 it is disclosed, is the daughter of the Justice's 
 boyhood sweetheart, whom for some reason he 
 did not marry. Mrs. Whipple has just dis- 
 covered in an old album of her mother's a letter 
 
 3
 
 34 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 from the Justice bearing on her aversion to 
 cat's-eyes. Justice Prentice recalls the circum- 
 stance, and declares that here is new evidence ; 
 he will go to Louisville himself to testify in a 
 new trial. He lies nobly. He says he had 
 already made up his mind to agree for a new 
 trial on the constitutional point already raised. 
 Left alone, he listens as the clock strikes two. 
 He picks up a miniature of his old sweetheart. 
 " Your ghost was in this room to-night," he 
 says, " and influenced a decision of the Su- 
 preme Court of the United States." 
 
 The third act is again in BrookHeld's house, 
 late at night. The new trial is over, the jury 
 out, — not a novel way of gaining suspense, 
 but given an entirely new import by Mr. 
 Thomas, for, as he waits, BrookHeld attempts 
 by telepathy to influence one of the jurymen. 
 Furthermore, possessing the knowledge that 
 Hardmuth planned the assassination of the 
 Governor of Kentucky a few years before, 
 he has made that charge in the newspapers. 
 Jiardmuth, now the prosecuting attorney, has 
 hounded Clay from jealousy. The charges 
 against him, read by five hundred thousand 
 excited Kentuckians, are bound to stir up pop- 
 ular sentiment in Clay's behalf. Going fur- 
 ther in his belief in telepathy than Brookfield, 
 Justice Prentice alarms that five hundred thou- 
 sand people cannot all be thinking about one
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 36 
 
 thing without influencing a jury, though locked 
 up in a courthouse. Apparently Mr. Thomas 
 would have us believe so too, for Clay is set 
 free. Then Hardmuth rushes in to shoot 
 Brookiield, shoving a revolver against his 
 breast. Jack switches a light on over his foe's 
 face, startling him into attention. " You can't 
 shoot me," he says. " You can't pull that 
 trigger. You can't even hold that gun." The 
 gun falls with a crash to the floor. " I 'd like 
 to know how in hell you did that ! " says the 
 dazed Hardmuth as the curtain falls. 
 
 The last act, once more at midnight, unlike 
 some last acts, takes the story into new regions ; 
 the play is not done when the conventional 
 climax has been reached. Experimenting with 
 a deliciously comical Kentucky sport, Brook- 
 Held finds that he can tell what cards the other 
 holds. He feels that unconsciously he has been 
 exercising such power all his life, which ex- 
 plains his " luck." Just so, in a less definite 
 way, Master Builder Solness accounted for his 
 luck. With that discovery his card playing is 
 forever over. His sister tells him that his be- 
 lief in his power to influence the thoughts of 
 others is foolish, morbid. " That is something 
 we shall never know in this life," he answers, 
 " but we can all live as if it were true." 
 Against the protest of the other characters, he 
 tells Clay that he holds the fatal cat's-eye in
 
 36 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 his closed fist, and makes the trembhng boy 
 put his hand over it. Clay thrills with horror 
 and aversion. Brookfield lets him suffer to the 
 full. Then he opens his palm, disclosing — a 
 latchkey! The boy is cured. Finally, his last 
 action is to help Hardmiith escape out of the 
 State, for the assassination Hardmuth had 
 planned Brookfield had one day conceived as 
 possible in exactly the way it was executed. 
 Knowing the influence he had always exerted 
 over Hardmuth, he felt himself in a measure 
 guilty (again we recall the Master Builder 
 and his brooding conscience). So the play 
 closes. The mild " love interests," that have 
 neither obtruded nor been missed, are, it might 
 be added, satisfactorily adjusted, but the real 
 interest has been in BrookHeld's adventures 
 amid subconscious phenomena, and in the les- 
 son Mr. Thomas would have them teach — that 
 our thoughts are dynamic as well as our words, 
 that human responsibility is a more terrible 
 thing than some of us know or admit. 
 
 The play is beautifully acted, to aid in the 
 illusion. John Mason may always be relied on 
 for a good performance in any part. Here he 
 is the gentleman gambler with artistic tastes 
 who won his way to a fine cleanliness and 
 strength of character. His growth of char- 
 acter, still more his puzzled wrestling with 
 psychic phenomena, are firmly, quietly, and
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 37 
 
 finely rendered by Mr. Mason. But the most 
 notable performance, in some ways, is that of 
 Russ Whytal as Justice Prentice. His work 
 stands out for a single very definite reason. 
 He is called upon to portray a Supreme Court 
 Justice, a man of great intellectual force and 
 dignity and deep spiritual nature ; and he does 
 it. How many times we have seen cabinet min- 
 isters, statesmen, poets, generals, imaginary 
 or drawn from history, represented on the 
 stage, and how seldom have they been more 
 than so many actors trying to appear grave, 
 or learned, or profound! What is more sad 
 than the sight of the ordinary actor affecting 
 intellectual profundity? It is as incongruous 
 as would be the sight of President Eliot or 
 William James playing pool in the Lambs Club. 
 The old-time actors had a way of getting 
 around the difficulty; they did it by means of 
 a statuesque demeanor, a sonorous voice, and, 
 if possible, blank-verse dialogue. But men of 
 intellectual profundity are seldom of statu- 
 esque demeanor, nor are their voices univer- 
 sally sonorous ; and their conversation does not 
 in ordinary circumstances differ materially 
 from our own, except there is less of it. The 
 modern actor in a modern play, if his author 
 is unwise enough to give him a man of intel- 
 lectual force to portray, is confronted by a 
 task far more difficult perhaps than many a
 
 38 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 " classic " role presents. Such a task Russ 
 Whytal accomplishes with apparent ease. How 
 does he do it? Not by any affectations of 
 dignity, any posturings of grave learnedness, 
 any pomposities or strut. He was wise enough 
 to know that such things are of the traditional 
 theater. But he does it by observing life itself, 
 by maintaining a simple, unaffected bearing, 
 the smiling, kindly naturalness of a man truly 
 large and wise. Perhaps Mr. Whytal has 
 mingled often with such men — as it was 
 Booth's object in founding the Players Club 
 that his fellows should do, for Booth was a 
 truly large and wise man himself and saw the 
 dangers that beset the actor. Surely Mr. 
 Whytal has observed them, understood them, 
 understood the particular character of Judge 
 Prentice. And he has imitated them, not other 
 actors ; he has given to his Judge not only the 
 bearing of intellectual force, but of that pecu- 
 liar judicial force which subtly differentiates 
 a justice from his fellows. Mr. Whytal's per- 
 formance is essentially realistic, essentially 
 modern ; it belongs in spirit to the new drama. 
 And yet what scoffer, what ancient graybeard, 
 can say that it is not lovely, that it is not indeed 
 poetic? 
 
 Again we are brought to the question. What 
 is there in telepathy? If there is a better ques- 
 tion to start a discussion than this, the writer
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 39 
 
 has yet to find it. There is a well-known artist 
 in New York who affirms, and whose wife sup- 
 ports him, that before their marriage he could 
 will her to do so and so when she was absent 
 from him and she would do it; and that since 
 their marriage, if he is reading, say, a tale of 
 Poe downstairs at 2 a. m. and gasps at a shiv- 
 ery climax, she will scream in her sleep up in 
 the chamber. Instances of the case in hand 
 in the play — the reading of cards by telepathy 
 — can be recited doubtless by the score by be- 
 lievers. On the other hand, in the 1906 edi- 
 tion of Bramwell's work on " Hypnotism " he 
 says: ''After many years of hypnotic work and 
 frequent opportunities of investigating the ex- 
 periments of others, I have seen nothing, 
 absolutely nothing, which might be fairly con- 
 sidered as affording even the slightest evidence 
 of the existence of telepathy, or any of the 
 so-called ' occult ' phenomena." He then de- 
 scribes a series of experiments in reading cards 
 conducted by a committee of the Society for 
 Psychical Research, where the subjects were 
 generally hypnotized, and so abnormally sus- 
 ceptible {Brookficld in the play was not in 
 a hypnotic state), and states that the percent- 
 age of correct guesses fell " far below the 
 number which ought to have been reached ac- 
 cording to the laws of chance." But he leaves 
 Mr. Thomas this loophole: ''Despite all this
 
 40 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 it would be unphilosophic to deny the possi- 
 bility of telepathy, and I am quite ready to be 
 convinced of its existence if any one can divine 
 even as few as six out of every dozen cards 
 selected by the operator under circumstances 
 similar to those described." But Sir Oliver 
 Lodge, in a recent number of Harper's 
 Monthly, says : '' The first fact established by 
 the society's labor was the reality of telepathy 
 — that is to say, of the apparently direct action 
 of one mind on another by means unknown to 
 science. That a thought or image or impres- 
 sion or emotion in the mind of one person can 
 arouse a similar impression in the mind of an- 
 other person sufficiently sympathetic and suffi- 
 ciently at leisure to attend and record the im- 
 pression is now proved. But the mechanism 
 whereby it is done, or even if there is anything 
 that can be likened to physical mechanism at 
 all, is still unknown." The truth is, science 
 as yet knows nothing about telepathy, thought 
 transference, and the like. If it cannot very 
 stoutly affirm, neither can it deny. The whole 
 subject lies in the misty borderland of this 
 world of mind and matter. And whatever Mr. 
 Thomas himself believes, he hit on a subtle way 
 alike to confound his critics and to stimulate 
 and excite the interest of his audiences. 
 
 But when we come to hypnotism, science has 
 a word to say. Here we are still on debatable
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 41 
 
 ground, to be sure, but ground where some 
 milestones already emerge from the mist; 
 some things are clear and certain. There has 
 been and still is much popular misunderstand- 
 ing of hypnotism; much hysterical rot is be- 
 lieved about it. Braid found it a superstition, 
 dominated by the theories of mesmerism (the 
 transference of '' vital fluid " from operator to 
 subject) in 1841. When he died, in i860, he 
 left it on the way to becoming a science. 
 He had shown that the hypnotic state (the 
 name is his as well as the scientific affirmation 
 of the facts) is not objective but subjective. 
 And he was in a way to the theory now pretty 
 generally held that the hypnotic state is but 
 an unloosing of the forces of the " subliminal 
 self," which recent psychology has shown find 
 their way to influence even " normal " actions 
 and play a great part in the religious life. It 
 is absurd that only certain people can hypnotize 
 or be hypnotized. Any intelligent doctor can be 
 taught the trick; it can even be taught to a 
 subject so that he can hypnotize himself. And 
 it has been proved that about ninety-four per 
 cent of the adult human race are capable of 
 being hypnotized. Of this six per cent re- 
 mainder a large portion is made up of the im- 
 becile and insane, who cannot be influenced. 
 Another error still prevalent is that weak- 
 willed people are more easily subjected. The
 
 42 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 contrary is the case, for, as a rule, fixity of at- 
 tention is required to bring about the hypnotic 
 state. But the chief popular error that mod- 
 ern practice has tended to disprove, almost 
 without a shadow of question, is the pictur- 
 esque notion that the hypnotized subject loses 
 his volitional power, is at the mercy of the 
 man who has hypnotized him. In 1897 Bern- 
 hcim still maintained that five out of a hun- 
 dred subjects could be made to do anything; 
 that is, to commit crimes or acts contrary to 
 their normal impulses and moral sense. But 
 other and more recent investigations take away 
 even these five, and declare that not only in the 
 hypnotic state is the volitional power alive, but 
 the moral sense is even keener than at other 
 times. You cannot make a subject do what he 
 absolutely does n't want to do, is the latest 
 dictum. Finally, it was stated by Braid that 
 no one can be " affected by hypnotism at any 
 stage of the process unless by voluntary com- 
 pliance," and it is equally certain to-day that 
 mere fear of hypnotism absolutely precludes 
 its possibility. There cannot be an unwilling 
 subject. 
 
 The application of this to " The Witching 
 Hour " is quite apparent. BrookHeld saves his 
 life by hypnotizing a man who has jammed a 
 revolver against his breast to shoot. " I 'd like 
 to know how in hell you did that ! " says the
 
 "THE WITCHING HOUR" 43 
 
 foiled villain, coming out of his " sleep " with 
 astonishing rapidity. 
 
 Precisely. That is the question you too ask 
 when you leave the playhouse. It is to the 
 credit of Mr. Thomas's story-telling ability 
 that if you are easily moved in the theater you 
 don't ask it on the spot. That BrookHeld should 
 hypnotize a man in the flash of an eye, espe- 
 cially a man over whom he had exerted an in- 
 fluence for some years, is quite believable, pro- 
 vided the man consented. Many physicians 
 can hypnotize as quickly. But that he should 
 hypnotize a man who most certainly was not 
 giving his consent, and should make him do 
 the very thing he most certainly did not want 
 to do, is a hard pill to swallow. It is true that 
 Hardmuth did not expect to be hypnotized and 
 so was not actively, only negatively, opposed. 
 It is true that the suggestions followed were 
 not contrary to his moral sense, but in line 
 with it, not to shoot, but to refrain from shoot- 
 ing. And it is true, as a physician has pointed 
 out, that his mind was tremendously concen- 
 trated, and so in one sense prepared for hyp- 
 notic influence. It is also true that there are 
 no cases on record in the scientific libraries of 
 hypnotism used as a means of self-defence 
 against a murderer, as a kind of mental jiu- 
 jitsu. Perhaps nobody can say without danger 
 of error — certainly no mere dramatic reporter
 
 44 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 — that this dimax of Mr. Thomas's is not 
 possible. But the known facts are against its 
 possibihty, certainly its probability. It is a 
 mighty monstrous pill to swallow. It is too 
 violent; its final effect is to weaken rather 
 than strengthen the structure of the play. 
 
 But swallow the pill or not as you like, scoff 
 or not as your skepticism or credulity dictates 
 at the telepathy, there still remains in " The 
 Witching Hour " a human story, crisply, nat- 
 urally, strongly told; there still remains the 
 medicinal effect of a mild hypnotism applied 
 with no little philosophic and psychologic in- 
 sight in the last act, not the shallow, or bro- 
 mide, philosophy of the usual drama; there 
 still remains the imaginative skill displayed in 
 weaving through the warp of concrete facts 
 the woof of airy things and things intangible. 
 Mr. Thomas has surely added nothing to sci- 
 ence ; he may even have exceeded what science 
 and common sense allow him of hypnotic and 
 telepathic phenomena. But this at least he has 
 done, and well done; he has reached down 
 through the crust of the commonplace for the 
 dim fires that smolder beneath, and in a 
 drama of truth and power he has set a coal 
 from those fires to glow unceasingly. His 
 attempt was audacious, fine; his achievement 
 deserving of a fine reward.
 
 M 
 
 "PAID IN FULL" 
 
 (AsTOR, February 25, 1908) 
 
 ARRY in haste and repent in Har- 
 lem " might very well serve as a 
 motto for Eugene Walter's new 
 American play, " Paid in Full." President 
 Eliot of Harvard has frequently complained 
 that so many young men abstain from matri- 
 mony until they are thirty. Mr. Walter in the 
 first act of his play has given the learned presi- 
 dent an answer. Better a dumb-waiter and no 
 servant, at the other end of the subway where 
 love is, than to dwell where the bedrooms are 
 actually on a separate floor? No doubt, no 
 doubt! But mixed up with poor human na- 
 ture's brighter part is pride, and a certain 
 craving for creature comforts, and other un- 
 fortunate traits. And mixed up with our social 
 and economic system are city rents as lofty 
 as the cave dwellings where we live in layers, 
 and high prices for the indispensable luxuries 
 of life as well as for the less important neces- 
 sities, and small salaries paid to the youngsters. 
 And if the young men do not marry before 
 they are thirty and rear three children to roam
 
 46 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 the vast spaces of a Harlem flat, to fatten in 
 the heahhful Harlem air, there is something 
 to be said in defense of them. It was because 
 Mr. Walter said it in his first act, and said it 
 well, said it through the medium of action and 
 characters, not by spouting a thesis, and said 
 it too, in such a manner that the human story 
 of his play got silently and swiftly and enter- 
 tainingly under way, that when the first curtain 
 fell on the opening night hope was extraor- 
 dinarily high in the hearts of his audience. 
 But this hope was only in part realized by sub- 
 sequent acts, and it is important to see exactly 
 why, for Mr. Walter is a dramatist far too 
 valuable in promise not to be handled with the 
 utmost severity. He is a man who should go 
 on, treating his work ever more seriously and 
 truthfully, finding in his first success, in spite 
 of praise or royalties, at best a partial failure. 
 He ought to have the stuff in him to be, after 
 his first success, one of the most discontented 
 men in New York. 
 
 Joseph Brooks (surely Mr. Walter meant no 
 harm when he named his villain after one of 
 our more or less prominent theatrical man- 
 agers!) is a young man employed as collector 
 by Captain Williams, head of the Latin-Amer- 
 ican Steamship Line. He has married a nice 
 girl named Emyna, rushing in where angels 
 fear to wed, and the opening act discloses them
 
 "PAID IN FULL" 47 
 
 in their Harlem flat, at the humble task of 
 washing the dishes and clearing up the dining 
 room, for they are too poor to afford a maid. 
 Joe is a tempery, discontented sort of person, 
 who has been more and more embittered every 
 time other men in his office have had a raise in 
 salary while he has not. Captain Williams 
 was, it appears, formerly in command of a 
 piratical Pacific sealer — a hard, wolfish, cruel 
 man, now in business as then on the deck of 
 his ship. Even before he appears on the scene, 
 although the weakness of Joe's character is 
 apparent, you yet feel sympathy for the lad. 
 The iron hand of the social system is heavy 
 upon him, and like many another weak and 
 egotistical man he supposes that it is against 
 him. Hence his undigested socialism. James 
 Smith, an unsuccessful suitor for Emma's 
 hand, who is still her devoted friend and un- 
 selfishly interested in Joe's welfare, hits the 
 nail on the head when he says : *' If Joe had 
 got his ten-dollar raise to-day he 'd be howling 
 for capital. There are lots of such Socialists." 
 There are ; and it was Mr. Walter's great op- 
 portunity to continue the character he sketched 
 so admirably in his opening act. When Cap- 
 tain Williams comes to the flat with Emma's 
 mother and sister, two characters needlessly 
 exaggerated, out of farce in fact, distinct 
 blots on the texture of the drama, Joe breaks
 
 48 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 in upon him with a hot-headed tirade, a fire- 
 eating, defiant invective that is at once melo- 
 dramatically stirring, an exposition of char- 
 acter, both of Joe's and the Captain's, an 
 excellent motive for the Captain's subsequent 
 scheme of revenge, and, though in complete 
 disregard of Joe's later conduct, a bid for sym- 
 pathy for the young man. When his wife has 
 interposed between him and the giant Captain's 
 fist, and the guests have departed hastily after 
 such a painful scene, Joe is in a perfectly natu- 
 ral rebellious mood, ready for anything. He and 
 Emma are invited to a theater party. They 
 cannot go because she has no clothes fit to 
 wear in company with her former friends. He 
 resolves on a theater party of his own, and 
 hang the expense. Emma runs to get ready. 
 He takes a bill from the drawer where he had 
 placed his late afternoon collections for the 
 company. Emma returns, beaming. They turn 
 out all the lights in the flat to save expense 
 and go out. The curtain descends on a dark 
 stage. It is an opening act of extraordinary 
 excellence, with the farcical mother-in-law as 
 the one weak spot. Surely she could sting 
 Joe's pride by her intimations that her daugh- 
 ter had made a bad match in a less exaggerated 
 manner. It is an act that is vital with a truth- 
 ful observation of existing conditions, that sets 
 forth the leading characters of the play with
 
 "PAID IN FULL" 49 
 
 salient strokes, that naturally and swiftly pre- 
 pares the spectator for the coming drama and 
 rouses his curiosity. Joe does not steal to make 
 a play. He steals because logical circumstance 
 drove him to it. The play is going to be, you 
 are confident, the outcome of the characters, 
 not the characters of the play. Pinero himself 
 need not have been ashamed of this act. 
 
 Before the second act some months have 
 elapsed. Joe and Emma are seen living in a 
 " semi-fashionable " hotel, where the wall- 
 paper and the furniture don't match. But 
 there is a telephone instead of a speaking-tube, 
 and an upright piano. Emma is elaborately 
 gowned. Her hands are no longer red from 
 dish-washing. She has the kitten qualities of 
 her sex — she purrs when surrounded with 
 luxury. She thinks that Joe has had his sal- 
 ary trebled, with six months of back pay as 
 well. But Joe's temper has n't improved. He 
 has become impossible. There is no vestige of 
 the gentleman left. Either his thefts have 
 utterly ruined him or the sympathy he gained 
 at first was gained imder false pretenses. The 
 Captain and James, it seems, have been away 
 in South America, the Captain, of course, wish- 
 ing to give Joe enough rope to hang himself 
 with. But they come back, and faithful James 
 tells Joe that the Captain knows all. The Cap- 
 tain calls and plays with Joe before his un-
 
 50 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 suspecting wife with deliberate, sly, wolfish 
 cruelty. There is dramatic stufif in this scene; 
 it bites. Joe is shadowed by detectives. He 
 cannot escape. The Captain goes out, telling 
 him to be at the office at eight the next morn- 
 ing. And then Joe confesses everything to his 
 wife. He exposes layer after layer of abom- 
 inable caddishness. He says he stole for her 
 sake, which is more than half true, or would 
 have been true did he not say it in such a 
 brutal, unloving way. At length, in his cow- 
 ardly fear of jail, he is driven to suggest that 
 she go at once to Captain Williams's fiat and 
 intercede for him. " The Captain likes you — 
 he likes pretty women," Joe says. " And all 
 women know how far they can go." And he 
 adds that she ought to do it since it was she 
 who drove him into crime. Well, with that 
 speech every last spark of sympathy for Joe, 
 every last mite of interest in him as a type to 
 be studied for light on social conditions, van- 
 ishes. On the opening night there was a 
 smothered gasp almost of horror in the audi- 
 ence. For a moment it seemed as if the entire 
 structure of the play was tottering, so violently 
 were the sensibilities wrenched and the in- 
 terest shifted. So Joe was nothing but a skunk 
 after all ! Nay, worse, he was nothing but a 
 conventional stage villain used to bring about 
 a third-act situation! So a play that started
 
 **PAID IN FULL" 51 
 
 in hopefully as a social study was to be in the 
 end nothing but the fulmination of a young 
 dramatist trying to write a '* strong scene " ! 
 It was not pity for Emma, but sorrow for an- 
 other play gone wrong, that saddened the hearts 
 of some in the audience. Mr. Walter had his 
 chance — and he missed it. 
 
 But in missing it he found something else 
 of positive value, and in his third act, by the 
 sheer dramatic life of his situation, he saved 
 his play from the commonplace, perhaps from 
 what would have been popular failure, even if 
 he did have to tear a leaf out of Maeterlinck's 
 '* Mona Vanna " to do it. For Emma goes to 
 Captain Williams's flat, a curious place with 
 a wheel over the door, a capstan for a table, 
 and port and starboard lights agleam, like a 
 Fourth Avenue drug store, and there the old 
 sea wolf fools her and the audience alike by 
 disclosing an elementary streak of iron gener- 
 osity in his nature, a coarse kind of chivalry, 
 that is perhaps none the less pleasant to con- 
 template because it results more than half from 
 a desire for a picturesque and surprising form 
 of revenge. " They say I 'm a brute, do they? 
 Well, I '11 show 'em that — I ain't ! " was the 
 formula of the Captain's psychology. After 
 all, as Frank Sheridan played him, there is 
 something deliciously probable about this psy- 
 chology. It may well be that the Captain is the
 
 52 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 most intricately human character in the play. 
 And one the more regrets that Mr. Walter had 
 so completely to sacrifice Joe in order to make 
 this evident. There is a cruel waste of good 
 material in such construction. Of course after 
 the earlier revelation there was but one end 
 possible when Emma returned to the " semi- 
 fashionable " hotel. She left Joe forever — and 
 for the faithful James. Everything comes to 
 him who waits. 
 
 The failure of the play, then, is not a failure 
 to arouse interest in dramatic situations, nor a 
 failure to attract public patronage. It is a fail- 
 ure at exactly the point where so many well- 
 meaning and seriously written plays fail — a 
 failure to bend the stubborn material of the 
 stage always and consistently to the purposes 
 of significant truth, allowing instead the mate- 
 rial to warp the significant truth. It may be 
 true that such skunks as Joe exist and manage 
 to marry chaste and lovely Emmas in spite of 
 the counter proposals of faithful and adoring 
 Jameses. But it is not significant, it is not rep- 
 resentative. No light is shed on the dark places 
 of any considerable number of Harlem flats; 
 there is no lesson to be learned, no real com- 
 ment made on present social conditions. *' Paid 
 in Full " is not, after all, a '* criticism of life," 
 but simply another play. It is an interesting, a 
 promising play. But it is not what it should be,
 
 "PAID IN FULL" 53 
 
 what it might have been. Judged by the exact- 
 ing standards, not of Broadway but the leading 
 examples of the modern social drama, it is a 
 failure. 
 
 In a general way of course all these things 
 discussed are comprised by the term " dramatic 
 style." Dramatic style lies quite as much in the 
 structure, in the unification of atmosphere and 
 mood, in the development of character, as in the 
 mere dialogue. The farcical mother-in-law in 
 " Paid in Full " is, for example, an error of 
 style, a kind of dramatic split infinitive! But 
 in a narrower sense the term may be used 
 to describe the language in which a play is 
 couched and which when nicely handled may 
 be potent for effect or charm even in the most 
 realistic of plays. It is in this sense at least 
 that Mr. Walter may be said to be lacking in 
 style. He has much to learn and some things 
 to unlearn. Contrast for a moment the nerv- 
 ous, beautiful prose of " The Great Divide " 
 with the language of Mr. Walter's play. It can 
 hardly be urged that Ruth and Steve do not 
 speak human language, even if on occasion they 
 do strike out similes worthy of Shelley. Or 
 contrast his dialogue with that in " The Witch- 
 ing Hour," the work of a man who is n't, as 
 Mr. Moody is, a student and teacher of rhetoric, 
 and a poet as well. Mr. Thomas's characters, 
 though they speak in character, though the
 
 54 THE A^IERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Judge uses a different vocabulary from the 
 gambler, do not for that reason necessarily 
 speak harshly, without distinction. It is a nice 
 problem, no doubt, that faces any writer of 
 dialogue to draw the line exactly right between 
 a realistic reproduction of conversational slop- 
 piness and a scrupulous rhetoric. Yet he must 
 always remember that a part of the pleasure 
 to be derived from a work of art is an aesthetic 
 pleasure, and the mere reproduction of conver- 
 sational sloppiness will in the end bring weari- 
 ness and a sense of vulgar commonplaceness. 
 Mr. Walter has displayed in " Paid in Full " 
 no care whatever for beauty or distinction of 
 speech. His language is bald and common- 
 place. And his play suffers thereby, is not 
 without a taint of cheapness. 
 
 But in the speeches assigned to the faithful 
 James he has erred still further. In his desire 
 to avoid bookishness, to suggest the breezy, 
 slangy freshness of this Colorado Cayley 
 Drummle, this sentimentally lovable fellow, at 
 once so simple and so sharp, James talks like a 
 book all the time — a book of slang. James 
 has a peculiar, a picturesque vocabulary. He 
 talks in metaphors, the racy metaphors of the 
 street or the West. His vocabulary is a part of 
 his charm and of his character. But he is a 
 man of deep and sincere feeling, of tender sen- 
 sibilities and gentle instincts. When, therefore,
 
 "PAID IN FULL" 55 
 
 he describes to the woman he loves the shame of 
 his mother who bore him nameless into the 
 world and died of her grief, the slang would in 
 reality have fallen from him and he would have 
 spoken in simple, touching English. There 
 would have been no laughs from the audience 
 during his narrative had he so spoken. Mr. 
 Walter, however, has increased rather than 
 diminished the quantity of his slang during this 
 scene, has even more highly colored his meta- 
 phors. So the speech is false to character, it 
 strikes harshly and painfully on the ear. And 
 it smells of the lamp quite as much as any 
 bombastic rhetoric could. 
 
 After all, style in the drama, as anywhere else, 
 is the outer manifestation of an inner sense of 
 fitness. If a character is perfectly realized, the 
 author cannot but make him speak fitting words 
 and do fitting things. If the dominant mood or 
 purpose of a play is thoroughly and firmly laid 
 hold of, the author cannot but reject all persons 
 and episodes that are not in harmony, that 
 shatter his mood or distract him from his pur- 
 pose. Perfectly to realize all characters, firmly 
 and thoroughly to lay hold of a dominant mood 
 and purpose, is a task that only the exceptional 
 authors of this earth can accomplish, least of all 
 dramatic authors, for whom the material is so 
 stubborn, the distracting temptations so many 
 and great. If Mr. Walter is wise, he will learn
 
 56 THE AlVIERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 many lessons from " Paid in Full " and keep 
 an even more exacting watch on himself. It 
 should be his ambition to be one of these ex- 
 ceptional authors. 
 
 In the acting, "Paid in Full " has been a shin- 
 ing example of the merely commercial value of 
 good stage management. Without a star in 
 the cast, each part told at its true worth, and all 
 the players worked together for the play. Yet 
 Tully Marshall as Joseph Brooks stood out in 
 the cast by virtue of his performance. Joe is 
 a thankless role from the actor's point of view, 
 because he becomes utterly a cad and loses all 
 sympathy of the audience. Mr. Marshall, 
 however, was not concerned ; he set to work to 
 discover exactly what external forces brought 
 out the latent caddishness and abominable 
 qualities in this weak-willed youth and then 
 showed their workings with vivid naturalness. 
 Mr. Marshall here was superior to his author. 
 Mr. Walter, you feel, made Brooks abominable 
 largely because that was the easiest way to 
 bring about his third-act situation. Mr. Mar- 
 shall, taking Brooks rather as a specific human 
 being than a pawn in the plot, extracted every 
 bit of logical cause from circumstance and kept 
 Brooks human in spite of his author. He never 
 seemed to play for the story at all; always he 
 played to explain, to make real, the character of 
 Brooks. He was not playing a part; he was
 
 "PAID IN FULL" 57 
 
 tracking down life. It was a fine piece of act- 
 ing, disclosing just the kind of intelligence and 
 skill to make vital and moving the modern 
 drama of contemporary life, the drama that has 
 a purpose above the mere trickle of a story, 
 the rehashing of conventional situations — that 
 is searching for truth.
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 
 
 (Lyric, October 21, 1907) 
 
 I 
 
 DO not see," cries Mr. Arthur Symons, 
 " why people should ever break silence 
 upon the stage except to speak poetry." 
 Perhaps his answer was to be found at the 
 Lyric Theater, where the players in Mr, Mac- 
 Kaye's " Sappho and Phaon " broke the silence 
 to no effect and to small audiences, for one week 
 only. Mr. Symons admits, he says, of nothing 
 on the stage between pantomime and the poetic 
 drama ; all the rest is mere photograph, useless, 
 barren. While there are few people who will 
 go with him to this extent of fanatic apprecia- 
 tion, there are plenty who will share with him 
 a belief in the vast superiority of the poetic 
 drama, if not of the pantomime, over the prose 
 record of life on the stage; who will hail any 
 attempt to write a drama in verse at any time 
 as supremely to be encouraged. Ls it supremely 
 to be encouraged? Is the poetic drama — that 
 is, the drama in verse — essentially, inevitably, 
 superior? In the new Twentieth Century is the 
 drama in verse necessarily more poetic in its 
 final effect than the naturalistic play in prose
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 59 
 
 wrought by a man of insight and imagination? 
 To be specific, could not Percy MacKaye better 
 serve himself and the American Stage by writ- 
 ing dramas of to-day, in the idiom of to-day, by 
 deserting Pegasus for a motor car ? 
 
 This tight old world is in very little danger 
 from revolutionists, iconoclasts, new ideas in 
 any form. We are compact of an inherited 
 stock of beliefs and ideas, and we adopt as little 
 that is new as possible; we hate a change, a 
 readjustment. We get along with the old just 
 as long as we can, and when a change is in- 
 evitable we welcome just as little of the new as 
 our consciences or our comfort will allow. In no 
 department of our ideas is this more true than 
 in our ideas about the drama. Old traditions 
 flourish just because they are traditions; old 
 conventions, moldy with time, still prevail and 
 are accepted by audiences long after every one 
 knows they are false and hollow. The stage 
 villain, the stage servant, the stage hero, what 
 are they but conventions we lack the initiative 
 to give up? And one of the most deep-rooted 
 of our traditional beliefs about the theater is 
 the belief that the blank-verse drama is in- 
 evitably the noblest form, by divine right king. 
 And so each time that a new drama in blank 
 verse is written we heave a pious ejaculation of 
 approval, we fill up our critical fountain pens 
 to praise, if possible, or if we are not critics
 
 60 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 but just '* patrons of the theater," we hasten 
 to buy seats. And then we all go to the 
 theater and are solemnly bored, and between 
 acts quote to each other the familiar bromide: 
 " The trouble is there are no actors any longer 
 who know how to read blank verse ! " It does 
 not occur to us to admit — nor would we admit 
 it if it did — that perhaps the poetic drama fails 
 to interest us for quite another reason, because 
 it is no longer a living form, because whether 
 we like and approve it or not, the old order does 
 change. And sooner or later it will compel our 
 reluctant admission. 
 
 Now, nobody is going to deny that the dear 
 bromide about actors and blank verse is true, 
 save in the honorable case of Julia Marlowe. 
 Fred Eric alone of the entire " Sappho and 
 Phaon " company (and he was trained by Miss 
 Marlowe) could get his lines across the foot- 
 lights as verse, even could speak them in excited 
 moments so that the words were intelligible 
 above the sound of the property surf, which so 
 perilously suggested the arrival of the winter 
 coal supply. The star herself, Mme. Bertha 
 Kalisch, was the worst offender. But in the 
 name of common sense, why can't our actors 
 read blank verse? Who is to blame? We arc, 
 the spirit of the age is, the evolution of the 
 drama is ; and could anything be more illogical, 
 if not actually hypocritical, than our melan-
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 61 
 
 choly lamentations over a corpse of something 
 which we ourselves have killed actually with- 
 out regret in the cause of entertainment? If 
 our actors cannot speak blank verse, it is be- 
 cause they have not been trained by practice 
 to speak it, and that is because the blank verse 
 drama has not been played; and if the blank 
 verse drama has not been played, that is be- 
 cause the public does not want it. What we 
 consciously approve from motives of supposed 
 propriety we unconsciously disapprove from in- 
 stinct. Of course, our instincts carry the day; 
 they always do. And we present the melan- 
 choly spectacle, so hateful to Ibsen, of men and 
 women who dare not come right out into the 
 open for their instincts. We are in much the 
 same position as the good deacon whom Pro- 
 fessor Pratt describes in his book on *' The 
 Psychology of Religious Belief." " The time 
 is coming," said the deacon, sadly, " when I 
 shall have to believe what I believe ! " 
 
 Yet it is not such a terrible thing to believe 
 what you believe. It is like taking a cold plunge 
 in the morning. The preliminary fear is awful, 
 the after effect a glowing reaction. So the man 
 who finally admits honestly to himself that 
 the modern naturalistic drama interests him 
 tremendously and the blank verse drama seems 
 to him archaic, outworn, false, a thing now for 
 the closet, not the stage, clears himself " of past
 
 62 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 regrets and future fears " and is filled with a 
 certain bounding exhilaration and faith in the 
 present. He is like the rich man who lost all 
 his money in the Civil War and rolled on the 
 ground in sheer delight of feeling free again. 
 What your theater-goer has lost is the load of 
 tradition, the burden of the past, an inherited 
 pessimism; what he has gained is freedom to 
 trust the present and hope for the future. And 
 his gain is so great that it is quite worth the 
 chance even of being wrong. Crede experto. 
 But there are arguments in plenty to buttress 
 his position, aside from this greatest one, the 
 freedom to trust in the present tendencies of 
 the stage, the greatest because faith in one's 
 own generation is always the finest incentive 
 to good and significant work. The drift of art 
 has always been toward specialization. Mod- 
 ern criticism has busied itself with searching 
 out and analyzing the peculiar qualities of the 
 poem, the novel, the picture, the statue, the play. 
 If a novel could just as well be a play or an epic 
 a novel, modern criticism tells us that novel or 
 that epic is a bad piece of art. But the drama 
 has long been a jumble of the arts, only feel- 
 ing its way up gradually and realizing imper- 
 fectly a sure and distinct ideal of its own. As 
 the " apron " of Shakespeare's stage gradually 
 shrank further and further back till now it 
 has disappeared, the players being entirely
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 63 
 
 framed behind the proscenium arch, the " room 
 with the fourth wall removed " being fully 
 realized, this ideal has emerged more and more 
 clearly. The growth of scenery has done away 
 with the need of language to describe the scene. 
 Electric lights and the thousand mechanical 
 aids to illusion have done away with the demand 
 for pictorial description in the play. A slow 
 growth of technique has eliminated the solil- 
 oquy, boiled down and concentrated the action, 
 made the scene within the proscenium frame so 
 much more natural, so much more like life, that 
 to our modern ears nothing but lifelike speech 
 will be tolerated from the players, and uncon- 
 sciously we have come to demand that it shall 
 still further fulfill the demands of naturalism 
 and be speech couched in prose. If the old-time 
 spouting actor is dead, the old-time blank verse 
 spouted is archaic. The drama has, in short, 
 become a highly specialized art form, its ideal 
 being to recreate reality as surely, as vividly, as 
 directly as possible. To that end it divorces 
 poetic speech as a convention false to life, as 
 it has divorced the false exaggerations of the 
 actors. 
 
 Nor is this at all to say that the modern drama 
 is only a photograph, or even that it cannot be 
 in a larger sense poetic. One of the great 
 achievements of the Nineteenth Century was 
 to strike the fetters from prose. Wordsworth
 
 64 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 dismissed the old Eighteenth Century distinc- 
 tion between prose and verse by declaring the 
 difference to rest upon the almost technical 
 basis of the absence or presence of metrical 
 beauty. That distinction glorifies the prose 
 drama. Newman and Ruskin and Arnold and 
 Pater have taught us that prose may carry its 
 burden of loveliness no less than verse, may 
 have its own cadences and melody. It was 
 Pater who said that music is the ideal art be- 
 cause it is impossible in music to distinguish the 
 form from the substance or matter, the subject 
 from the expression. Now, the poetic drama is 
 a divorce of the form and the subject matter 
 in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, so sel- 
 dom is the subject matter sufficiently unworldly, 
 glorified, saturated with mystic or musical feel- 
 ing as to comport naturally with verse in the 
 mouths of the characters. The content, the 
 subject matter of the drama to-day, is not a 
 thing apart from life; it is a section of life 
 where prose is spoken, and a perfect welding 
 of form and substance demands that prose be 
 the form. That this welding can be accom- 
 plished without loss of beauty in the mere 
 speech " The Great Divide " sufificiently attests, 
 a play in which the spoken words at once fulfill 
 the ideal of the modern naturalistic stage and 
 the ideal of imaginative charm and verbal 
 cadence. And that the modern prose drama
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 65 
 
 need not be and is not a mere photograph the 
 works of Ibsen and every playwright who has 
 wrought from the idea, who has had a " criti- 
 cism of hfe " to make, abundantly prove. Life 
 may still be treated poetically, life may still be 
 glorified on the stage. Only now it must be 
 glorified not by being made something differ- 
 ent from life, something apart and unreal, but 
 something first of all like life, a piece of it, set 
 out truthfully and considered for what may be 
 there over and above the more obvious aspects. 
 It is not the poetry in the blank verse drama 
 which we find, in our hearts, uninteresting; 
 it is the unreality. We are no more literal- 
 minded than our fathers were. But we have 
 been taught by the evolution of the stage, by 
 the specialization of the drama, the divorce be- 
 tween the art of playwriting and the art of 
 verse making, to look for one quality of emotion 
 from the one art, and another quality from the 
 other. We are but following the inevitable 
 march of things and events. Why then should 
 we be ashamed? 
 
 Let us not be ashamed ! Let us go right on 
 enjoying " A Grand Army Man " more than 
 " Sappho and Phaon " and not tell ourselves we 
 should n't. Let us say right out that Percy 
 MacKaye, a young American of high ideals, 
 steadfast adherence to his best beliefs, courage, 
 intelligence, fine taste and imaginative quality, 
 
 s
 
 66 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 could far better serve our stage and his own 
 ideals by giving us dramas of our own day in 
 our modern idiom. Let us not mind the scho- 
 lastic people, ''praisers of what is old and accus- 
 tomed at the expense of what is new; who 
 would never have discovered for themselves the 
 charm of any work, whether new or old, who 
 value what is old in art or literature . . . for 
 the conventional authority that has gathered 
 about it." Let us not think that all verse is 
 poetry — much of Mr. MacKaye's is n't — or 
 all prose unpoetic. Let us not fancy that what 
 we don't like is good for us and what we do 
 like is therefore bad! 
 
 It would be a pretty problem for some student 
 of aesthetics to figure out what share the growth 
 of the music drama in the past seventy-five or 
 one hundred years has had upon the decline of 
 the drama in verse. The opera, especially in 
 New York, is enormously patronized. And the 
 tragic opera is especially popular, just as the 
 poetic tragedy used to lord it in interest over 
 the lighter forms of verse plays. Once upon a 
 time music was the spokesman of the lighter 
 moods, and the stage looked after the grand 
 passions. Now there is hardly a grand passion 
 once set down in heroic verse and mouthed by 
 our Garricks and Keans and Forrests that is 
 not sung in opera over the .sobbing, wailing, 
 crashing harmonies of strings and wood wind
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 67 
 
 and ringing brass. How tame seemed Mr. 
 MacKaye's love scene between Sappho and 
 Phaon to any one whose ears carried the mem- 
 ory of the duet from the second act of *' Tristan 
 and Isolde" ! And when his fisher folk entered, 
 singing their hymn to Poseidon, — a hymn, by 
 the way, of great effectiveness and charm, as 
 was all Professor Stanley's music for the play, 
 — did it not seem as if the play had at last 
 reached its true medium, becoming opera? In 
 the poetic drama at its best there resides a 
 haunting unreality, a moonlit potency over the 
 primal emotions, the vague places of the heart, 
 closely akin to the eloquence of music. The 
 music of the verse indeed is but a kind of aria. 
 This is very far from the semi-intellectual ap- 
 peal of the drama as we know it to-day; but 
 it is correspondingly close to modern opera, 
 even to opera since Gliick. Perhaps what 
 " Sappho and Phaon " tries to do Wagner 
 achieves. Perhaps the release of the human 
 spirit through the biological emotions (there 
 is really no other adjective) once accomplished 
 by the poetic drama is now accomplished by 
 opera. It is a pretty question, and one by no 
 means lightly to be dismissed. 
 
 But for some time now the reader has been 
 either scornfully tolerant or wriggling with in- 
 dignation. Perhaps at last he explodes the 
 word " Shakespeare " like a bombshell. Really
 
 68 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 that is not fair, because it has been lo, these 
 many generations since Shakespeare made his 
 appeal solely as a dramatist. When revivals 
 of his work warm the Winter of our discontent, 
 no small portion of the audiences is drawn from 
 a class which does not as a rule frequent the 
 playhouse, and, for the rest of us his charac- 
 ters are so familiar and fraught with past as- 
 sociations and even with childhood dreams, 
 his dramas so much a part of our education and 
 our English inheritance, that he is no fair test. 
 Shakespeare as exception proves more than one 
 rule. His genius triumphs over his gross ab- 
 surdities of plot; his poetry lifts play and 
 players and beholder into its own exalted and 
 lonely regions, where no one but he has trod. 
 Rather try Beaumont and Fletcher on Broad- 
 way, and see how long one of their plays would 
 run, how much interest it would awake, to 
 judge the Elizabethan poetic drama on its 
 fitness as a class, a genre, for the modern stage. 
 Has the reader any doubts of the result ? What 
 Eighteenth Century verse drama would he 
 care to revive? Addison's " Cato " ? Or per- 
 chance " Douglas," which at its first perform- 
 ance inspired the excited Scotchman to cry out, 
 "Where's your Willie Shakespeare noo?" 
 We know the dramas of the early Nineteenth 
 Century poets, great as poetry, were bad as 
 stage pieces, and we have recently seen at the
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 69 
 
 very theater where " Sappho and Phaon " was 
 exhibited the melancholy failure of " Virgin- 
 ius," which, atrocious " poetry " as it is, was 
 once effective in the acting. Not long ago we 
 saw the failure of Stephen Phillip's modern 
 " Ulysses," and a year later the cool reception 
 of his " Paolo and Francesca," which had 
 been hailed, between covers, as works of a 
 high order of merit. And now " Sappho and 
 Phaon " is the latest sacrifice on the cruel 
 altar of Tradition, the latest costly offering 
 of money and thought and energy. Does 
 it not seem futile? Does it not seem foolish? 
 Does it not seem too wasteful to be 
 encouraged ? 
 
 There is a young poet in New York who says 
 some day he is going to write a play in mixed 
 prose and verse about modern life. His scenes 
 will be laid right here and now in America; his 
 characters will wear the conventional garb of 
 the age. The exposition will be in prose, but 
 when the emotions mount, when the play 
 swings into its climaxes, he will show, declares 
 this poet, that verse is still your only form of 
 speech, that poetry has not perished from the 
 world. Noble ambition! And may he find a 
 manager to produce his play and actors who 
 can speak his lines! If he is a poet by divine 
 right, no doubt he can shatter all theories, 
 sweep everything before him. If he, unlike
 
 70 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Mr. MacKaye, can achieve the music and sim- 
 phcity and heart-searching eloquence of such 
 poetry as these hues of MiUon teUing of the loss 
 of Proserpine — 
 
 "... which cost Ceres all that pain 
 To seek her through the world" — 
 
 and if he can also write a play which other- 
 wise fulfills the modern requirements of tech- 
 nical skill and faithful portrayal of life and 
 character, well, the crown and sceptre are his ! 
 But while we are waiting for him to write this 
 play, let us not worry too much over our low es- 
 tate. Let us not be too sure that because the 
 blank verse drama does not flourish, poetry has 
 therefore perished from the earth. Let us re- 
 mind ourselves now and then that if Pinero 
 could n't write " An Ode to a Nightingale," 
 neither could Keats have written " Iris." Let 
 us try to see in the loss of verse from the drama 
 a compensating vividness of reality, as though 
 the stage had crept closer to life and could now 
 help us where before it only comforted with de- 
 lusions. And, above all, let us try to see that 
 poetry does not reside alone in the five-foot 
 iambic line or in any metrical combination of 
 words; that common things ennobled, that 
 hearts touched with pity or warmed by love, 
 that sacrifice and birth and death may all be- 
 come poetry if a ray of truth shine suddenly
 
 PARNASSUS VS. THE PUBLIC 71 
 
 upon them so that they stand out Hke images 
 for us to see and wonder at. 
 
 When Hilda exclaims, *' My Kingdom, Mas- 
 ter Builder, my Kingdom on the table ! " the 
 words carry a world of suggestion that make 
 them more truly poetry than anything, perhaps, 
 in " Sappho and Phaon." And the humble sit- 
 ting room of Wes^ Bigelow's house, sleeping in 
 the warm sunlight to the drowsy tick of the 
 clock, has the quality of Whittier's domestic 
 verse about it no less sure and potent than 
 " Snow Bound " itself. No playwright need be 
 less a poet for working in the medium effective 
 with a modern audience — indeed, whether he 
 approves or not, practically demanded by the 
 modern audience. And, by yielding to his 
 times, he can surely accomplish far more prac- 
 tical good. Trying to dam the stream of tend- 
 ency with a drama in blank verse may be he- 
 roic, but it is not economical. The stream 
 flows on.
 
 RHYME AND UNREASON 
 
 (Empire, January 15, 1908) 
 
 WITH all due respect and admiration 
 for Miss Maude Adams, with all 
 due respect and admiration for the 
 drama " made in France " (a trade-mark sup- 
 posed to carry all the weight of the English 
 " sterling "), with all due — well, with all due 
 consideration of the applause bestowed upon 
 play and players, it is impossible to take " The 
 Jesters " very seriously. Putting aside for a 
 moment the question of metrical form, the con- 
 tent and spirit of this play are spurious, and 
 greatly to admire it, even greatly to derive 
 pleasure from it, is to confuse the real with 
 what is only imitation ; to confuse, if not actu- 
 ally to debase, one's standards of taste and 
 judgment; certainly to entangle one's merely 
 friendly interest in the personality of Miss 
 Adams with one's aesthetic appreciation of a 
 work of art. Such a confusion of judgments is 
 not, unfortunately, rare or difficult to fall into, 
 and therein lies one of the greatest dangers of 
 the " star " system. The apparently consider- 
 able public approval of " The Jesters " is an 
 excellent case in point.
 
 RHYME AND UNREASON 73 
 
 For the metrical form of the English ver- 
 sion ought alone to condemn it. The rhymed 
 Alexandrines of the French drama in verse 
 have been accepted in France as the ideal poetic 
 form for so many generations that they have 
 acquired a dignity of tradition no less power- 
 ful than the English tradition of blank verse, 
 the five-foot iambic line, unrhymed. There is a 
 very simple reason for this — the lack of ac- 
 cent in the French language. To the English 
 or the German ear, in fact, the French tongue 
 seems often unfitted for verse forms at all, and 
 the tripping flow of the Alexandrine couplet 
 can never, to such ears, rise to the dignity, the 
 eloquence, the poetic suggestion either of the 
 Miltonic line or even the rapid, staccato beat 
 of the four-foot iambic, the meter of Scott. But 
 when a trained French actor — and most 
 French actors are trained in elocution as a 
 singer is trained in colorature — tosses off 
 these Alexandrines, they do achieve an effect 
 quite different from prose, musical, romantic. 
 However, the very fact which justifies them as 
 a verse form in French completely condemns 
 them as a verse form in English. This is by 
 now such an accepted cant of criticism that it 
 seems almost absurd to have to repeat it. The 
 lack of accent in French justifies the iambic 
 hexameter. The presence of accent in English, 
 the existence of accent at the very basis of Eng-
 
 74 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 lish versification, makes the iambic hexameter, 
 especially when rhymed, about the most mo- 
 notonous, artificial, inhuman verse form that 
 could possibly be chosen. It is only fair to state 
 the report that neither Miss Adams nor Mr. 
 Frohman was responsible for this choice, it 
 being thrust upon them by M. Zamacois, the 
 French author of the play, who must be vir- 
 ginally ignorant of English literature, as only 
 an educated Parisian can be. But, after all, the 
 critic is n't greatly concerned with whose fault 
 the choice may be. The choice was made, and 
 he has to consider the result. 
 
 Matters were not mended any by John 
 Raphael, who undertook the task of making 
 the translation into the barbaric Alexandrines. 
 Not only is his translation so commonplace in 
 diction that one wonders why he is n't better 
 known, — poet laureate, perhaps, — but in 
 style it is often little more than the versifica- 
 tion of a schoolboy turning Ovid into English. 
 Frantic inversions of sentences occur to bring 
 about a rhyme; words are dragged in by the 
 heels, poor, little, honest, plodding, prosy 
 words, for the same purpose ; often the rhymes 
 are quite unsanctioned by any law of poetic 
 usage, even by the Brownings ; and as for the 
 ring and tramp of dramatic verse, the elo- 
 quence of imaginative phraseology, the magic 
 of the poet, none of these things is here. One
 
 RHYME AND UNREASON 75 
 
 feels pretty sure, too, that they would n't be 
 here even were the Alexandrines absent, even 
 if a more suitable meter had been chosen. 
 Somebody once unjustly remarked that a 
 translated poem is a boiled strawberry, un- 
 justly, because T. E. Brown's translations, for 
 example, prove well enough that the trick can 
 be done, especially if the original has some- 
 thing real to say. But it takes a poet to do 
 it. Mr. Raphael is n't a poet. So when the 
 audience goes into raptures over Miss Adams's 
 very pretty recitation of the sentimental pas- 
 sage about the breeze, 
 
 "Le souiSe qui remue imperceptiblement 
 Cette jeune glycine au tour du vieux sarment," 
 
 and so on, their raptures, if they have any 
 real taste in poetry, any real judgment of 
 what is and what is not good verse, are wholly 
 due to their pleasure in seeing Miss Adams 
 prettily posed in a tableau vivant, and their 
 pleasure in hearing her small, sympathetic 
 voice tackling this interminable tale. Just 
 because a speech happens to be in rhyme, just 
 because it has to do with these ladylike acces- 
 sories of the poets, " gentle zephyrs " and sigh- 
 ing maidens and perfumes and broken hearts, 
 it is not necessarily poetry, even if in some 
 simple bosoms that gentle delusion does prevail. 
 And if it is not poetry, if it has not caught the
 
 76 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 magic utterance, if the lips of it have not been 
 touched with the coal from the high altar, to 
 listen to its poor, sentimental masquerade is 
 far less pleasant and profitable than to listen 
 to simple, honest prose, which by its mere sim- 
 plicity can often come far closer to real poetry 
 than this spurious rhyme stuff ever can. 
 
 Since we are on the subject of verse, it will 
 do nobody any harm to turn to his Shake- 
 speare. Read from the last act of " The Mer- 
 chant of Venice " : 
 
 The moon shines bright. In such a night as this 
 When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
 And they did make no noise, — in such a night 
 Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls — 
 
 ... In such a night 
 Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew — 
 
 ... In such a night 
 Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand, 
 Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 
 To come again to Carthage. 
 
 Here is the very soul and the magic of poetry, 
 as Arnold pointed out in one of his essays, 
 that transcendent quality lurking in the lan- 
 guage, one knows not how, to subdue the brain 
 of the reader, to kindle his imagination, to 
 transport and to expand him. Go to " The 
 Jesters " with those last lines in your memory, 
 three of the most transcendent lines in Eng- 
 lish poetry, that only Keats has equaled, for
 
 RHYME AND UNREASON 77 
 
 it is only possible rightly to estimate verse by 
 the touchstone of the best examples — go with 
 those lines as a touchstone and see what magic 
 you can find in " The Jesters," what "poetry " 
 anywhere worthy of that high title. There is 
 none; it is metrical joiner's work, and clumsy 
 work at that, nothing more. It deserves no 
 consideration as literature; as an example of 
 literary or poetic drama, merits no enthusiasm. 
 But a line of proof is worth more than pages 
 of assertion. Here are several lines, as many 
 as I have the heart to afflict, of Chicofs lengthy 
 tale about the breeze. The second line quoted 
 is especially "a favorite of mine," though I must 
 confess a certain fondness also for the six- 
 teenth, with its reminiscence of Heine, and the 
 incomparable thirteenth, suggestive at first of 
 " The Wreck of the Hesperus," but speedily 
 developing into originality. " Blue were her 
 eyes " is good ; but so were the eyes of the 
 skipper's little daughter. However, they were 
 " soft as the young sky at dawn " (which, by 
 the way, is pink), while the skipper's daugh- 
 ter's were merely likened to fairy flax. But 
 enough of comment. The Alexandrines shall 
 speak for themselves. Here they are: 
 
 The gentle breeze which stirs the leaves of yonder vine 
 
 Recalls to me a tale, a favorite of mine, 
 
 A story which one day in an old book I found, 
 
 An ancient tome, gaunt, grim, black-lettered, leather-bound,
 
 78 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Which tome, looking as though 't were filled with tales of sin, 
 
 Promised but little of the charm I found within. 
 
 'T was in this book I read the tale, which, if you please, 
 
 I -will repeat to-night — "The Story of the Breeze." 
 
 A breeze one day, abroad on fun or mischief bent, 
 
 Entered a castle grim, traversed the battlement. 
 
 And on the terrace found, sitting and spinning there, 
 
 A maiden of sixteen, blue eyed, with golden hair. 
 
 Blue were her eyes and soft as the young sky at dawn, 
 
 Or the waves of the lake the breeze had crossed that morn. 
 
 And as the intruder loosed a strand of golden hair 
 
 The maid looked up and laughed, so sweet, so chaste, so fair. 
 
 That the breeze, who til! then had kissed and whirred away, 
 
 Over the trees and far, fickle until to day, 
 
 Knew that this time his heart was bound and tethered there 
 
 To that child of sixteen, blue eyed, with golden hair, 
 
 For the fair maid had won, won all unconsciously, 
 
 A lover without name and whom she could not see, 
 
 While the breeze loved to love, and for no royal throne 
 
 Would have exchanged his right to love her thus unknown. 
 
 Well — it rhymes. 
 
 But if " The Jesters " had anything what- 
 ever of value to say over and above its form 
 there might be some reason for excusing the 
 clumsy translation. Unless memory is at fault 
 the translation of " Cyrano " played here was 
 none too good in form, not so good, certainly, 
 as Miss Gertrude Hall's prose version. But 
 " Cyrano " had many things to say that were of 
 value, even if said with less than their original 
 poetic grace. " Cyrano " had vitals. Its 
 swashbucklings and its romantic posturings
 
 RHYME AND UNREASON 79 
 
 never lost a certain hold on reality, were cap- 
 able at any moment of pathos, of dramatic 
 seriousness. Moreover, its wit was wit; it 
 did not merely call itself such. Its humor arose 
 from the characters, not, as in "" The Jesters," 
 from the land of opera bouffe. Its men were 
 men, its women women ; and if their emotions 
 were somewhat superlyric, at least they were 
 never neuter ! 
 
 But " The Jesters " has absolutely nothing 
 whatever to say that has not already been said 
 again and again, mostly better said, and 
 mostly, for that matter, in " Cyrano." The play 
 was originally produced by Sarah Bernhardt, 
 and probably it was written for her. It is n't 
 the first play that Sarah has disported herself 
 in that had nothing to say, but it is one of a 
 few that we remember which says nothing so 
 tamely. Most of the others at least made a 
 noise ! The central idea of the piece, that of a 
 Prince Charming disguised as a grotesque 
 jester in order to court his lady love, might, in- 
 deed, conceivably yield to a resourceful play- 
 wright and to an actor like Coquelin or Mans- 
 field considerable fun and a real situation or 
 two. But, though we are told that Jacasse (or 
 Chicot, as Miss Adams prefers to be called, 
 fearing, no doubt, that a phonetic pronuncia- 
 tion would be accepted by her audiences in lieu 
 of a translation!) worsts all his opponents in
 
 80 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 a jesting tournament, his victory is about as 
 convincing as that of the young woman over 
 the milhonaire in " The Lion and the Mouse." 
 Just as there the real effect was one of pity for 
 the thick wits of the milhonaire, so here one 
 chiefly scorns the other jesters instead of ad- 
 miring Jacasse (pardon, Chicot). And, of 
 course, the presence of a woman in the role is 
 utterly destructive of any illusion during the 
 so-called " love scenes." Boys may have 
 played Juliet in Shakespeare's day, but girls 
 cannot play Romeo now, unless they do it, as 
 Ann did in " Man and Superman," by a com- 
 plete reversal of the sexes. 
 
 The gifted and golden Sarah, having long 
 ago conquered all the female roles within her 
 horizon (which is not so wide perhaps as the 
 world), Alexander-like, sighed for new roles 
 to conquer, and played Hamlet and L'Aiglon, 
 and now in her declining years, just to show 
 how little time has touched her, this role of 
 the youthful Prince Charming. It must have 
 been a perfect pickle for her, with its bravura 
 passages of rapid fire lyrics, its long-winded 
 speech about the breeze, its hump, its sword- 
 play, its love-making (Sarah pleading passion- 
 ately as she planned an additional chapter for 
 her autobiography), its infantile romanticism 
 and its half-baked emotions. One imagines 
 her smiling to herself as she walked through
 
 RHYME AND UNREASON 81 
 
 this part, yet smiling a little wistfully, for the 
 dead days when it was not needful to let her 
 energies trickle through such tiny channels. 
 And one imagines Paris, well aware of the 
 wistfulness of the smile, watching, applauding, 
 no less kind to its old favorite than New York 
 is to its yotmg one. Yet did Paris take it all 
 quite seriously, was it unaware of the other 
 corner of the smile? It seems incredible. 
 
 Well, as with the little VAiglon, Miss Adams 
 has once more assumed a male role laid down 
 by Sarah the Grand. She has rushed in where 
 angles fear to tread. And nobody could look 
 more charming and graceful in those frank 
 masculine garments than she. Indeed she 
 looks altogether too charming. As the gro- 
 tesque jester, her hump alone is grotesque, and 
 that is almost invisible. Any genuine effort 
 to make the disguise stand out by contrast, any 
 willingness on her part to sacrifice her per- 
 sonal charm for the demands of the play, is 
 lacking. The demands, to be sure, are slight 
 enough; it is no Rigoletto that she is called 
 upon to impersonate, even in jest. If it were 
 she could not do it. It is not lack of ability; 
 it is lack either of understanding or of willing- 
 ness to let her art stand higher than the easy 
 appeal to the personal affections of a simple- 
 minded public. The creation of illusion in a 
 love passage is beyond her power as it is be-
 
 82 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 yond that of any other woman player in a 
 man's role; and for this reason alone "The 
 Jesters " could never have more than a suc- 
 cess of curiosity. 
 
 But a little something more than the sim- 
 pering romance, the tame prettiness of the 
 play as it is given here is possible. And that 
 something is not lost through the clumsiness 
 of Miss Adams's supporting company, which 
 in most cases is considerable. It is lost through 
 Miss Adams's own failure to forego the pretty 
 and the romantic (I blush every time I am 
 obliged to use that excellent word in connec- 
 tion with this play) and make herself exter- 
 nally unattractive and grotesque, perhaps in 
 voice and manner as well as form and garb, 
 in order to win what dramatic contrast and 
 what faint echo of real romance the play might 
 contain. Now, when Miss Adams takes the 
 center of the stage, radiating that peculiar, 
 elfin charm that has so endeared her to the 
 public, looking as lovely as a picture, as grace- 
 ful as a sylph, and recites her speech about 
 the breeze, one thinks awhile of ugly old 
 Cyrano and his speech below the balcony, and 
 then, more and more, of Kipling's poem, till 
 finally the devil whispers behind the scenes, 
 "It's pretty, but is it art?"
 
 SOPHOCLES IN THE BACK YARD 
 
 (Garden, February ii, 1908) 
 
 OF the hundred or more dramas of Soph- 
 ocles only seven have been preserved 
 for us in their entirety. The rest, if 
 they survive at all, survive only in precious 
 fragments. One of these fragments is the 
 stately line: 
 
 For ever fairly fall the dice of Jove, 
 
 known in the epigram, " The dice of Jove 
 are always loaded." 
 
 Another is part of a chorus: 
 
 The looms adamantine 
 
 Of Destiny weave 
 All sorts of devices 
 
 Men's souls to deceive; 
 They cannot be measured, 
 
 They cannot be fled; 
 [They wait by his threshold, 
 
 They wait by his bed.] 
 
 These fragments indicate with the brevity of 
 the Athenian poets that belief in Nemesis so 
 characteristic of their dramas, that sense of
 
 84 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 fate which criticism never fails to mention. 
 Criticism does not always adequately, even 
 correctly, account for it, however. The Greeks, 
 certainly the Greeks of the age of Pericles, 
 were not fatalists. Fatalism belongs to a later 
 period, and " eat, drink, and be merry, for to- 
 morrow we die " was a doctrine of life that 
 Sophocles would have repudiated with lofty 
 scorn. Their belief in fate was rather a re- 
 ligious faith, a trust in the moral order, in a 
 guiding power beyond and behind all their 
 pantheistic doctrines, their legendary religions. 
 So if the sins of the fathers were visited on 
 the children, as seemed so often the case in 
 Greek history, they accounted for it by the 
 justice of all powerful Jove. It was not a 
 doctrine of inherited sin either. It was no 
 Christian dogma of man's fall. The sins of 
 the father brought suffering on the children, 
 but did not make them sinful too. There was 
 something profoundly pitiful in this affliction 
 of the innocents to the Greek mind, but noth- 
 ing hopeless, nothing that demanded an elabo- 
 rate scheme of salvation. Eventually the bal- 
 ance of justice swung to even beam. Electra 
 was revenged and Orestes purged of the crime 
 of matricide. Not to realize this philosophical 
 basis of Greek tragedy, not to realize that the 
 highly specialized and critical Athenian audi- 
 ences of the time of Pericles regarded the
 
 SOPHOCLES IN THE BACK YARD 85 
 
 performance of tragic drama almost as a re- 
 ligious rite, recalling as they must have done 
 that actually within the memories of their 
 fathers it had been solely a religious rite and 
 not drama at all, — a lyric performance made 
 up of song, ritual, and the dance, — is to miss 
 the spirit of Greek tragedy entirely. And not 
 to detect in the rhetoric, the language, of such 
 a poet as Sophocles, even in translation, a chaste 
 restraint and nobility of utterance that has the 
 effect, even apart from the underlying thought, 
 of idealizing and making dignified the most 
 bloody and sordid of incidents, is to fail in 
 critical insight. 
 
 It is only when the spirit of Greek tragedy 
 is missed, its language and restraint uncom- 
 prehended, its lyricism and ritualistic origin 
 forgotten, that the " Electra " of Hugo von 
 Hofmannstahl can be judged as in any way 
 representative of the " Electra " of Sophocles. 
 Indeed were it even an attempt at reproducing 
 Sophocles, it would be entitled only to the most 
 scathing condemnation as a weak and feeble 
 replica of an original that should be sacred. 
 But it is not such an attempt. It is an attempt 
 to make something new and different, with 
 the story of " Electra " as a starting-point. 
 It no more pretends to be Sophocles than 
 Wilde's " Salome " pretends to be the Bible. 
 Failing to grasp this fact, the spectator at
 
 86 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Mrs. Campbell's production at the Garden 
 Theatre who knew anything at all about 
 Greek tragedy was hard put to get his 
 bearings. 
 
 It is significant that Von Hofmannstahl has 
 shifted the scene of " Electra " to the rear of 
 the palace of Clytemnestra. The Greek chorus 
 of ladies in waiting has become a crowd of 
 servants. Von Hofmannstahl is Sophocles in 
 the back yard! When the play opens these 
 servants are discussing Electra, who, it is dis- 
 closed, is driven to live with them, clothed in 
 rags and fed on table refuse. They speak of 
 her as crouching in corners, as spitting at them 
 when they taunt her. They draw a picture 
 so far removed from the figure of Sophocles, 
 who shone regal through her rags, that before 
 Electra enters, the intelligent beholder has been 
 prepared for quite a new and dififerent being 
 from the heroine of the Greek drama. To say 
 that Mrs. Campbell when she did enter as 
 Electra was not Greek is to say that nega- 
 tively, at least, she played this modern drama 
 properly. 
 
 Electra' s first speech in the Greek play begins 
 as follows: 
 
 Holy light, with Earth and Sky, 
 Whom thou fillest equally, 
 Ah, how many a note of woe. 
 Many a self-inflicted blow
 
 SOPHOCLES IN THE BACK YARD 87 
 
 On my scarred breast mightst thou mark, 
 
 Ever as recedes the dark; 
 
 Known, too, all my nightlong cheer 
 
 To bitter bed and chamber drear, 
 
 How I mourn my father lost. 
 
 Whom on no barbarian coast 
 
 Did red Ares greet amain. 
 But as woodmen cleave an oak 
 My mother's axe dealt murderous stroke, 
 Backed by the partner of her bed, 
 Fell ^gisthus, on his head; 
 Whence no pity, save from me, 
 O my father, flows for thee. 
 
 So falsely, foully slain. 
 
 As the lyric speech goes on, interspersed by 
 comments and attempts at comfort from the 
 chorus, and more than once suggesting sources 
 of Matthew Arnold's poetry, though Electra 
 declares she is " uncomely arrayed," it is no 
 half-crazed female talking, who would snarl 
 like a dog at the servants. Here is only chaste 
 restraint and nobility of language. Here are 
 no such passages as in the new version, where 
 Electra describes in detail, with a kind of per- 
 verted fury, the murder, the spattering of the 
 blood, the dragging forth of Agamemnon's 
 body by the heels; where she refers to her 
 own enforced virginity in literal, almost physi- 
 ological terms, talks of breasts empty of milk 
 and uncaressed by baby lips; where she am- 
 plifies on the queen's dream, hinted at by
 
 88 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Sophocles, drawing a frenzied picture of her 
 imagined revenge, which not content with 
 her mother's death includes her torture. Con- 
 trast with the language of Sophocles this 
 speech from Arthur Symons's English ver- 
 sion of the new play (available in book 
 form), almost unctuously degenerate in its 
 insistence on the details of horror. Electra 
 speaks : 
 
 Where are you, father? Have you not the strength 
 
 To lift your face and look on me again? 
 
 It is the hour, father, it is our hour; 
 
 The hour when these two slaughtered you, your wife 
 
 And he who lay in the same bed with her. 
 
 Your kingly bed. They struck you in your bath, 
 
 Dead: and your blood ran over both your eyes, 
 
 And all the bed steamed with the blood; then he. 
 
 The coward, took you by your shoulders, dragged you 
 
 Out of the room, head foremost, and both legs 
 
 After it trailing; and your eyes, wide open. 
 
 Staring behind them, saw into the house. . . . 
 
 Your son Orestes and your daughters, we 
 
 These three, when all is done and there arises 
 
 Canopied purple from your streaming blood. 
 
 The sun sucks upward, then we three, your blood, 
 
 Will dance about your grave; and I will lift 
 
 Knee after knee above the heap of dead 
 
 Step by step higher, and all who see me dance. 
 
 Yea, all who see my shadow from afar 
 
 Dancing, shall say: Behold how great a king 
 
 Here holds high festival of his flesh and blood. 
 
 And happy is he about whose mighty grave 
 
 His children dance so royal a dance of triumph.
 
 SOPHOCLES IN THE BACK YARD 89 
 
 Or take this speech to Orestes, frankly indic- 
 ative of the spirit of the play: 
 
 . . . And when 
 At night before my mirror, I blew out 
 The lamp, I felt, and with a maiden thrill, 
 My naked body through the heavy night 
 Shine, as a godly thing immaculate. . . . 
 
 . . . Do you think if I 
 Had pleasure of my body, that his sighs 
 Would not throng on me and his groans not throng 
 About my bed ? For jealous are the dead, 
 And he has sent me hatred for a bridegroom, 
 Hollow-eyed hatred. And that horrible thing, 
 Breathing a viperous breath, had I to take 
 Into my sleepless bed, that it might teach me 
 All that is done between a man and wife. 
 
 The Electra of the Greek drama is a princess 
 of majestic stature, an idealized character, 
 whose soul-absorbing passion of revenge trans- 
 figures her into an instrument of destiny, whose 
 piercing grief and torment are part of the sor- 
 rows of her line, inflicted upon her by the all- 
 seeing gods and only to be wiped out by pun- 
 ishing the criminals who brought them upon the 
 house of Agamemnon. The story of " Elec- 
 tra " is not a pretty tale ; matricide is not a 
 pleasant thing to contemplate. And it was one 
 of the great glories of the Greek poets that 
 they could lift such a theme into the regions 
 of tragic sublimity by their sheer religious sin-
 
 90 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 cerity and nobility of mind, arousing " pity 
 and fear," and in Aristotle's phrase, " purg- 
 ing the emotions." Pity and fear are not 
 aroused by Von Hofmannstahl's play, but 
 curiosity and horror. The emotions are not 
 purged, but scraped, irritated, made to shiver 
 and creep. In all probability this was the effect 
 sought; certainly it is the effect gained. 
 Therefore his '' Electra " is not in any true 
 sense a reconstruction of Greek tragedy. It is 
 something absolutely different, entirely mod- 
 ern, and no doubt degenerate. However, ex- 
 actly what constitutes degeneracy must be left 
 to wiser heads to decide, to the passionately 
 proper Max Nordau, perhaps. Personally we 
 would not for a moment intimate that a per- 
 formance of a Greek drama, with all the classic 
 accessories and with the ancient tongue once 
 more spoken, in the antique setting of the Har- 
 vard Stadium, is not a far more beautiful and 
 satisfactory and uplifting thing than a perform- 
 ance of Von Hofmannstahl's play, even with 
 Gliick's overture for the " Iphigenia " (which 
 nobody listened to) . But neither would we inti- 
 mate that a picture of blood lust for revenge, 
 a portrayal of a woman crazed by the passion 
 for physical retribution on the bodies of those 
 who murdered her father, a psychopathic study 
 of the fabler] Electra, may not be fascinating, 
 curiously alluring and in no wise necessarily
 
 SOPHOCLES IN THE BACK YARD 91 
 
 harmful so long as it is not supposed to repre- 
 sent anew the drama of Sophocles. This mas- 
 querading in olden garb, this neo-classic form 
 of the modern " Electra," this simulated stride 
 of true tragic passion, while they are perversely 
 a part of its uncanny charm, are also its danger 
 for the uncritical beholder. Judge it not as 
 Greek drama, but as something modern and 
 deliberately cruel and bloodlustful, something 
 quite godless and sordid, not sublime, and the 
 new " Electra " will hold for you a new sensa- 
 tion, a strange allurement, inspire a shiver of 
 delicious horror, a shudder of unsanctified 
 delight. 
 
 And it is in this spirit that Mrs. Campbell 
 played it. A remarkably striking woman to 
 look upon, and a remarkably effective actress 
 in certain roles, Mrs. Campbell has never dis- 
 played that glib virtuosity of a Bernhardt. The 
 blank verse oration, full of sound and fury, 
 and so often signifying nothing, it has never 
 been hers to peal forth with quivering effect. 
 Still less has she ever shown that she could 
 Sardoudle; the Fedoras and the Toscas are 
 not for her. Perhaps she has too much scorn 
 for their falsity and pyrotechnics. But give 
 her a character that interests her, that wins her 
 belief, and she can seize upon its salient outline 
 with bold, firm grasp, and then fill that outline 
 in with the minutest strokes of shading, with
 
 92 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 patient cross hatching, and with broad sweeps 
 of color and shadows too. Thus she did with 
 Mrs. Ehbsmith, one of the finest portraits on 
 the contemporary stage. Thus she did with 
 Beata in " Es Lebe das Leben." And thus she 
 did with Electra, in Von Hofmannstahl's 
 drama. She accepted it, she beheved in it, 
 she exerted herself on its creation, and it came 
 to life under her touch, a sinister, terrible 
 woman, a strange perversion of the eternal 
 Aholibah, whose lust is the lust for blood, whose 
 desire is toward murder and revenge. *' I have 
 kissed thy mouth, lokanaan, I have kissed thy 
 mouth," sings Salome, while the acid strings 
 in Mr. Strauss's multitudinous orchestra are 
 biting horribly. And Electra' s triumph dance 
 before the palace door says no less plainly, " I 
 have had thy blood, Clytemnestra, I have had 
 thy blood," while Mr. Strauss's acid strings 
 in his operatic version will no doubt bite hor- 
 ribly once more. That indicates the spirit and 
 the achievement of Mrs. Campbell's per- 
 formance. 
 
 To bring this conception to the birth the 
 sonorous delivery of the sensuous verse of Mr. 
 Symons, after the manner of the " old school " 
 actors of poetic tragedy, would have been out 
 of place and ineffective. It would have been 
 as out of place as a make-up suggesting the 
 tragedy queens of Sir Thomas Lawrence, in-
 
 SOPHOCLES IN THE BACK YARD 93 
 
 stead of an Aubrey Beardsley drawing, which 
 is what Mrs. Campbell actually suggested. 
 Her method of speech was a natural reading 
 of the verse, that let its sensuous similes tell 
 rather than its measured roll; and her impas- 
 sioned outbreaks came as a smothered fury 
 rather than an oratorical period. There is 
 much to be said for this method under any cir- 
 cumstances. Here it was the only method. For 
 here Electra is not a figure of tragic dignity 
 and noble passion, neither an instrument of 
 destiny nor its victim. Nemesis is not here, 
 the rushing of the wings of Fate. She is a 
 woman sick with the lust for blood, " some- 
 thing curious and sensual." In her black rags 
 and her grape-blue headgear, the naked marble 
 of her bosom deepening the rings below her 
 thirsty eyes and accentuating the cruel crimson 
 of her lip line, Mrs. Campbell moved a sinister 
 figure about the stage, a figure not of brooding 
 misery, but malignant hate, to dig with her 
 own hands for the hatchet when she thinks 
 Orestes dead, to dance in a kind of fit of horrid 
 joy when she has heard her mother's screams 
 and seen the King dragged forth and slain, 
 falling at last prone on the stage in a faint, 
 worn out with the excess of passion, like some 
 creature in a Bacchanalian orgy, some figure 
 from the ancient pictures of the Dionysian 
 mysteries.
 
 94 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Sophocles would not have recognized his 
 Elcctra in this performance, true enough. But 
 Sophocles would not have recognized his lan- 
 guage or his spirit in such a speech as Electras 
 to her sister, " Swear to me, mouth upon 
 mouth " ; or his play in the abolition of the 
 lyric choruses, or in the total subordination of 
 the part of Orestes, or in the lost characteriza- 
 tion of the sister, Chrysothemis, in the original 
 so sharply contrasted in spirit with Electra, or 
 in the omission of that splendid throwing open 
 of the portals to disclose Orestes by his 
 mother's corpse and his recognition by the 
 King, or above all in the dance. This is not 
 Sophocles's Electra. And any criticism of Mrs. 
 Campbell because she did not rise to sweeping 
 heights, fulfilling the conception of Greek 
 tragic poetry, ample and large and nobly elo- 
 quent, is utterly futile and beside the point. 
 What she did is what she should have done; 
 she created by picture and pose and the play 
 of passion over her wonderful face, by smoth- 
 ered voice and baleful outbursts, by body and 
 by speech, a definite and unforgetable portrait 
 of the nursed fury of revenge, of the thirst for 
 blood, of perverted lust. It is as foolish to talk 
 of loveliness, or dignity, or nobility in this per- 
 formance, as some have done, as it is to find 
 fault with it for lacking these qualities. It 
 did not possess in any ordinary sense of those
 
 SOPHOCLES IN THE BACK YARD 95 
 
 words loveliness, or dignity, or nobility, and 
 probably it did not aim to. It did exactly what 
 it set out to do definitely, hence eloquently, and 
 that was to portray the Electra of Von Hof- 
 mannstahl. Because it succeeded, it was a 
 fine performance and needs no further defence 
 or justification.
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 
 
 (Knickerbocker, September 30, 1907) 
 
 MR. JONES'S new play, " The Galile- 
 an's Victory " (or " The Evangehst," 
 if that inept title must be used), seems 
 to many people rather more a revival. And 
 they are more than half right. It is more 
 than a dramatized revival meeting, of course; 
 but it is certainly that, psychologically, and 
 even, at the close of acts three and four, in 
 actual externals. The revivalist is seen upon 
 the platform, the repentant sinner mounts 
 beside him, the hymns are sung, the red ban- 
 ner is waved, even the glass of water is 
 seen on the table. But because of this very 
 fact about the drama the attitude of the aud- 
 iences toward it furnishes quite as pungent a 
 comment upon religious conditions as anything 
 in the play. 
 
 And why? Because this drama relies for its 
 solution upon one of the deepest and most fun- 
 damental facts of religious experience; it deals 
 not only with the passion of love but the pas- 
 sion of repentance, worked out through the 
 influence of religious example, and ending in 
 the cry of the erring wife as she falls on her
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 97 
 
 knees: "Christ shall have lone! [her little 
 daughter]. Christ shall have me! " — as plain 
 a case of the transfiguring experience known 
 as *' conversion " as could well be found. Now, 
 most of us profess, at least, some religion. 
 And those of us who do not, but who have the 
 slightest knowledge of religious literature 
 or who have had the slightest contact with 
 religious gatherings, cannot be so blind as 
 to deny the reality of " conversion," the 
 tremendous force in some people of the 
 orthodox religious emotions. The play, then, 
 deals with realities, with important and vital 
 realities. Yet it is probably a perfectly safe 
 statement — certainly it is a statement made 
 after numerous conversations with all sorts of 
 people, skeptics, believers, Jews, Protestants, 
 and a Roman Catholic, who have seen the play 
 
 — that for the bulk of the audience the religious 
 motives of the drama have a kind of unreality. 
 As one woman, who attends a church every 
 Sunday and was brought up in the odor of 
 Episcopal sanctity, expressed it, " I 'm quite 
 sure Mrs. Nuneham loved her child, and almost 
 sure she loved Dr. Allen, but her conversion 
 did n't convince me a bit." If Mr. Jones had 
 done his work badly this remark would have 
 no significance. But he has n't. He has, to 
 be sure, smothered his story with a lot of talk 
 
 — pretty good talk, but talk, none the less — 
 
 7
 
 98 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 but the unconvincing scenes of Mrs. Nune- 
 ham's conversion are quite as skilfully handled 
 as the scenes with her lover or her child, which 
 do convince. Moreover, her innate suscepti- 
 bility to religious influence is prepared for from 
 the very first. Why, then, does the drama go 
 lame with the audience, where by every right 
 it should rise up and stride? 
 
 In his play Mr. Jones has once more made 
 use of smug and fussy Nonconformist types 
 of clergymen and the narrow and self-satisfied 
 Churchman, setting them over against each 
 other and also over against an evangelist, 
 something between a Salvation Army General 
 and a Moody, who makes them all look, 
 as Mr. Jones intended, like a very ineffective 
 lot of Christians. He has further reintro- 
 duced the erring wife to our attention and 
 suggested that her reformation lies through 
 religion as preached by the evangelist, al- 
 most through that heightened experience 
 known as " conversion." Over against her he 
 has set her husband, who makes science his 
 religion and is left to its cold and pallid com- 
 forts at the end. Sylvanns Rebbings, the re- 
 vivalist, who dominates the drama, would seem 
 to typify in Mr. Jones's purpose a present day 
 attempt to live the life of Christ, and so preach 
 the religion of Christ, to the shame of the 
 creeds. And he further would seem to exem-
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 99 
 
 plify, in the author's purpose, the perfectly 
 scientific truth that psychologically feeling and 
 conduct, not thought, are the essence of reli- 
 gion. We pray because we can't help it, be- 
 lieve in God because we need Him, are reli- 
 gious because there is something in our nature 
 which demands the uplift and strength of the 
 " not ourselves," a strength so real that reason 
 cannot deny it. Mr. Jones has, in the person 
 of Fyson, who calls England the " country of 
 200 hundred religions and only one sauce," 
 introduced the modern skeptic — the man who 
 has no faith because he has studied them all — 
 as a sort of cynical Greek chorus. And he has 
 preached in no uncertain tones his Emersonian 
 belief that " God builds His temples on the ruin 
 of churches, in the human heart " ; that the 
 religious need is eternal ; that it must be satis- 
 fied if we would find the fullest salvation and 
 peace, and that the way was once shown very 
 plainly and simply, to be reshown to-day not 
 by this or that body of doctrine but, as it hap- 
 pened in this play, by a poor revivalist with the 
 boundless love of God, Man, and straight, 
 honest, charitable living in his heart. All this 
 he has done by telling the story of a wife who 
 erred and was brought to repentance by a re- 
 vival meeting. Why do we accept her error, 
 but not her repentance? Why is the play a 
 failure?
 
 100 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 For answer we will plunge boldly into a con- 
 sideration of the case of Mr. S. H. Hadley, 
 who was an active and useful rescuer of drunk- 
 ards in New York. Let him speak: 
 
 " One Tuesday evening- I sat in a saloon in 
 Harlem, a homeless, friendless, dying drunkard. I 
 had pawned or sold everything that would buy a 
 drink. I could n't sleep unless I was dead drunk. 
 I had n't eaten for days and for four nights pre- 
 ceding I had suffered with delirium tremens, or the 
 horrors, from midnight till morning. ... As I sat 
 there thinking I seemed to feel some great and 
 mighty presence. ... I walked up to the bar and 
 pounded it with my fist till I made the glasses 
 rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on 
 with scornful curiosity. I said I would never take 
 another drink if I died on the street, and I really felt 
 as though that would happen before morning. 
 Something said : * If you want to keep this promise 
 go and have yourself locked up.' I went to the 
 nearest station house and had myself locked up." 
 
 He was released after a bit and went to his 
 brother's house, where he was put to bed. Then 
 the story goes on: 
 
 " When I arose the following Sabbath morning I 
 felt that day would decide my fate and toward even- 
 ing it came into my head to go to Jerry McAuley's 
 Mission. I went. He rose and 'mid deep silence 
 told his experience. There was a sincerity about this 
 man that carried conviction with it, and I found 
 myself saying: *I wonder if God can save me?'
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 101 
 
 When the invitation was given I knelt down with a 
 crowd of drunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. 
 Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor soul ! 
 A blessed whisper said, ' Come ' ; the devil said, 
 ' Be careful.' I halted but a moment, and then with 
 breaking heart I said, * Dear Jesus, can you help 
 me ? ' Never with mortal tongue can I describe that 
 moment. Although up to that moment my soul had 
 been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glori- 
 ous brightness of the noonday sun shine into my 
 heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the precious 
 feeling of safety, of freedom, of resting on Jesus! 
 I felt that Christ with all his brightness and power 
 had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had 
 passed away and all things had become new. 
 
 " From that moment till now I have never wanted 
 a drink of whiskey and I have never seen money 
 enough to make me take one." 
 
 Dr. Leuba remarks that in this experience 
 there is little or no doctrinal theology; it starts 
 with a need for higher help and ends wth a 
 feeling that such help has been found. Mr. 
 Hadley's w^hole life thereafter was a testimony 
 to the efficacy of his conversion. Now, the 
 internal analogy of this case to that of Mrs. 
 Nuneham in the Jones play is striking. She 
 had sinned; on her overwrought nerves at the 
 right moment came the influence of the evan- 
 gelist ; the testimony of her erring sister, whose 
 sin was like her own, convinced her that she, 
 too, would find help in confession; she con- 
 fessed to her husband; and later she, too,
 
 102 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 found the complete transformation wrought by 
 " resting on Jesus." There was no doctrinal 
 theology about it. Mr. Jones made that plain 
 enough by his satire of the sectarian clergy- 
 man. Her transformation caused her to give 
 up her lover, and there is no more reason for 
 supposing that she ever went back to him or 
 that she did not find happiness of a new kind 
 in spite of her sin than there is to doubt this 
 authentic record of Mr. Hadley. Moreover, 
 as Professor James says, " How irrelevantly 
 remote seem all our usual refined optimisms 
 and intellectual and moral consolations in pres- 
 ence of a need of help like this! Here is the 
 real core of the religious problem. Help! 
 Help! No prophet can claim to bring a final 
 message unless he says things that will have 
 a sound of reality in the ears of victims such 
 as these. But the deliverance must come in 
 as strong a form as the complaint if it is to take 
 effect ; and that seems a reason why the coarser 
 religions, revivalistic, orgiastic, with blood and 
 miracles and supernatural operations, may pos- 
 sibly never be displaced. Some constitutions 
 need them too much." Mrs. NiincJiam cried 
 for help; and she found it — some would say 
 in a coarser form of religion. Mr. Jones would 
 say in a strong inpouring of the simple, primi- 
 tive Christianity. Her case is absolutely au- 
 thentic. And yet — and yet it leaves us almost
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 103 
 
 cold and but half convinced when we see it on 
 the stage! 
 
 Beside the importance of a fact like this, all 
 bickerings about this or that technical merit 
 or defect in the drama sink to utter insignifi- 
 cance. We are confronted with the question: 
 Are the religious emotions incapable of con- 
 vincing representation on the stage? And 
 why? Is a whole vast field of human effort 
 and aspiration to be barred from the play- 
 house, not because it does not exist in life, but 
 because we do not accept it as real and inter- 
 esting when we see it in a drama? Again, 
 why? The answer in its baldest state is proba- 
 bly not single but double : the reason is partly 
 in us, partly in the drama. Fully to answer 
 the question would require a tabulation of 
 hundreds of personal confessions of theater- 
 goers. ]\Ianifestly, then, the answer attempted 
 here is at best perhaps in the nature of a 
 hypothesis. 
 
 First, to find the reason for the lack of con- 
 viction in stage religious emotions by looking 
 within ourselves. Whatever our religious be- 
 liefs or negations, a little introspection will 
 probably disclose to most of us our instinctive 
 feeling that the religious emotions are in their 
 essence something private, intimate, personal. 
 They have their outward manifestations in 
 conduct, but it is in their inwardness, their
 
 104 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 unique quality of seeming to come directly to 
 us from the Beyond without the aid or inter- 
 position of human agencies that gives them 
 their peculiar flavor. Ringed around as we all 
 are by the impenetrable wall of personality, 
 living, as Pater says, " in our own dream of a 
 world," there are yet many emotions and pas- 
 sions that seem almost to set us free, to enable 
 us to go out of our own shell and creep for the 
 moment into the shell of a fellow man. Such 
 are the passions of sex love, of motherhood, of 
 jealousy and hatred, of greed, of revenge. 
 Mrs, Nimcham's love for her child lone, or 
 for Dr. Allen, even her fear of discovery and 
 her sense of shame are directly and vividly 
 understandable to an audience. They speak a 
 common speech; they somehow get in to us 
 over the wall of self. But each man's religious 
 emotions are peculiarly and irrevocably his 
 own. They never come to him from a fellow. 
 And whether they rise from his " subliminal 
 self," as the psychologists say, or come from 
 God, as the Church says, the effect is abso- 
 lutely the same — they seem to come from the 
 Beyond. Therefore, words that can in a meas- 
 ure convey the sense of his other emotions to 
 his fellows, fail when used of these. There- 
 fore, the religious emotions of his fellows have 
 for him, when represented by words — in art 
 or life — a curious unreality. The speech of
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 105 
 
 the ordinary emotions connects us with a world 
 of facts and with each other. The speech of the 
 rehgious emotions connects us with a world 
 beyond and above the facts and each separate 
 soul is called on to make the connection for 
 himself. Does not this suggest a partial ex- 
 planation of why the religious emotions on the 
 stage, and more especially the more heightened 
 and mystic emotions such as conversion, fail 
 as a convincing dramatic motive with a big, 
 mixed, and none too seriously inclined audi- 
 ence? Not every one indeed, even of the most 
 pronounced religious sentiments and convic- 
 tions, has experienced conversion. Most of us 
 perhaps live all our lives in *' a universe one 
 story high," which makes the whole process of 
 transformation in another doubly hard to com- 
 prehend; that internal upheaval and change 
 in values which to us who have been more or 
 less true to one single self all our lives seems 
 often perhaps illogical and unreal. Every day, 
 too, religion is insisting less and less on " con- 
 version." The loss of creeds means the loss of 
 certain mental processes. To some of us, pos- 
 sibly, " The Evangelist " seems that most 
 hopeless of all things for a play — old-fash- 
 ioned. In his attempt to be modern, has not 
 Mr. Jones gone back to the oldest formula of 
 evangelistic " salvation "? 
 
 And here also we may see where the stage
 
 106 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 itself has failed to handle these emotions, even 
 in Mr. Jones's play, in the most nearly effective 
 way. For the stage is surely in part to blame. 
 The more intimate and personal the emotion 
 depicted, the more intimate and personal must 
 be the treatment, if the stage would convince. 
 You cannot paint a miniature with a palette 
 knife. You could not represent the soul states 
 of the people in " The Master Builder " by the 
 style of '' Virginius." And, with all due re- 
 spect to Mr. Jones, you cannot represent the 
 conversion of Mrs. Nuneham by sublimated 
 melodrama. For when all is said and done, in 
 his serious plays at least, Mr. Jones has never 
 got the virus of " The Silver King " out of his 
 system. Mrs. Nuneham is moved to make her 
 confession by watching a revival meeting in 
 full swing. We know what is going on within 
 her mind, we know that it is a perfectly possible 
 situation, which in real life has happened again 
 and again — we know, intellectually. But emo- 
 tionally we do not know, because her emotions 
 have begun to enter that region of the reli- 
 gious consciousness where they cease to speak 
 a universal language and adopt an utterly per- 
 sonal one. To make us feel with her, her soul 
 state must somehow be laid bare to view. And 
 here the methods of melodrama, even of the 
 ordinary " well made play," are quite inade- 
 quate. Perhaps there was a time when the
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 107 
 
 " Ben Hurs " and " Sign of the Crosses," and 
 other semi-reHgious plays made some sort of a 
 rehgious appeal to certain people. But the time 
 for that is over on any considerable scale. 
 Even as religion itself has entered on a new 
 era where the individual standard of judgment 
 prevails, the drama, thanks in a large measure 
 to Ibsen, has entered on a new era where the 
 individual delineation of character and emotion 
 prevails. If a man and a girl kiss each other 
 or a mother embraces her child, even in Eighth 
 Avenue melodrama, we are still ready to be- 
 lieve that they love each other, because their 
 mere act fires in us a whole train of associated 
 ideas drawn from daily life. Habit and con- 
 vention, too, help the dramatist and actors. 
 But with the more intimate and subtle emo- 
 tions — among which the religious emotions 
 take first place — no such train awaits to be 
 fired. The dramatist cannot paint these emo- 
 tions in big, sketchy strokes and hope to win 
 conviction. If once he won a measure of con- 
 viction for them by this method it was because 
 the public knew no other way. The other way 
 is known now, and it must be followed when 
 religious emotions are represented. 
 
 " In other words," says the heroic reader, if 
 any reader has endured thus far ! — "In other 
 words, * The Galilean's Victory ' would have 
 been a better play if Ibsen had written it! "
 
 108 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Well, the reader's heroism must be re- 
 warded by letting him say what he pleases! 
 Personally I admire Mr. Jones tremendously. 
 His wit, his sincerity, his keen observation, his 
 pungent dialogue, his literary style, are wholly 
 admirable and refreshing. I even forgive him 
 the lack of humor in his treatment of his heroes. 
 For instance, would n't Rebbings, in the pres- 
 ent play, have gained in appeal and reality if 
 he had possessed just a touch of that quaint- 
 ness in speech which was exemplified by the 
 English revivalist Billy Bray, who said, *' I 
 can't help praising the Lord. As I go along 
 the street I lift up one foot and it seems to 
 say ' Glory,' and I lift up the other and it 
 seems to say * Amen.' " But we cannot help 
 thinking that it is not so much the quantity 
 of talk after all which causes the lack of con- 
 viction in his latest play as it is the touch of 
 antiquity in his methods, the failure to get right 
 down to the intimate exposition, step by step, 
 of Mrs. Nimeham's change in heart. The re- 
 ligious nature of this change made his task 
 doubly difficult and perhaps impossible com- 
 pletely to accomplish. But certainly, by ap- 
 plying the methods of Ibsen, he could have 
 accomplished more than he did; he could have 
 made his woman figure live for a far greater 
 portion of his audiences from one end of the 
 play to the other, not only in her erring pas-
 
 MR. JONES'S REVIVAL 109 
 
 sions of sex love and in her motherhood, but 
 in her passion of repentance as well and in her 
 final surrender of herself, of all her warring 
 impulses, to the great peace and security " that 
 passeth understanding."
 
 nr 
 
 BUNYAN PERSECUTED AGAIN 
 
 (Hackett, November ii, 1907) 
 
 HE failure of " The Evangelist " by 
 
 ■ Henry Arthur Jones afforded occa- 
 -■- sion to comment on the difficulty of 
 representing the religious emotions in the 
 drama, especially of representing those subtle, 
 personal emotions, those perhaps morbid doubts 
 and broodings and visions, which constitute 
 the preparation for the great spiritual adven- 
 ture of conversion, as well as the emotions of 
 conversion itself. After Miss Henrietta Cros- 
 man's appearance in a stage version of Bun- 
 yan's " Pilgrim Progress," made by James 
 MacArthur, the same remarks are again in 
 order. Bunyan's Christian, in fact, may be 
 taken as the classic example of the man who 
 seeks salvation through conversion, — conver- 
 sion, that is, in the narrower sense of Protes- 
 tant Christianity. Conversion " denotes the 
 process, gradual or sudden, by which a 
 self hitherto divided and consciously wrong, 
 inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and 
 consciously right, superior and happy in con- 
 sequence of its firmer hold upon religious real-
 
 BUNYAN PERSECUTED AGAIN 111 
 
 ities." Especially to the Nonconformists of 
 Bunyan's day, among whom our Puritan an- 
 cestors are counted, this meant first a passion- 
 ate attention to self, a brooding, melancholy, 
 almost sickly conscience, and then a great re- 
 lease through belief in the Cross, through a 
 concentration of the attention on the life to 
 come. To most of us to-day this does not 
 seem the healthy minded view of the universe ; 
 and to many of us both the preliminary despair 
 of soul, conviction of sin, horror at the wicked- 
 ness of this world and the subsequent exalta- 
 tion of faith and the renunciation of this world 
 are almost incomprehensible. Yet once they 
 were facts of common experience, and even 
 to-day they are far less uncommon than those 
 of us suppose who live in the white light that 
 beats upon Broadway. And they are the facts 
 which give to *' The Pilgrim's Progress " its 
 real significance in the history of the faith and 
 fear of the English nation. 
 
 With that truth held fast in mind the utter 
 futility of the present stage version of Bun- 
 yan's book becomes doubly apparent. The 
 simple fact that " The Christian Pilgrim " is 
 a bore is, of course, sufficient to condemn it. 
 Indeed, the most ardent workers for the cause 
 of religion should be the first to rejoice in the 
 failure of a play that makes solemn things 
 merely dull and turns the heart of the doubter
 
 112 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 to the other road in instinctive repulsion. The 
 mass of the theatergoing pubhc ask no other 
 excuse to stay away than the plea of dulness, 
 and they are quite right. But there are other 
 excuses to be urged, and first of them is this 
 failure of the stage version to make the story 
 a gripping reality, to make of Christian other 
 than a lay figure, to recreate the homely, heart- 
 stinging, emotional appeal of Bunyan's book. 
 Failing in that, it failed absolutely to justify 
 itself. It tampered with a religious and liter- 
 ary masterpiece, and achieved only a kind of 
 paint and pasteboard blasphemy. It may have 
 pleased Miss Crosman by placing her in the 
 center of the stage for long periods, where 
 she could repeat, in a monotonous rising and 
 falling inflection (or rather infliction) the 
 ringing speeches of Christian, though in all 
 conscience her Christian was far enough away 
 from the rugged, racy, if soul-tortured fellow 
 of Bunyan. It may have pleased her managers 
 by affording them a chance to display lavish 
 if wholly unsuitable scenery, and giving them 
 an opportunity to appear as patrons of Art 
 with a big A. But to all who love the Chris- 
 tian religion, of whatever sect; to all who re- 
 vere English literature and enter with unshod 
 feet at the portals of Bunyan's masterpiece, to 
 all who hold the various arts of music and 
 drama and fiction in proper appreciation and
 
 BUNYAN PERSECUTED AGAIN 113 
 
 respect for their differences, this stage version 
 of " The Pilgrim's Progress " is an ill-timed, 
 misjudged, uneffective presumptuous thing. 
 There is no use trying to excuse it on the 
 ground that it " meant well," that it " tried to 
 do something fine." It did not try to do some- 
 thing fine, but something presumptuous and 
 silly. It ought never to have been put on the 
 stage. 
 
 "So hot, my little Sir?" as Emerson used 
 to say. Yes, so hot ! For you cannot love the 
 drama unless you love other art forms as well. 
 You cannot estimate the worth of a play unless 
 you are in love with life. You cannot respect 
 a playwright unless you respect his brother 
 craftsmen. And when you see a great pas- 
 sage of original literature such as the descrip- 
 tion of the fight between Apollyon and Chris- 
 tian reduced to the weak absurdity of a stage 
 duel with tin swords, your shame for the stage 
 is in proportion to your love for great litera- 
 ture. Or when your childish mind has pon- 
 dered with awe in the dark of your little 
 chamber over those words of the Psalmist, 
 " Yea, though I walk through the Valley of 
 the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil " ; 
 and your youth time has seen you stand at the 
 open grave of him who gave you life and the 
 Shadow of Death was very heavy upon you 
 and the evil well nigh impossible not to fear;
 
 114 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 and your adult years have found you still pon- 
 dering that Shadow that looms ever larger 
 across your path, filling the mind with a great, 
 dim, solemn, terrible imagery, amplifying even 
 the imagery of Bunyan with worldless pictures 
 of your own ; when this has taken place within 
 you, to see the Valley of the Shadow of Death 
 depicted on the stage of a Broadway theatre 
 by crudely painted pasteboard and gauze cur- 
 tains is more than ridiculous — it is painful, 
 it is torture. And you marvel at the mind 
 which could have conceived such a thing, even 
 while you suffer. 
 
 It is no answer that stage versions of " The 
 Pilgrim's Progress " have been played in other 
 lands and tongues. It is no answer that other 
 masterpieces of literature have been sliced up 
 for stage use. One act of vandalism does not 
 excuse another. And not only does the piece 
 of literature vandalized suffer, but in the long 
 run the stage suffers too. It suffers because 
 it invites a comparison that it cannot endure, 
 because it falls so far below the work it seeks 
 to copy that in the spectator familiar with the 
 original a certain scorn of the dramatic me- 
 dium is unconsciously bred. Nothing, of 
 course, could be more unjust to the stage, 
 which within its own limits is invincibly vivid 
 and compelling. Its failure is due to the un- 
 wise men who would push it beyond its limits.
 
 BUNYAN PERSECUTED AGAIN 115 
 
 In such a case as the one immediately under 
 discussion not only was it pushed beyond its 
 limits but the effort to make a play out of " The 
 Pilgrim's Progress " was still further impeded 
 by a complete misconception of the place and 
 power of theatrical scenery. Down at Dream- 
 land, Coney Island, the more than Miltonic im- 
 agery of the first chapter of Genesis is shown in 
 stage pictures. For a quarter you can see chaos 
 in its birth throes; you can see the dry land 
 emerge ; finally you can see Adam and Eve in 
 pink union suits listening to the property ca- 
 naries and preparing to raise Cain. It reminds 
 you of Wright Lorimer's alleged remark after 
 he had produced " The Shepherd King." 
 " I 've found," he is reported to have said, 
 " lots of other good stuff in the Bible to drama- 
 tize." All such exhibitions are a relic of the 
 ancient Miracle and Morality plays of the Mid- 
 dle Ages; they have persisted down to the 
 present time, at Coney Island and similar 
 places, influenced to be sure by electricity and 
 David Belasco, but in the main living out their 
 lives quite apart from the great body of Eng- 
 lish drama to which they once gave birth. 
 Just so, schoolboys in America, who have never 
 heard of Professor Child's collection of Eng- 
 lish and Scottish Ballads, to this day sing to a 
 primitive tune a certain indecent ballad which 
 was probably old in Chaucer's time and which
 
 116 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 may be found in the oral literature of every 
 European people. These exhibitions, for all 
 their use of modern scenery, are relics of the 
 Middle Ages; they are popular anachronisms, 
 handed down from a primitive day and bearing 
 no more relation to the drama of the present 
 than " Annie Rooney " does to the music of 
 Richard Strauss. 
 
 But these Miracle and Morality plays before 
 they rose on the one hand into English drama 
 and sank on the other into Coney Island side 
 shows achieved a certain literary distinction of 
 their own, a certain simple power and pathos 
 that we recently saw when Miss Matheson 
 played " Everyman." But they achieved it not 
 by elaborate scenery (which indeed was then 
 unknown), but by beauty of speech and sin- 
 cerity of feeling. The great images of Death 
 and the Eternal, the allegorical representations 
 of the human passions, were not attempted on 
 a grand scale that should vie with the Eternal 
 Himself, but quaintly hinted only, and the be- 
 holder was left to fill out the picture from his 
 own imagination with the help of lovely lan- 
 guage. Death in " Everyman " was just a man 
 with a drum, a skeleton painted in his gray 
 clothes. Yet how much more potent was he 
 over the imagination than, say, the Beelzebub 
 of " The Christian Pilgrim," with his property 
 electric lights, his illuminated sword, his sur-
 
 BUNYAN PERSECUTED AGAIN 117 
 
 rounding backdrops and gauze curtains and all 
 the rest of the machinery. Everyman roamed 
 through the world on a bare stage — and the 
 bare stage became the world. Christian jour- 
 neyed the steep road to the Celestial City 
 through eleven sets of elaborate scenery — and 
 they were just eleven sets of elaborate scenery. 
 Had they not been forced to challenge compari- 
 son with the incomparably superior and vastly 
 different imagery of Bunyan, had they but rep- 
 resented generalities of the religious imagina- 
 tion instead of specific scenes from a great 
 prose poem, they would still have been only 
 eleven sets of scenery; they would still have 
 failed of their effect. For they were trying to 
 do what stage scenery cannot do. They were 
 trying to translate images that dwell on the 
 cloudy heights and in the sky spaces of the 
 human imagination into the narrow, realistic 
 terms of the theater. Words can trans^late 
 sometimes and do often suggest these images. 
 Music can float them out on its harmonies. 
 Blake once caught them and painted the morn- 
 ing stars singing together. But the men who 
 paint scenery for Henry B. Harris and Mau- 
 rice Campbell cannot catch them; they cannot 
 be reproduced by canvas and colored lights 
 in a Broadway play-house. At Dreamland, 
 Coney Island, " A Christian Pilgrim " might 
 very well vie with " Creation " as a sample of
 
 118 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 an archaic form of primitive play and spectacle 
 " brought up to date." On Broadway as a 
 sample of the developed modern drama it has 
 little place. One might almost lay down as a 
 law that the growth and perfection of scenic 
 illusion in the theater is inseparable from the 
 growth and perfection of realism in the drama. 
 Whenever a play begins to float away from 
 realism, to drift into the mystic regions of 
 poetry and romance, of the supernatural and 
 the allegorical, the fierce light of disillusion 
 begins to beat upon the scenery. And when 
 the play has floated clear up and away into 
 those regions of pure imagination, when its 
 scenes have been transported to the Valley of 
 the Shadow of Death, to the foot of the Cross, 
 to the City Celestial, words alone, and they but 
 hardly, may avail to transport the beholder 
 to such exalted spots. Here the hint is worth 
 more than the mechanic's realization, here the 
 spark that fires the train of suggestion is the 
 only efifective illumination. 
 
 Perhaps in Miss Crosman's play the setting 
 which most nearly realized Bunyan's flavor 
 and imagery was that for The House Beau- 
 tiful, which had a certain cleanly brightness, 
 a sweet sunny simplicity, even if Piety, Charity 
 and Prudence were hardly as attractive to look 
 upon as very like they should be, though per- 
 sonal pulchritude has never been a quality
 
 BUNYAN PERSECUTED AGAIN 119 
 
 supremely associated with these estimable vir- 
 tues. But even as you looked upon them and 
 upon Christian sitting in their midst and heard 
 snatches of that high talk they indulged in to- 
 gether, even as you beheld the property goblets 
 and the basket of fruit which you were curious 
 to test for its reality, the memory of the book 
 came over you and everything before you up 
 there on the stage seemed mockery and sham. 
 After all, that book is perfection, you thought. 
 After all, it does in its own way, in its own 
 medium, something supremely great in a su- 
 premely great manner. After all, to slice it 
 up and boil it down and toss it out upon the 
 boards is wickedness and sacrilege. And 
 while Miss Crosman's voice droned sing-song 
 from the stage and the sunlight spluttered and 
 a bit of the canvas stone roof of the house 
 waved in a draught and the audience coughed 
 restlessly these were the words that your inner 
 ear heard like a solemn accusation: 
 
 " Thus they discoursed together till late at 
 night; and after they had committed them- 
 selves to their Lord for protection, they betook 
 themselves to rest: the Pilgrim they laid in a 
 large upper chamber, whose windows opened 
 toward the sun-rising: the name of the cham- 
 ber was Peace; where he slept till break of 
 day, and then he awoke and sang."
 
 "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 
 
 (Savoy, March 23, 1908) 
 
 A CAREFUL consideration of all the ob- 
 jections raised to " The Servant in the 
 House " by Charles Rann Kennedy, 
 inspires the reflection that a considerable num- 
 ber of people regard Mr. Kennedy's play as a 
 descent from the sublime to the religious. This 
 is important, as it of course calls for a redefini- 
 tion, both of sublimity and religion. For that 
 task of redefining, however, the present re- 
 viewer feels himself in all humility incapable. 
 It must be intrusted rather to those pregnant 
 minds who have made it necessary. And, great 
 as the drawback undoubtedly is, " The Servant 
 in the House " must needs be discussed here 
 under those conceptions of sublimity and reli- 
 gion, with their attendant qualities, which poor, 
 mistaken humanity has so long accepted in the- 
 ory and painfully striven for in practice. We 
 would gladly rewrite even the Gospels if we 
 could, realizing with one commentator, that 
 a mere restatement of them can contain noth- 
 ing new, that it is inevitably " trite." But our 
 flowerless prose, our lack of his sonorous rhet-
 
 "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 121 
 
 oric, is alone a sufficient deterrent. We must 
 humbly pass on the job. 
 
 Is there no spot to be saved for any earnest 
 reality except " the poor little enclosure behind 
 the altar rail " ? Mr. Kennedy's play, which 
 is truly a modern Morality, not a sermon nor 
 a tract, but a statement of applied or ethical 
 religion in terms of the drama, a play with its 
 own dramatic appeal and human significance, 
 attempts to say that a spot shall be saved, and 
 that spot — the stage. Jesters have risen up 
 to smite this daring author; his restatements 
 of the Sermon on the Mount are characterized 
 by one as " the most obvious and irreproach- 
 able platitudes that mental mediocrity could 
 devise or stodgy dulness admire, concerning 
 morality and the brotherhood of mankind." 
 Another suggests, of the Servant, that " this 
 impressive figure, clothed in its mysticism, 
 scarcely lent itself to the job of passing around 
 the toast." If any argument were really 
 needed in justification of the play, which is 
 amply justified by its sheer dramatic appeal, 
 this last sentiment quoted would furnish it. 
 If, after nineteen hundred years, the message 
 of the Gospels is so misunderstood that a critic 
 of whatever race or creed can miss entirely 
 this symbolism of service, then all his and 
 everybody's else contentions that " The Ser- 
 vant in the House " is needless because it is
 
 122 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 " trite," because it states " nothing new," fall 
 in a heap, self-refuted. 
 
 As a matter of fact, not to mince matters, 
 not in the face of anything so sincere as this 
 play to be guilty of insincerity and half truths, 
 the objections to '' The Servant in the House " 
 disguise themselves as they may under chatter 
 of art for art's sake, or the thrice tiresome and 
 fundamentally meaningless assertion that " the 
 mission of the stage is not to preach," are in 
 reality based on ethical unresponsiveness, on 
 that shallow and cowardly fear of the serious, 
 the deep, the truth-seeking, which character- 
 izes minds suspicious of moral passion or 
 dulled by the material environment, the cares 
 and the pleasures of a daily life bounded by a 
 narrow horizon. It was against this unre- 
 sponsiveness, this fear, that " The Servant in 
 the House " had to fight for its stage life, and 
 it is to the credit of New York theatergoers 
 that the victory was signal. The discussion 
 which waged about the play was in itself " a 
 sort of a compliment," as Smee would say in 
 " Peter Pan," and it was the means of bring- 
 ing the work widely before the public, drawing 
 to the theater the curious, who in most cases 
 remained as converts. That much of history 
 may be allowed, however interjaculatory. 
 ** The effect of any writing on the public 
 mind," says Emerson, " is mathematically
 
 "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 123 
 
 measured by its depth of thought. How much 
 water does it draw? If it awaken you to 
 think, if it Hft you from your feet with the 
 great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to 
 be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of 
 men; if the pages instruct you not, they will 
 die like flies in the hour." It is a sad reflection 
 that plays which do instruct, however, are the 
 plays too apt to perish in the hour. Therefore 
 to record the success of " The Servant in the 
 House," not between covers but in the theater, 
 is important. 
 
 The austere lofty soul of James Martineau 
 has passed full orbed into the spirit land. His 
 words live, nor do we fear to be " trite " in 
 repeating them. In the middle of the last cen- 
 tury he wrote, '' Our current notions of be- 
 nevolence have descended to us from the recent 
 times of feudalism; yet we are conscious that 
 they do not come up to the higher demands 
 which have arisen, or adapt themselves to the 
 new intellectual and moral wants comprised 
 in any Christian estimate of the poor in this 
 world. The ease of ancient condescension is 
 gone; the grateful recognition of human 
 brotherhood is not attained. To aim at mak- 
 ing men like ourselves into creatures with 
 enough to eat — though a thing unrealized as 
 yet — is felt to be insufficient, and how to raise 
 them into the likeness of the children of God
 
 124 THE AISIERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 we cannot tell — the very notion receiving at 
 present but a timid acknowledgment." 
 
 And does anybody fancy that this " grate- 
 ful recognition of human brotherhood " has 
 been made in the brief half century since the 
 sermon on "Winter Worship" was written? 
 Does any one fancy that the notion of raising 
 our brothers into " the likeness of God " is 
 much more boldly acknowledged to-day? Go 
 to the Rev. Percy Grant's Sunday evening 
 Socialistic debates and you will hear speaker 
 after speaker affirm that the Bread Line has 
 no soul, only a belly. And those speakers are 
 not the sentimental philanthropists, who are 
 shocked by the sentiment, but the men from 
 the East Side, the young Socialists, who have 
 invaded this Fifth Avenue church burning with 
 reality and confronted by conditions. The 
 mere task of making their brothers into " crea- 
 tures with enough to eat " is all they can 
 grapple; it absolutely limits their horizon. 
 " The Bread Line itself may not be divine, but 
 the men in it are," said a speaker in refutation. 
 And came a woman's voice, '' Is it the diviner 
 the longer it is ? " 
 
 The speaker had no answer. Have you, 
 you who object to "The Servant in the House" 
 because of its " platitudes " about human 
 brotherhood, because there is " nothing new " 
 in it, because in your busy life you have not
 
 "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 125 
 
 waked to wonder " and who is my brother? " 
 to contrast your professions with your prac- 
 tice, your faith with your works, and resent in 
 the theater any play which sounds an alarm 
 bell to your sleepy conscience — have you any 
 answer? You object to "The Servant in the 
 House," perhaps, because " it does not prove 
 anything " ? As if any play ever proved any- 
 thing! As if any play could prove anything 
 about a problem that all over the world real 
 men have wrestled with and are wrestling with 
 and will wrestle with so long as the human 
 spirit struggles upward through every chang- 
 ing cycle of civilization, which ever needs not 
 proofs but inspirations, the inspiration of such 
 plays as " The Servant in the House " no less 
 than others! Let us bid this Servant set our 
 house in order, too; let us clean out the 
 drains, let us have done with cant and hypoc- 
 risy and at least acknowledge that if the play 
 does not thrill and move us, seems stupid, tire- 
 some, that is perhaps because our hearts do not 
 answer to the call of our brothers, whatever 
 our heads may do, because our emotions are 
 not fired by the ethical purposes of the world, 
 because we do not care or do not dare, not to 
 apply, but merely to see applied, the simple 
 test of Christian conduct — *' How would 
 Christ have acted here?" 
 
 For, after all, if Christianity has survived
 
 126 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 its many colored shells of creeds and dogmas, 
 if it has spread beyond churches and profes- 
 sions of faith, that simple test of conduct has 
 been the persistent element that could not be 
 lost. Unitarians and Liberal Jews and Social- 
 ists, men who enter no church portals and the 
 robed priest before the high altar and the 
 Cross, can apply it. It asks for no faith save 
 faith in the best instincts of the human heart. 
 And Mr. Kennedy in his play evokes no dog- 
 mas; rather does he bury them in that drain 
 below the church. He holds no brief for any 
 theology, he neither ofifends nor flatters any 
 sect. Because religion in his play is not per- 
 sonal but humanitarian, not a matter of indi- 
 vidual " conversion," but ethical passion, the 
 gospel of Brotherhood, he avoids the unreality 
 for the modern mind of Mr. Jones's " Evange- 
 list." He merely evokes the spirit and the hu- 
 manity of the historic Christ, giving Him 
 bodily form, as he needs must do for purposes 
 of his allegory, and lets us see how, as he sup- 
 poses, the Christ would work out the problems 
 of a concrete household, how the Christ spirit 
 would differ from and put to shame the life 
 of to-day. It was a bold attempt and only to 
 be justified by a fine achievement. But the 
 achievement is fine. Through the devious 
 ways of modern dramatic technique Mr. Ken- 
 nedy has reached the simplicity of a Morality
 
 "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 127 
 
 play and speaks to his generation of higher 
 things in a voice that his generation can yet 
 understand. 
 
 And does his Morahty mean sociaHsm? 
 Or does it mean that he would tear down all 
 the churches that are built over the drains and 
 moldering cesspools of lies and deceit? The 
 Drain Man grasps hands with the Servant 
 when he learns the latter is a socialist, crying 
 '' That 's what I am, too! " But his socialism, 
 to the larger view of the Servant, is a belief in 
 " fighting with his class against all the other 
 classes." With a quiet, kindly, almost amused 
 gesture the Servant banishes such socialism, 
 the kind the legislatures might decree, but how 
 far from the sort He means! The Morality 
 is indeed thus almost a rebuke of the social- 
 ism now rampant in print and on platform; 
 it goes deeper than that. Socialism for Him 
 means something voluntary, a distinction that 
 is surely just now hardly over insisted on. 
 The socialists themselves are the ones most 
 likely to object to the drift of Mr. Kennedy's 
 drama here. 
 
 And as for his scathing satire on conven- 
 tional religion, his bitter smelling allegory of 
 the church built over a festering tomb only 
 to be cleaned up by a common laborer, proud 
 of his station, and a vicar who throws away 
 his cassock, doubtless Mr. Kennedy will be
 
 128 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 glad to let you think what you like. Martin- 
 eau (still to test this play by the loftiest stand- 
 ards) said from his pulpit that our worship 
 " has become a commemoration, telling what 
 once He was to happier spirits of our race, 
 and how grateful we are for the dear old mes- 
 sages that faintly reach our ear, how we will 
 cherish the last remnant of that precious and 
 only sure memorial — the fragile and conse- 
 crated link between His sphere and ours. . . . 
 Or, if we direct our face the other way . . . 
 we fall into the insincerity of coming before 
 God by way of keeping ourselves in practice 
 and turning our religion into a rehearsal." In 
 other words, our religion is not a thing of here 
 and now, but ever of the future or the past. 
 That is all these dead bodies beneath the 
 church in the play need to mean. 
 
 But if you are a man saddened by the sight 
 of churches filled Sunday after Sunday with 
 old women and little girls, if you are a man 
 wearied by pulpit discourses that do not meet 
 your needs or that even violate your reason 
 and experience, if the bickerings of sects, the 
 claims and counter-claims of creeds and dog- 
 mas disgust you, Mr. Kennedy will not much 
 care if you meet his allegory more than half 
 way, and start tearing down flying buttresses. 
 For in one of the most eloquently written 
 speeches of the play, and a speech eloquently
 
 "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 129 
 
 delivered by Walter Hampden as the Servant, 
 with beauty of voice, nobility and dignity of 
 utterance and a sincerity that stamped him as 
 an artist and a man of feeling, Mr. Kennedy 
 builds another church, the Church Universal, 
 where all may worship together. 
 
 The pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of 
 heroes, the sweet human flesh of men and women is 
 moulded about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable; 
 the faces of little children laugh out from every 
 comer-stone ; the terrible spans and arches of it are 
 the joined hands of comrades, and up in the heights 
 and spaces there are inscribed the numberless mus- 
 ings of all the dreamers of the world. It is yet 
 building — building and built upon. Sometimes, 
 the work goes forward in deep darkness, sometimes 
 in blinding light; now beneath the burden of un- 
 utterable anguish, now to the tune of a great laugh- 
 ter and heroic shoutings like the cry of thunder. 
 Sometimes, in the silence of the night time, one may 
 hear the tiny hammerings of the comrades at work 
 up in the dome — the comrades that have climbed 
 ahead. 
 
 " The numberless musings of all the dream- 
 ers of the world ! " One of these dreamers is 
 Mr. Kennedy; one of these musings is "The 
 Servant in the House." The Celtic imagina- 
 tion of Walter Hampden — for he bears in 
 reality a Celtic name, if his home is Brooklyn 
 and his training English — played with the 
 dream and loved it and made it very real and 
 
 9
 
 130 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 very reverent and deep and sweet. He was 
 aided by a company, especially by Tyrone 
 Power, who caught the fire of its purpose and 
 knew how to utter it in terms of human feel- 
 ing, who could win tears for a father's grief 
 or a daughter's longing as well as point the 
 allegory. So the play delivered its message 
 at the Savoy Theater, in Thirty-fourth Street, 
 just off Broadway. It is not flippantly to be 
 dismissed; it is not lightly to be discussed; 
 it is not to be discussed at all in the set terms 
 of criticism, for this or that flaw in technique 
 or construction, this or that failure to measure 
 up to rule, sink to insignificance before the 
 fact that it dreams a dream, that it hears those 
 hammers tapping up in the dome, that it speaks 
 a message of which the conventional drama 
 knows nothing, a message to the spiritual 
 longings of men. How strange that we should 
 be talking so of a drama on our Alley, our gay, 
 irresponsible, frivolous Alley, with its merry 
 widows and the rest! How strange that we 
 should have the chance, perhaps even the in- 
 clination ! We rub our eyes, yet still we find 
 ourself awake, and still the fact persists that 
 " The Servant in the House " was visible at 
 the Savoy Theater, in Thirty-fourth Street, 
 just off Broadway, to speak to us if we 
 would but listen, to win our tears, to shame 
 our petty prides and selfish aims, in the city's
 
 "THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE" 131 
 
 dust and din and fearful complexities of choice 
 and conduct, to hint a simple standard as 
 the one solution, and to breathe on some of 
 us again perhaps " the silence of immortal 
 hopes."
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 
 
 (Bijou, September 23, 1907) 
 
 As pen and ink alike serve him who sings 
 
 In high or low or intermediate style; 
 
 As the same stone hath shapes both rich and vile 
 
 To match the fancies that each master brings; 
 So, my loved lord, within thy bosom springs 
 
 Pride mixed with meekness and kind thoughts that smile: 
 
 Whence I draw naught, my sad self to beguile, 
 
 But what my face shows — dark imaginings. 
 He who for seed sows sorrow, tears, and sighs, 
 
 (The dews that fall from heaven, though pure and clear, 
 
 From different germs take divers qualities) 
 Must needs reap grief and garner weeping eyes; 
 
 And he who looks on beauty with sad cheer 
 
 Gains doubtful hope and certain miseries. 
 
 Michael Angelo, Master Builder. 
 
 HENRIK IBSEN is one of the most 
 popular playwrights in America to- 
 day, a statement which may sur- 
 prise some people. Scorned, abused, heaped 
 with vile epithets alike in England and the 
 United States when his works first began to 
 be translated, so that William Winter's re- 
 views of " Ghosts " were in far greater need 
 of expurgation than the drama could be, Ibsen 
 has now come into his own. His printed
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 133 
 
 plays are among the books most in demand 
 in the New York pubhc hbraries, they are 
 sold in great numbers at the book shops, 
 they are a part of all collegiate courses in 
 the drama. Mrs. Fiske has played " A 
 Doll's House," " Hedda Gabler " and " Ros- 
 mersholm," the last for the entire season of 
 1907-8. Mary Shaw has played " Ghosts " 
 from coast to coast, with great success. Ethel 
 Barrymore has played " A Doll's House " ; 
 that drama, indeed, figures almost every week 
 in the program of some stock company through 
 the country. Wright Lorimer has played " A 
 Wild Duck." Richard Mansfield's last season 
 was given over to a production of " Peer 
 Gynt." Even "When We Dead Awaken" 
 has been tried in New York in the commercial 
 theater. Of " special performances " of vari- 
 ous of his plays there have been many, and 
 during the past two seasons a new Ibsen inter- 
 preter has been added to our stage in the 
 panther-like person of Alia Nazimova, a Rus- 
 sian Jewess who came to America to play in 
 Russian and remained to learn our language 
 and conquer our native public. 
 
 The one she has accomplished well enough; 
 the other completely. Her Hedda Gabler was 
 a high-born exotic, an orchid of a woman, bale- 
 ful, fascinating — and to some of us not at all 
 like Ibsen's heroine. But it attracted the pub-
 
 134 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 lie. Her Nora in " A Doll's House " was quite 
 different. The actress even looked different. 
 She had shrunk physically. She had shed ten 
 years of her life. She was a nibbling little 
 squirrel of a woman, who nosed into surrep- 
 titious candy bags, romped on the floor with 
 her children, made physical love to her hus- 
 band with absolute animal innocence. Nazi- 
 mova was more than ever hailed by the public. 
 Her continental love for showing off the arts 
 of impersonation, her facile and effective 
 handling of the whole pack of actor's tricks, 
 delighted even those who did not find much 
 sincerity behind her marvelous technique — 
 who felt, for instance, that her Nora in the 
 third act quite lacked the real suggestion of 
 intellectual awakening, something which mere 
 technique cannot give, and which Mrs. Fiske 
 made so thrilling. Those who did not feel this 
 lack hailed her as the greatest actress since 
 Duse. It was partly, no doubt, this personal 
 popularity of the dark, sensuously fascinating 
 Russian, this " tiger cat in the leash of art," 
 won in the brief space of a year, that enabled 
 her to put on " The Master Builder " at the 
 Bijou Theater, New York, September 23, 
 1907, and to keep it on for almost two months, 
 a remarkable run for this most baffling and 
 subtle of all the grim old Norseman's plays. 
 Excellently supported by Walter Hampden in
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 135 
 
 the title part, she flung down this pearl of 
 symbolism before — well, before any chance 
 Broadway audience that cared to come. And 
 though some critics raged and some theater- 
 goers scoffed, she demonstrated what a con- 
 siderable public there is, after all, for the more 
 subtle things of art and she showed us what a 
 vast field of poetry, symbolism, suggestion, 
 still lies untrodden by our native actors and 
 authors. 
 
 It was not until 1906, when their corre- 
 spondence was published, that the world knew 
 of the romance — if romance it can be called 
 — between Ibsen and eighteen-year-old Emilie 
 Bardach of Vienna, which began and appar- 
 ently ended at Gossensass in the summer of 
 1889. Ibsen was sixty-one. Autumn lured 
 Spring, or at any rate was profoundly dis- 
 quieted by Spring; also interested in Spring 
 as copy ! That Spring loved Autumn, Autumn 
 at least believed. Edmund Gosse records that 
 Ibsen said at this time, " Oh, you can always 
 love, but I am happier than the happiest, for 
 I am beloved." On his seventieth birthday 
 he wrote to his '' princess," " That summer 
 at Gossensass was the most beautiful and the 
 most harmonious portion of my whole exist- 
 ence. I scarcely venture to think of it, and 
 yet I think of nothing else. Ah ! forever ! " 
 And Ibsen, being an artist, made copy of the
 
 136 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 episode ; he made " The Master Builder." 
 Grim old Norwegian, whiskered prober of 
 social sores, merciless technician, iconoclast, 
 individualist, he was a Sentimental Tommy to 
 the end ! And just because he was a Sentimen- 
 tal Tommy none can ever say how much of 
 " The Master Builder " is autobiography, how 
 much is not. Perhaps he himself could not 
 have told, if he would. Only we know that it 
 had its base on fact, on the experiences of one 
 of the world's great artists in his sixty-first 
 year with a young girl of eighteen. It cannot 
 be ignored as fantastic, then, as silly, as mean- 
 ingless. Rather must we admit, if we do not 
 comprehend it, that our souls are too small, 
 our natures too lacking in complexity. It 
 faces us as one of the most fascinating, if one 
 of the most baffling works in modern litera- 
 ture. 
 
 Those tiresome people who are forever 
 telling you that a successful drama must tell 
 its story by means of " action " forget — or, 
 rather, they never knew — that the sight of a 
 man whose mere life is at stake at the point 
 of a pistol is infinitely less interesting, dra- 
 matic, important than the sight of a man whose 
 soul is at stake at the point of another's ideas 
 and inspiration. Such people have no place 
 at " The Master Builder." In front of this 
 surcharged, half-mystic drama, where men
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 137 
 
 and women sit and talk while thrilling events 
 come to birth and fruition in their souls, your 
 ordinary theatergoer looking for his " story " 
 halts. And ordinary criticism halts, too. 
 There is a time when the critic must adventure 
 on his own way and report alone his own im- 
 pressions. The best he can hope is that he 
 may persuade others to adventure where he 
 has gone, with the seeing eye and the under- 
 standing heart; the worst, that he may be 
 considered fantastic, perhaps by that writer 
 of popular fiction in the audience at Nazi- 
 mova's first night who said that he did n't 
 know what the play meant, and if he did he 
 would n't admit it. First and foremost, then, 
 what is it in this drama, inherent in its very 
 structure, oozing through its dialogue, which 
 renders the common cants of criticism vain, 
 making the commentaries of William Archer 
 or Brandes or the rest alike unsatisfactory? 
 These men tell what the play is about, what it 
 means (no one of them agreeing with any 
 other!), but they do not get the secret of its 
 haunting thrill into words. 
 
 Leaving the technique of Scribe forever be- 
 hind him with the tarentella dance in Act II 
 of " A Doll's House," Ibsen struck out into 
 new waters. From then on his dramas were 
 dramas of mental states, his theater the brain, 
 and his technique boiled away all quid pro quo,
 
 138 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 all the tricks and artifices of the " well made 
 play," became so subtly simple that it seems 
 utterly artless. Everything happens because 
 that is the sort of people the characters 
 were, the plays are written by the finger of 
 fate. The result was comprehensible to any- 
 body in " Hedda Gabler " and " Ghosts." But 
 in " The Master Builder " a new element ap- 
 pears, and remains to the end in " When We 
 Dead Awaken." 
 
 And it is this new element that makes the 
 play so hauntingly strange and bafiling. Mae- 
 terlinck has named it " secondary dialogue." 
 Over and above what the characters say, run- 
 ning along between the lines, cropping out now 
 and again in touches of symbolic speech, is a 
 conversation between their souls. And in this 
 is the real drama, in this mystic region as far 
 from the ordinary world of the theater as it 
 is close to the world you and I, in our deepest 
 moments of intercourse with those we love, 
 know to be our ultimate reality. What words 
 can represent it? Can you put into language 
 the secret influences that come to you from 
 the heart of the one you love, the not-to-be-re- 
 sisted power of your own ideals, the voices that 
 seem to urge you from the air? You try in 
 vain to recall a forgotten name, yet one day it 
 comes walking unsought into your mind from 
 out that great, dim marginal field of conscious-
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 139 
 
 ness which modern psychology is beginning 
 to teach us is the source even of our reHgion. 
 And how much of our converse with those 
 nearest and dearest does this same dim part 
 of the brain supply, itself supplied, perhaps, 
 by some unguessed telepathy, so that a mere 
 report of the words that passed between us — 
 poor commonplaces of daily speech — would 
 be pitifully inadequate even to hint at the depth 
 and meaning of our relations ! Such soul speech 
 there is between Hilda and Solncss, plainly 
 baffling to the other characters on the stage. 
 (Alas! baffling too, perhaps, to how many in 
 the audience?) That is what Hilda meant 
 when she cried out that she knew the Master 
 Builder better than the rest of them. That is 
 why again and again during the performance 
 of the play I myself and others I have talked 
 with actually forgot to listen to the words 
 passing on the stage, fascinated by the curi- 
 ous sensation that currents of influence and 
 understanding were leaping from this man to 
 this girl and back again, tense and exciting, 
 like sparks between the knobs of an induction 
 coil. 
 
 It remained for Ibsen to suggest this super- 
 speech in the drama, to win a technique clair- 
 voyant and subtle enough to carry it. " The 
 Master Builder " is a play of the subconscious 
 elements of man. That is why you cannot get
 
 140 THE AINIERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 its strange thrill into words ; that is why your 
 own subconsciousness jumps out to meet it; 
 that is why, perhaps, there is so much doubt 
 as to its more external meanings. And that 
 is why you are told by numerous commonplace, 
 unimaginative people that it is no drama at 
 all. But drama it is, of a new and strange and 
 wonderful sort. And whether you take its 
 externals to picture, in Archer's words, " the 
 history of a sickly conscience side by side with 
 a robust conscience " ; or, with Lugne-Poe, con- 
 sider it "an heroic drama of pride"; or be- 
 lieve it to mean that Hilda as the spirit of the 
 new generation created the Master Builder's 
 soul anew, so that he once more stood on the 
 heights; or believe it to mean that no man's 
 soul can be created anew, so that he fell to 
 death when he tried to stand a second time on 
 the heights ; or conceive it as the tragedy of a 
 great artist, who must ever love anew for in- 
 spiration: whether you accept one or all of 
 these interpretations does not matter much 
 after all. What matters is the mere presence 
 of this soul speech between the brooding Mas- 
 ter Builder, who defies our ultimate analysis, 
 and Hilda, of whom he says : " You are like 
 a dawning day. When I look at you I seem 
 to be looking toward the sunrise." 
 
 Solness, the Builder, is in reality the chief 
 figure in the drama. But with Nazimova as
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 141 
 
 Hilda naturally the interest centered in seeing 
 what this remarkable Russian would do as a 
 dawning day. And what she did was at times 
 marvelous in its minute fidelity to the surface 
 of life and its haunting suggestion of the depths 
 below the surface. It was a new Nazimova 
 who entered, alpenstock in hand, a very girl, it 
 seemed. The contrast with her languid, tall, 
 full-blown Hedda was remarkable. She was 
 short, slight, and in every line and gesture 
 unmistakably, buoyantly girlish. Different 
 clothes, a different hat, the hair done differ- 
 ently? Yes, but the secret was not there. 
 Rather it lay in her so vivid imagination that in 
 some mysterious way the part she was playing 
 wrote itself out upon her form and features. 
 There was thought and plan and study behind 
 that first awkward handshake so typical of a 
 young girl from the country, and in the position 
 of her feet as she stood against the wall, and in 
 her free hop upon the bookkeeper's stool, or 
 her manner of plumping down into a chair or 
 on the floor; but it was study guided and 
 made utterly spontaneous by her unerring 
 imagination. 
 
 Which, of course, is not to say that there 
 do not exist deeper or shallower conceptions 
 of what the life of a part is. And this life 
 Nazimova was to live as Hilda contained depths 
 she did not sound. At her first entrance like a
 
 142 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 spring wind, you knew that the " younger gen- 
 eration " had come pounding at the door, that 
 there was new breath of inspiration, that some- 
 thing was going to happen to Solness. But 
 her second act palpably fell ofif, partly because 
 the unexpectedly fine and intelligent perform- 
 ance of Solness by Walter Hampden grew a 
 little monotonous under the strain — the part 
 is a veritable Hamlet in length and its demands 
 are tremendous — and partly because she her- 
 self was a little lost in playing this game for a 
 man's soul where the lure had nothing of the 
 physical. For the sexual allurement of Hilda, 
 except in a smothered, vmconscious way, is not 
 exercised till that strange love scene just before 
 the final curtain; her allurement is all of " the 
 sunrise and the dawning day " ; she came to 
 put new wine of effort into the Master Builder's 
 veins by her free, fearless faith in him, her per- 
 fect understanding, and her influence was not 
 of the body, it was of the ideal, the aged artist's 
 rediscovered dream of the ideal, Solness not be- 
 ing the first great artist whose need was always 
 to find it in a woman. Subdue her sexual al- 
 lurement as she would, Nazimova could not 
 quite vitalize steadily and firmly this feature of 
 the character. But she rose in the final act to 
 put forth the sex appeal at last with poignant 
 eloquence, to claim her own. And her achieve- 
 ment of so much of the " secondary dialogue "
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 143 
 
 was in itself a triumph, on our stage where 
 everything must be downright, exphcit. Only 
 a continental actress, perhaps, could have done 
 it. We may say that Nazimova is " insincere," 
 that her art consists of cleverly handled tricks ; 
 but the fact remains that she has brought some- 
 thing to our stage it did not possess before, 
 something modern, subtle, exciting, the power 
 to suggest finer shades of meaning, symbols 
 in the dialogue, to speak the speech and the 
 super-speech as well, unknown to our native 
 players or our authors, either. 
 
 But what of the Al aster Builder himself? 
 What of this egotistical old artist inspired by a 
 chit of a girl to attempt once more " the im- 
 possible " ? How many secrets does he not 
 hide, how many searchings of our own aspira- 
 tions does he not inspire? The play is, in re- 
 ality, his soul story, narrated to Hilda; finally, 
 at the end, shaped by Hilda. What are we to 
 make of this story? 
 
 When Nazimova produced the play in New 
 York one of the ablest (and oldest) of the 
 critics wrote, " Inasmuch as no two of [the 
 commentators], seemingly, are able to agree 
 upon its true meaning or upon the nature of 
 the message which it is supposed to convey, it 
 is difhcult to avoid the conclusion that a good 
 many of them belong to the numerous body of 
 youthful enthusiasts who are prone to see
 
 144 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 something deep and wonderful in whatever they 
 themselves do not fully comprehend." Ex- 
 actly ! I was discussing Ibsen once with a man 
 older than I. He admitted that he had never 
 seen one of Ibsen's plays performed. " But," 
 said he with an air of finality, " I 've read 
 everything William Winter has written on the 
 subject. And when you are as old as I am," he 
 added, " you will think as I do." " Probably," 
 said I. *' That is one of the tragedies of grow- 
 ing up!" It is, unfortunately, a sign of ad- 
 vancing years to lose faith in the unintelligible. 
 I once heard William James tell a young 
 woman who had not understood his lecture on 
 Pragmatism that it is good for all of us now 
 and then to listen to something we don't under- 
 stand. Sometimes, no doubt, the unintelligi- 
 ble is n't worth understanding. But it is far 
 better, as well as more modest, to infer that it 
 hides a secret our minds are not yet large 
 enough to grasp, rather than to infer that our 
 minds must be able to grasp anything worth 
 grasping. Perhaps, in reality, this arrogant 
 attitude of age is but a sign of mental laziness. 
 Life is a riddle none of us has read. For a 
 space we try; then we grow tired, preferring 
 the peace of our fireside and the Belasco drama. 
 Ibsen is a trumpet call to youth. Like Emerson 
 he preaches not philosophy, but efifort. Though 
 " The Master Builder " is the story of an aging
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 145 
 
 artist, its message is to youth. There is some- 
 thing of the Peter Pan in the artist. He re- 
 fuses to grow up. He must refuse to 
 grow up, or he could not keep on creating, 
 playing his game of make-believe. But 
 some of him grows up, and knows the make- 
 believe for something other than his boyish 
 half supposes. Doubts come; the adult ego 
 sees cruelties committed by the boy ego in its 
 acts of creation ; something of the old, wild en- 
 thusiasm is gone ; where once the act followed 
 the thought now courage is lacking; the Vik- 
 ing conscience is no more. And the aging 
 artist turns to youth. September wooes May- 
 time. Heaven help the artist's wife. He must 
 be cruel to the last. 
 
 Now all this is set forth in " The Master 
 Builder," directly, unmistakably, in the regula- 
 tion terms of the psychology of the theater. 
 Doubtless Ibsen meant Solness to be a bit auto- 
 biographical, a poet, not an architect. The 
 church towers he first built were the early 
 poetic dramas, the " homes for human beings," 
 the later domestic dramas, and finally " the 
 castles in the air," the last of the plays, meta- 
 physical speculations, lyric soul states. But 
 there is nothing symbolic about the jealousies 
 of Mrs. Solness, there is nothing symbolic about 
 the Master Builder's doubts and broodings 
 over the human tragedies that have followed 
 
 10
 
 146 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 his devouring career as a great artist, the more 
 as he seems to have had a kind of telepathic 
 power over those about him, so that he finally 
 came to believe that what he willed would often 
 come to pass — a belief in part scientifically jus- 
 tifiable, in part, perhaps, sheer mysticism, but 
 very human and perplexing. Nor is there any- 
 thing symbolic about this tremendous egotism 
 of his. He cannot give up his art, for all his 
 doubts and regrets. He must go on building. 
 And he must have inspiration. He must, in 
 short, have Hilda. He knows that retribution 
 will come, in a world where the individual can- 
 not live his fullest without injuring others. 
 That is his tragedy, that one of life's trage- 
 dies, one of its ironies, and the Nemesis which 
 hangs over this drama. But so far all is plain, 
 a study of the artist by one of the greatest of 
 the tribe. 
 
 It is Hilda who makes the real trouble for 
 the critics. And it is Hilda, perhaps, who is 
 the real symbol, as well as a very human figure, 
 exercising a very genuine and physical allure- 
 ment over the Master Builder. She is youth, 
 hard, uncompromising, demanding her king- 
 dom here and now on the table. Is that why 
 the old men fiee from the play, assuring us it 
 means nothing? Do they know only too well 
 what it means? We all set out in life after a 
 kingdom, and we all go down to a grave '' in a
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 147 
 
 vale of the land of Moab." Eternal effort, 
 eternal aspiration, is there no surer happiness? 
 There is none nobler, Ibsen would say. And 
 youth, with passionate scorn, would urge the 
 aged seeker ever onward and upward. " Ox- 
 ford," exclaimed Matthew Arnold, " home of 
 lost causes and impossible loyalties ! " " Just 
 once more, Mr. Solness! " pleads Hilda. " Do 
 the impossible once again ! " On no other 
 terms will she have him. That is her king- 
 dom, to keep him ever striving for the impos- 
 sible, ever climbing higher than he can, 
 higher than he dares — as high, in fact, as 
 he hopes and dreams! That is the trumpet 
 call to youth in " The Master Builder " ; that, 
 perhaps, why the aged will not, dare not, 
 hearken. 
 
 But S'olness fell and was dashed to pieces. 
 Brittle age crashed against unyielding youth, 
 Solness against Hilda, and went down like 
 crockery. What is the answer to the riddle 
 here? Perhaps there is no answer. Life does 
 not answer our questionings, why should Ibsen ? 
 Poor Solness, poor Hilda, their hearts tugged 
 and pulled by the Troll o' dreams within them 
 both, must their end always be but castles in the 
 air? What builder, however much a master, 
 can build the stairs that reach to a castle in the 
 air? As the play floats up into symbolism, into 
 allegory, it points no path to the unattainable,
 
 148 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 it kindles no beacon on the heights. Only in 
 the laboring darkness it comes like a voice from 
 the higher ledges, '* Hope on, and climb ! " Oh, 
 grim old Norwegian, it was cruel of you to in- 
 sult our critics so ! They know well enough that 
 life is plain and simple and easy, that striving 
 for the dream is no part of it, that it is far bet- 
 ter and saner, instead of building castles in the 
 air which cannot be reached, to own your little 
 home in Flatbush, easily reached and quickly 
 by the Brooklyn Rapid Transit. What is all 
 this mystic talk about effort and aspiration and 
 freedom and " harps in the air," this setting of 
 problems without a solution, this stirring up of 
 our souls into a brief, bitter moment of doubt 
 whether life has any solution, save only always 
 to strive? Why, even Charles Klein can settle 
 the problems of life for you in the drama 
 neatly and expeditiously — that is, what few 
 problems life has, such as trusts and labor ques- 
 tions. No, grim old Norwegian, we " youthful 
 enthusiasts " are all wrong about you ! You 
 are shallow and meaningless and mean. You 
 cannot read us the riddle of life, tell us the 
 destiny of man. You can only hint at mys- 
 teries, trumpet-call to effort toward the dream, 
 paint castles in the air. Go back and sit 
 by the Sphinx and be ashamed of yourself. 
 We will put by our youth as fast as we 
 can and apologize for our enthusiasms and
 
 HARPS IN THE AIR 149 
 
 insist that every character on the stage shall 
 be as simple and plain and easy to read as 
 life itself is. That will be something worth 
 doing — and may we be struck dead when we 
 do it!
 
 NAZIMOVA AS THE LADY LISA 
 
 (Bijou, December 30, 1907) 
 
 OWEN JOHNSON has dramatized the 
 Lady Lisa. Probably he did it uncon- 
 sciously; and probably Nazimova is 
 virginally ignorant of Walter Pater. But to 
 see " The Comet " is certainly to recall, not 
 Kipling's crude poem about the Vampire, 
 with its rag and its bone and its hank 
 of hair appropriated from ?he Sacred Books 
 • of .Buddha, nor the cruder picture it accom- 
 panied as text; but rather, if a little vaguely 
 and a little apologetically, that passage of in- 
 comparable prose ff-om '* The Renaissance," 
 from the essay on Leonardo da Vinci, begin- 
 ning, " Hers is the head upon which all ' the 
 ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids 
 are a little weary. She is older than the rocks 
 among which she sits," the haunting cadences 
 go^on to say; " like the vampire, she has been 
 dead many times, and learned the secrets of the 
 grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and 
 keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked 
 for strange webs with Eastern merchants: 
 and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of
 
 NAZIMOVA AS THE LADY LISA 151 
 
 Troy; and, as St. Anne, the Mother of Mary; 
 and all this has been to her but as the sound of 
 lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy 
 with which it has molded the changing Ihi- 
 eaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. 
 The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping to- 
 gether ten thousand experiences, is an old one; 
 and modern thought has conceived the idea of 
 humanity as wrought upon by and summing 
 up in itself all modes of thought and life. Cer- 
 tainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodi- 
 ment of the old fancy, the symbol of the mod- 
 ern idea." 
 
 It is at once the strength and the weakness 
 of Mr. Johnson's play that it suggests not 
 only this passage, but kindred pictures of the 
 woman who holds in her cinder of a body, in 
 her cinder of a soul, the experiences of the 
 ages. It is its strength because the conception 
 has an irresistible appeal to the imagination, 
 a compelling poetry about it. It is its weak- 
 ness because Mr. Johnson has sacrificed to his 
 symbolism the keen, homely tang of reality. 
 Even the other characters, as well as his hero- 
 ine, are dramatized moods, theories, soul states, 
 not beings of our common flesh and blood. 
 Whether this results from an exaggerated 
 effort after the symbolic — '' The Comet " is 
 Mr. Johnson's first play — or from a lack of 
 interest in the characters as persons does not
 
 152 THE AJMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 greatly concern us. The fact remains. That 
 his primary effort was not after reaUty is, how- 
 ever, plainly enough shown by the setting of 
 the drama — in the Spanish Pyrenees. Ob- 
 viously the characters are not Spanish, they 
 belong to no nation. They are creatures of 
 the author's brain. He put his scene where 
 he did to remove it as far as possible from real- 
 ity, doubtless in part influenced by the exotic 
 personality of his star. " Magda," which the 
 play inevitably suggests, is frankly and unmis- 
 takably German. Its feet are on solid ground. 
 " The Comet " is not American. Its feet are 
 not on solid ground. It lacks that homely 
 touch of familiar domestic detail which would 
 have helped it vastly in winning the under- 
 standing and interest of the average audience. 
 
 But had that touch been given it Mr. John- 
 son would then have had to face the task, more 
 easy now from the very unreality of his setting, 
 of making real this fantastic figure of a 
 woman, this vision with the centuries in her 
 sleepless eyes and a cinder for a soul. As she 
 stands now, for all his efforts to make her 
 carry a " message," to make her impressive 
 as an illustration of certain theories of his re- 
 garding the artist ego, Lona, on the stage, 
 is chiefly impressive for a certain picturesque 
 quality, as of a metaphor come to life, for her 
 suggestions to the imaginative beholder of dim
 
 NAZIMOVA AS THE LADY LISA 153 
 
 fables read long ago, of Poelike tales, of the 
 face of the Lady Lisa, of horrible experiences 
 and great spiritual adventures, not real and 
 capable of bringing suffering to you in your 
 theater chair but lived in a fantastic dream. 
 She has the vagueness and the charm of 
 allegory. 
 
 Now, without doubt, though Mr. Johnson 
 intended some of this picturesqueness, he in- 
 tended even more that Lona should be a fic- 
 tional embodiment of such a type of woman 
 artist as George Sand (to mention only the 
 dead), who ate up Chopin and De Musset and 
 even bore a child to satiate her lust for exper- 
 ience, and mounted on the dead soul of her, 
 on her slain womanhood, to artistic heights. 
 He meant Lona should be a very real person. 
 But Lona does not impress the beholder as a 
 real person nor is she surrounded by real per- 
 sons nor does she move in a setting of reality. 
 In so far as she does not, his drama may be 
 said to be a failure, wherever the fault lies. 
 But in so far as he yet contrives to create 
 vividly and with well wrought episode the 
 imaginative picture of a woman upon whose 
 head " all the ends of the world are come," 
 figurative and aloof though she be, he has done 
 something fine, something out of the ordinary 
 on our stage, something which should win for 
 him praise and approval, not scorn and laugh-
 
 154 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 ter. This Lona of his, this " woman of a 
 thousand years, fleeing in the smoky dawn," 
 personified by Nazimova and a wonderful 
 gray gown with a wonderful tall collar, is, 
 merely to look upon, merely to hear recite her 
 horrible confession of her fall and her rise, 
 an unforgetable thing, a thing to haunt you, 
 to invade your dreams, to disturb your little 
 illusions and the petty gratifications of your 
 little loves and hates. Not to feel this, not to 
 give Mr. Johnson the credit for it, is to do a 
 gross injustice. 
 
 It is only fair to the author to state briefly 
 what theories of life and conduct — for " The 
 Comet " is a drama with a purpose — he in- 
 tended to convey in his play. First, then, the 
 drama hymns the exaltation of the artist over 
 the individual. Lona, a George Sand type, 
 believes that her soul is dead as the price of 
 her greatness, and glories in that fact. The 
 woman had first to die in her, she says, " be- 
 cause the woman would have to be a slave." 
 (See G. B. Shaw, "The Revolutionist's Hand 
 Book " : " Home is the girl's prison and the 
 woman's workhouse.") But nobody is ever 
 quite dead, and so Lona's soul is roused by Fer- 
 nand's young passion to be great and his ap- 
 peal to her to help him. It is still a sort of 
 artist's vision that she has — she will be the 
 creator of Fernand; but it is a creative, not a
 
 NAZIMOVA AS THE LADY LISA 155 
 
 destructive instinct toward one of her fellows, 
 and so marks a kind of regeneration in her. 
 Fernand plainly enough is intended to convey 
 the lesson that the artist who would interpret 
 human nature must not judge, but understand. 
 There is no dispute with this fine moral. 
 *' Father," he says, " what I have learned to- 
 day has made me so humble that I would go 
 and seek the most miserable outcast in the 
 street to learn what she can teach me." So 
 from scorn of the Comet he passes to the point 
 of packing up to depart with her to " learn 
 life." Finally Cecilia, the young sister of 
 Lona, betrothed to Fernand, typifies the 
 woman who sees no way to get experience but 
 by attaching herself to a man, and when Lona 
 takes Fernand away from her she is not so 
 much broken-hearted as glad of the initiative 
 which has been given her to " cross the seas " 
 for herself. (Again see Shaw, as above.) 
 
 Now it would be perfectly easy to take most 
 of the doctrines in this play and find sources 
 for them in more or less recent literature. 
 Startling novelty they do not have. " You 
 wish a career, you said to climb, and you are 
 going to put on your back a double burden," 
 says Lona to Fernand, referring to his mar- 
 riage. Literature is not lacking in this sort of 
 thing. Kipling ends *' The Story of the 
 Gadsbys " with a poem, where he says that
 
 156 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 " white hands cHng to the tightened rein," and 
 adds: 
 
 "Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, 
 He travels fastest who travels alone." 
 
 Shaw's preface to " Man and Superman," 
 wherein he discusses the sex impulse and the 
 artist impulse, is a source for this play; I do 
 not say a conscious source, but a source none 
 the less, for ideas that are in the air will surely 
 get into the work of an earnest and scholarly 
 young writer like Mr. Johnson. Professor 
 Thomas's " Sex and Society " might have fur- 
 nished another bit, Lonas speech, " The future 
 is ours [i. e., woman's] ; we have never gone 
 back, all civilization and all society have 
 changed as we have forced our way up." 
 " Hedda Gabler " very palpably furnishes a 
 dramatic device, that of making Fernand re- 
 main in the room with Lona to show his 
 strength, just as Loveberg drank the punch. 
 Even, of course, the idea of the woman who 
 sums up in herself the experiences of a thou- 
 sand years is not new to literature and specu- 
 lation, if it is to the stage. " I '11 make a legend 
 of these old thoughts that young men begin 
 with," Fernand exclaims. Well, Mr. Johnson 
 has made a play! 
 
 However, it is not with sources that I would 
 quarrel, nor with the fact that Mr. Johnson
 
 NAZIMOVA AS THE LADY LISA 157 
 
 does n't give the impression in his work of a 
 thorough digestion of these ideas. It is with 
 the fact that the ideas as he has used them are 
 after all quite demonstrably false. George 
 Sands there are, and it is wholly legitimate 
 and entirely fascinating to show in a play. 
 But to preach from her that through her way 
 lies greatness in art, to use her as a symbol 
 of the artist's vision, is to falsify the artistic 
 achievement and debase the artist 's vision. 
 To say that the interpreter of humanity must 
 understand, not judge, is fine and true. But 
 to imply, as Mr. Johnson will seem to do in 
 the eyes of his audiences, whether that was 
 his intent or not, that in order to understand 
 the woman of the gutter one must go down 
 into the gutter with her is juvenile and absurd. 
 Even the white hands clinging to the tightened 
 rein is a theory too often exploded to have the 
 force of law. The vagaries and varieties 
 of the ''artistic temperament" (Oh, perilous 
 phrase!) are many and great. This tempera- 
 ment has produced monsters in order to pro- 
 duce masterpieces. But it has also produced 
 the Brownings and such a host of other sane 
 and noble men and women, who have lived at 
 peace with society, their neighbors, and their 
 wives, that no such attitude as Mr. Johnson's 
 — which is not free from a taint of the Bohe- 
 mian pose — is seriously representative of the 
 artist soul.
 
 158 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Another quarrel there is, too, with his 
 gratuitously unpleasant catastrophe. Lonas 
 first false step, as Owen Davis would phrase 
 it, had been taken eighteen years before the 
 play begins, and Fernand's father had been 
 the guilty man, though Fernand does not know 
 it. After this long interval she comes back 
 and is about to take his son away (there is 
 something of Hawthorne's " Feathertop " 
 here). The father, in a mad effort to stay his 
 boy, all other means failing, cries out, " There 
 is a law which even the beasts of the field obey, 
 that father and son shall not share the same 
 woman." Then the boy goes out and kills 
 himself, and into Lona's eyes, which have be- 
 gun to glow again with human warmth, comes 
 the dead lustre of the burnt-out coal as the 
 curtain falls. Of course, there is no such law, 
 certainly not for " the beasts of the field." Mr. 
 Johnson has never bred dogs. But if there 
 were such a law, under the avowed philosophy 
 of the play Fernand should have broken it. 
 However, that is not the point. The objec- 
 tion is rather to the needless nastiness of the 
 entire episode, savoring as it does of D'An- 
 nunzio. The structure of the play may demand 
 it from the beginning, but then the structure 
 of the play from the beginning is in need of 
 revision. Mr. Johnson could have preached 
 what he wants to preach quite as effectively
 
 NAZIMOVA AS THE LADY LISA 159 
 
 under conceivably different circumstances and 
 avoided what is after all a taint. There is 
 no desire on the part of the present writer to 
 deny any man the right to his ideas and their 
 full expression, to wave the moral bugaboo, 
 to turn a deaf ear to any message, whether 
 from archbishop or anarchist. In fact the an- 
 archist is likely to get the more attentive audi- 
 ence! But this episode under discussion is no 
 part of Mr. Johnson's message, only of his 
 machinery. It is not essential to his philoso- 
 phy, even deeply to his psychology, only to the 
 arbitrary structure of his story. For that rea- 
 son it is gratuitous and, in all kindness to Mr. 
 Johnson, in bad taste. 
 
 Nazimova's portrayal of the cinder woman 
 gives to the play more of popular appeal than 
 its philosophy is ever likely to. Surely she 
 is the living embodiment of Fernand's descrip- 
 tion, " a woman of a thousand years, fleeing 
 in the smoky dawn." Surely the awakening 
 of a spark in her burnt-out cinder of a soul is 
 denoted with a vividness and certainty that 
 are astonishing. And surely in her final and 
 sudden collapse once more into a cinder the 
 art of mere bodily pose and suggestion is seen 
 at its very finest. That Nazimova's Lona is 
 not a living, pulsating, mental organism, for 
 all its dead soul, such a complicated being as 
 Mr. Johnson probably had in mind to paint, is
 
 160 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 true. It is a strange, fantastic vampire out 
 of the realms of unreality, a dead thing met 
 in dreams on the road of night, dead with its 
 own weight of vague, shadowy experiences. 
 But it comes across the footlights like a heavy 
 odor, all the more strangely on that account. 
 And until another actress has played the part 
 it transcends criticism to say whether the 
 effect is not inherent, after all, in the construc- 
 tion of the drama, itself unreal, a play of 
 theories and passions, not persons. At any 
 rate there they are, play and picture, some- 
 thing purpose-fraught and imaginative, and 
 out of the ordinary to such a degree that they 
 have been viewed and judged with a copious 
 amount of misunderstanding, incomprehen- 
 sion and silly and stupid jeers. They may not 
 be to your liking, but they are not to be merely 
 laughed away. The thorns may crackle under 
 the pot and the coins jingle in young Mr. 
 George Cohan's pocket; but the author of 
 " The Comet," if he is wise, will not let that 
 trouble him in the least.
 
 OF JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE 
 
 (Lyric, March 9, 1908) 
 
 ONCE upon a time a recruit in a regi- 
 ment stationed at Peshawar, so we are 
 told by Kenneth Grahame, apphed for 
 leave of absence " in order to attend to family 
 matters of importance." Knowing that he 
 would desert if the leave were not granted the 
 colonel let him go. Presently he returned, 
 subdued but cheerful. The colonel ventured 
 to inquire if he had arranged matters in his 
 family to his satisfaction. And he replied: " I 
 got him from behind a rock." 
 
 There is something delightfully appealing 
 about this primitive method of dealing out 
 justice. It hardly accords with open plumbing, 
 taxicabs, churches, piano players, police de- 
 partments, Andrew Carnegie, and other appur- 
 tenances of modern civilization. But there 
 come times to all of us, though we stand on 
 the topmost rung of the ladder of evolution and 
 look down in scorn on the Cave man, when, 
 like the walrus, we " deeply sympathize." 
 William Vaughn Moody's " little man in trou- 
 sers, slightly jagged," advised quite perti- 
 nently that 
 
 II
 
 162 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 "If nature made you graceful, don't get gay, 
 
 Back-to before the hippopotamus: 
 If meek and godly, find some place to play 
 
 Besides right where three mad hyenas fuss: 
 You may hear language that we won't discuss." 
 
 Often perhaps it's a relative; Kenneth Gra- 
 hame preferred uncles; our own choice would 
 be aunts. But often too it is n't a relative at 
 all. There are various kinds of bores, and 
 men who employ little children in factories, 
 and assorted occupants of Circe's sty who 
 bring dead cigars into street cars, or pursue 
 women, or wear offensive dress waistcoats 
 with brass buttons, — " They 'd none of them 
 be missed." But alas! convention doth make 
 cowards of us all; and, like Zerlina in " Don 
 Giovanni," we would, and yet we would not. 
 We have not the courage of our convictions. 
 The weight of the social order is heavy upon 
 us, and we let our marked down victims live. 
 But Art is not reality, however hard it strives 
 to be in the Belasco drama. In the theater we 
 can indulge a sneaking satisfaction in the per- 
 formance of deeds of slaughter that we should 
 never dare do ourselves. We can be mad 
 hyenas to our heart's content and not feel a 
 bit the worse for it. In short, we can rejoice 
 that Rodion, in Laurence Irving's play, '' The 
 Fool Hath Said, There Is No God," chopped 
 old Gromoff up with an axe, knowing that it
 
 OF JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE 163 
 
 served the old swine jolly well right; and we 
 can not only refuse to be convinced that Rodion 
 ever repented of his deed but actually hope that 
 he did n't repent, without feeling that our 
 sentiments fail to do us credit. 
 
 Now those of us who are doomed by birth 
 and training to stagger through life under a 
 Pilgrim's pack of Puritan conscience may ex- 
 perience, along with these sentiments, a vague 
 presentiment that we ought to be ashamed of 
 them, much like the small girl in the advertise- 
 ment who is sure that a certain breakfast food 
 is bad for her because it 's so good ! There 
 must, we are confident, be something pro- 
 foundly immoral about a play that makes of 
 murder not a fine art, indeed, as De Quincey 
 did, but a thing of moral beauty, of ethical 
 satisfaction. For, mark you, this Fool who 
 said in his heart there is no God, also said, 
 " Moses gave the Ten Commandments ; he 
 didn't keep them." He was no fool, not he! 
 In spite of the author's feeble efforts to con- 
 vince us to the contrary in the last act, he was 
 never converted. Poor little Sonias trivial 
 superstitions and pack of stale conventions 
 that she called her religion could not impress 
 such a mind as Rodion s except with pity. He 
 gave himself up to the police that she might 
 keep her faith, not because he had lost his. 
 Or, if you object that he had no faith, his
 
 164 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 doubts, then, for doubts sometimes represent 
 a far deeper and more passionate capacity 
 for religion, for the higher Hfe, than any con- 
 formity to creed can do. And if he had acted 
 from any other motive he would have seemed 
 weak-kneed, a quitter. He was never sorry 
 that he killed the old man, and neither are we. 
 What, then, are we to think of such a play, a 
 successful plea for the morality of murder? 
 Should not the police be called in? This is 
 worse than "Mrs. Warren's Profession"! 
 
 Well, some of us won't think anything at all 
 about it, because the play as a story is, after 
 the opening act or two, dull and monotonous. 
 Nothing dull ever harmed anybody's morality. 
 If virtue would only wear scarlet the world 
 would be a better place at once ! And some of 
 the rest of us will think, " Lo, how difficult it 
 is to write a good play." 
 
 For the real trouble with Laurence Irving's 
 drama is that he dodges the issue, both the 
 technical issue and the ethical, or the working 
 out of his idea. It is the same old trouble. 
 How countless many dramas have gone to 
 ruin on the same reef! The lodestone moun- 
 tain in " The Arabian Nights " never wrecked 
 more ships. Perhaps the dramatists have too 
 long bowed down before false gods, invoking 
 Melpomene when it is the patron shade of a 
 Jevons or a Hegel they should seek, authors
 
 OF JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE 165 
 
 of dreary works on logic. Dreary, yes; but, 
 oh, how indispensable ! We talk of " the great, 
 irregular art of Shakespeare " (or Pater 
 does). As if there were ever anything more 
 remorselessly logical than " Othello " ! But 
 we maintain with our patronage in the theater 
 "Iris," and "Mrs. Dane's Defence," and 
 " The Thief," plays that march their plot 
 along with logical progression, each new step 
 following out of the last, each step a part of 
 the whole, but the whole not seen or realized 
 till the parts have all been fitted. It is not the 
 curse of " the well made play " that it follows 
 this logical course, but that it does nothing 
 more, that its whole is not worth the trouble. 
 
 Now, the technical problem in " The Fool 
 Hath Said, There Is No God " was clearly 
 stated in the first act. Rodion declared that 
 the moral conviction of a man who commits 
 a so-called crime for what he deems the good 
 of humanity is a better weapon of defence 
 against detection than the " nervous insensi- 
 bility " of the true criminal. Rodion had 
 moral conviction enough to reform Philadel- 
 phia, but he also had nervous sensibility 
 enough to stagger Philadelphia's most famous 
 specialist in that line, Dr. Weir Mitchell. 
 The battle between his moral conviction and 
 his tottering nerves, a purely subjective battle 
 within himself, made material for the actor's
 
 166 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 art — picturesque, and up to a certain point 
 interesting material. But it did not make 
 drama, which requires two wills, not one; and 
 after a time these nervous fits, these physical 
 collapses, grew deadly tiresome. The techni- 
 cal problem of the play was not really to 
 picture them but to set Rodions will against 
 that of Besac, the examining magistrate, to 
 weave around this struggling captive an ever 
 tightening net. And either from his desire to 
 elaborate the stellar role, which caused him 
 to dwell too much on the subjective emotions 
 of Rodion, or from his inability logically to 
 work out his problem with fertile invention, 
 Mr. Irving fails to develop this situation step 
 by step, to construct a drama that holds the 
 attention in ever increasing grip. 
 
 In a word, Bezac's cross questionings do not 
 hang together, do not lead each from each, do 
 not close in about the victim. They are hap- 
 hazard, scattered. To be sure, Bezac was sup- 
 posedly baffled by Rodion' s resistance; and 
 cross-examiners before now, in life, have ap- 
 peared to have no logical plan, to be ques- 
 tioning at random. But the drama is not life. 
 There is not the same interest felt in the fate 
 of a fictitious character as in the fate of a liv- 
 ing man, however humble he may be. A 
 drama to maintain its interest must concen- 
 trate, must develop, must move by accumu-
 
 OF JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE 167 
 
 lated force. Compare the big act of " The 
 Hypocrites," where the preacher is driven step 
 by step into an ever more hopeless position, to 
 be released only at the final moment, or of 
 " Mrs. Dane's Defence," where the lawyer, 
 by question after question, slowly, relentlessly, 
 inevitably, backs his victim up a blind alley 
 against the dead wall of a confession, with the 
 fourth act of Mr. Irving's play and the differ- 
 ence will at once be seen. That Mr. Irving 
 realized his problem is evident from Rodions 
 
 final " I , I ," interrupted just in time 
 
 by the false confession of the workman. But 
 this is a trick, a mere theatrical trick; and it 
 comes at the very end of an act without devel- 
 opment or suspense, too late to save it. 
 
 But Mr. Irving no less surely dodged his 
 ethical issue, failed to follow the logical devel- 
 opment of the idea behind his play. 
 
 " I was my own spider," says the hero of 
 one of Turgenieff's novels. " We Russians 
 have no other life problem," he goes on, " than 
 the cultivation of our personality! . . . With- 
 out having received from within any definite 
 direction, in reality respecting nothing, believ- 
 ing firmly in nothing, we are free to make of 
 ourselves whatsoever we will. . . . On the 
 other hand, we are great psychologists. Oh, 
 yes, we are great psychologists ! But our psy- 
 chology strays off into pathology; our psy-
 
 168 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 chology is an artful study of the laws of a 
 diseased condition and a diseased development, 
 with which healthy people have no concern. 
 But the chief thing is, we are not young — in 
 youth itself we are not young! " 
 
 Sad words, these; yet how true a descrip- 
 tion of Rodion! He was his own spider, 
 caught in the meshes of his wild, anarchistic, 
 humanitarian theory of justifiable homicide. 
 His brooding, introspective psychology was 
 but pathology too; and surely he was never 
 young; that thin, haggard face of his, a face 
 full of fruitless passions, the scarred battle- 
 ground of intellectual rebellions, which Mr. 
 Sothern made manifest, never knew the smile 
 of careless youth. But why, zvJiy was he never 
 young? How make him young again? How 
 free him from the web his own fate had spun? 
 How set him right with the social order? That 
 was the intellectual problem of the play — a 
 splendid problem, worthy of the highest 
 powers. 
 
 And this is how the author answered it! 
 He told Rodion that murder revenges itself 
 not on the conscience but the nervous system. 
 And he tried to tell us that the prattling pray- 
 ers of an ignorant girl and her mummeries be- 
 fore an ikon are sufficient to solve the intellec- 
 tual doubts of a man who is seeking with his 
 own hand to redress terrible wrongs that seem
 
 OF JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE 169 
 
 to him woven in the texture of the universe. 
 In the name of the Prophet, figs! The best 
 play that was ever written, to be sure, is not 
 an answer to any problem. For a play deals 
 with individual men and women, and it is only 
 by the collection of large numbers of individual 
 cases that anything like a law, a solution of a 
 problem, can be arrived at. Yet if a play is 
 to be of the slightest value, even as one in a 
 collection, it must be made of different stuff 
 than this. Mr. Irving is in the ridiculous posi- 
 tion of the man who used to answer the argu- 
 ments of an evolutionist by quoting the book 
 of Genesis. 
 
 So we swing around through seriousness 
 seriously to consider the absurdities of our 
 opening paragraphs. For, horrible as murder 
 is, greatly as it violates our civilized instincts, 
 there is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Irving 
 meant his audiences to sympathize with Rod- 
 ion in the murder of Gromoif ; there is not the 
 slightest doubt that the audiences do sympa- 
 thize, are perfectly satisfied to see the old swine 
 killed. There are warring instincts in us too, 
 the mad hyena heart beating beneath the 
 boiled shirt bosom, the right of the individual 
 rebelling against the might of society. Do we 
 not still talk of " the unwritten law " ? Rodion, 
 a Russian, saw human life held as anything 
 but sacred by the Government and the institu-
 
 170 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 tions about him. When conventional reHgion 
 quoted to him the Decalogue, he replied that 
 Moses slew the Egyptian. Even his friends 
 agreed that old Gromoff deserved to die; it 
 was only after they had seen the body, only 
 under the physical repugnance at a bloody 
 corpse, that the idea of his murder became hor- 
 rible to them. That is a good deal like saying, 
 Thou shalt not kill because it is n't pretty. 
 All our centuries of struggle up from the prim- 
 eval ooze have accomplished but little if that 
 is the best answer we can give. 
 
 Rodion was at odds with society. And it 
 was only by the social argument that he could 
 be answered. Little Sonia lisped, as she had 
 been taught to do, that our lives are given to 
 us by God, without the slightest conception of 
 what she meant. And though she recoiled 
 from Rodion before he gave himself up, she 
 was perfectly ready to marry him after he 'd 
 served his time in Siberia — as if that made 
 any difference! A far deeper and far more 
 searching answer must be given — and rightly 
 given — to convince a Russian revolutionist. 
 Perhaps he must needs be taken up on an ex- 
 ceeding high mountain and shown all the king- 
 doms of this earth, the webs of our destinies 
 interlaced, the consequences of our individual 
 acts going far down into ourselves, but also 
 far out to infinite space, involving others as
 
 OF JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE 171 
 
 they go. Even then the task of answering 
 him will not be easy, for his poor mind has 
 been cruelly warped and blistered by oppres- 
 sion. It was a task quite too much for Lau- 
 rence Irving. He could convince us that old 
 Gromoff was a swine, but he could not con- 
 vince Rodion that he had no right to kill 
 him. He could not adequately meet his moral 
 issue. 
 
 And it makes not the slightest difference 
 whether the faults of his play are the faults of 
 Dostoieffski's novel, " Crime and Punish- 
 ment," or not. It was his business to make a 
 drama, not to photograph a book. As a mat- 
 ter of fact the book is at once a minute picture 
 of Russian life and a minute study in morbid 
 psychology; it is not dramatic, and it differs 
 materially in incident from the play. It need 
 not be considered here at all. Mr. Irving's 
 drama is not likely to occupy a very prominent 
 place in Mr. Sothern's repertoire, though he 
 will possibly continue to present it now and 
 then. For if it has failed as a play it has not 
 failed as a means of showing the actor in a 
 new and striking impersonation, one that 
 marks a broadening of his scope, a deepening 
 of his powers. It was Rodion s theory that 
 the moral conviction of the man who mur- 
 ders for love of Humanity is a stronger asset 
 against detection than the nervous insensibility
 
 172 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 of the real criminal. Mr. Sothern was called 
 upon to suggest, then, the sufferings and the 
 mental conditions of a high-strung, intensely 
 nervous young man who has done a physically 
 horrible thing which has shattered all the 
 lower centers of his being, while the higher 
 centers — his will and his moral sense — re- 
 main untouched. It was a curious and a fasci- 
 nating problem the actor faced, and he met it 
 resourcefully and well. The quivering nerves, 
 the tortured imaginings, the ordinary processes 
 of thought and suggestion completely over- 
 thrown by what he had done he suggested with 
 almost painful fidelity. He seemed always 
 trembling on the verge of collapse, almost tor- 
 tured beyond endurance. And yet he sug- 
 gested, also, the indomitable will and fiery 
 purpose of this young idealist, the splendid 
 heart below the querulous outbreaks of nerv- 
 ous passion and the bloody deed; the fighting- 
 intellect, too, that resisted the Magistrate till 
 the last. In his Malvolio, Mr. Sothern showed 
 the rare ability he possesses of suggesting, be- 
 neath an exterior however grotesque, an innate 
 nobility. Again, as Lord Dundreary, the gentle- 
 man behind the " silly ass " was never quite 
 lost to sight. The outer aspect of both these 
 characters is comic. The outer aspect of 
 Rodion is tragic. Mr. Sothern has shown 
 that he can sustain both aspects on a plane of
 
 OF JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE 173 
 
 splendid dignity. And as Rodion his expendi- 
 ture of obvious method was less than it has 
 ever been before, his art more artless. It is a 
 long road from Zenda to modern St. Peters- 
 burg. Our hats should go off to the actor who, 
 in defiance of profits, has made the journey.
 
 OUR LEADING ACTOR 
 
 THE attempts to place the late Richard 
 Mansfield in a fixed artistic position 
 ought to be a sufficient warning against 
 that sort of criticism. He was the greatest actor 
 in America; he was the worst actor in Amer- 
 ica. And one critic, dodging the issue, an- 
 nounced that there were three kinds of actors, 
 good, bad, and Richard Mansfield. Yet there 
 is an eternal fascination to the human mind in 
 putting people into niches, in weighing genius 
 in a balance and placing a tag upon it. Heine 
 said: "Nothing is more foolish than the 
 query, Which poet is greater than the other? 
 Flame is flame and its weight cannot be deter- 
 mined in pounds and ounces. Only a narrow, 
 shopkeeper mind will attempt to weigh genius 
 in its miserable cheese scales." But Heine said 
 this just after he had remarked that Cervantes, 
 Shakespeare, and Goethe were the great trium- 
 virate of poets ! And since the deaths of Joseph 
 Jefferson and Richard Mansfield it has oc- 
 curred to many people to inquire. Who is our 
 leading actor? Probably if a vote could be 
 taken on such a question public choice would 
 fall on E. H. Sothern, who has for many years
 
 OUR LEADING ACTOR 175 
 
 been universally popular and who has more re- 
 cently devoted a large share of his energies 
 to what is best and finest in the drama. At 
 the risk of weighing genius in our cheese scales 
 let us see what claims Mr. Sothern has to this 
 proud eminence. 
 
 In pessimistic moments perhaps it seems as 
 if his chief claim were based on the fact that 
 there are so few to dispute the pedestal with 
 him. David Warfield, Henry Miller, Otis 
 Skinner, Robert B. Mantell? These, but who 
 else? Difficult as it is to express satisfactorily 
 in words, we all have a pretty definite concep- 
 tion in our minds of that peculiar quality in 
 an actor which raises him above his fellows 
 and makes him the master of our emotions. It 
 is an ease and certainty of technique; it is a 
 fluency and largeness of voice and manner; 
 it is a comfortable assurance of power in re- 
 serve and the ability to meet whatever demands 
 may arise; and, comprising, yet going beyond 
 these things, it is a personal sincerity and 
 eloquence, a sense of the man behind the mask, 
 of a mind and heart large, energetic, purpose- 
 ful and strong. Personality in this sense is a 
 far difTerent thing from the " personality " 
 of the young player who trades on a pretty 
 face or a pleasant smile; and it can no more 
 be divorced from acting than from any other 
 branch of art, or from life itself. And, judged
 
 176 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 by this conception of greatness, the pedestal of 
 preeminence would surely not be overcrowded 
 were we to place all Mr. Sothern's rivals upon 
 it, beside him. The group would not resemble 
 the hosts of Artaxerxes. However, as each 
 of his rivals seems lacking in one or more of 
 the qualities that go to make up Mr. Sothern's 
 artistic equipment, perhaps it is only fair to give 
 him the benefit of his versatility, and if pos- 
 sible his lone place at the top of the group. He 
 would be the last to want this position if he 
 did not deserve it, and the last to intimate that 
 the way was barred to any other to reach a 
 place by his side. If certain of his rivals could 
 widen their repertoires and give rein to their 
 own artistic impulses instead of dwelling year 
 in and year out with a single part or two, his 
 place, even to-day, might be far less secure. 
 
 Comparisons are odorous chiefly to super- 
 sensitive noses. Mr. Warfield and his real 
 friends will not smell out offence in the state- 
 ment that until he has played a larger number 
 and a wider range of parts than Levi, Von Bar- 
 wig and IVes' Bigelow his position must re- 
 main below Mr. Sothern's. Granville Barker, 
 during a trip to New York to decide that he 
 did n't want to be director of the New Theater, 
 visited the Stuyvesant Theater and came away 
 to talk about " Warfield's marvelous tech- 
 nique." It is marvelous. Within the narrow
 
 OUR LEADING ACTOR 177 
 
 bounds of the characters he has so far played 
 it seems almost flawless. And no acting on 
 our stage to-day can compare with Mr. War- 
 field's for immediate emotional effect. But 
 does Mr. Warfield create the impression of an 
 amplitude of power sufficient to compass other 
 and more poetic, more imaginative, more in- 
 tellectual roles? Perfect as he is in his genre, 
 has he yet demonstrated the larger gifts to give 
 us a figure like Don Quixote? Hardly. After 
 he has played Shy lock (and his Shy lock is 
 going to restore a fund of comedy to the old 
 play that will be a revelation, unless all signs 
 fail) perhaps Mr. Warfield's name will have 
 to be written larger. That is everybody's 
 hope. 
 
 Henry Miller's contribution to the contem- 
 porary stage has been of late rather stage 
 management than acting. Not to forget his 
 very human and illuminating performance as 
 Stephen Ghent, the total effect of " The Great 
 Divide " was more striking than any single 
 performance in it. The ensemble of " The 
 Servant in the House " is another triumph for 
 his skill. In this generation, when a system 
 that boasts it has put our theater " on a busi- 
 ness basis " has in fifteen years been unable 
 to discover or train a single stage manager 
 worthy of the name, such a genius as Mr. 
 Miller's is not lightly to be passed over. A 
 
 12
 
 178 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 good stage manager needs imagination quite 
 as much as the actor, and imagination of a 
 wider and more comprehensive kind, to see 
 not one part, but all parts, to dream the struc- 
 ture out of the blocks. Mr. Miller is, indeed, 
 so good a stage manager that he realizes bet- 
 ter than any of our players, save Mrs. Fiske, 
 how much the spirit of the stage has changed, 
 how now the good actor is representative, a 
 medium for the author's meaning, not a figure 
 to strut impressively in the lime-light. Mr. 
 Miller is putting on good plays, and putting 
 them on well, putting them on better, in fact, 
 than any other manager. Just now, in an age 
 when ignorant vulgarians dominate our stage 
 from their Broadway business offices Mr. Mil- 
 ler's influence for good can hardly be over- 
 estimated. But in the present instance we are 
 estimating acting only, not stage management; 
 and as an actor, Henry Miller surely lacks 
 something of the charm and grace that Mr. 
 Sothern commands. 
 
 If exuberant vitality and ease, grace and 
 fluency of diction were the sole test, Otis 
 Skinner would easily carry off the palm. 
 How much Mr. Sothern's Hamlet would gain 
 by the other man's sheer physical vitality 
 in a climax and his triumphant elocution! 
 There is promise, too, in Mr. Skinner's past. 
 In Bowker's " Francesca " he was a figure
 
 OUR LEADING ACTOR 179 
 
 to be remembered. There is never any doubt 
 of his reserve power or his fund of resource- 
 ful technique. And he has a mind of no com- 
 mon order. Yet Mr. Skinner comes to us 
 year after year always in a new play — one 
 play, and not always a good play. He has for 
 us no repertoire, no characters peculiarly and 
 affectionately associated with himself. That 
 is partly our fault, for we have been altogether 
 too long, in New York at any rate, in appre- 
 ciating Otis Skinner at his real value. No 
 actor, whether his own manager or not, ean 
 afford the productions and company for a 
 repertoire unless his public following is ex- 
 tensive. Mr. Skinner and his manager prom- 
 ise better things for him in the future. But 
 at present his leadership is not complete. 
 
 Robert B. Mantell is conserving " the classic 
 repertoire." Dear old " classic repertoire," 
 thrice blessed, admired, never to be too much 
 praised, tiresome old " classic repertoire," 
 how many crimes have been committed in thy 
 name! For it is a crime to be dull; it is the 
 one artistic sin for which there is no forgive- 
 ness nor a drop of water in hell. Many a play- 
 wright down below sits on a red hot stove 
 reading his own dull plays while a little devil 
 prods him with especial good will to keep him 
 awake. And some of these playwrights bear 
 names not unknown to the text-books. Yet
 
 180 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 somebody has got to conserve the " classic 
 repertoire." Aye, as long as the race shall 
 last that repertoire must be kept alive; say 
 what we will, think what we will, deeper than 
 speech or thought in us is an instinct which 
 demands it. And just now we are offering up 
 Mr. Mantell on the altar of our instinct. We 
 ought to be grateful. Probably we are. Mr. 
 Mantell has a fine voice and a big presence 
 and a grasp on the traditional requirements 
 and means of expression of the " classic reper- 
 toire." He is doing his task admirably. But 
 there is a drama of to-day and of to-morrow 
 that interests us. A leader must know of that 
 drama too, must interpret and shape it for us. 
 
 There is one actor who does, and she is an 
 actress — Mrs. Fiske. Easily the foremost 
 of our women players, everything that can be 
 done with the head she does, and some things 
 that the head cannot do. Her Tess, her Becky 
 Sharp, her Hedda Gabler were figures that 
 will live in the memory of those who saw them 
 as long as life lasts. It may be her appeal is 
 too dominantly intellectual to command the 
 widest public following; but a wide following 
 is not always essential for a leader. Certainly 
 Mrs. Fiske, both as actress and producer, 
 fighting against heavy odds, has been a pio- 
 neer, has warred on the side of progress, has 
 done as much as any other single person in
 
 OUR LEADING ACTOR 181 
 
 the American theater to keep our standards up 
 above the dust of dollars where the Powers 
 that produce forever strive to drag them. 
 Mrs. Fiske has done a man's work in our the- 
 ater, and done it better than most men ; which 
 is humbly submitted to the Suffragettes for an 
 argument! But still we cannot quite bring 
 ourselves to the point of making a hard and 
 fast comparison between an actress and an 
 actor, of weighing Tess and Don Quixote in 
 the same cheese scales. Something still in- 
 heres in the masculine art of more dominant 
 power, if not of more perfect workmanship, 
 that makes us turn instinctively to it for lead- 
 ership, and forbids the comparison. Is this a 
 shocking confession? None the less it must 
 stand. 
 
 So we come to E. H. Sothern, who lingered 
 in New York to produce " Don Quixote " at 
 great expense when he might have been 
 playing " Dundreary " on the road to $16,000 
 a week. (Indeed, his last week of '' Dun- 
 dreary " in Boston brought him $20,000.) 
 One of those neat little critical bromides is, 
 " Mr. Sothern is essentially a comedian." Mr. 
 Sothern is essentially a conscientious and 
 painstaking and ambitious artist. In the days 
 of " Zenda " and " An Enemy of the King," 
 when a thousand girlish hearts beat high at 
 every matinee and sweet young things averred
 
 182 THE .\MERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 that they " could die Hstening to Sothern say 
 ' Darhng! ' " it was perhaps fortunate for him 
 that he was a comedian. He escaped a trag- 
 edy. He weathered the perils of picture book 
 romance and rode out upon the great, deep sea 
 of " Hamlet." Then came the engagement 
 with Miss Marlowe, which bettered his elocu- 
 tion, as an engagement with Miss Marlowe 
 must do for any player, and widened the field 
 for his achievement and ambition. Since 
 then Mr. Sothern has shown no sign of paus- 
 ing and his acting has steadily deepened in 
 truth and power. His Hamlet has mellowed, 
 grown sweeter, graver, more thoughtful and 
 more elastic in its lighter moods. There are 
 touches of poetry in his Villon that were not 
 there five years ago. And in his newer parts, 
 even when the plays have failed, he has dis- 
 closed new powers as an actor. 
 
 As Rodion in " The Fool Hath Said, 
 There is no God," he was called on to sug- 
 gest a mental struggle, a tortured mind in 
 combat with an iron will. And he suggested 
 it surely, vividly, and without the sense of 
 effort that has sometimes been apparent in 
 his acting. And he turned from the comic 
 absurdities of Dundreary to do this thing. 
 As Don Quixote he had a more difficult task, 
 that of making plausible and appealing in the 
 flesh one of the greatest figures in literature,
 
 OUR LEADING ACTOR 183 
 
 a figure already created in the imagination 
 of his audience and set in a place apart. To 
 perform this task required imagination of 
 him and a fine understanding of Cervantes's 
 Knight, and eloquence and technique. He 
 struck the right note at once with his make-iip, 
 the lean, pathetic, middle-aged figure, the wild, 
 bright, vision-haunted eyes, the hollow cheeks 
 — at once grotesque and sad. And through 
 all the comic absurdities of the part and the 
 farcical episodes of the play he never for one 
 instant offended the lover of Cervantes's Sor- 
 rowful Knight, because his Don never for one 
 instant lost his pathetic dignity, his chivalrous 
 bearing born of a beautiful and chivalrous 
 soul. There are times in life when you laugh 
 at Cervantes's book; there are other times 
 when you weep. At moments of Mr. Sothern's 
 performance you know both moods — when he 
 accepts the Duke's ironic invitation with a 
 sweet courtesy Mallory might have envied, 
 when he sits dejected in his cage, " a captured 
 eagle," the scoffers cry, but how much more 
 like a captured eagle than they guess! 
 
 There is hardly a passage in all literature, 
 unless it be the parting of Launcelot and Guen- 
 ever in Mallory, to equal for pure pathos the 
 overthrow of Don Quixote by the Knight of 
 the Silver Moon. " Dulcinea is the fairest 
 woman in the world, and I the unhappiest
 
 184 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 knight on earth; but it is not meet that my 
 weakness should disown this truth. Strike 
 with your lance, Sir Knight!" For some 
 strange reason, in the play it was not the 
 Knight of the Silver Moon who vanquished the 
 Don. His shield bore red crosses, like a pack- 
 age of surgeon's plaster. And it was inevita- 
 ble that the pathos be less poignant. Yet Mr. 
 Sothern's cry, '' Dulcinea is the fairest woman 
 in the world!" rose faintly above the stage 
 hubbub with a stab of eloquence, and the es- 
 sential meaning, the tragedy and poetry of the 
 overthrow were borne home to every heart, 
 though everything till then had been but farce 
 to many in the audience. The capacity to 
 achieve an effect like that belongs only to the 
 few. It stamps its possessor as a leader. 
 
 Mr. Sothern's repertoire during the season 
 of 1907-8 included " Hamlet," a Shakespear- 
 ian classic; " Lord Dundreary," a specimen of 
 early mid-Victorian drama and a monument 
 to his father; "If I Were King," a modern 
 romantic play; " The Fool Hath Said," a psy- 
 chological drama ; and '' Don Quixote," an 
 attempt by an American playwright, Paul 
 Kester, to give stage life to a great figure of 
 world literature. He staged all these plays 
 himself, sufficiently sumptuously and with in- 
 telligent feeling for their different atmos- 
 pheres and demands. To present them all he
 
 OUR LEADING ACTOR 185 
 
 had to train and maintain a large company, 
 at considerable expense. That Mr. Sothern's 
 acting is without faults or that it realizes to 
 the full his own or his critics' ideal nobody will 
 maintain. He still tends always to drag his 
 tempo. He still falls into his old tricks now 
 and then of recurring over-emphasis, produc- 
 ing an artificial and monotonous effect. He 
 still lacks sometimes what seems almost a phys- 
 ical vitality to master a climax or sweep a 
 speech up to the point of emotional discharge. 
 You have that indescribable feeling inside of 
 you as you Hsten of something rising, rising, 
 rising, and not quite getting there — an un- 
 comfortable feeling of almost. But he is an 
 actor whose command of his art is constantly 
 growing, whose devotion to it, and to the best 
 in the drama, is deep, vigilant, and sincere, and 
 whose repertoire and achievement are already 
 wider, more varied and more stimulating to 
 all classes than that of any other American 
 actor. The best that we can wish for him and 
 for ourselves is that he may have to fight per- 
 petually to maintain his leadership.
 
 FALLING IN LOVE WITH ONE'S 
 
 WIFE 
 
 (Empire, August 31, 1907) 
 
 IT all happened because Mme. Dupre did n't 
 read the " Ladies' Home Journal." Had 
 she done so she would have known that 
 there are certain things all young girls should 
 know, preferably from the lips of their moth- 
 ers. And thus enlightened, little Trixie Dupre 
 would hardly have entered into the matrimon- 
 ial state with her guardian, Gerald Evers- 
 leigh, so lightly, nor been so willing to go into 
 a dark room for developing purposes with M. 
 Valboure (was there not a pun in the French 
 original?) nor otherwise comported herself 
 in a manner rather hard to reconcile even with 
 an age before apples were a table fruit. As 
 Cayley Drummle told Tanqueray, " Of all 
 forms of innocence, mere ignorance is the least 
 admirable." Certainly, seriously considered, 
 " My Wife," an adaptation from the French 
 of Gavault and Charnay, by Michael Morton, 
 and shown for the first time in America at the 
 Empire Theater by John Drew, tends to prove 
 Cayley entirely in the right.
 
 FALLING IN LOVE WITH ONE'S WIFE 187 
 
 However, nobody but a moralist would seri- 
 ously consider this Britonized ebullition of the 
 French sense of humor. It is a pretty safe 
 guess that in the original Trixie's blind inno- 
 cence of ignorance was taken for granted as a 
 working hypothesis (it was pragmatically true, 
 because it worked well in the play, to be learned 
 in the advanced philosophy!). And, in the 
 original, doubtless the fun of the piece was 
 largely drawn from the efforts of the Gerald 
 of the English version to keep his ward away 
 from his mistress; and later from her naive 
 betrayals of her ignorance of the meaning 
 of matrimony. Readers of Guy de Maupas- 
 sant know that French literature is quite cap- 
 able of extracting humor from this sort of 
 thing, and though the English adapter has 
 converted the mistress into an actress of 
 passable propriety and toned down the naive 
 betrayals of Trixie into the least compass 
 possible, his plot still rests on Trixie's igno- 
 rance, and we must do him the kindness to 
 grant him his hypotheses. Some literal- 
 minded souls will still fail to find it shriek- 
 ingly funny that a girl of eighteen, even 
 though she has been brought up in France, 
 can have been married a month without real- 
 izing the oddity in the world's eyes of sepa- 
 rate suites or the impropriety of showing 
 ardent letters from a lover. But why worry
 
 188 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 over the literal-minded? They do enough 
 worrying themselves, goodness knows! 
 
 Granted Trixie's innocence, then, and here 
 is what happened in the English version: 
 Trixie Duprc, aged eighteen, had to be married 
 within six weeks or lose a fortune left by an 
 old maid aunt. Dupre pere wished her to 
 marry So and So, but she loved Rene Falan- 
 dres, whom Pere Dupre did not approve. So 
 she came to her guardian's flat, while he was 
 entertaining an actress at supper, with a plan 
 of action. It was no less than a marriage with 
 this guardian, Gerald Ever sleigh (a confirmed 
 London bachelor), to be annulled by divorce 
 when Rene returned from a trip to foreign 
 parts. That would save the fortune and give 
 her Rene as well. Gerald finally was forced 
 into acceding to her weird proposal, and the 
 second act shows them in a Swiss hotel on 
 their ** honeymoon." Here Trixie carries on 
 with every man in sight, to the demolition of 
 her husband's British dignity, forces him into 
 a duel, and when Pere and Mere Dupre finally 
 arrive on the scene gives the whole scheme 
 away by naively sympathizing with her hus- 
 band because he has no view of Mount Blanc 
 from his chamber window. That sends Gerald 
 back to London in disgust, leaving the girl 
 with her parents. 
 
 But her parents then forsake her too, so she
 
 FALLING IN LOVE WITH ONE'S WIFE 189 
 
 flies to Gerald just as he has another of those 
 nice Httle dinners arranged, so dear to every 
 bachelor, as every playgoer knows. Gerald, 
 forgetting that he is really but holding her in 
 trust for Rene (they did these things better 
 in the old Welsh days; see book one of the 
 Mabinogion), finds he loves her after all, and 
 kisses her for the first time on the mouth. 
 He has fallen in love with his own wife, which 
 seems always to be an hilarious idea in the 
 French drama. Rene comes back, and in an 
 amusing scene where each man entirely mis- 
 understands the other finally manages to make 
 it known that his heart has changed: he met 
 a new love in Morocco, to be precise (again 
 we recall Maupassant), so there is no divorce, 
 and presumably Gerald eventually sees Mount 
 Blanc. 
 
 Such is the story, a Gallic morsel of farce, 
 flimsy, unreal, with much of its fun inevitably 
 gone. Probably even in France much de- 
 pended on the actors ; here, much more depended 
 on them. In London, it is said, the required 
 crispness, speed and verve were imparted, and 
 the role of Gibhy, friend of Gerald, a stupid, 
 sleepy-headed, good-hearted young nobleman, 
 something between a silly ass and a musical 
 comedy Tom Pinch, was played by an artist 
 who made it stand up above the others and kept 
 the house in a roar. But this conception of
 
 190 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 the part was too much for Ferdinand Gotts- 
 chalk, who played it in his usual fussy, eccen- 
 tric manner, not at all suggestive of nobility, 
 and rather more of insolence than indolence. 
 He was amusing at times; but then again at 
 times he was n't, and those times stuck out. 
 Miss Billie Burke, a little English ingenue im- 
 ported to play Trixie, displayed the dearest 
 profile on Broadway, but a very monotonous 
 and sophisticated imitation of innocence. Pos- 
 sibly nobody could play the part with complete 
 satisfaction after her sixth year. As for the 
 rest of the cast, they labored ponderously 
 where speed, crispness, the Gallic Touch, was 
 their only salvation. Mr. Drew himself, of 
 course, as Gerald, is much too expert an actor 
 thus to err. He was crisp, polished, effective; 
 he carried the climaxes single handed. He was 
 the jolly bachelor, he was the indignant hus- 
 band, finally he was the almost ardent lover. 
 It is always a bit hard for Mr. Drew to be ar- 
 dent in a play — and " My Wife " is only a 
 farce, after all. But he labored in rather a 
 barren vineyard. His talents are worthy a 
 more significant vehicle, and there were mo- 
 ments on the stage when he could be fancied 
 as thinking so, too.
 
 CURING A PESSIMIST 
 
 (Lyric, September i6, 1907) 
 
 " The drama was supposed to be written in blank verse, that 
 is, good, wholesome, commonplace language the wrong end 
 foremost, after the manner of Sheridan Knowles." 
 
 [From "Thirty Years passed among the Players," by Joe 
 Cowell, Comedian: New York, 1844.] 
 
 WE met our friend the Pessimist, who 
 usually has a grouch on the capaci- 
 ties of the dramatic form, and he 
 was smiling blandly. 
 
 " What is this ? " we cried. " An accident ? " 
 
 " Oh," said he, " one cannot remain pessi- 
 mistic all the time, even in a community of 
 optimists ! Besides, I 've seen James O'Neill's 
 revival of * Virginius.' " 
 
 " And that makes you more hopeful about 
 the stage ? " 
 
 " Infinitely," he answered, " infinitely. I am 
 always more hopeful of the future when I get 
 a good dose of the past. That makes you sure 
 history can't repeat itself; it could do nothing 
 so bad again. Did it ever strike you that Dar- 
 win ought to have been the most cheerful of 
 men? He was confident of the infinite inferi-
 
 192 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 ority of his ancestors, and didn't pretend to 
 like Shakespeare." 
 
 " Come, come," said we, " leave that latter 
 pose to G. B. S." 
 
 The Pessimist shrugged his shoulders. " As 
 you like," he said, " though I don't see why 
 he should have the enjoyment of it all to him- 
 self. It 's rather a nice pose, a kind of literary 
 blasphemy that helps the soul a whole lot. But 
 will you ? " 
 
 He pointed toward a door. We would, so 
 he led the way, and after he had shaken hands 
 with a press agent and nodded to an actor and 
 spoken a word well understood by the waiter, 
 qualified by the adjective " two," he pointed 
 to a portrait of Forrest on the wall, then 
 brought his fist down on the table and forth- 
 with delivered himself of the following re- 
 markable discourse. We set it down as nearly 
 as possible verbatim. A phrase here and there 
 may be our own, to cover a slip in memory, 
 and there were interruptions caused by the re- 
 curring visitations of the waiter which are not 
 indicated. In substance, however, what he 
 said may here be found, though without, alas! 
 the peculiar nasal twang of his utterance in 
 excited moments, an outcropping, we suspect, 
 of New England ancestry. 
 
 "You see that man Forrest?" he began. 
 " What do you suppose his effect would be on
 
 CURING A PESSIMIST 193 
 
 an audience to-day if he came back in his old 
 repertoire? Dickens once remarked on the 
 pattern of Macready's waistcoat, ' such a 
 happy combination is not hkely to occur again.' 
 Probably not; styles have changed in waist- 
 coats. When Joseph Kilgour appeared in ' The 
 Movers ' with a pink one the stage manager 
 had a fit and the audience tittered with derisive 
 mirth. But would Macready's acting be any 
 less out of date than his waistcoat? Some 
 things about it, I grant you, would be fresh and 
 true — enunciation, vocal technique, imagina- 
 tion, the unified conception of character that 
 subordinates all details to the central idea, all 
 that belongs to the art of acting everywhere 
 for all time. But the old school lung power 
 standard for heroism, how would that strike 
 us now? As ridiculous, I tell you, simply 
 ridiculous! You remember how Kean used to 
 terrify even the members of his company by 
 the indescribable violence of his performance 
 as Shylock, and how Macready before he went 
 on for Shylock's great scene would brandish 
 a heavy ladder in the wings, uttering oaths 
 meanwhile, to work himself up into a state of 
 panting rage. These old actors used to grasp 
 their audiences by the scruff of the neck and 
 haul them up into a pitch of emotional excite- 
 ment. To be heroic was to appear six feet tall, 
 with a distorted face and the voice of a mad 
 
 18
 
 194 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 megaphone. Tragedy was all fire and thunder 
 and reverberating blank verse. They did n't 
 impersonate human beings, these men — they 
 impersonated volcanic eruptions: Edwin For- 
 rest played Vesuvius, not Virginius. And shall 
 we suppose that we change our style of waist- 
 coat but go right on being contented with the 
 same old style of dramatic wear, which is so 
 much more important? " 
 
 Here we interrupted. " Is it so much more 
 important?" we inquired. "The stage is but 
 amusement, while our waistcoats " 
 
 *' Piffle ! " said the Pessimist, " you 're going 
 to quote Carlyle, and I won't stand it ! Under 
 every waistcoat beats a heart, and behind every 
 drama and every piece of acting there ought 
 to be an idea, the idea of representing life truly, 
 sanely, helpfully. Now, there 's just one way 
 to do that, either for dramatist or actor — he 
 must follow the fashion of his time. As Pin- 
 ero, in an address on Stevenson as a dramatist, 
 remarked, there 's at least one sure rule in 
 playmaking, you cannot pour new wine into 
 old bottles. ' Virginius,' for instance, is a 
 busted old bottle. It won't hold wine. If 
 somebody should write a play to-day just like 
 ' Virginius,' every bit as good of its kind, no- 
 body would go to see it, because for us it 
 would n't be life, it would be hopelessly stilted, 
 artificial. And if some actor should arise to
 
 CURING A PESSIMIST 195 
 
 play it in the good old ' heroic ' fashion he 
 would move nobody except, perhaps, some old 
 chap who lingers into the Twentieth Century 
 from ante-bellum days, because now we do 
 not accept such acting as a representation of 
 life; so how can we be expected to get human 
 emotions from beholding it? 
 
 " Where are the dramas of the Eighteenth 
 Century? Just three of them, one by Gold- 
 smith and two by Sheridan, have survived on 
 the boards. Where are the dramas of the first 
 half of the Nineteenth Century? Go and see 
 * Virginius,' smell the mould upon it and you 
 will be answered. Where are the ' bread and 
 butter ' plays of Robertson, those plays that 
 swept the English stage like wildfire forty 
 years ago, made Lady Bancroft famous and 
 buried a bread knife in the heart of the bombast 
 drama which had preceded them? Dead, all 
 dead. ' Caste ' and * School ' and the rest of 
 them would seem as artificial to us to-day al- 
 most as * Virginius.' An old Norwegian with 
 whiskers, pacing up and down till he wore a 
 path in the carpet planning how he could write 
 a play without a soliloquy, how he could put 
 life on the stage not half way but wholly, not 
 conventionally but significantly, how he could 
 make the drama speak as much with the voice 
 of authority as the novel or the poem, did 
 that ! Yes, he did that, and the English critics
 
 196 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 crucified himj or tried to, when he got trans- 
 lated into their language. But it was too late. 
 The new bottle was made, the new wine of the 
 modern world went into it, and that is where 
 we go now for our drink. Waiter, the same 
 again ! 
 
 " Oh, I don't mean," he continued, " that 
 only the plays of his Whiskers are worth while, 
 or that all plays now must treat of his subject 
 matter. The world is wide and wherever three 
 are gathered together " 
 
 " One of them a woman? " we interjected. 
 
 " As you like ! Wherever three are gathered 
 together there is a possible drama. What I 
 do mean is that to this modern world the forms 
 and fashions of other days on the stage have 
 no reality, so that a play cast in their mould now 
 has no reality for us and any acting in it, how- 
 ever fine according to the old standards or the 
 new, will leave us cold and unmoved. This 
 talk about fine acting as if it were something 
 that can be divorced from the play makes me 
 tired. Suppose Sembrich at her recital should 
 sing ' Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,' in her 
 very best voice, with all her exquisite vocal 
 art, would you thrill with emotion? You might 
 (if you knew enough about singing) admire 
 intellectually her vocal skill, but you would 
 wait for ' The Miller and the Brook,' or * The 
 Nut Tree ' for an emotion. Why should we
 
 CURING A PESSIMIST 197 
 
 assume that acting can be effective or worth 
 while in a play which is not true? 
 
 " I '11 tell you why, because some of us are 
 still children in the theater. We lay aside with 
 our wraps everything but our ' primitive cred- 
 ulity ' and tend to swallow whatever is set be- 
 fore us without question. We like this or that 
 player instinctively for his personality. We 
 are absorbed in the story the play tells and 
 what the story is, how it is told, whether true 
 or false, probable or improbable, matters very 
 little. That is why Shakespeare, who has lived 
 because of his truth of characterization and 
 his masterly skill in developing his plots from 
 this characterization, was in his own day re- 
 garded by a public hungry for a story as no 
 better perhaps than his contemporaries. That 
 is why ' Virginius ' could be hailed as a great 
 tragedy in verse almost at the very hour when 
 Keats and Shelley were making themselves 
 immortal. That is why to-day a string of 
 rubbish, false, absurd, silly, like ' Nancy Brown 
 of Harvard ' can attract big audiences and only 
 in the vicinity of Cambridge a vegetable. 
 Harry Woodruff lies on his stomach under a 
 property elm reading a book and the dear girls 
 go into ecstasies. The play tells a false, foolish 
 story and the dear public who have n't been 
 to college swallow it with the ready faith of 
 children listening to a nursery rhyme. Is it
 
 198 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 possible that a second jump into a bram- 
 ble bush will not restore the wise man's 
 optics? Of course it isn't! What an absurd 
 idea ! " 
 
 " Still we 're not all like that, you know," 
 we put in timidly. 
 
 '* Of course we 're not, of course we 're 
 not!" shouted the Pessimist. ''Didn't you 
 catch me smiling? Do you suppose I 'd smile 
 if we were? Did n't the public forty years ago 
 wake up and hail Robertson ? Why? Because 
 they saw real doors and windows, real bread 
 and butter, real cups and saucers on the stage, 
 and people that were almost real too, who 
 talked almost real language and had almost 
 real emotions. Then at last the audiences be- 
 gan to have almost real emotions also. It was 
 pretty shallow reality, but people none the less 
 began to suspect that the stage, instead of 
 being something apart from life, could be a 
 picture of and commentary upon it. The lung 
 power tragedian heard his death knell. Audi- 
 ences had begun to use their brains. Did n't 
 Irving himself, though he arose with the torch 
 of Macready, have to find for himself a new 
 style of expression to fit the new ideas until 
 he almost revivified dead dramas by his living 
 way of playing them? No, sir; as soon as the 
 public began to reflect on the manner of telling 
 the story there was revolution all along the
 
 CURING A PESSIMIST 199 
 
 line. It was like turning Darwin loose in an 
 old time camp meeting. 
 
 " And the good work has gone steadily and 
 hopefully on. To-day a fair portion of the 
 public not only reflects on the manner of 
 telling a story but even on the matter of it. 
 Some of us are getting almost grown up. 
 Sometimes the story actually interests us less 
 than the people in it, than the idea behind it. 
 What do these people think and feel, why do 
 they act as they do? First we insist that to 
 win our sympathies at all they shall speak in 
 our idiom, live and move in the understand- 
 able atmosphere of our time, be real to us as 
 life itself is real to us. And after that, after 
 we have accepted them as human beings whom 
 we can comprehend, whose doubts and fears 
 and joys and sorrows are like our own, or what 
 our own might conceivably be, after, in short, 
 we have been put in a state where the commun- 
 ication of emotion from the actors to us is pos- 
 sible, we watch their development through the 
 drama, we watch and feel with them as we 
 would with our friends. It is not so much 
 now what they are doing as how they are doing 
 it and how they are developing under the 
 strain for better or worse that holds our at- 
 tention and makes the playwright's fame as 
 an author worthy of serious attention. No 
 false heroics, no strut and platform eloquence,
 
 200 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 no world of the theater unhke anything in 
 life is possible to-day if the dramatist would 
 win the worthiest part of the public. He can 
 make no false steps, interject no soliloquies to 
 help his tale along, rely on no vocal splurges, 
 no trite conventions. He must be unrelent- 
 ingly true to the life and ideas of his times. 
 The hero to-day is not the figure in a tunic or 
 glittering mail who can raise a chest tone to 
 the galleries and shatter a chandelier. He is 
 the man who, like one of us in voice and dress 
 and mode of life, in inherited ideas and con- 
 ventional environment, yet unlike us dares lis- 
 ten to his own soul and follow its voice through 
 thick and thin. The hero of the stage to-day 
 who can win our sympathies and thrill our 
 hearts and lift us up to the heights is not Vir- 
 giniiis, but Dr. Thomas Stockmann." 
 
 " That 's pure, unadulterated Shaw," said 
 we. 
 
 " Is it? " said the Pessimist. *' Well, I dare 
 to be in the right, even with Shaw ! Have you 
 the audacity to tell me that you can go to * Vir- 
 ginius ' after seeing ' The Great Divide ' with- 
 out a positive revulsion of feeling, a cringing 
 of your perceptive faculties away from such 
 a travesty of life? Have you the audacity to 
 tell me that after suffering with that man and 
 that woman in Mr. Moody's play, after trying 
 to plunge to their motives, after straining to
 
 CURING A PESSIMIST 201 
 
 readjust your outlook on life to meet the new 
 problems they present, you can raise one little 
 tear for Virginiiis and his fool daughter, you 
 can find one glimmer of interest? Have you 
 the audacity to tell me that after listening to 
 the vivid, nervous, condensed, lifelike speech 
 of Mr. Moody's characters you can listen with 
 any patience to the bombastic, iambic prose 
 of " 
 
 '' Hold on," we cried, stung by his tone. 
 *' We tell you nothing of the kind. You Ve 
 not given us a chance to say a word anyhow." 
 
 *' Very good, don't," said he. " Now I 'm 
 not saying that the drama of the future will 
 be thus or thus. Maybe our best to-day will 
 be as artificial and old fashioned in thirty years 
 as * Caste ' is now. I 'm only saying that it 's 
 what it is to-day, and being what it is the man 
 who writes plays and the man who acts them 
 has got to accept it if he wishes to hold our 
 attention, win our sympathies, stir our emo- 
 tions. The man who revives Sheridan 
 Knowles, the man who tries to act like Mac- 
 ready, the man who writes a modern play in 
 the style of other days is doomed to failure. 
 He is pouring new wine into old bottles. He 
 is wasting precious juice. We still have horse 
 cars in New York and we still have plays 
 equally anachronous. They both pay too. But 
 their days are numbered. This is the age of
 
 202 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 electricity and Truth. The stage has got to 
 measure up to reahty if it wants to hold the 
 attention of thinking men and women. In the 
 drama, as in religion, the dear old days of 
 * primitive credulity ' are numbered." 
 
 "What about the poetic drama?" we in- 
 quired timidly. 
 
 " What about it ? Who said anything about 
 it?" he cried, reaching for the check. "We 
 were talking about ' Virginius.' "
 
 KISSES AND DAVID BELASCO 
 
 (Belasco, December 3, 1907) 
 
 ONCE it was a bed, now it is a kiss, that 
 Mr. Belasco cannot get along without 
 in his dramas. Having discovered 
 that beds are also used to sleep upon, the Wiz- 
 ard has discarded them from his list of the- 
 atrical properties, and adopted kisses. The 
 Belasco kiss differs from every other variety. 
 "When all is said, what is a kiss?" asked 
 Cyrano, and he replied to his own question 
 that it was " a rose red dot upon the letter i in 
 loving," and many other delectable things be- 
 sides, which so moved the heart of the fair 
 Roxane that she cried out, " Come and gather 
 it, the supreme flower ! " But there the matter 
 ended. She did n't say anything more about 
 that particular kiss all the rest of the play. 
 The i was dotted, the page turned. Roxane, 
 however, was French. Mr. Belasco's recent 
 heroines are not. Such carpc diem philosophy 
 is impossible for them. They go on talking 
 about the kiss till the end of the chapter. It 
 is evidently a tremendous event in their young 
 Jives. The Girl of the Golden West, who had
 
 204 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 tended bar in a California mining camp for 
 years without a single lapse from the chaste 
 standards of Dowie, Jr., which is one of the 
 miracles of modern drama, had no regrets 
 that her lover was a highwayman. But she 
 could n't get over the fact that he " had her 
 first kiss." She dwelt upon this awful loss 
 with pathetic insistence. The little Rose of 
 the Rancho, who had been *' laughing in the 
 leaves " for quite some time amid amorously 
 inclined young men of Spanish extraction, was 
 equally ignorant of the dotted i till her false 
 lover kissed her. And then she ran to the 
 shrine of the Virgin and wiped the vile thing 
 from her lips. And in " The Warrens of Vir- 
 ginia " we find the same allegiance to the Pro- 
 hibition party among the fair daughters of the 
 F. F. V.'s. Agatha Warren, who in common 
 with the rest of her family talks about " South- 
 ern chivalry " and such things to a degree that 
 almost approaches realism, is quite as unkissed 
 as her California sisters. And after her 
 Northern lover has taught her the proper way 
 to dot an i, it is that which rankles in her bosom 
 when she learns his treachery. The mere fact 
 that he has violated the hospitality of her home, 
 that he has brought ruin on the Southern 
 cause, disgrace upon her father, that he has 
 done, though in the stern duty of war, a 
 despicable thing and shattered her ideal of him,
 
 KISSES AND DAVID BELASCO 205 
 
 is apparently as nothing beside the fact that 
 he has kissed her. It is that she rages about, 
 walking down stage toward the fireplace. 
 For her the i seems to be measured by the size 
 of the dot. 
 
 Now perish the thought that we should seem 
 to speak lightly of so important a matter as 
 a lady's kiss! It is a subject, to be sure, that 
 we would not wish to appear too wise about; 
 but we would not appear unduly ignorant 
 either. And when The Girl of the Golden 
 West sets so much store by something which 
 neither her environment nor her instincts 
 would have taught her was of supreme impor- 
 tance we are a bit skeptical. Again we are 
 skeptical when Miss Agatha of Virginia 
 naively tells Lieutenant Burton that down 
 South a man does n't kiss a girl, nor a girl a 
 man, till it 's very awfully important and mean- 
 ingful. That is doubtless supposed to be an- 
 other manifestation of " Southern Chivalry." 
 Whether it is chivalrous or not is largely a 
 matter of individual temperament! Whether 
 it is true or not is another question, and one 
 that cannot be decided except by the evidence 
 of those who manifestly won't come into court 
 to testify. But a certain gentle and kindly 
 skepticism will surely not be construed as an 
 insult, even in Virginia. Rather may it be 
 taken as a compliment! If Southerners talked
 
 206 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 a little less about their chivalry they might win 
 more credence for it as something different 
 and finer than the ordinary gentleman's re- 
 gard for his women folk the world over. As 
 it is the matters of sex probably absorb quite 
 as much of the attention of Southern men and 
 women as of Northern, and the Southern girl 
 is probably no less instinctively on her guard 
 against the sweet, amorous assaults of her 
 chivalrous young cavaliers, and no more ten- 
 acious in resistance. 
 
 The whole question is one of very consider- 
 able unimportance. If there 's anybody who 
 does n't know that the kiss of first love, the 
 betrothal embrace, is a high and holy thing, 
 a civilized community is no place for him. 
 And if there is anybody who does not know 
 that there are also other kisses sweet and harm- 
 less; that the hymn of love's omnipotence 
 never was and never can be chanted with 
 meeting lips alone, he is a very curious sort of 
 person. Mr. Belasco is overworking this 
 kissing business. He has tried to give to some- 
 thing superficial and episodic the air of depth 
 and finality. He has turned a simple mani- 
 festation of half physical passion into a dra- 
 matic convention and sought with it to achieve 
 an effect of emotional reality. The attempt 
 is so characteristic of his methods — we say 
 his methods advisedly, though William De
 
 KISSES AND DAVID BELASCO 207 
 
 Mille wrote " The Warrens of Virginia " — 
 that it serves to point a lesson quite as well 
 as anything else in this play at his theater. 
 For Mr. Belasco, widely heralded though he 
 be as a realist, is as a matter of fact no realist 
 at all. The achievement of true poetry perhaps 
 requires the brightest talent and the most de- 
 voted effort. But next to that the achievement 
 of realism is the most difficult task for the ar- 
 tist, one that requires insight, imagination, 
 unflagging purpose, unflinching adherence to 
 the truth. Realism is truth to the facts of life, 
 and realism on the stage must be truth to the 
 facts of life mirrored in an art form the most 
 trying of all art forms to bend to reality. The 
 playwright who would be a romantic or who 
 would create melodramas is allowed consid- 
 erable license of plot and incident; he can use 
 various of the dramatic conventions with 
 which the stage bridges the gulf between fact 
 and fiction. But the realist cannot do this. 
 No less than characters and scene must inci- 
 dent and plot be utterly natural. There must 
 be truth to life in every department. Now, 
 does anybody suppose it is easy to be true to 
 life in one department alone, to say nothing 
 of all? Two lovers quarrel in a room. The 
 room looks just like a real room. But what are 
 his feelings? What are hers? A searching 
 interest in human nature is required to furnish
 
 208 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 an answer; yet the realist must find that 
 answer, else he is no realist. The writer of 
 melodrama or romance may indicate some con- 
 ventional mode of feeling — Mr. Belasco's 
 heroine talks about her first kiss — and hasten 
 on with his story; and we are no wiser than 
 before. But the realist cannot do this, his 
 passion being to get at the truth. He may have 
 to peel off layer after layer of conventional 
 utterance, but at last he will wring from his 
 characters a true confession. And we have 
 learned something. And just so the incidents 
 of his play will be contributory to character, 
 not *' action," to the development of a picture 
 of human life that interests us because it is 
 human life, tingling with reality, not to the 
 development of a story that interests us be- 
 cause we are excited to learn what will happen 
 next. And yet the realist cannot ignore his 
 story and remain a successful artist on the 
 stage. Therefore he must win a technique so 
 clairvoyant that it is not visible, enabling him 
 to tell a story that seems not to be told but to 
 happen. The successful realist must, in short, 
 be neither a prosaic man nor a trivial one, but 
 a man of searching mind and superb crafts- 
 manship. Far from resting on superficial de- 
 tail, his chief interest will lie in the deepest 
 places of the heart. It is because his interest 
 rests on surface detail and his insight is limited
 
 KISSES AND DAVID BELASCO 209 
 
 to superficial reality that David Belasco is not 
 a realist. 
 
 It is quite true that Mr. Belasco has never 
 very stoutly maintained the contrary. A man 
 of the theater in the most intimate sense of 
 the term, all his life a stage director, producer, 
 dramatist, manager, with a wonderful scenic 
 imagination, and a sense for the more obvious 
 phase of dramatic style unparalleled on our 
 stage, so that nothing he shows can wholly 
 fail of conviction, he has for many years been 
 putting on plays to the best of his ability, en- 
 tertaining a vast public and winning for him- 
 self a unique and honorable fame. He has 
 never preached a philosophy of life nor an- 
 nounced that he had one to preach. Perhaps 
 life does not greatly interest him, his interest 
 in the theater is so tremendous and so absorb- 
 ing. He is not the stuff that preachers are 
 made of, and all realists are preachers of a kind. 
 What Mr. Belasco has done has been to 
 write pieces for the play-house, not criti- 
 cisms of life. Well aware that such pieces to 
 be successful or to satisfy his own standards 
 must, however, superficially resemble life, he 
 has bent his mind to devise them with all pos- 
 sible air of probability and with all possible 
 fidelity of pictorial setting. Especially in the 
 latter respect he has succeeded as no other man 
 of our time has. The sitting-room of IVes' 
 
 14
 
 210 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Bigelozv's house in " A Grand Army Man," 
 or the beautiful outdoor scene with its trees 
 and saplings and broken gun carriage and 
 running brook in " The Warrens of Virginia," 
 or the interior set in the same play, which, by 
 the simple but imaginative device of a window 
 opening from the great room into the hall, 
 allows the audience to see the tall clock, the 
 stairs and the heads of people passing in that 
 second room and begets an overpowering sug- 
 gestion of the spaciousness and solidity of the 
 mansion — are all eloquent proofs of his scenic 
 power, a power that is not without its touch 
 of poetry too, and never without the painter's 
 taste. And in a less marked degree he has so 
 ordered the exits and entrances of all his play- 
 ers, guided their manners and gestures, worded 
 their speeches and put in sequence their acts 
 as to create again the sense of surface reality. 
 So deftly and so carefully has he done it, in 
 fact, that the unthinking have been deceived 
 time and again at his dramas and supposed 
 that the pleasure they were deriving from his 
 well-told stories was the pleasure derived from 
 the true picture of life, from thoroughgoing 
 reality. And because of that fact it becomes 
 the critic's duty to point out that his plays in 
 the main are not reality. It would be silly to 
 disparage the romance or the melodrama — 
 good, healthful art forms both, and always to
 
 KISSES AND DAVID BELASCO 211 
 
 be enjoyed. It would be equally silly to ask 
 or expect Mr. Belasco to write like Sudermann 
 or Ibsen. It would be absurd to belittle his 
 fine achievement because it is not something 
 different. And no carping critic even from a 
 college English department would wish to see 
 his plays any less successful. All that is asked 
 is that it be borne in mind that his plays are 
 not deeply reality, that they are good stories, 
 not emotionally nor intellectually good dramas 
 — in short, that a popgun is not the crack of 
 doom. 
 
 That a hair, however, sometimes " divides 
 the false and true " in drama as in philosophy 
 " A Grand Army Man " bears witness. In 
 that play, aided and inspired by the genius of 
 David Warfield, himself a creator no less than 
 his playwright and a man of reasoned and 
 sound convictions about his art, Mr. Belasco 
 has, by a mere shift of the emphasis, gone 
 down through his surface details to the true 
 realism beneath, instead of employing the de- 
 tails to hide the threadbare conventions of his 
 story. In that play, thanks to Warfield, the 
 emphasis has been placed on character; the 
 story, none too fresh nor skilfully told, has 
 been subordinated and simplified till the char- 
 acter interest dwarfs and hides it. What is 
 conventional in the play gives place to what 
 is real. And a true picture of American life
 
 212 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 has been painted, a true and lovely criticism 
 spoken, if it is not indeed rather an apprecia- 
 tion than a criticism. Hence " A Grand Army 
 Man " becomes a contribution to American 
 drama, while " The Warrens of Virginia," 
 like so many other of the Belasco productions, 
 is only an ephemeral entertainment. 
 
 As such it can be mildly recommended to 
 theatergoers who are not too insistent on fresh- 
 ness of plot or incident. If some of them are 
 a little bored at the sentimental love scene be- 
 tween General Warren and his wife, knowing 
 full well that it is just there to heighten the 
 pathos of the climax, when it is certain long be- 
 fore the act is over that the General's happiness 
 will be dashed to earth by the news of the 
 Union ambush, we can only bid them be of 
 good cheer — this is a melodrama they are 
 looking on, and besides Frank Keenan as the 
 General is acting very well indeed, displaying 
 a power to suggest tenderness hitherto unsus- 
 pected. Work such as Mr. Keenan does in this 
 play is not lightly to be passed over. He is 
 still a little angular in style, a little acid, a 
 little suggestive of the man whose effects are 
 somehow cramped in the creation, so that they 
 do not come from him quite with ease and spon- 
 taneity. But his range is wider in this part 
 than it has ever been before, his personal pres- 
 ence more charming and his emotional expres-
 
 KISSES AND DAVID BELASCO 213 
 
 sions far greater. It was always his gift to 
 visualize a character and subordinate all de- 
 tails to that picture and its underlying signi- 
 ficance. He could see a part whole. But as 
 General Warren he sees a part large as well, 
 and he is able to make it tell not only pictorially 
 but emotionally, to make it live as a person, 
 not a picture. This testy, proud, tender, 
 courtly, narrow-minded, big-hearted Confed- 
 erate commander of his is the one breathing 
 figure in the play, the one character that exists 
 after the final curtain has fallen, however in- 
 terested you may be in the fate of the others 
 while the story is in full race. 
 
 And because it is a living character, and 
 because Mr. Keenan plays it so well, perhaps 
 you will leave the theater wishing that the last 
 act had been the first. Sitting under the roses 
 before his Colonial mansion five years after the 
 war, worn out with ploughing — he, a Warren 
 of Virginia, forced now to work in his own 
 fields ! — the General's story has just begun. 
 The curtain is just rung up on the tragedy of 
 the old South. No melodrama can depict ade- 
 quately the great struggle of '6i to '65; no 
 drama, however deep and serious, can pack 
 that tremendous bloodshed into the poor traf- 
 fic of an evening on the stage. But the realist 
 could take the Warrens on their impoverished 
 plantation after the war was over and in a
 
 214 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 story as simple as he chose get at the 
 depths of their fine, proud hearts and write 
 a play worth while. After all the General 
 is most appealing and most picturesque just 
 when the present play is finishing. After 
 all the present story is most interesting just 
 when it is most superficial, conventional, and 
 unsatisfactory — at the final scene when the 
 Northern lover is forgiven for his treach- 
 ery. We suspect he never was forgiven. But 
 if he was, it was not after a five-minute inter- 
 view — no, it was after prayers and tears and 
 struggle and heartache. These struggles and 
 these heartaches are Agatha's real drama. We 
 should like to see them depicted, though not 
 by Miss Charlotte Walker. We should like to 
 see the real story of the Warrens of Virginia 
 set forth upon the stage. After the fiction we 
 should like the facts. We are grateful for the 
 former, but there is a need it does not satisfy, 
 a deeper hunger the Belasco drama does not 
 meet.
 
 THE CASTLES VS. MR. POLLOCK 
 
 (Lyric, December 20, 1907) 
 
 SIR AUSTIN FEVEREL remarked that 
 Woman will be the last thing civilized 
 by Man. If that is true it is due not so 
 much to the quality of the material as to the 
 clumsy methods of the workman. Eternal war- 
 fare has never been conducive to the growth 
 of civilization. What is needed is a peace- 
 maker thrice blessed. And that the sexes are 
 in eternal combat Mr. Meredith is not alone 
 of our great thinkers in affirming. No less 
 profound a philosopher and mighty an artist 
 than Egerton Castle (also Agnes ditto) has 
 declared much the same thing in that classic 
 of recent fiction, " The Secret Orchard," which 
 a few seasons back was what R. R. Whiting 
 would call one of the six best smellers. Mr. 
 Meredith, indeed, is so impressed with the 
 greatness of the combat that he breaks into 
 verse about it — into verse that can almost be 
 read in the original. In his poem called " A 
 Preaching From a Spanish Ballad" he 
 remarks :
 
 216 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Never nature cherished woman: 
 She throughout the sexes' war 
 
 Serves as temptress and betrayer, 
 Favoring man, the muscular. 
 
 And when the Spanish lady's roving husband 
 comes home to surprise her with a lover, to 
 whom she has boasted that she is " no help- 
 less woman," but a free agent, like Magda, 
 she cowers before him. 
 
 'Round his head the ancient terrors, 
 
 Conjured of the stronger's law, 
 Circle, to abash the creature 
 
 Daring twist beneath his paw. 
 
 How though he hath squandered Honour! 
 
 High of honour let him scold: 
 Gilding of the man's possession — 
 
 'T is the woman's coin of gold. 
 
 Well, perhaps! But woman will never be 
 raised to the rarefied atmosphere of masculine 
 civilization by keeping it so. That was the way 
 they did things back in the Middle Ages, when 
 mankind had reached about that stage of de- 
 velopment now represented by popular fiction 
 and drama. In the book which the Chevalier 
 Geoffrey de La Tour Landry made for the 
 " teching of his doughters " in 1371 are many 
 " fayr examples " of how the Erring Sister 
 was regarded by professing Christians in those 
 days of chivalry and cathedrals. Caxton made
 
 THE CASTLES VS. MR. POLLOCK 217 
 
 a translation of the book, and he was the first 
 to put it into print, in 1484. Here is a typical 
 passage which must have edified the Httle 
 daughters of the Knight of the Tower very 
 much and taught them sweet charity. Out of 
 our great reverence for Professor Brander Mat- 
 thews we shall reproduce Caxton's spelling. 
 The chapter is headed, " How before this tyme 
 men punysshed them that were difTamed." The 
 good knight seems a little wroth that Erring 
 Sisters are no longer treated so badly as once 
 they were in France. He sighs for the " good 
 old days " prior to 1371 ! 
 
 " And yet," he says, " I ne knowe but fewe 
 Reames this day, sauf the Reame of Fraunce 
 and of Englond, and in the lowe or basse 
 Almayne, but that men doo justyse of them 
 when the trouthe and certaynte of the dede 
 may be openly knowen, that is to wete, in 
 Romayne, in Spayne, in Aragon, and in many 
 other Reames. In somme places men kytte 
 of theire throtes, and in somme they be heded 
 before the peple. And in other places they be 
 mewred or put bytwene two walles. And 
 therfor this Example is good and prouffytable 
 to every good woman." 
 
 Alack, there was one form of torture un- 
 known to this kindly old flower of French 
 chivalry ! Horrible as it is to be " mewred," 
 or put between two walls, it is worse to be put
 
 218 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 between two covers, two castle walls, as it 
 were. There the poor wronged damsel is not 
 only heaped with scorn and dismissed with- 
 out charity but she is absolutely inundated by 
 a sea of rhetoric, drowned in a welter of hifalu- 
 tin bombast. Our first impression after read- 
 ing the book was one of utter bewilderment 
 that such a work could ever have found a pub- 
 lisher or a public. We spoke of this to the 
 very literary critic, and he said: "Humph; 
 you had oughter read * Three Weeks.' " Our 
 next impression was one of admiration for 
 Channing Pollock, who, while using so much 
 of the language of the book, has contrived by 
 boiling each speech down seventy five per cent to 
 make it sound like human utterance and who 
 has accomplished the more Herculean task, 
 while using the characters and episodes of the 
 book, of endowing them with some qualities of 
 interest and some show of reality. We shall 
 never forgive Mr. Pollock, if he did it of his 
 own volition, for selecting such a book to 
 dramatize. But once having dramatized it, we 
 take ofif our hat to his accomplishment. 
 
 A third impression there was after reading 
 the novel (besides, of course, drowsiness) — 
 a renewed conviction that of all the cants of 
 criticism none is less worthy of attention and 
 respect than the shudder of horror at the 
 " happy ending." The happy ending to a story
 
 THE CASTLES VS. MR. POLLOCK 219 
 
 that begins unpleasantly is generally supposed 
 to be "inartistic" and "illogical." As a matter 
 of fact, in at least fifty cases out of a hundred 
 it is nothing of the kind. " The wages of sin 
 is death? " Not at all. Nothing is more cer- 
 tain than that sin often commands very good 
 wages. And the scarlet woman is n't the only 
 sinner on whom a lot of pity is wasted. It is 
 the glaring plainness of this fact which makes 
 the task of the moralist so hard. But, far more 
 than this, what makes the average tragic end- 
 ing in reality illogical and inartistic (because 
 untrue) is the vast difference in time between 
 popular literature and life; the morals and 
 motives of such fiction are the morals and mo- 
 tives of the Middle Ages, or of the Cave men. 
 The life of most of us is lived in the pres- 
 ent generation. It is entirely to Mr. Pol- 
 lock's credit that he discovered this fact. For 
 " The Secret Orchard " is an excellent case 
 in point. Its morals and motives are of the 
 Middle Ages — if they ever existed in time 
 or space ! — even of the Caves. When Lieu- 
 tenant George Dodd of the U. S. N., who 
 represented manly strength and Anglo-Saxon 
 resolution and a smooth face and everything 
 dear to the sweet girl readers of the Castle 
 brand of fiction, fell madly and devotedly 
 in love with little Joy, it was a pleasant thing 
 and in every way creditable to the young
 
 220 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 gentleman. But when, on discovering that his 
 sweetlieart, whom he loved with all the devo- 
 tion of his great, broad, manly Anglo-Saxon 
 nature (42 chest, 6 inch expansion, please) 
 had in her innocence and trustfulness once 
 fallen a victim to the arch enemy, Man, what 
 did he do? Did he pity her? Did he make 
 any efifort to provide for her, to safeguard her 
 future? Did it enter his head to forgive her, 
 to go on loving her? Oh, no! He at once 
 reverted to type, he became a Cave man. 
 Somebody else had taken a nibble of the fruit 
 he wanted all to himself, so it no longer had 
 any value for him. His great, strong Anglo- 
 Saxon nature rose manfully to the occasion 
 and he cried out to Cluny, the seducer, within 
 hearing of the girl, too, " Bastard Stuart as you 
 are — would you palm off your discarded mis- 
 tress upon me ! " The book tells us that these 
 noble sentiments were " spat " at Cluny, and 
 they were followed by a blow. The next morn- 
 ing this manly representative of Saxon chiv- 
 alry killed Cluny in a duel, and went off to 
 America without any further attention to poor 
 little Joy, who just about then had some slight 
 need of a friend or two. 
 
 And that is the ending which Mr. Castle 
 deems " artistic " and " logical," and which he 
 demands be restored to the play before the 
 stage version is shown elsewhere. As far as
 
 THE CASTLES VS. MR. POLLOCK 221 
 
 the book is concerned, the only logical and 
 artistic ending is the waste-basket. As far 
 as the play is concerned, Mr. Pollock's artistic 
 sense is quite correct, because he doubtless 
 realizes that not the loss of chastity but the 
 loss of the desire to be chaste is what matters ; 
 that already white flags are being borne between 
 the opposing lines in the battle of the sexes; 
 that truly civilized men hold it logical rather 
 that all honor be " coin of gold " than that a 
 bimetallic standard prevail ; that love which is 
 worthy of the name forgiveth all things; 
 finally, that even in Christendom there are be- 
 ginning to be Christians. In the book Joy 
 continued to love her seducer. That would 
 be an excuse for the Lieutenant's failure to 
 marry her. But nothing can excuse his base 
 desertion of her. And nothing but the most 
 primitive and conventional and fiction-fed mind 
 can find any pleasure in his melodramatic duel 
 with Cluny. It is the act of a Cave man, mad 
 with the selfish lust of revenge. It is barbaric 
 and silly. It has nothing to do with the stand- 
 ards of to-day. The critics who object to Mr. 
 Pollock's ending, where Joy, who has come to 
 loathe her seducer, is forgiven by her lover 
 without debate, and where Cluny, instead of 
 being shot down, is permitted by the Lieuten- 
 ant very sensibly to work out his salvation 
 through remorse, are Cave men critics. They
 
 222 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 are pleading for a barbaric standard which 
 has too long prevailed in the play-house, the 
 standard which helped Maeterlinck to feel, after 
 an evening at the theater, that he had been 
 spending three hours with his ancestors. 
 
 Guy de Maupassant knew better than this, 
 and nobody has ever accused him either of lack 
 of artistry or undue optimism. Do you recall 
 the brave little Jewess in "Mile. Fifi," who was 
 only " une putain"? She went back to her 
 life of shame after her escape from the Prus- 
 sians' dinner party. But, we learn at the close, 
 " elle en fut tiree quelque temps apres par un 
 patriote sans prejuges qui I'aima pour sa belle 
 action, puis I'ayant ensuite cherie pour elle- 
 meme, I'epousa, en fit une dame qui valut au- 
 tant que beaucoup d'autres." 
 
 Ah, well, Lieutenant Dodd was n't " un pa- 
 triote " ; he was only an American. Some- 
 times there is a difference. Nevertheless it 
 is impossible to escape the conviction that Mr. 
 Pollock's ending gives to the play of " The 
 Secret Orchard " whatever significance that 
 drama has, for it is his personal reaction on 
 the situation, his contribution of a " criticism 
 of life " to a work that otherwise is conven- 
 tional and unreal. In his earlier play, " The 
 Little Gray Lady," Mr. Pollock tried to put 
 on the stage a bit of life observed at first hand, 
 a story of middle class life in Washington,
 
 THE CASTLES VS. MR. POLLOCK 223 
 
 among Government employees. He lacked then 
 the technical skill he has shown in " The Secret 
 Orchard." But that earlier play was the more 
 worth while just because it was observed at 
 first hand, just because it was a piece of the 
 author's experience. It is profoundly to be 
 hoped that in his next play he will return to 
 the fount of original inspiration, to himself — 
 and not to any such trashy, stale, and feeble 
 book by another as " The Secret Orchard." 
 Mr. Pollock is young; he is one of the growing 
 number of American young men who are be- 
 ginning to get a hearing on our stage — Percy 
 Mackaye, William De Mille, George Middle- 
 ton, Owen Johnson, Austin Strong, and others. 
 The next decade will find our native drama in 
 their hands. And it cannot be too urgently 
 pleaded that they stick to reality, to life as 
 they see it; that they follow each his gleam 
 and knuckle under as little as possible to the 
 supposed standards of the box office, the ideas 
 of ignorant managers ; that they consent with 
 protest to the easy dramatization of ephemeral 
 fiction. It is n't in such fiction that a worthy 
 drama is to be found; it is in the life they 
 share and observe; still more it is in their 
 inmost selves. 
 
 But all this while we have said nothing about 
 Joy's eyes. They must have been very remark- 
 able eyes, like those Mr. Hichens once wrote
 
 224 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 about. The hero of " An Imaginative Man " 
 married a woman to find out the deep secret 
 of her mysterious, unfathomable eyes. He 
 found it. It was that there was n't any secret. 
 They were just eyes. So he was greatly bored, 
 and, being a Hichens hero, he went to North 
 Africa, where he fell in love with the Sphinx 
 and dashed out his brains against the left paw 
 of that somewhat unresponsive sweetheart. 
 So Cluny soothed his conscience during his 
 conquest of Joy by finding the devil in her eyes. 
 The Lieutenant, on the other hand, read there 
 only sweetness and innocence. Miss Josephine 
 Victor, who played the part, compromised on 
 black rings. 
 
 Moral : When you see what you want, don't 
 make excuses.
 
 THE ROUGH DIAMOND AS HERO 
 
 (Daly's, January i 8, 1908) 
 
 LET us sing of the playwright and his 
 balloons. Styles change in balloons as 
 in everything else, but the scientific 
 construction of the balloon remains the same — 
 a light, tight covering inflated with gas or hot 
 air. A decade ago the prevailing style was a 
 pretty pink, the color of an Anthony Hope 
 romance. " Made in Zenda " had to be the 
 hall-mark on the bag. Now there has been 
 a radical change, and a yellowish, whitish, 
 brownish tinge is demanded, a mixture of 
 gold, alkali dust, and Nevada or Arizona mud. 
 " Made in a Western mining camp " is the re- 
 quired hall-mark. But exactly the same prin- 
 ciple makes the balloons go up — gas. As an 
 aeronaut Mr. Paul Armstrong has made two 
 successful flights. Now, at Daly's Theater, he 
 has attempted a third, with a cheering multi- 
 tude on hand to ease away on the ropes and 
 watch, with craning necks, the hardy adven- 
 turer soar to a dot against the blue empyrean. 
 Only, for some reason or other, the balloon 
 refused to soar. Ballast bag after ballast bag 
 
 15
 
 226 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 of jokes and " funny lines " were thrown out 
 of the car. Still the balloon did not tug at its 
 anchor ropes, still it did not ascend. And at 
 last the suspicion grew to a certainty that some- 
 thing was the matter with the gas ; its specific 
 gravity had gone wrong; it had become as 
 dense as the surrounding atmosphere, the nor- 
 mal atmosphere in which we live and move 
 and have our being with our two feet on the 
 earth. 
 
 A chemical investigation was at once or- 
 dered, and the presence discovered in the tanks 
 of a strange, foreign element suspiciously like 
 oxygen. How it got there none of the ex- 
 perts could say, unless its presence was to be 
 explained by a kind of chemical telepathy, for 
 this oxygen is none other than the common 
 sense of the public. The whole matter is one 
 to engage Mr. Thomas's attention. At any 
 rate its presence in the tanks was quite suffi- 
 cient to spoil the flight of the balloon, and the 
 good gas bag " Society and the Bull-dog," in- 
 stead of voyaging among the clouds and hob- 
 nobbing with Orion, remained fast at its an- 
 chorage, wabbling groggily. And, with the 
 best wishes in the world for the success of 
 Mr. Paul Armstrong and the native drama, the 
 judicious observer cannot feel sorry. For when 
 the native drama would base its claims to at- 
 tention on any such false and jingo pictures
 
 THE ROUGH DIAMOND AS HERO 227 
 
 of American characters and conditions as those 
 of this play in particular, and in the main of 
 the whole school of alkali dust dramas, failure 
 is the only fate deserved. Gas it is that in- 
 flates them, gas that makes them go up; and 
 when the gas is exhausted they shall come down 
 and hang inverted in a treetop, like the nest 
 of last year's oriole. 
 
 One of them there is, to be sure, which marks 
 an honorable exception, " The Great Divide." 
 And it is not the intellectual subtlety nor the 
 nervous beauty of the language nor the high 
 poetic quality of the images scattered through 
 it that makes this drama an astonishing ex- 
 ception so much as it is the simple common 
 sense of its characterizations. Intellectual 
 subtlety and nervous prose and poetic imagery 
 are not to be expected save from an unusual 
 playwright, a man of wide culture and fine 
 training and deep imagination. It is not aston- 
 ishing when these qualities are absent, even 
 from successful plays. But simple truth to 
 fact, ordinary common sense in characteriza- 
 tion and incident, ought to be the possession 
 of every dramatic author, high or low, or else 
 his right to scribble plays at all may be called 
 very seriously in question. " The Great Di- 
 vide " was a drama that contrasted the " rough 
 diamond " West with the much abused East ; 
 but Mr. Moody, being neither a rank senti-
 
 228 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 mentalist nor a blind man, realized that rough 
 diamonds, even when they are miners, are the 
 better for cutting and polishing; and that the 
 inherited dignity from generations of men and 
 women of gentle breeding, the refinements of 
 a civilized community, the moral conscience of 
 a developed people, are not lightly to be put 
 aside, are not easily to be worsted, indeed are 
 not to be worsted at all, but only infused with 
 blood a little fresher and more primitive. Mr. 
 Moody's type of the West was a drunken miner 
 bent on rape; of the East, a fine woman with 
 instincts strong yet refined, with a mind alert 
 and open, yet guided by, if you like, a New 
 England conscience. That this man was a 
 type of the whole West, or this woman a type 
 of the whole East, it would be folly to assert. 
 But at least no facts were juggled with, com- 
 mon sense was not put to the blush, the ab- 
 surd spectacle was not presented of culture 
 made a mockery and crudeness glorified into 
 one of the cardinal virtues. 
 
 Common sense, however, seems to be the 
 last quality prized by the playwright; hence 
 the alkali dust school of drama, a thing of 
 warped perspective, false characterization, ex- 
 aggerated sentimentality and copious crudities. 
 Perhaps Bret Harte was to blame in the be- 
 ginning, laying, as he did, over the realism 
 of his tales the shimmer of his fun and the
 
 THE ROUGH DIAMOND AS HERO 229 
 
 golden glamor of his romance. That fun and 
 that romance were surely their own justifica- 
 tion, and " The Luck of Roaring Camp " will 
 remain imperishable. But in other hands and 
 in the coarser medium of drama the fun is 
 cheapened, the romance dies away, and now 
 even the realism has vanished, giving place to 
 an absurd conventionality. What truth or 
 value is there in all this pack of " Western " 
 plays with which we in the East have been 
 deluged, all of them informing us how noble 
 is the rough-shod miner, how feeble and rotten 
 are we? Has anybody dramatized the Western 
 Federation of Miners? Have we seen Moyer, 
 or Haywood, or Pettibone as the hero of a 
 play, or Harry Orchard? Has it ever been 
 intimated in one of these dramas that men and 
 women of gentle breeding and refined tastes 
 and fine ideals do now and then dine, yes, and 
 even dance, in New York restaurants such as 
 Sherry's, and that beside them one of these 
 " rough diamonds," however noble his heart, 
 would cut rather a sorry figure, would repre- 
 sent, after all, a lower round in the ladder of 
 civilization ? The real problem is n't to get 
 down to him, but to get him up. 
 
 Once upon a time one of these " rough 
 diamonds " from Arizona, a man who there is 
 every reason to believe was eminently respect- 
 able in morals and had never put a bomb
 
 230 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 under anybody's front gate, came to New 
 York, lunched at Sherry's, and was conducted 
 through the prominent streets of the city. 
 Finally he said: "Me for the desert again! 
 I can't stand this. I want room to think in ! " 
 One imagines Paul Armstrong's bosom heav- 
 ing with joy at this remark, his soul expand- 
 ing with an answering ardor. But a chilly 
 little stubborn fact will not out of the way. 
 No doubt this miner went back to Arizona; 
 no doubt he thought and thought and thought 
 till his brains were numb, like the babes in 
 Toyland. But Peterkin's question remains to 
 be answered, " What good came of it at last? '* 
 Alack ! his thoughts were wasted on the desert 
 air! He may have been a mute, inglorious 
 Kant, for all we can say. But there were no 
 citizens of Konigsberg to set their watches at 
 4.30 when he went by, little and sober and 
 mild. No old Lampe on threatening days 
 " was seen anxiously following him with a 
 large umbrella under his arm, like an image 
 of Providence." No manuscript that should 
 shake the world with its ideas was cumulating, 
 mountains high, in his study. At most he 
 increased a little with his pick the world's store 
 of yellow gold for us to scramble and fight 
 for in the stifling market-place. And while 
 he was thinking his great thoughts out there 
 in the desert to mingle with the alkali dust in
 
 THE ROUGH DIAMOND AS HERO 231 
 
 symbolic union, right here in the Eastern 
 metropoHs Professor Dewey was lecturing at 
 Columbia on the Relativity of Truth to scores 
 of young men, and noted physicians were work- 
 ing at the problem of preventive medicine, and 
 a myriad books were being written out of 
 which some tiny percentage of the far more 
 precious ore of human knowledge will be ex- 
 tracted for future generations to profit by. 
 Indeed, this task of contrasting the rough-shod 
 West with the degenerate East, the mining 
 camp with the metropolis, is not so simple and 
 easy as the alkali dramatists seem to suppose. 
 And let us, however charmed we may be, and 
 quite legitimately charmed, with the pictur- 
 esqueness and humor of mining camp or 
 ranch, in the name of common sense have done 
 with supposing that the task is accomplished 
 when a deluge of sentimentality has been poured 
 through the drama and the rough diamond 
 takes his daughter back to the gulch, satisfied 
 that his way is the best way and conscious 
 that the author would have us think so, too. 
 
 In the face of this fundamental falsity, cer- 
 tain other faults in *' Society and the Bull- 
 dog " assume a relative unimportance. Yet 
 they are not unimportant to Mr. Armstrong 
 if he is to continue to write plays with a hope 
 of any significant success. And the most cry- 
 ing of these faults, perhaps, is not so much his
 
 232 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 careless and clumsy observation — or at least 
 his rendering — of the usages of polite society, 
 even of the near-society represented in this 
 play, as his fatal trick of mixing up farce and 
 burlesque and drama in a jumble absolutely 
 fatal to illusion. A certain unity of style is 
 demanded, even in an alkali drama. If we are 
 to accept as serious the noble sentiments and 
 sturdy fiber of the rough diamond hero, there 
 must be some seriousness in the portrait of the 
 society which, by contrast, brings his splendid 
 character into the light. If the one is n't true, 
 the other will not seem so. The entrance of 
 the tenderfoot in the first act of the new play, 
 coming into a Nevada mining camp clad in 
 comic opera green riding clothes that he never 
 under any circumstances would have worn, and 
 carrying a golf bag, though it was already half 
 past six in the evening and he must have 
 known there was n't a course within three 
 hundred miles, was like a slap in the face to the 
 audience. The spectator who had supposed 
 that he was looking at least on an attempted 
 reproduction of life sank back prepared for 
 almost any absurdity, even the strains of the 
 " Rosary " wailed on a parlor organ under the 
 stage while the heroine tells the hero that she 
 loves him. Yet even this preparation was in- 
 sufficient quite to allay amazement at the hap- 
 penings that follow in Sherry's, the Lew Fields
 
 THE ROUGH DIAMOND AS HERO 233 
 
 waiters, the fantastic *' society " people, the 
 opera boufife extravagances. The last glim- 
 merings of illusion gave way to laughter long 
 before the act was over. Even farce can have 
 some outward semblance of reality. But this 
 wild burlesque had none. Disregard of all ar- 
 tistic unity, scorn or indifiference to the com- 
 mon sense and taste and judgment of the 
 public, could go no further. *' Society and the 
 Bull-dog " deserved no better fate than failure.
 
 ON TAKING COHAN SERIOUSLY 
 
 (Garrick, February 3, 1908) 
 
 WHEN George M. Cohan, author, poet, 
 actor, composer, stage manager, con- 
 ductor, in short one of the most ver- 
 satile artists and mighty minds that incubates 
 near the southwest corner of Broadway and 
 Forty-second Street, is in New York, forty- 
 five minutes will take him quite far enough 
 from the bright lights. But when he is in 
 Boston forty-five miles is not far enough away. 
 So he journeyed out to Brookfield, Massachu- 
 setts, which is about fifty miles from the Hub by 
 railroad and a hundred by the Boston and Al- 
 bany, and wrote a play about that hitherto in- 
 ofifensive village. He called his play " Fifty 
 Miles from Boston," and he showed it at the 
 Garrick Theater, with Edna Wallace Hopper 
 as the village postmistress and Laurence Wheat 
 as the hero. 
 
 This hero was none other than Joe Westcott, 
 just home from dear old Harvard, where he 
 had won the baseball game by his magnificent 
 pitching. Of course, Brookfield turned out to 
 the last broiler to welcome him. That 's the
 
 ON TAKING COHAN SERIOUSLY 235 
 
 way they always do when you get home from 
 college. The really improbable thing about it 
 is that Harvard won the game! Now, Joe 
 loved Sadie IVoodis, the village postmistress. 
 The Government paid Sadie so well for read- 
 ing postal cards that she sported silk stockings 
 and a picture hat of magnificent proportions. 
 Sadie loved Joe, too. But Sadie's bad, naughty 
 little brother had swiped four hundred dollars 
 out of the post office till to bet on Yale with 
 (it looked like a safe risk!), and only Dave 
 Harrigan, the Brookfield Dude, knew about it. 
 Dave was awful sweet on Sadie, also, but he 
 did n't have a look in. She told him so while 
 she pumped real water from a real pump, 
 which proved this a rural drama. So Dave 
 told Jed IVoodis, the brother, that he 'd peach 
 on him if he did n't make Sadie throw Joe over 
 in his favor. Jed sure was up against it bad, 
 and he did as he was bid, which gave Edna 
 Wallace Hopper a chance to be emotional and 
 helped out the comedy. 
 
 Just before the end of the second act it 
 looked as if Sadie would have to give up Joe 
 or see little brother spend twenty days in the 
 shade. In fact you were quite sure that she 
 was going to give up Joe, right then and there, 
 for the post office inspector was due the next 
 morning. But soft! What noise is this that 
 breaks upon the still evening air? Can it be?
 
 236 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 No ? Yes ? It is — it is the village fire bell ! 
 Can it be again? Is the hand of fate so kind? 
 Do such things really happen ? They do ! The 
 post office is on fire! A great sigh of relief 
 swept over the audience (or was it laughter?). 
 Let the inspector come! Ashes tell no tales! 
 Jed was saved. Sadie was saved. Joe should 
 make his home run after all. And Edna Wal- 
 lace Hopper need be emotional no longer! 
 
 After this act, which was the last but one, 
 Mr. Cohan made a speech. He said he hoped 
 nobody would take him seriously. Now, the 
 author who comes before a curtain and asks 
 the audience not to take his work seriously is 
 pretty sure to have his request granted. If 
 an author does n't regard his own efforts as 
 worthy of serious consideration, nobody else 
 under heaven is going to reverse his judgment. 
 Of course, no work that is n't taken seriously, 
 even the most fantastic farce — taken, that is, 
 as an effort toward achieving some sort of 
 definite artistic effect — will in the long run 
 command any attention, bring any credit to 
 author or producer. So when Mr. Cohan 
 comes forth and attempts to apologize for the 
 crudeness and triteness and absurd childishness 
 of his play by asking the audience not to take 
 him seriously, he is in reality publicly con- 
 fessing his failure and his unfitness to claim 
 consideration as a dramatic author.
 
 ON TAKING COHAN SERIOUSLY 237 
 
 As a musician, of course, Mr. Cohan has 
 always been a joke. His idea of composition 
 is to take a good tune and spoil it. He tosses 
 " Yankee Doodle," " Dixie," a Sousa march, 
 a few yards of ragtime, a stock waltz or two 
 into a pot, sets it on the stove and waits till 
 it comes to a boil. Then he skims off the waste 
 matter which rises — and, lo ! that scum is a 
 Cohan overture, or march, or waltz, or " pa- 
 triotic song," or anything you choose, accord- 
 ing to the tempo employed by the conductor. 
 But as a playwright Mr. Cohan used to show 
 gleams of something better than this. There 
 were moments of hilarious farce in " Running 
 for Office." In certain other of his pieces the 
 slang and easy, '' nervy " poise of the young 
 race-track hanger-on were caught with some- 
 thing like fidelity and with a good bit of flip 
 humor. " Running for Office " had claims to 
 serious consideration as a farce with songs, a 
 rough kind of comedy vaudeville, to employ the 
 French term. There were times when " Forty- 
 five Minutes from Broadway " had claims to 
 serious consideration as a genre picture, a half 
 unconscious rendering of character types that 
 George Ade would depict consciously and with 
 a touch of satire. 
 
 And as long as Mr. Cohan stuck to this 
 genre, to the depiction of these types, in the 
 limited field of broad humor (or Broadway
 
 238 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 humor!), no sensible person could complain. 
 If you did n't like these types, these flip young 
 men loaded with the latest slang, it was your 
 privilege to stay away, knowing that by no 
 chance would it occur to Mr. Cohan to make 
 fun of them as well as with them, that for 
 him they represented the hero in his finest 
 form. Many did like them, went to see and 
 applaud them, and there was no harm done 
 except for the subtle debasement of taste that 
 must inevitably result from careless listening 
 to such atrocious music as Mr. Cohan's. 
 
 But, emboldened and perhaps a little over- 
 elated by his success, Mr. Cohan was not con- 
 tent to go on doing the things he knew how 
 to do and had some right to do. He must 
 needs rush in where better men than he have 
 trod with timid feet; he must needs try to 
 depict emotions, create melodramatic situations, 
 render types of character far afield from either 
 his acquaintance or his tastes. And he has be- 
 come hopelessly lost. His work is futile, his 
 labors barren, because he has disclosed neither 
 the human sympathy nor the intelligent ob- 
 servation, nor the technical skill truthfully to 
 depict men and women when their hearts are 
 touched and to set them in a plausible and 
 sustained story. Such a piece of work as 
 " Fifty Miles from Boston," considered as a 
 play — and that, in spite of Mr. Cohan's ex-
 
 ON TAKING COHAN SERIOUSLY 239 
 
 cuses, is exactly what it aims to be — is so 
 silly, false and ineffective, and was so ridicu- 
 lously played by its heroine into the bargain, 
 that one is hard put not to get serious about 
 it, seriously angry. Such a play is a kind of 
 insult to our intelligence. And the attitude of 
 its author, this " I hope you will not take me 
 seriously " pose — as if any artist that is n't 
 worth taking seriously is worth taking at all! 
 — is a greater insult still, for it insults his 
 fellow playwrights and his brother actors as 
 well as us. However, there is a retribution 
 so certain that we can afford to keep our 
 tempers and pass on to more important mat- 
 ters. Mr. Cohan's play fell of its own dullness 
 and falsity. The truth is mighty and shall 
 prevail. Even Mr. Cohan cannot stop it.
 
 "THE HONOR OF THE FAMILY" 
 
 (Hudson, February 19, 1908) 
 
 ONCE Upon a time there was a man who 
 hearkened to the persuasive patter of 
 a book agent, and bought a complete 
 set of the works of Balzac, illustrated with 
 alleged etchings. He opened the pages in one 
 volume, the *' Droll Stories." This volume he 
 has loaned frequently. He says his friends 
 like Balzac. A considerable amount of popular 
 appreciation of the novelist Rodin has immor- 
 talized in a bath-robe is based on a similar 
 selection from his writings. This may be due 
 in part to the fact that Balzac is one of those 
 authors you can safely admire without read- 
 ing, you can appreciate without enjoying. At 
 any rate, it is doubtful if " Un Menage de 
 Gargon " (or '' La Rabouilleuse," as Balzac 
 himself later preferred to call it) is widely 
 enough known to act as a lure for " The Honor 
 of the Family," shown in America by Otis 
 Skinner. That play here will have to stand 
 or fall solely on its intrinsic interest. And it 
 can the more readily do that, as it is only re- 
 motely Balzac after all; as it is a farcical
 
 "THE HONOR OF THE FAMILY" 241 
 
 melodrama dominated by Mr. Skinner at his 
 best. 
 
 " The Honor of the Family " is an English 
 version by Paul M. Potter of *' La Rabouil- 
 leuse," by Emile Fabre, produced in Paris at 
 the Odeon in 1903, and crowned by the Acad- 
 emy. The French piece was announced simply 
 as " d'apres Balzac," and one fancies was per- 
 haps inspired by old Hochons remark in the 
 novel about Philippe and Max: " Those two 
 fellows rolled up to meet each other like two 
 storm clouds." The difficulties of translating 
 " La Rabouilleuse " may well excuse the change 
 in the English title, and in book and play alike 
 Philippe is the real figure, not Flore, the fish 
 whipper. Those who know the book, surely 
 one of Balzac's best, for all the sudden de- 
 velopment of Philippe's intellectual powers in 
 midstory, must not expect, however, to find the 
 play very close " after Balzac." Aside from 
 the insurmountable difficulty of packing a Bal- 
 zac novel into the compass of an evening on the 
 stage, is the unmitigated villainy of Philippe 
 himself, one of the most abominable and vividly 
 drawn scoundrels in the entire " Comedy." 
 The theater is not yet free enough from con- 
 vention to endure such a villain as a hero! 
 And in the novel there is Joseph as mitiga- 
 tion, but too palely drawn to serve as dramatic 
 stuff. Alas, Balzac's naughty folk are always 
 
 16
 
 242 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 his best ! So " The Honor of the Family " is 
 after all not Balzac but a play suggested by 
 Balzac. Balzac may thus briefly be packed off 
 stage, and the play enjoyed without further 
 tliought of him. 
 
 The play begins when the novel is half done 
 and concerns itself entirely with what went on 
 in poor old senile Pere Rouget's house after 
 Philippe arrived on the scene. Instead of the 
 sinister, evil, cruel, hypocritical monster of the 
 book, Philippe is a swaggering guardsman, 
 more Dumas than Balzac, habitually something 
 the sort of man Petrucio assumed to be. Mr. 
 Skinner garbed himself in cavalry boots and 
 a faded military frock coat, bought a loaded 
 cane and borrowed Oscar Hammerstein's 
 hat, which came down to the bridge of 
 his nose. Thus picturesquely arrayed, he 
 burst into the house of his uncle, old Rouget, 
 where Max and Flore were in possession 
 conspiring for the Rouget millions. From 
 that moment he swaggered and swore and 
 shot terrible glances from his brilliant eyes, 
 and browbeat and cajoled and plotted and 
 planned, and had his will (and his uncle's 
 will!) before he was done. He killed Max in 
 a duel, to get rid of him. He proposed mar- 
 riage to Flore to get a firmer hold on the 
 fortune. He was a serio-comic hero out of 
 wild romance, delightful, picturesque, exuber-
 
 "THE HONOR OF THE FAMILY" 243 
 
 ant — and no more like Balzac than Dumas is 
 like Ibsen. 
 
 The natural exuberance of Mr. Skinner, the 
 vitality, that is, of his style and personality, 
 amply fit him for the first requirement of this 
 role. From the first moment when his head 
 appears outside the great window till the last 
 curtain this exuberance never flags, this swag- 
 gering, fighting, strong-headed, loud-mouthed 
 soldier never lets the attention lapse from him, 
 never lets it be felt that his is not the domi- 
 nant will. But Mr. Skinner adds a rare grace 
 of plastic movement, a fund of comedy, now 
 broad, now ironic, the force and distinction 
 of a diction learned when the art of speech 
 was held in higher esteem than now, the de- 
 lights of striking and significant facial expres- 
 sion, and finally the crowning virtue of truth 
 to character that permits him no possible lapses 
 into sentimentality, no deviation from the ideal 
 laid down at the first. It is a performance 
 that has won for Mr. Skinner in New York 
 the tardy acknowledgment, deserved long ago, 
 that he is one of our leading actors. 
 
 The part of Flore ("La Rabouilleuse ") is 
 the only other one in the comedy of much sig- 
 nificance. This was originally played by Miss 
 Percy Haswell, without distinction. The Rab- 
 ouilleuse was physically beautiful and morally 
 ugly. She was crafty, avaricious, strong
 
 244 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 willed. She was also a sensualist. Miss Has- 
 well was the ordinary stock company leading 
 woman doing the ordinary things that leading 
 women do in the ordinary drama. Thus her 
 duels with Mr. Skinner were one-sided affairs 
 from the beginning. But Mr. Skinner's Phil- 
 ippe is so big and so vital and so picturesque 
 that many shortcomings can be overlooked for 
 its sake and " The Honor of the Family " 
 cheerfully recommended to all theatergoers 
 whenever and wherever it is performed by 
 that sterling actor.
 
 CRANE AS A SIX CYLINDER KID 
 
 (Empire, March 2, 1908) 
 
 THE latest in the long list of charac- 
 ters assumed by William H. Crane for 
 the delight of the American public is 
 Lemuel Morewood, in George Ade's new play, 
 " Father and the Boys " ; and as Lemuel 
 Morewood he gave a convincing and comical 
 demonstration of how it is possible, even at 
 fifty, to move rapidly from a position fourteen 
 miles behind the procession to one seven miles 
 ahead of the band. In fact, he finally left the 
 band so far in the rear that he had to go back 
 for them. That is George Ade for it. In the 
 less poetic language of the always dignified 
 dramatic review Mr. Crane played the part 
 of a country reared New York merchant who 
 had retained, for all his money, the simple 
 country tastes and the thrifty country habits 
 of his boyhood. But his two sons had not. 
 He had sent them to college, where one was 
 graduated with a *' summa cum " in football, 
 the other with an exaggerated ambition to 
 become a cotillon leader. Taking them into 
 the firm with him. Father still had to work
 
 246 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 ten hours a day, while Thomas boxed with 
 an ex-Hghtweight in the private office, and 
 IVilliam entertained in his corner a society 
 leader with a name combed in the middle (a 
 clever woman, somebody called her, and Father 
 dryly remarked that a woman had to be after 
 she was forty). It was a clear case of every- 
 body working Father. 
 
 But Father was n't that kind of a man — not 
 for long. He got a bit tired of being told 
 that he was fourteen miles behind the pro- 
 cession. He was n't very strong for seeing 
 his sons get the loafing habit, still less for 
 seeing them fleeced at roulette in his own 
 house by certain of their " society " friends. 
 So he drank his glass of milk and went 
 up to bed, and then came down again in 
 a full evening dress suit (as they say in 
 Brooklyn), bought a stack of yellow chips and 
 busted the bank, represented by Major Bellamy 
 Didszvorth, man about town. Then he said 
 he .p;uessed he would n't play any more and 
 took Bessie Brayton, a Western product, out 
 to supper. 
 
 That was Act II, " The Boys and Father." 
 Act III was just '' Father." He had reached 
 the race-track with his Western product and 
 a " betting commissioner." He had shed thirty 
 years of his life. He hadn't been near the 
 office for a month. The poor boys had to
 
 CRANE AS A SIX CYLINDER KID 247 
 
 spend whole hours there now. Everything 
 was coming his way, even the ponies. Four- 
 teen miles behind the procession? He was 
 miles ahead and going stronger every minute. 
 His sons were horrified. They pleaded with 
 their rebellious parent. But it was vain. He 
 was ofif for Goldfield with Bessie, his Western 
 product, and they after him to save him from 
 the toils of a designing woman. Now, of 
 course, it was all right. Mr. Ade is nothing 
 if not moral. The Goldfield trip was to save 
 Bessie's mine. It also gave the author a chance 
 to say that if you want to see those " pictur- 
 esque Western costumes " you must go to the 
 theater in New York. The only folks who 
 wore them in his play were the Easterners. 
 Bessie saved her mine and found her sweet- 
 heart (who owned the other half of the mine, 
 by the way, Mr. Ade throwing in retribution 
 in full measure). The Boys were taught a 
 lesson and Father probably returned eventually 
 to his nine o'clock game of checkers and his 
 glass of milk. 
 
 A jovial, wholesome, boyish, naive story this, 
 told with the utmost spirit, with racy, pictur- 
 esque dialogue, with those little, half-satirical 
 touches of observation that are so much a part 
 of Mr. Ade's charm. It never goes far below 
 the surface, but it is human and it is appeal- 
 ing. And for two acts it is farce that often
 
 248 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 trembles on the verge of comedy, that just 
 misses being chiefly interesting not for its fun 
 but for the really touching predicament of 
 Father, his plaintively dry efforts to make his 
 boys realize that life is a serious thing. Then 
 it sinks rapidly into farce, into farce that doesn't 
 quite cover, either, the joints of its structure. 
 But Mr. Ade's fun is still potent, still char- 
 acteristic enough to hold the interest and carry 
 the play to success. 
 
 Mr. Crane, of course, is quite competent for 
 the role of FatJier. The under note of country 
 sincerity, of a warm, generous nature, is never 
 lacking in his performance; and the dry humor 
 of the character, the comic perplexities, the 
 efforts to master slang, to call himself a " Six 
 Cylinder Kid " without self-consciousness, and, 
 above all, the unctious abandonment to juvenile 
 revels, are all denoted surely, easily, and with 
 delightful effect. Mr. Crane has played bigger 
 parts in better plays, but " Father and the 
 Boys " has the breath of wholesome fun in it, 
 and it will be welcome on our stage so long as 
 Mr. Crane cares to keep it in his repertoire.
 
 "TODDLES" AS A TEXT 
 
 (Garrick, March i6, 1908) 
 
 WE are minded to preach a sermon 
 with " Toddles " as the text. For 
 " Toddles '' curiously invites to the 
 consideration of serious things, even if it is an 
 adaptation by Clyde Fitch from the French. 
 That is n't exactly what its authors intended 
 when they wrote it, nor what Mr. Barrymore 
 intended when he played it. But if, as Heine re- 
 marks, "even in the highest pathos of the World 
 Tragedy bits of fun slip in; the desperate re- 
 publican who, like Brutus, plunged a knife to 
 his heart perhaps smelt it first to see whether 
 some one had not split a herring with it," it is 
 equally true that in the maddest fun of theatri- 
 cal farce bits of seriousness slip in. The des- 
 perate reviewer sitting at the Garrick Theater 
 even as he watched Toddles in his mad efforts 
 to avoid making up his mind was inevitably 
 reminded of poor Benjamin Constant. 
 
 And who, pray, was Benjamin Constant? 
 
 Benjamin Constant was a man, in the words 
 of Professor James, " often marvelled at as an 
 extraordinary instance of superior intelligence
 
 250 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 with inferior character." At least he accom- 
 phshed this — he made many foot-notes for 
 learned books on psychology. But he himself, 
 as recorded in his "Journal" (Paris, 1895), 
 did not foresee any such useful, not to say ex- 
 alted, outcome to his life. '^ I am tossed and 
 dragged about by my miserable weakness," he 
 writes. " Never was anything so ridiculous 
 as my indecision. Now marriage, now soli- 
 tude; now Germany, now France; hesitation 
 upon hesitation, and all because at bottom I 
 am unable to give up anything." 
 
 Is it possible that the Frenchmen who first 
 gave Toddles life, M. Tristan Bernard and M. 
 Andre Godfernaux, were acquainted with the 
 classic case of Mr. Constant? Or is it simply 
 that the tribe of Benjamin is many in the land? 
 At any rate if Toddles had been capable of 
 introspection and possessed of the needful in- 
 telligence to set down what he saw he could 
 have written of himself in these very words of 
 the inconstant Mr. Constant. For Toddles too 
 was beset by " an all round amiability " ; he 
 was unable to get mad at any of his alterna- 
 tives, or, which amounts to the same thing, he 
 could get mad at all of them by turns. And 
 so he too was incapable of action, could not 
 make up his mind. Now the act of making 
 up one's mind is by no means so simple and 
 voluntary a matter as some of us suppose. We
 
 "TODDLES" AS A TEXT 251 
 
 are all at best a bundle of warring impulses 
 and inhibitions. " Act," says an impulse. 
 *' Don't act," says an inhibition. And whether 
 we act or not depends far less often than one 
 would like to admit on our " will power," in 
 the ordinary sense of the term. It depends 
 on the relative force of the impulse and the 
 inhibition. A soldier stands irresolute in ac- 
 tion. His will power cannot drive him to ad- 
 vance. But his comrades sweep by with a yell 
 and a cheer. The impulse is suddenly strength- 
 ened. Before he knows it he is looking into 
 the mouth of a cannon. Or his comrades sweep 
 by the other way, and with equal unconscious- 
 ness he is in full flight. " Buy that necktie in 
 the window " says the impulse. " Don't buy 
 it," says the inhibition of prudence, " you have 
 already far more than you need." And you 
 walk on half a block. But your feet drag at 
 the corner, and presently you are back inside 
 the store, waiting for change. Impulse has 
 won, has caused you to act, has made up your 
 mind for you because your passion for neck- 
 ties is stronger than your sense of prudence. 
 But if on the corner you had recalled that your 
 money was needed for your sick mother or 
 your own dinner you would not have gone 
 back, because prudence, re-enforced by this 
 other inhibition, would have carried the day. 
 Let any one bring back to mind the things he
 
 252 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 has done in sudden anger or under the stim- 
 ulus of any strong passion or excitement that 
 he would not have dreamed of doing under 
 normal circumstances, could not have " willed " 
 himself to do, and it may become apparent that 
 the so-called " lack of will power," the pathetic 
 incapacity for action, inability to make up the 
 mind, which seems to stunt so many lives, is 
 in reality but a lack of genius for emotion, a 
 weakness of impulse, so that the inhibitions 
 habitually win the day, and the career of that 
 man is barren. 
 
 Now Toddles had an inhibitive mind. The 
 intensity of his feelings was always below the 
 discharging point, as the psychologists would 
 say, since they know that any feeling, if strong 
 enough, is bound to discharge itself into action 
 of some kind or other. Toddles was not 
 ignorant of what he wanted or of what he 
 did n't want. He simply did n't want anything 
 hard enough, did n't repudiate anything hard 
 enough, to drive his inhibitions of laziness, 
 love of luxury, and the rest to the wall and 
 ring from him a definite Yes or No. Toddles 
 knew that marriage would bring him greatly 
 needed money and companionship which he 
 desired. But there were a pack of inhibitions 
 not unknown to bachelors before now which 
 barred the way, and he could not make up his 
 mind to overcome them, because his impulses
 
 "TODDLES" AS A TEXT 253 
 
 were not strong enough. On the other hand, 
 after he had once been definitely pledged to 
 matrimony the negative impulse to resist was 
 not intense enough to conquer, and Toddles 
 finally got out of bed on his wedding morning 
 and into his tub unable to see his way out of 
 his dilemma. But while he was tubbing his 
 clothes were stolen. The way out was found 
 for him. He did not have to make up his mind 
 at all! With a cry of pathetic joy he leaped 
 back into bed, where he lay, the sorry symbol 
 of chronic irresolution. 
 
 And the tragedy of Toddles is the moral 
 tragedy of human life, that comes about, not 
 because we do not know the higher from the 
 lower way, right from wrong, wise from fool- 
 ish, but because our impulses for the high, the 
 right, the wise do not possess sufficient explo- 
 sive force to conquer our inhibitions. Some 
 one has said that " life is one long contradic- 
 tion between knowledge and action." No one 
 in this world knows better the upper from the 
 nether road than the hopeless failures, the 
 lights that failed, the men of early promise, 
 of brilliant minds and no achievement, the 
 critics who do not construct, the reformers who 
 only chatter. " As far as moral insight goes," 
 James remarks of such men, ** in comparison 
 with them the ordinary and prosperous philis- 
 tines whom they scandalize are sucking babes."
 
 254 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 And he cites Rousseau and Restif, men who, 
 knowing the higher, could only follow the 
 lower road, because only there were their im- 
 pulses strong enough to discharge into action. 
 But even for such men an impulse sufficiently 
 re-enforced will alter all their lives. Just as 
 fear can convert a criminal into a saint, just 
 as the news of Juliet's death roused Romeo 
 into a man of action, the sudden blossoming of 
 something akin to real affection in Toddles ral- 
 lied his scattered impulses, drove his habitual 
 inhibitions in a pack out of his brain and con- 
 verted the wavering, hesitating, irresolute, ter- 
 rified victim at the matrimonial altar into an 
 ardent lover fearlessly facing the marriage 
 ring. It may be love is a kind of madness, but 
 madness has given the courage for more mighty 
 deeds (madness and anger) than " will power " 
 ever did. Toddles's case is a shining example 
 of the dynamic force of the ruling passion. 
 
 But this being a sermon, it is time now for 
 the moral. And the moral is, *' Acting is not 
 so easy as it looks." 
 
 For why else rear this towering superstruc- 
 ture of psychology on the poor little foundation 
 of " Toddles " than to make plain the reason 
 why the play here, with John Barrymore, was 
 not the success it was in London, with Cyril 
 Maude? Mr. Maude is an actor of varied 
 powers and wide experience. Only a year ago
 
 "TODDLES" AS A TEXT 255 
 
 he was playing James A. Heme's famous part 
 in " Shore Acres." From Nathaniel Berry to 
 Toddles is a very considerable register. To 
 say that he was a success as Toddles because 
 the part fitted him is not to explain his success 
 in scores of dissimilar parts. It is the actor's 
 business to fit his part, not to make the part fit 
 him. It is his business to have a technique 
 that will accommodate itself to any and all de- 
 mands. And such a technique is not acquired 
 in a day, a month, a year, nor by intuition or 
 inheritance. It is acquired by playing many 
 parts, by practice, practice, practice. No one 
 supposes that Sembrich could sing the songs 
 of every mood and period with flawless art 
 and careful dififerentiation without a vocal 
 technique won by years of effort and a wide 
 acquaintance with all schools of music. Yet 
 the idea seems to prevail that an actor can play 
 any part, so long as it chances to " fit " his 
 personality, with almost no technique at all. 
 We would not accept a violinist whose bowing 
 was faulty, whose intonation was false, who 
 failed to interpret the music he played, merely 
 because we liked his face, his smile, his " per- 
 sonality." But as a public we are very far 
 from even this rather fundamental standard 
 of criticism where acting is concerned. We 
 care no more for the technique of acting than 
 some of the players we applaud.
 
 256 THE AJMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 That is not quite true either, for in the long 
 run we unconsciously bow to greatness, to 
 superior skill, and forget our inefficient favor- 
 ites of the moment. Gradually the Sotherns, 
 the Skinners, emerge and take their rightful 
 places. But it would save time if we were a 
 bit more conscious about it. There would be 
 less temptation then for managers, who in all 
 truth are hard enough put to find efficient 
 players, to cast young men and women of pleas- 
 ant personality in parts beyond their powers, 
 thus making of plays that might give pleasure 
 at most but half-hearted successes. 
 
 For Mr. Barrymore, the bearer of a distin- 
 guished and honorable name in the stage 
 world, young, attractive, promising, is still 
 technically unequipped for the part of Toddles. 
 The play is a farce, light, frivolous; the part 
 is a farcical part. But so is Dundreary a far- 
 cical part; yet Sothern waited till he could 
 play Hamlet before he attempted it. If a farce 
 has the qualities of genuine popularity (and 
 "Toddles" has) it has them because it exag- 
 gerates humanity, not falsifies it. And you 
 cannot exaggerate a trait of character if you 
 cannot depict it in its natural state. You can- 
 not create a farcical character, clean-cut, con- 
 sistent from curtain to curtain, an entity, if 
 you cannot maintain a character delusion with- 
 out exaggeration. If we loaded poor Toddles
 
 "TODDLES" AS A TEXT 257 
 
 with text-book phrases out of psychology it 
 was to show the human basis of his character 
 — the basis which, if clearly brought out by 
 a resourceful actor, would make him, for all 
 his farce, a human being to the audience. But 
 to bring this out requires a sure technique; 
 for the actor it is a solemn task, no less diffi- 
 cult than to play many a " serious " role. 
 
 No one has ever gone on record as accusing 
 Mr. Sothern of being, personally, at all like 
 Dundreary. In fact, the dissimilarity might 
 almost be called striking. But Mr. Sothern's 
 Dundreary in the play is comic, first and fore- 
 most, for its unflagging fidelity to character, 
 its unity of design, its constant revelations in 
 a hundred little ways of a very human if mon- 
 strously exaggerated type of brain. Nothing 
 that he says or does, no single chuckle or facial 
 expression but clearly reveals this central psy- 
 chological conception. And to do this requires 
 technique, technique, and again technique. 
 Not a single halted utterance or sudden con- 
 centration of attention in the search for his 
 pockets, but is the surer, hence the more comic, 
 for the musing moods of Hamlet. Not a single 
 cry of triumph at the solution of an absurd 
 conundrum, but is more effective for the ro- 
 mantic heroism of " Zenda " or " If I Were 
 King." That is so true it is platitudinous; 
 but please remember this is a sermon ! 
 
 17
 
 258 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Now Toddles in his lesser way had his psy- 
 chological basis of character ; he was a human, 
 if exaggerated, entity. He was a man who 
 could n't make up his mind, a baby in long 
 breeches. Mr. Barrymore knew this, and he 
 tried as best he could to indicate it. But his 
 task was too much for him, and he was only 
 occasionally successful, simply because he 
 lacked technique, he had not the trained re- 
 sources of his art sufficiently at his command. 
 His Toddles did not " hang together," the 
 moods from moment to moment were not 
 clearly related to the character as a whole, and 
 in their several places they were not indicated 
 surely, cleanly. His command over facial ex- 
 pression is slight. His command over accent 
 is slighter. He feels for effects restlessly, 
 with hands, voice, body, and creates the sense 
 of effort, not of achievement. To be sure, he 
 was constantly hindered, not helped, by a badly 
 trained company. But the cause of his failure 
 was deeper than that; it lay in the actor him- 
 self, in his lack of technique. If Mr. Barry- 
 more, like Mr. Maude, could play Nathaniel 
 Berry, he too, like Mr. Maude could play Tod- 
 dles. Life may be a survival of the fittest, but 
 actors too often suppose it to be a survival of 
 the best fitted. Well, it is — only, not quite 
 the way they mean.
 
 WHERE IS OUR DRAMA OF '76? 
 
 (Garden, April 20, 1908) 
 
 ONCE upon the Fourth of July a patri- 
 otic American visited a London music 
 hall where a " human encyclopaedia " 
 was answering questions such as " In what 
 year did Milosh Orenevertch knock Kara 
 George on the head and start the feud in Ser- 
 via? " or " How many pins laid in a row would 
 it take to reach from London to Paris ? " and 
 the American asked, *' What great event took 
 place on the Fourth of July ? " The human 
 encyclopaedia walked well down to the foot- 
 lights angrily. " That wa'h n't no great 
 event," said he, " that were a bloomin' 
 houtrage ! " 
 
 Why is it that this "bloomin' houtrage," 
 which is a towering point in American history, 
 which has been productive of more fire-crack- 
 ers, burned fingers and fervid perorations 
 than any other event in our career as a nation, 
 has never had adequate representation on our 
 stage — it nor any event of our War for In- 
 dependence ? Why is it that the New Theater,
 
 260 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 when it opens on Central Park West will 
 find no American historical drama of our 
 early and surely dramatic days worthy of 
 a place in its repertoire? Why have all 
 the plays about the Revolution, from the 
 first years after that struggle down to Ed- 
 ward Vroom's " The Luck of Macgregor " 
 at the Garden Theater, been comparative fail- 
 ures? "Why have they been failures?" say 
 you. " Why, because they have been such bad 
 plays." Granted; but that really explains 
 nothing, any more than the managerial tradi- 
 tion that " the public does n't want such plays " 
 explains anything, being a statement not of 
 cause but efifect, the effect of bad dramas. To 
 answer the question one must find out why our 
 War for Independence has not inspired good 
 plays, why it has not produced a drama to 
 satisfy the historical sense, to rouse patriotic 
 enthusiasm and meet also the require- 
 ments of the dramatic form. Surely there is at 
 least one big play in the Revolution. There 
 must be, since none has ever come out! 
 Has it remained there through accident or 
 necessity? 
 
 The attempts to coax it forth have been as 
 the sands on the shore. They began almost as 
 soon as the war was over. And here is a 
 witness that they are still going on. But who 
 remembers them? Let us name a few in New
 
 WHERE IS OUR DRAMA OF '76? 261 
 
 York City. There was " Bunker Hill ; or, 
 The Death of General Warren," at the John 
 Street Theater in 1797. Next came William 
 Dunlap's " Andre," a year later. At the Park 
 Theater in 1823 " Green Mountain Boys " was 
 tried in February, *' The Battle of Lexington " 
 in July. There was " The Battle of Brandy- 
 wine " at the Chatham Theater in 1856. The 
 same year came " New York Patriots, or the 
 Battle of Saratoga," at Barnum's, " with Con- 
 tinental uniforms and a considerable outlay in 
 scenery." Edward Eddy used to play Long 
 Tom CofHn in a Paul Jones drama in the 70's. 
 In 1887 the late David Lloyd produced a play 
 of old New York in Revolutionary war time, 
 called " The Dominie's Daughter," at Wal- 
 lack's. The scene was laid around Beek- 
 man Street. Kyrle Bellew was the star. 
 Failure was the fate. Then later we saw 
 Victor Mapes's attempt in " Capt. Barring- 
 ton " to dramatize George Washington. 
 James A. Heme wrote " The Minute Men " 
 in the 8o's. Clyde Fitch, who broke through 
 into success with " Nathan Hale," failed 
 dismally with '' Major Andre." After the 
 opening night of the latter piece, by the 
 way, somebody said to the manager : " You 
 might have known better. Spy plays al- 
 ways fail." " But how was I to know it 
 was a spy play when I accepted it?" he
 
 262 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 answered. Even theatrical managers can't 
 know everything. 
 
 This Httle hst represents but a tithe of the 
 attempts to make a play out of the Revolution. 
 Yet not one of the dramas remains in the 
 repertoire of the American theater, not one of 
 them has risen above the moment to be dra- 
 matic literature, to perpetuate dramatically the 
 historical background of our national life. 
 That background is receding further and 
 further into the mists of the past. To H. G. 
 Wells, an Englishman, it seemed already as re- 
 mote as the Wars of the Roses. To us, though 
 tradition still lingers on in New England and 
 hatred of the English is inculcated with every 
 game of lead soldiers on the garden paths, it 
 is growing sometimes almost as remote, and 
 the Fourth of July perorations have a curious 
 flavor of antiquity. In the early days of the 
 last century, when memory of the struggle 
 was still fresh and the nation was still trying 
 its young limbs with the tingle of novelty in 
 every leap and blow, grateful for its release, 
 there were no American dramatists with the 
 technical skill to write any sort of drama. And 
 now, when our dramatists have acquired or 
 are acquiring the technical skill, the present is 
 too full of problems, the future too engrossing, 
 the past too remote, for them to be interested in 
 the Revolution. We are at once too old and
 
 WHERE IS OUR DRAMA OF '76? 263 
 
 not old enough as a nation to make copy of 
 our past. Perhaps that is the real reason why 
 the historical drama of 1776 does not get 
 written. 
 
 An American student of the French Revo- 
 lution has computed that if a man beginning in 
 youth should read ten hours a day till he was 
 ninety he could just get through the mass of ma- 
 terial at present in print about that struggle. 
 Much of this material was not written by 
 Frenchmen, but the French have contributed 
 their share, no little of it in the form of drama. 
 Sardou in his later years turns back to this 
 fruitful field. And some of these dramas have 
 been no less popular in England and America 
 than in France, no less popular than " The Only 
 Way," the French Revolution seen through 
 Dickens's sentimental spectacles. This does not 
 mean that we Americans are more interested 
 in the events of '93 than those of '76, even if 
 they were more packed with blood and fury, 
 full of a more concentrated and tumultuous 
 rebellion. It simply means that the historic 
 sense is more developed in French dramatists, 
 fuses more harmoniously with the dramatic 
 sense, and these dramas, of historic signifi- 
 cance, to be sure, are also — and for us pri- 
 marily — interesting and absorbing stage sto- 
 ries. Possibly it is easier to write a good play 
 about the French Revolution than about ours —
 
 264 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 there is more material and vastly more examples 
 to profit by. But the chief reason why better 
 plays are written about it is that better minds 
 are brought to bear on the task, it is regarded 
 more seriously, treated with more historical 
 knowledge, the result looked upon as a part of 
 the great monument alike of French literature 
 and French tradition. Neither toward our his- 
 tory nor our stage have we yet reached this 
 standard. And until we do the drama of '76 
 is not likely to be coaxed forth. 
 
 When G. B. Shaw wrote " The Devil's 
 Disciple " he was not so much minded to flat- 
 ter us as to rap the British. The scene might 
 quite as well have been laid in South Africa. 
 G. B. evidently became enamored of " Gentle- 
 manly Johnny " Burgoyne and wanted to use 
 him in a play. In an amusing stage direction 
 we read : " Burgoyne is boundlessly delighted 
 by this retort [of Richard's], which almost 
 reconciles him to the loss of America." Just 
 how an actor is to express in pantomime recon- 
 ciliation to the loss of America is not stated. 
 But G. B.'s idea of American geography is rud- 
 imentary. Somehow or other the British under 
 Burgoyne are in New Hampshire, where one 
 of them says, " I will undertake to do what we 
 have marched south (sic!) from Boston to do." 
 They did not march from Boston, but Canada; 
 they were in the New Hampshire " Grants,"
 
 WHERE IS OUR DRAMA OF '76? 265 
 
 now Vermont, and Burgoyne was not with 
 them. The town boasts of a Presbyterian 
 church, which is almost as astonishing as Bur- 
 goyne's presence there. There is no nasal 
 twang in the speech of the Yankees. They 
 talk Shawese. This is n't a play of the Ameri- 
 can Revolution. It is just another toot of G. 
 B.'s horn from his cart-tail. In his preface he 
 gloats over the fact that when Mansfield pro- 
 duced " The Devil's Disciple " in America in 
 1897 we hailed it as original, when, as a matter 
 of fact, its episodes, complications, all its melo- 
 dramatic structure is old as — as melodrama. 
 What has that got to do with the case? No- 
 body cared about its structure. A musician 
 went to " Pelleas et Melisande " at the Man- 
 hattan last winter, coming away to rave about 
 Mary Garden and the drama. " But the mu- 
 sic?" he was asked. "Oh, the music," said 
 he — " the music did n't bother me." That 's 
 about the case with the story in " The Devil's 
 Disciple." The wit, the equivoke, the " dia- 
 bolonian ethics," the sense of a new, humorous 
 and keenly alert mind playing over and about 
 a subject were (with Mansfield's acting) what 
 pleased us then, as they have pleased us since 
 in other plays by G. B. Shaw. Being all Shaw 
 they are all original. But by the same token, 
 " The Devil's Disciple " is n't a play about the 
 Revolution — it is n't an American historical 
 drama.
 
 266 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 But for all its historical inaccuracy, its lack 
 of true color and atmosphere, its emphasis not 
 on the American point of view but on the 
 Shavian, it is the nearest thing we have to a 
 Revolutionary War play, because it brings to 
 bear on the subject more style and intelligence. 
 Mr. Vroom marched his red coats in and out 
 in " The Luck of Macgregor " with the same 
 scene showing behind Fort George as behind 
 Spuyten Duyvil. He did not even attempt to 
 show that rounded end of Manhattan Island, 
 that dome of rock and woods, which must look 
 even to-day something as it did then save per- 
 haps for the change to second growth timber 
 — the only spot on our island that still speaks 
 of the vanished days. Mr. Vroom not only 
 failed to make a melodrama that hung together 
 plausibly as Shaw's does, but he failed even 
 more conspicuously than Shaw to create any 
 true atmosphere or color. And as for wit or 
 style or satire or character interest, his play 
 was as barren as a musical comedy. At least 
 Dick Dudgeon, if he primarily preaches Shav- 
 ian philosophy, is fired by an under impulse 
 of real patriotism. At least the Presbyterian 
 parson, if he in reality should have been a Con- 
 gregational Calvinist, glows with a hint of the 
 passions that blazed up at Lexington and kept 
 our army from freezing at Valley Forge. Per- 
 verse melodrama " The Devil's Disciple " may
 
 WHERE IS OUR DRAMA OF '76? 267 
 
 be, and not American. But it is a man's play 
 at any rate. It is grown up. It does not insult 
 our Revolution, belittle our history. Such 
 trivial, puerile, theatrical, pretty pasteboard 
 and red-coated concoctions as " The Luck of 
 Macgregor " do belittle our history, insult our 
 Revolution. We are quite right in refusing to 
 have anything to do with them. 
 
 But we are not right in supposing that be- 
 cause these bad plays fail to interest us all 
 plays about our early struggle are doomed to 
 failure. The American drama is just now 
 waking up to look about with a man's eyes, 
 to put ideas and speculations and comment 
 where a few silly sentiments before did duty. 
 Great Divides and Witching Hours are suc- 
 ceeding the trivialities of the past. The drama 
 is waking up, too, thanks in no small measure 
 to Mr. Belasco, to the charm and genuine in- 
 terest of correct detail and atmosphere. Our 
 stage, in other words, is reaching a point where 
 a drama of the Revolution could be written and 
 presented in a manner worthy of the theme 
 and satisfactory to a public that are not always 
 such fools as some folks would have us believe. 
 It would be a drama in which the " ragged 
 regimentals " of the Continental militia and the 
 red coats of the British did not have to do 
 duty at all times for the atmosphere; where 
 the spy plot — its possibilities surely stretched
 
 268 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 nearly to the end by Gillette in " Secret Ser- 
 vice " — did not have to do duty for the story ; 
 where the passion for the cause of liberty was 
 the true motive of action, not the traditional 
 and silly " love motive " of conventional drama, 
 and where the splendid characters of some of 
 our early heroes found adequate expression 
 and development. To write such a play is, less 
 than ever as the past recedes, not a task for any 
 but a first rate talent. And our men of first 
 rate talents are just now too preoccupied with 
 problems of the present to turn back into his- 
 tory for their themes. That is, no doubt, a 
 healthful sign. But the busiest market-place 
 is the better for a monument, none the less ; the 
 preservation of landmarks has more than a 
 sentimental value. And dramas that shall 
 worthily set forth our early history as a nation 
 must, after all, be the basis of a national reper- 
 toire, if we are ever to have a national reper- 
 toire. England more fortunate, has in her 
 repertoire classics of every period to perpetuate 
 those periods on the stage. We in America 
 had no drama of our own worthy of the name 
 till very recent years. If we are to perpetu- 
 ate our past at all we must reconstruct it. And 
 because any task of historical reconstruction 
 requires unusual knowledge and power, the 
 drama of the Revolution is still unwritten. But 
 sooner or later now, with the expansion of
 
 WHERE IS OUR DRAMA OF '76? 269 
 
 ideas in the American theater, the development 
 of adult consciousness in the native playwright, 
 it is bound to come. Perhaps it will arrive in 
 time to dedicate the National Theater. It is 
 as easy to cherish two dreams as one!
 
 AUDIENCES — A SPRING GROUCH 
 
 WAS it Richard Hovey who said that 
 " Success is in the silences, though 
 fame is in the song " ? Those words 
 came floating up in my memory as I sat at a per- 
 formance of " The Governor and the Boss " in 
 the Lincoln Square Theater, a home of the 
 cheap stock company, starting a long train of 
 suggestion and speculation that was hardly to 
 be switched upon a siding even by the appear- 
 ance of Mamma Spooner before the curtain to 
 tell the audience what a fine company was hers. 
 What roused the memory was the attitude of 
 the audience toward the play. Few dramas are 
 as interesting as the attitude of the audience 
 toward them. In this case the attitude of the 
 audience was, after the first act, all that was 
 interesting. It was a curious audience, curi- 
 ous, that is, to one accustomed only to the 
 theaters in the bright light district. Small 
 girls and vacant chairs were in the majority. 
 But the shrill pipings of infants could be heard 
 here and there, presupposing the presence of 
 mothers determined to escape in Art for the 
 hour the petty bounds of domestic routine, even 
 at the cost of disturbing other people. And
 
 AUDIENCES — A SPRING GROUCH 271 
 
 there were stout women who ate candy during 
 and between the acts, a few wise eyed youths 
 and some men. The play was quite new; 
 hence, perhaps, the vacant chairs. But there 
 was nothing new about Edna May Spooner, 
 the star. Everybody knew her, palpitated with 
 admiration at her entrance, accorded her hearty 
 applause, and listened attentively and with no 
 sign of disapproval to her monotonous, arti- 
 ficial manner of speech. 
 
 As the drama got under way, disclosing it- 
 self as an attempt, however inadequate and 
 clumsy, to reproduce modern political condi- 
 tions on the stage, the attitude of this audience 
 if not one of baffled intelligence was at least 
 one of impassivity, of tolerant expectation. 
 Girls and mothers, chocolate cream fattened 
 females and wise eyed youths waited patiently 
 for the " love scenes," the " comic relief," the 
 " emotional situations " instinct and experience 
 taught them would eventually come. The part 
 of the Boss was very well played. In act one 
 the Boss came to see young Graham, Inde- 
 pendent candidate for Governor, and Graham 
 burst out into an oration denouncing him, de- 
 claring that he would never withdraw in favor 
 of the regular party candidate. The Boss 
 waited impassively till he was done. " Are 
 you all through orating ? " he asked dryly. 
 ''Then let's really talk." And he quietly
 
 272 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 spiked the reformer's guns by stating that he 
 had called to announce the withdrawal of his 
 candidate, not to suggest the withdrawal of 
 Graham. It was a scene capitally conceived, 
 disclosing the essential characteristics of each 
 man by means of speech or action, and 
 shrewdly humorous in its unexpected twist of 
 climax. Yet the audience, though giving it 
 their attention inevitably, were not roused to 
 mirth, and their faces betrayed no overwhelm- 
 ing signs of stimulated intelligence. 
 
 But, see! What has happened? Suddenly 
 their faces are alight, they lean forward, laugh- 
 ter sways them; they are transfigured into 
 vital attention, stirred, aroused. Has a great 
 emotional actor or a great comedian suddenly 
 appeared upon the stage? No, Tommy, 
 the fresh office boy, has entered in trousers 
 too tight for him and he is down by the 
 footlights talking slang and making " mugs " 
 at the house. The " comic relief " has at 
 last arrived. Here is something the audi- 
 ence can understand, something they are 
 accustomed to. What does it matter if 
 the actor who plays Tommy is grossly out of 
 the picture, if he ridiculously over-acts, if his 
 mouth is twisted and spread into a caricature 
 of the mask of comedy? He is the hero of 
 the moment. The Boss is forgotten. His is 
 the fame.
 
 AUDIENCES — A SPRING GROUCH 273 
 
 Yes, success is in the silences. And how 
 much difference, one fell to wondering, is there 
 after all between this audience at the Lincoln 
 Square, with its narrow little range of apprecia- 
 tion, its pitifully limited capacity of under- 
 standing and criticism, and the audiences 
 further south on Broadway, where fame is in 
 a song about " Bill Simmons " and the magnif- 
 icent success of Sothern's impersonation of 
 Don Quixote is in the deep, deep silence of the- 
 atrical failure? Critics utter their shrill com- 
 plaints; dramatists, managers, and actors are 
 rapped and roasted ; a famous European writer 
 says, " in America the dramatic art has shrunk 
 to a low and exceedingly vulgar level " ; we 
 wail that we have no native poetic drama and 
 next to no prose drama. Yet do we not receive 
 quite as good theatrical fare as we deserve? 
 Let us in this glad season of flower garden 
 hats, benefit performances, timid violets and 
 fresh asphalt permit the dramatists, actors and 
 managers to rest a while in peace and have a 
 look at ourselves — be critical of audiences. 
 
 A friend of the writer who spends his life 
 in doing good deeds among poor and rich alike 
 and so has little time for the theater, went the 
 other evening to one of our most successful 
 plays. There he met a man and woman of his 
 acquaintance and after the play they invited 
 him to supper, being, like the average husband 
 
 18
 
 274 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 and wife of Christendom, glad of company to 
 relieve the monotony of existence. They took 
 him to one of the most popular of the Rialto 
 cafes and *' ordered something." As the room 
 began to fill up he noted with amazement that 
 they knew after a fashion half the people there. 
 It was a strange kind of community, knit by 
 the single bond of nightly theater parties and 
 nightly meetings later at some cafe. With 
 growing astonishment he learned that his 
 friends had tickets to the theater for every re- 
 maining evening that week. As they talked a 
 third man, a broker, came over and joined them. 
 He had been to " The Servant in the House." 
 " It 's a good play," he said, " and I ought to 
 know. I 've been to the theater about a hun- 
 dred and fifty times in the last year." 
 
 "Good heavens! Why?" said the writer's 
 friend. 
 
 "Why not?" said the broker. 
 
 "What would you have us do?" said the 
 husband and wife. 
 
 "What would you have us do?" — isn't 
 that the heart of the problem, or very close to 
 the heart of the problem? When home be- 
 comes the last resort art becomes the first, and 
 neither profits. There are in the Broadway dis- 
 trict alone a quarter of a hundred theaters, 
 which represent an investment of millions of 
 dollars, which nightly cater to at least thirty
 
 AUDIENCES — A SPRING GROUCH 275 
 
 thousand people, which employ thousands of 
 actors and stage hands and mechanics and 
 ushers and scene painters and costumers. 
 Nightly through the Alley is the roll of car- 
 riages, the flash of jewels, the endless parade 
 beneath the electric letters of the theater por- 
 tals, the endless parade out again, and then the 
 gleam and smoke and clatter of restaurants and 
 cafes. How strange, how bewildering, how 
 meaningless it would all seem to the medita- 
 tive Martian, descended from his planet, where 
 life must be quiet and sedate, with so many 
 canals ! Yet it is not meaningless ; it is fraught 
 with a very grave meaning. It represents an 
 eternal hectic effort to escape boredom. The 
 Alley by night is a brilliant battle-ground, and 
 Time is the arch enemy. What is an extra dol- 
 lar or two paid to a nasty speculator on the curb 
 and cheerfully accepted by the doorman in 
 spite of the six foot high warning beside him 
 (he deals in tickets himself of an afternoon, 
 maybe) when three " golden " hours, which in 
 reality are only plated, can thus be laid low? 
 Some thousands of these theatergoers are vis- 
 itors to town. They are " seeing the sights," 
 or they have been buying dry goods supplies 
 all day and must fill in the evening, or they are 
 gleefully dragging the skirts of a supposedly 
 Puritan propriety through the dirt of a sup- 
 posedly naughty Tenderloin, with a musical
 
 276 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 comedy as a preliminary canter. Some other 
 thousands are genuine New Yorkers; that is, 
 they were born in Danbury, Conn., or Spokane, 
 Wash., and now Hve in layers on Manhattan 
 Island, planning to go back home again some 
 day — which they never do. Still others re- 
 side in Brooklyn. See them run for the sub- 
 way when the play is out. Enough of them will 
 be squeezed and shoved into a three car local 
 at Times Square to fill a seven car express at 
 the Grand Central. However, they will all get 
 home before morning. And all of these thou- 
 sands the theaters swallow up at eight every 
 evening and disgorge at eleven, day after day, 
 week after week. Millions of dollars pour into 
 the box offices. Dancers gyrate and sweat; ac- 
 tors strut and pose and supply columns of the 
 papers with unimportant gossip; naval lieuten- 
 ant tenors adventure on the high C ; managers 
 watch and plan. And yet we have no drama. 
 And yet " the powerful and complex aesthetic 
 pleasures of a work of art " are to be found in 
 but a scant half dozen theaters at best. And yet 
 the thinness and poverty of our theatrical fare 
 are only emphasized by the unprecedentedly 
 enormous demand for theatrical entertainment. 
 In plain language, we go to the theater not 
 to secure " the powerful and complex aesthetic 
 pleasures of a work of art," not to see our life 
 reflected on the stage, commented upon, ex-
 
 AUDIENCES — A SPRING GROUCH 277 
 
 plained to us, not for the uplift and release of 
 poetry — but simply because we have n't any- 
 thing else to do. When a man goes to the the- 
 ater because he has n't anything else to do he 
 is not in a condition to pick his play with much 
 discrimination, except vaguely to avoid *' any- 
 thing high brow," whatever that may mean. 
 And when this is his attitude, when all he asks 
 is that he shall not be bored, where is the en- 
 couragement, the stimulus, either to author or 
 manager, to give him more? There is subtle 
 truth in " The Witching Hour." The earnest 
 Vv^ishing of five hundred thousand citizens can- 
 not perhaps break through sealed doors and 
 dictate the verdict of a jury. But the wishes 
 and desires of a million playgoers cannot fail 
 to shape the drama that is written for them. 
 Let them but wish another " Witching Hour " 
 from Mr. Thomas and it will surely come. 
 Even a Theatrical Syndicate cannot stop it. 
 
 Moreover, when a man goes to the theater 
 a hundred and fifty times in a year because he 
 has nothing else to do, when he makes the play- 
 house but the spoil of listless hours, it means 
 with deadly sureness that he has no intellectual 
 resources in himself. The psychological prob- 
 lems, the complexities of choice and conduct, 
 the thousand and one questions raised by our 
 modern social and industrial conditions, which 
 are the material for a native drama, cannot be
 
 278 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 known to him, surely cannot interest him, or 
 he could not find one hundred and fifty plays 
 in New York in a season that he could volun- 
 tarily endure to sit through. Since these prob- 
 lems are unknown to him he does not demand 
 that the drama tackle them; he would be per- 
 plexed, astonished, very likely bored if it did. 
 "High brow!" would probably be his con- 
 temptuous commentary. The *' tired American 
 business man " (who evidently has also a 
 weary wife) has prattled asininely for some 
 time — or somebody has prattled for him — 
 that he wants when evening comes '* to be 
 amused," he needs " relaxation." And his is 
 not the only class to utter this chatter. In reality 
 the statement carries its own damnation, for it 
 is simply an admission that what amuses him 
 is coarseness, frivolity, falseness and bad art, 
 that he knows nothing and cares less about the 
 relaxation of genuine drama, the spiritual up- 
 lift and strengthening of a true aesthetic emo- 
 tion. His is a confession that his brain is 
 pitiably narrow and one sided, incapable of pay- 
 ing attention to more than one branch of serious 
 human endeavor, impervious to culture, dead 
 to art. He makes out a pretty bad case against 
 himself. If it is half as bad as he admits, it is 
 bad enough. 
 
 As a matter of fact we have too many the- 
 aters, too many actors, too many plays on
 
 AUDIENCES — A SPRING GROUCH 279 
 
 Manhattan Island. But as we also have too 
 many people matters are not likely to be mended 
 by subtraction. Two very pleasant features of 
 a civilized existence are impossible where there 
 are so many people — neighbors and homes. 
 Many neighbors mean no neighbors; and 
 " Paid in Full " is eloquent testimony to the 
 somewhat restricted existence in the average 
 flat. Down on the East Side, where we go to 
 carry sweetness and light, seldom dreaming 
 we might find a bit there for our own use, the 
 Jews have contrived to maintain a certain com- 
 munity interest ; and the Jews have a drama — 
 a vital, flourishing drama that is a part of their 
 lives. The New York Public Library branches 
 cannot keep Ibsen's plays on the shelves ; they 
 are in constant demand. And if you ask the 
 librarians who read these plays they answer, 
 " The Jews." It is the People's Institute that 
 largely supports Shakespeare in this city, that 
 put " The Man of the Hour " on its feet, that 
 has helped swing " The Servant in the House " 
 into the high road of success. To these people 
 going to the theater means a sacrifice. They 
 cannot go a hundred and fifty times in a year. 
 And when they do go they go for a better pur- 
 pose than to kill time. Probably most success- 
 ful dramas — successful in the better sense of 
 providing real aesthetic pleasure, of offering 
 notable acting or serious discussion — are sup-
 
 280 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 ported after the first few weeks by people to 
 whom the price of a ticket means a sacrifice. 
 It is the men and women who cannot have what 
 they want who want the best. So, though the 
 meditative Martian, reflecting on what he saw, 
 might wing back to his canals disgusted with 
 our Alley, we need not pull a long face after 
 all, since the prospect of an overwhelming pro- 
 portion of the population securing the means 
 to get what they want when they want it is so 
 remote, such an Utopian dream (if it would not 
 rather prove the opposite of Utopian), that it 
 need not worry us. Below the glitter and the 
 hectic flight from boredom that seems to the 
 casual glance as the essence of Broadway by 
 night is always to be detected the undercurrent, 
 fed from a thousand sources, of those who go 
 to the theater not to kill time but to use it, of 
 those who seek the relaxation not of lingerie 
 and lights but of aesthetic and intellectual emo- 
 tions. 
 
 After all, the wise man will not ask for much 
 more than this. He will admit without scold- 
 ing the right of narrower minds to their nar- 
 rower entertainments, and he will not hug the 
 delusion of universal reformation. Only he 
 will urge the further division of theaters and 
 managers into classes, so that the character of 
 an entertainment may be guaranteed by the 
 house where it is produced, and eventually per-
 
 AUDIENCES — A SPRING GROUCH 281 
 
 haps the endowment of at least one theater in 
 every large city where a wide repertoire of the 
 best drama is constantly played for the delight 
 and instruction of all who care to come, whether 
 they be many or few. At present our stage is 
 conducted for the " common average," which 
 here, as anywhere else, as in the school-room, 
 for instance, works hardship for the few. 
 What we need is a manager who cares so little 
 for money that he believes in the divine right 
 of the minority. And the broker who has been 
 to the theater one hundred and fifty times in 
 one season did see " The Servant in the House " 
 the last time. One real thing, at least, in one 
 hundred and fifty ! Perhaps that is n't so bad 
 a percentage. Perhaps the wise man will be 
 grateful for the one and forget the rest. That 
 is the part of philosophy. Let us revert to the 
 pretty, formal little afTectation of our grand- 
 fathers and close with a bit of poetry. Once 
 in a while a bit of poetry leaves a pleasant taste 
 in the mouth, even if the present mission of 
 poetry is to fill out the blank space on a maga- 
 zine page. And why not the rest of that verse 
 we began with? 
 
 Have little care that Life is brief, 
 
 And less that Art is long; 
 Success is in the silences, 
 
 Though fame is in the song.
 
 CROWDS AND MR. HAMILTON 
 
 M GUST AVE LE BON once wrote a 
 book called "The Crowd: A Study 
 of the Popular Mind," since when 
 every psychologist and every academic stu- 
 dent can tell you that " a man by the mere fact 
 that he forms part of an organized crowd 
 descends several rungs on the ladder of civil- 
 ization " ; that all legislative bodies, though 
 composed of intelligent men, are collectively 
 no better than children or barbarians; that all 
 theater audiences, even though composed of 
 men and women of culture and refinement, by 
 the " law of the crowd," possess as collective 
 bodies neither culture nor refinement, are in- 
 terested only in the most primitive emotions, 
 delight only in blood and carnage, in horse- 
 play or hysterics. Clayton Hamilton, a man 
 who takes his own brain to the theater but 
 thinks nobody else does, and who has written 
 a piece about it* called " The Psychology of 
 Theater Audiences," has been earnestly read- 
 ing Le Bon's book, as A. B. Walkley of the 
 " London Times " evidently read it before him. 
 And Mr. Hamilton, ignoring his own attitude 
 
 * The Forum, October, 1907.
 
 CROWDS AND MR. HAMILTON 283 
 
 when a unit in a theatrical audience, and ignor- 
 ing also the very possible supposition that may- 
 be some hundreds of other folks around him 
 are in the same attitude, swallows Le Bon at 
 a single gulp and boldly assures us that '' even 
 the most cultured and intellectual of men when 
 he forms an atom of a crowd loses conscious- 
 ness of his acquired mental qualities and harks 
 back to his primal nakedness of mind. The 
 dramatist, therefore, because he writes for a 
 crowd, writes for an uncivilized and unculti- 
 vated mind, a mind richly human, vehement in 
 approbation, violent in disapproval, easily cred- 
 ulous, eagerly enthusiastic, boyishly heroic, and 
 carelessly unthinking." 
 
 Now, there 's only one trouble with this 
 statement — it is n't true. It 's one of those 
 most pernicious of things, a half truth. It is 
 an out and out affirmation of a very much quali- 
 fied fact, just as Le Bon's work, which was, 
 without question, a great contribution to psy- 
 chology, none the less constantly and at times 
 violently exaggerated, as was natural, perhaps, 
 in the work of a man possessed by a new theory. 
 No one denies Le Bon's main contention that 
 an organized crowd tends always to absorb the 
 personal traits of the men who compose it and 
 to assume a great, comprehensive new con- 
 sciousness of its own, a consciousness made up 
 of the common traits of the individual atoms,
 
 284 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 not of their differences. And as men possess 
 in common certain primal and racial passions, 
 beliefs, instincts, rather than intellectual over- 
 beliefs and judgments, the mind of the crowd 
 tends always to be credulous, emotional, easily 
 swayed by passion and not at all by judgment. 
 There does n't a man exist who cannot testify 
 to this from his own experience, who has not 
 at some time or other, in a crowd — a gang 
 of sophomores hazing, a political convention, 
 what not — done something he would not have 
 done in cold blood by himself — cheered or 
 hooted with the rest at some sentiment that his 
 personal judgment would, if left to itself, have 
 received in the opposite way, " descended sev- 
 eral rungs on the ladder of civilization." The 
 mistake lies in supposing that all crowds al- 
 ways — especially Anglo-Saxon crowds — so 
 absorb the identity of the atoms which com- 
 pose them. They may always tend to, but they 
 by no means always succeed. And in no crowd 
 is the absorption so likely to be incomplete as 
 in the theater audiences which gather in the 
 better play-houses of a large city. 
 
 Indeed, if we must be psychological let us 
 be psychological in the only ultimate way and 
 indulge in a little introspection. Mr. Hamilton 
 himself does not admit that he becomes a 
 barbarian in the play-house; we do not get 
 a picture of him scrambling hastily down
 
 CROWDS AND MR. HAMILTON 285 
 
 the ladder of civilization as the asbestos 
 curtain rises. No, rather do we see him 
 perching perkily on the very top, exulting 
 that he was the only member of an audi- 
 ence in the middle West who appreciated 
 the lyric quality of " Othello." And if you or 
 I set our minds to the task of recalling some 
 evening in the play-house we shall find that 
 while the woman next to us was weeping we 
 were wondering why, or while we were lis- 
 tening to some speech with a lump in our throat 
 the man behind us was snickering. Undoubt- 
 edly there are times in the theater when we 
 laugh because a laugh sweeps over the audi- 
 ence, or are thrilled by contagion. But for the 
 most part those of us who have reached a cer- 
 tain scale of intelligence and achieved a certain 
 standard of taste sit in the theater more or less 
 oblivious to the crowd around us, getting our 
 ideas and emotions directly from the stage. 
 Mr. Walkley and Mr. Hamilton and the rest 
 who have found in Le Bon what seems to them 
 a scientific justification for the old academic 
 bugaboo of " primitive passions," of " appeal 
 to the great masses " in the drama, all admit 
 the presence in the orchestra chairs of certain 
 chosen people who keep themselves detached, 
 who retain their own identities. Sometimes 
 these paragons are called critics. But how 
 can anybody stroll in the lobby of a Broadway
 
 286 THE AISIERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 play-house between the acts without reahzing 
 that half the audience are critics, lacking only 
 the chance to blot white paper with black ink? 
 There are as many differences of opinion on 
 the first night of a new play as there are people 
 in the house. And they are not minor differ- 
 ences, but fundamental ones — this man liking 
 the play, that loathing it. There is no great 
 mob judgment of the play. The truth is that 
 this dear old theory about the inevitable neces- 
 sity of the dramatist to deal in primitive pas- 
 sions, to paint in raw colors, to appeal only 
 to the broad, fundamental instincts and emo- 
 tions of the race, to simplify the psychology of 
 his characters till each wears a label of good- 
 ness or badness as big as the number on the 
 back of a Vanderbilt cup racer, is a relic of 
 *' the spacious times of great Elizabeth," that 
 were in some ways about as narrow as well 
 could be. It is a theory still in part true, of 
 course ; true, certainly, of Eighth Avenue, true 
 of the Broadway balconies (when there is any- 
 body in them), true to a minor extent of the 
 lower parts of the house. But the increased 
 education, the more catholic and subtle tastes, 
 the greater sophistication and training in ap- 
 preciation of art of the modern man and 
 woman have already smashed great breaches in 
 the wall of this theory and are every day mak- 
 ing it less tenable. Mr. Hamilton is n't the
 
 CROWDS AND MR. HAMILTON 287 
 
 only man who goes into the theater without 
 checking his personal intelligence and refine- 
 ment at the coat room — aye, even in New 
 York, even in our merry, care-free, specula- 
 tor infested little White Alley! 
 
 " When a progressive stage society is 
 started," says Mr. Hamilton, " it usually damns 
 itself in the beginning by giving a special per- 
 formance of ' The Master Builder.' How can 
 it hope to uplift the crowd with a play that the 
 crowd cannot with any effort understand? " 
 And then he cries, " Why should we waste our 
 money and our energy trying to make the 
 crowd come to see ' The Master Builder ' ? " 
 
 We shall have to refer him to Mme. Nazi- 
 mova for an answer. She will tell him perti- 
 nently that she did n't waste any money, that 
 she took it in hand over fist at the box office 
 window. Perhaps she would add that she 
 did n't, however, make " the crowd," in his 
 sense, come to the Bijou Theater at all, that 
 in a city of four or five millions of people there 
 are conceivably various grades of taste and 
 intelligence, which do not mix in the play- 
 house in a great, heterogeneous mass, but which 
 seek each its own level of enjoyment; and con- 
 ceivably there is a grade capable of finding en- 
 joyment in Ibsen numerous enough to fill the 
 Bijou Theater for some few weeks, while an- 
 other grade is having the time of its life at
 
 288 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 the Rogers Brothers. At any rate, there were 
 the audiences at " The Master Builder " every 
 night, and packed in at the matinees (Mr. 
 Hamilton goes Hugo one better in his low 
 opinion of women as auditors in a theater). 
 There is the fact. What is Mr. Hamilton 
 going to do about it? 
 
 In his article he says, " The trouble with 
 most of the dreamers who league themselves 
 for the uplifting of the stage is that they 
 take the theater too seriously. [The theater 
 audience] seeks amusement . . . amusement 
 through laughter, sympathy, terror and tears." 
 In the name of the Muses shall we never have 
 done with this academic distinction between 
 the stage and the other arts, this condescend- 
 ing patronage bestowed on the poor play-house 
 by the learned gentlemen who walk beneath 
 college elms and appreciate the poetry of Shake- 
 speare while the vulgar mob, of course, know 
 nothing about it? If any actor or any man- 
 ager or any critic does n't take the theater 
 seriously he 'd better get out of it. If any man 
 in any profession does n't take his work seri- 
 ously he 's wasting his time, and his plain duty 
 is to get out and hoe corn or saw wood or 
 otherwise engage himself in some occupation 
 worthy of his ideals. As a matter of fact, 
 amusing people is the most serious business 
 in the world. And, as a matter of fact, the man
 
 CROWDS AND MR. HAMILTON 289 
 
 who does it through the drama is n't obHged 
 to be any less strict with his artistic conscience, 
 any more lax in his ideals of truth and beauty 
 than the man who does it through the novel 
 or the symphony or the statue. Are not musi- 
 cal audiences as much a " crowd " as theatrical 
 audiences? But did Mozart or Beethoven have 
 to select tunes that the " primitive whistle " 
 could gleefully compass for the themes of their 
 symphonies? Do the Kneisels have to play 
 music which an audience at the Casino would 
 enjoy? The word "amusement" needs rede- 
 fining. Like a good many other words, it needs 
 redefining at least once a generation. Plays 
 that " amused " our fathers don't amuse us ; 
 plays that amuse you don't amuse me. What 
 does each of us mean? In Shakespeare's day 
 it meant to be entertained by a story. In our 
 day, for a great many of us, probably includ- 
 ing Mr. Hamilton, it means to be shown a little 
 more clearly, a little more fully, the meaning 
 and the mystery of our human lives, their com- 
 plexities and problems, their hopes and fears. 
 And one of these complexities is the breaking 
 up of society into rough intellectual classes, so 
 that two plays of widely different appeal may 
 be shown on opposite sides of Broadway and 
 each find audiences that secure from it the pecu- 
 liar form of enjoyment their taste and culture 
 demand. The time is already at hand when 
 
 19
 
 290 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 the " primitive psychology " of the crowd need 
 not be a bugaboo for the ambitious and earnest 
 dramatist who feels in his heart of hearts that 
 there are other things amusing beside sitting 
 in a squash pie or choking your wife to death 
 in a jealous fury.
 
 OBSERVATION IN THE DRAMA 
 
 A CERTAIN well-known actress recently 
 said that she admired a certain other 
 well-known actress. "Why?" some- 
 body asked her, perhaps not unreasonably sur- 
 prised. " Because," said she, " she does so 
 wonderfully well those things that — that no- 
 body ever does ! " This is the feminine of 
 David Warfield's assertion that too many ac- 
 tors imitate not life but other actors. And 
 what is true of the players is equally true of 
 the playwrights. The old brown tree theory 
 in painting has its counterpart in play-making. 
 The artist who takes his canvas out of doors, 
 the dramatist who writes with his eye on life, 
 are alike refreshing. 
 
 If any proof of this were needed it is to be 
 found in Clyde Fitch's farce, " Girls." What- 
 ever Mr. Fitch's faults may be, lack of obser- 
 vation is not one of them. He goes through 
 life with his eyes open; his mind must be a 
 stored note-book of impressions. His men and 
 women are not forever doing the same old 
 things, saying the same old words, trotting out 
 the same old pack of tricks. They do things, 
 they say things which reflect the life around
 
 29:2 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 us and in a thousand little ways connect Mr. 
 Fitch's dramas with actualities. Thus the sur- 
 face texture of a Fitch play is always surpris- 
 ing and delightful; it seems fresh. When his 
 girls modestly retire to the folding bed, the 
 couch and the Morris chair respectively, set- 
 tling down for slumber, there is a sudden dia- 
 bolical thumping in the steam-pipes — a little 
 thing, but how painfully real to every flat 
 dweller in the audience! The comic effect of 
 this single small touch of observation is sur- 
 prisingly large. Again, the hero builds a bridge 
 across the air-shaft with a blind — a patent 
 bridge for cliff dwellers, he calls it, hitting off 
 our unholy fashion of existence in New York 
 with an epithet — and the blind falls down. 
 It does n't fall a few feet to the stage. You 
 hear it bumping from side to side down all four 
 stories that are supposed to be there, and then 
 comes the crash of broken glass. Mr. Fitch has 
 looked down one of these flat-house air-shafts 
 and seen the skylight at the bottom. And to 
 you, sitting in the audience, comes the picture 
 too, and you actually feel that room on the 
 stage to be four stories up. The illusion is 
 very pleasant — illusion always is. You are 
 delighted to have your imagination stirred into 
 doing a little work, into helping the playwright 
 build his scene. 
 
 Mr. Fitch sends one of his girls out for
 
 OBSERVATION IN THE DRAMA 293 
 
 provisions. He has observed what girls eat 
 on such occasions (or somebody has told him, 
 and he remembered). A titter runs through 
 the audience as the packages are undone. 
 Somebody is being hit here! Then there are 
 the hairpins in the match-box; and the funny 
 little confectionery bride atop the wedding cake 
 (in what East Side bakeshop window did Mr. 
 Fitch see that as he was strolling by to store 
 away the memory in a corner of his brain?) ; 
 and the '' elocutionist " who sings " Love Me 
 and the World is Mu-ine ! " the one and only 
 song for her to sing, sung in the one and only 
 way to sing it : and the silly married lady who, 
 blocked in her pursuit of her husband by one 
 of those office gates which have the real catch 
 on the under side of the apparent lock, gives 
 up the attempt to solve the puzzle and climbs 
 over the gate with that comical awkwardness 
 of the sex aware of their ankles. Most of us 
 have seen a woman straddle a gate and smiled. 
 Mr. Fitch knew we would smile at it in a play. 
 It would be easy to multiply examples of this 
 sort; every spectator of " Girls " can see them 
 for himself. Taken together they are what give 
 to the play in no small measure its freshness 
 and charm; they help to make it real, to con- 
 nect it with the lives of those in the audience, 
 to arouse pleasant associations, to pique mildly 
 the imagination. And they are all the result
 
 294 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 of Mr. Fitch's gift of observation, his feel for 
 the surface texture of Hfe, his habit of keeping 
 his eyes open not only in the theater but out- 
 side of it. 
 
 George Ade is another playwright possessed 
 of the seeing eye, " the eye for copy " it would 
 be called in a newspaper shop ; " the daily theme 
 eye " it is called by the Harvard English de- 
 partment. Before he wrote for the stage Mr. 
 Ade's " Fables in Slang " had carried his fame 
 abroad, because of their delicious observation, 
 their humorous rendering of certain phases of 
 life, particularly life in smaller towns. Even 
 to-day Ade is best appreciated by the man 
 reared in a small town. The foibles he most 
 keenly exposes are the foibles of the village. 
 The tale of the two youths in " Artie " — poor, 
 ill-fated, delightful " Artie " — who went to 
 the Union No. 19 ball, and of how they there 
 " picked up " the heroine, is not to be flavored 
 by your more sophisticated dweller on the 
 Avenue, who does not know that the game of 
 chance acquaintance has its etiquette but no 
 impropriety. The faintest suspicion of impro- 
 priety would have ruined the truth of this 
 scene. " The College Widow," of course, was 
 one long exhibition of delicious observations, 
 from the big guard, whose patent leather shoe 
 " bound just across the instep," to the board- 
 ing-house keeper's daughter and the " widow "
 
 OBSERVATION IN THE DRAMA 295 
 
 herself, who wore a new fraternity pin each 
 season. Indeed, just because Mr. Ade does go 
 through hfe with his eyes open, just because 
 he is interested in the men and women about 
 him, he is able to tap new springs of theatrical 
 supply, to avoid the stale, the overworked, the 
 conventional in the theater, bringing something 
 fresh and new to the stage. " The College 
 Widow " was hailed as new even by those 
 people who could not know that it was true, 
 who could not appreciate its quiet little jabs 
 of satire, its amiable, even affectionate, render- 
 ing of life in a small college. It is not his 
 slang that makes Mr. Ade's work popular with 
 intelligent people. George Cohan can write 
 slang. Certainly it is not his skill as a play 
 constructor, since his skill in that direction is 
 conspicuous only by its absence. It is his 
 freshness, the unworn, unhackneyed quality of 
 his texture and material. And he has this fresh- 
 ness because Mr. Ade keeps his eyes open. 
 And Mr. Ade keeps his eyes open because his 
 universe is not bounded by the Flatirons; he 
 loves life anywhere he meets it, loves to watch 
 it, to render it, to catch up some faint echo of 
 the amusement it gives him into his plays, that 
 others may be amused as he is. That is the 
 secret of the fresh charm of his work, that the 
 source of its vitality. 
 
 J. M. Barrie, perhaps, of all living English-
 
 296 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 speaking playwrights, best illustrates the power 
 of observation in the drama. No man has 
 tapped a more varied source of supply than 
 he, and no man has brought to the stage a 
 wider range of novel material. The village of 
 Thrums, the Quality Street of Jane Austen's 
 time, the Never-never-never land of childish 
 fairy tale, the English drawing-room of to-day, 
 with the life below stairs shown in comical 
 contrast, are alike subjects for his plays, and 
 alike handled with the most faithful and lov- 
 ing truth. How did Barrie come to write 
 "Peter Pan"? Did he say, "Go to, I will 
 write a play for children. Pens, ink, and paper, 
 boy!" Hardly. He walked with his dog in 
 Kensington Gardens ; he told tales to the chil- 
 dren there. He got acquainted with the ducks. 
 He learned where Peter lived, on the island. 
 Finally he met the Little White Bird, and that 
 was the little bird that whispered the secret of 
 the play in his ear, or rather of the book. The 
 play came later. Nana is unnatural history 
 only to those who have never watched dogs. 
 The play fails of appeal only to those who do 
 not remember their own childhood or who have 
 not lived it again with little children. Even 
 such a slight thing as Smee's sewing machine 
 illustrates Barrie's eternal watchfulness. He 
 and Mr. Frohman had gone down to Man- 
 chester to see the first " provincial " produc-
 
 OBSERVATION IN THE DRAMA 297 
 
 tion of the play. They were walking along 
 the street in the afternoon when Barrie sud- 
 denly stopped to gaze into a window. A man 
 was sitting there sewing at a machine. Barrie 
 grinned. " What is it? " asked Mr. Frohman. 
 "Why, don't you see?" laughed the author. 
 " Smee must have a sewing machine — it 's so 
 incongruous." And that night he had his ma- 
 chine and the audience roared. 
 
 "The Admirable Crichton," so different from 
 " Peter Pan," so profoundly philosophical be- 
 neath its whimsicality, is conceived in terms of 
 the most rigid and solid drama, its most effec- 
 tive moment being pantomime — the moment 
 at the end of the second act when the aristo- 
 crats who have revolted from the rule of the 
 butler come stealing sheepishly back in the 
 darkness, drawn by the magic odor of the pot 
 on the fire. And this solidity is due to what? 
 To Mr. Barrie's faithful observation. The ser- 
 vants sitting ill at ease in the lord's parlor 
 for their monthly dose of "equality" ; the butler 
 on the desert island become king because he is 
 the one who knows how to build fires, make 
 houses, cook the food, meet the primitive neces- 
 sities; the aristocrats back again in London 
 assuming once more their superior position 
 while the butler no less readily assumes his 
 by bowing his shoulders and rubbing his hands 
 again in the old, submissive way, all are indi-
 
 298 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 cated for the eye almost without the aid of 
 speech, and indicated because Barrie knew what 
 he was drawing, worked from the Hving model. 
 His observation was minute and patient and 
 seemingly unbounded. He knew how butlers 
 rub their hands, how the social castes below 
 stairs divide themselves, how servants sit when 
 they are trying to appear at ease in a drawing- 
 room, how Mayfair makes epigrams or holds 
 its head up haughtily or gets hungry on a 
 desert island, like the rest of us. Other men 
 could have worked out the logical scheme of 
 " The Admirable Crichton " as well as Barrie; 
 Shaw no doubt could have worked it out no 
 less wittily. But no other living playwright 
 could have made it not alone so humane and 
 kindly and sweet, but so real. For no other 
 playwright has watched men and women so 
 closely and so lovingly, remembering their little 
 tricks and attitudes, their pet phrases and per- 
 sonal humors, their oddities of dress and speech 
 and thought. It is n't Barrie's fault if he does 
 this. He cannot help it. That 's the way the 
 Lord made him — a lover of his fellow men 
 for their own sakes, not for the sake of put- 
 ting them into a play. He probably gets as 
 much fun out of his material before his plays 
 are written as we do afterward. 
 
 And what a pity it is, as A. B. Walkley has 
 pointed out, that Shaw is so entirely lacking
 
 OBSERVATION IN THE DRAMA 299 
 
 in just this quality of observation. Probably 
 few people have failed to experience a kind of 
 disappointment, a sense of vague lack, even at 
 the most brilliant of Shaw's comedies. They 
 get to the head, but not below it ; they inspire 
 laughter without warmth or glow; there is 
 something unreal about them, even about 
 " Candida," for they leave the emotions un- 
 touched. " The ordinary everyday surface of 
 the universe is to him," says Mr. Walkley, 
 " only a springboard from which he jumps into 
 the space of ratiocination — his own peculiar 
 space, a space of four dimensions." Perish 
 the imputation that this passionate Fabian, this 
 paradoxical Socialist, doef not love his fellow 
 men! G. B. S. loves us one and all. But he 
 is too burdened with the mission of correcting 
 us, of making the straight places of our phi- 
 losophy crooked, of supplying us with theories 
 and shattering our romantic ideals, to take any 
 interest in the mere surface details of our lives. 
 He could never sit in his club window and 
 watch the passing throng. If he should walk 
 in Kensington Gardens he would ask the ducks 
 why they were n't swans. There is none of 
 Mr. Barrie's loving, patient rendering of 
 minute detail in his dramas, because he is n't 
 interested in such detail in life. Therefore 
 " The Admirable Crichton," which is quite as 
 profoundly philosophical as anything Shaw
 
 300 THE AlVIERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 has written, is also a thousand times more 
 real. 
 
 To come back to Broadway, " Paid in Full " 
 admirably illustrates in its first act just this 
 quality of observation; and surely it is more 
 than chance that as the truth of observation 
 grows dim the drama grows more and more 
 theatric and conventional. The humors of a 
 Harlem flat (for a Harlem flat may have its 
 humors, to the onlooker at least!), the young 
 husband with the carpet sweeper, the dumb- 
 waiter, the speaking tube, the paper-hanger's 
 mess, the grocery bills, the petty economies in 
 light and fuel give to that admirable open- 
 ing act a tang of reality that is lacking later, 
 when the machinery of the story gets to creak- 
 ing and the characters become puppets for the 
 purposes of the play. Mr. Walter, however, 
 never quite loses his gift of observation. There 
 are touches of it in his " semi-fashionable " 
 hotel ; it gleams again in the setting for Capt. 
 Williams's apartment, and in the Captain's 
 conversation with his servant. And every fitful 
 gleam arouses a response in the audience that 
 ought to show plainly enough how priceless a 
 gift it is for the playwright, especially the man 
 who would make dramas of contemporary life. 
 
 Emerson once remarked, possibly not with- 
 out a touch of that local self-sufficiency which 
 still may be found in Concord, Massachusetts,
 
 OBSERVATION IN THE DRAMA 301 
 
 that the traveler to Europe finds nothing there 
 he does not take with him. Alas! the play- 
 wright finds nothing in life either that he does 
 not bring with him. After all, you cannot go 
 forth saying " I will discover a new corner of 
 life to exploit on the stage," with any hope of 
 success. It is the old fable of the two shep- 
 herds who sought the magic flower. Once upon 
 a time a reporter, lacking an assignment, went 
 down to the Battery and sat on the sea-wall, 
 bemoaning the injustice of the Fates who would 
 not bring about a subway accident or a bomb 
 explosion or a four alarm fire to swell his 
 slender space bill. The sun was warm. The 
 lazy tide ran by, bearing on its bosom many 
 strange things out to sea. And the reporter 
 had the curiosity of his kind. He forgot his 
 hard lot in the pleasant pastime of watching 
 the strange burdens of the tide. Presently he 
 was taking notes. A couple of hours later 
 he strolled back to Park Row and wrote a col- 
 umn. " It 's a low tide," he said, " that brings 
 no space." And it's a pretty poor corner of 
 life that will yield no drama. But that drama 
 is not to be had for the asking. The seeing 
 eye must discover it, the faithful hand tran- 
 scribe. It must be observed first for its own 
 sake, loved for its own sake. And that is only 
 possible when the playwright has almost the 
 painter's childish delight in the form and color
 
 302 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 and movement of the universe and the healthy- 
 man's warm-hearted interest in the doings of 
 his fellows. Mr. Barrie could not have created 
 Nana if he did n't like dogs, nor Crichton if 
 he lacked a fraternal interest in butlers. 
 George Ade could never have written " The 
 College Widow " if he had gone through college 
 with his nose in a book. Academic courses 
 in the technique of the drama, patient study of 
 Euripides and Shakespeare, Moliere and Con- 
 greve are all very well. But the young loafer 
 who lounges around the pool room in his club 
 and smokes too plenteous pipes of good fellow- 
 ship in unscholastic chat with his kind may be 
 closer to the right track, after all — which is 
 a dangerous doctrine for undergraduates!
 
 THE GRAPHOMANIA MIMETICA 
 
 INSPIRED by the far-reaching results 
 which have followed two recent theses for 
 the doctor's degree at Cambridge, one on 
 " The longitudinal vibrations of a piece of 
 rubbed string " and the other on " The place 
 of vision in the mental life of the mouse," a 
 friend of ours has for some time past been 
 working in his private laboratory, and soon 
 he will give to the world a monograph on " The 
 effect on the cellular organism of a guinea pig 
 of the bacillus graphomania mimetica." He 
 has, after months of patient labor, succeeded 
 in isolating this deadly microbe, and has several 
 tubes filled with the cultures, which multiply 
 in the temperature of Broadway at a prodigious 
 rate. We have been permitted to look at this 
 microbe through a powerful magnifying glass. 
 It is a horrid bug, yellow, striped with black. 
 We shuddered as we looked at it and made 
 sure to wash our hands with carbolic and to 
 disinfect our clothes. But the scientist seems 
 to handle the cultures quite without fear, and 
 now he is looking for human beings to experi- 
 ment on. The trouble, he says, is not to find 
 people willing to undergo an injection, but to
 
 304 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 find anybody who has n't already at least a 
 taint of the disease in his blood. Naturally 
 he tried first in the colleges; but the under- 
 graduates turned out the worst class of all. 
 One drop of blood from a Harvard senior dis- 
 closed on analysis 3,400,271 microbes, and even 
 in the women's colleges the contagion was al- 
 most as bad. If there is anybody who has 
 never written so much as the first act of a 
 play and has never felt the slightest itch to 
 write a play, this scientist would be grateful 
 for his or her name and address. But in spite 
 of his inability to find hitherto a perfectly 
 healthy human being on whom to experiment, 
 and in spite of his inability to find any agent 
 that will kill the germ without also killing the 
 victim (marriage will often cure love, but pro- 
 duction seems only to heighten the play writing 
 fever), our scientific friend has yet been able 
 to draw a few pretty certain conclusions re- 
 garding the disease that can hardly fail to be 
 of interest. 
 
 One of the symptoms which usually (though 
 not always) distinguishes the play writing fever 
 from authoritis in general is the presence in 
 the victim of hallucinations, closely akin on the 
 one hand to the morbid idea that the world is 
 in a conspiracy against one — a common form 
 of incipient insanity — and on the other to ex- 
 aggerated egotism. To what lengths the first
 
 THE GRAPHOMANIA MIMETICA 305 
 
 form of the hallucinations will lead a victim is 
 well illustrated by a playwright who not long 
 ago wrote a furious letter to a certain manager 
 declaring that his play had not been read. He 
 knew it had n't because he sprinkled sand be- 
 tween pages thirteen and fourteen, and the 
 sand was still there when the manuscript came 
 back to him! Managers don't read the plays 
 submitted to them, he hotly affirmed. They 
 produce only the work of foreigners or dra- 
 matists who have " arrived." The Great Amer- 
 ica Drama comes knocking at their door and 
 they send word they are out. The second 
 phase of the hallucinations is also illustrated 
 by this same case. The playwright was totally 
 incapable of comprehending that perhaps it was 
 enough to read twelve pages of his play to find 
 out that it was unfit for the stage. As some- 
 body once took the trouble to say, " You don't 
 have to eat the whole of an egg to discover 
 that it 's rotten." There was never a play- 
 wright yet who did not feel confident that his 
 play was great, who did not know that it 
 " united the technique of Ibsen with the amus- 
 ing surface detail of Fitch," as a budding 
 young dramatist said to us only yesterday while 
 enthusiastically describing his latest master- 
 piece. This same young bud had a play pro- 
 duced not very long ago; and that, we admit, 
 
 ought to be an argument for the stupidity of 
 
 20
 
 306 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 managers, though he arrives at his conclusion 
 concerning the mental capacity of the powers 
 that produce by quite another logical route. 
 This play was a dire failure. Not one of the 
 characters was alive, not one of them spoke 
 human speech, not for a moment did the drama 
 convince, not once did it disclose the trace of 
 a talent. But was he purged of his fever? 
 Far from it ! He laid the blame on the actors 
 and the stage management, and went blithely 
 to work on a second masterpiece! 
 
 Now, nothing can be more certain than that 
 this man does not know how to write a play, 
 or, better, that he has not the quality and force 
 of imagination to conceive a story in terms of 
 the theater. He can and has written fiction 
 of some merit and charm. He cannot and 
 never will write a play. But the fatal germ is 
 in his veins, the nasty little yellow bug is eat- 
 ing at his tissues. And incapacitated for self- 
 criticism as a result, deluded, wrapped up now 
 in his dream, he goes right on trying, and will 
 go right on trying till the Ultimate Disappoint- 
 ment, Doubtless the malign influence of the 
 lady of the winged wheel is at work here, and 
 in all such cases, to some extent. When a 
 poor pen pusher to whom five cents a word is 
 a dream of avarice reads that Charles Klein 
 has made half a million dollars from '' The Lion 
 and the Mouse," or that Fitch's royalties have
 
 THE GRAPHOMANIA MIMETICA 307 
 
 mounted in a single year into six figures, it is 
 easy and natural for him to convince himself 
 that he too can write a play. The fact that 
 he knows nothing about the theater, that he 
 has never trained his mind to think in terms 
 of the stage, that the dramatic medium is not 
 the medium proper to his imagination, does not 
 deter him in the slightest. So he writes the 
 play, and back it comes to him from manager 
 after manager. And does it occur to him that 
 perhaps these men, who after all have had quite 
 as much experience in the theater as he, know 
 a little what they are about, that possibly his 
 play is unfit for the stage ? Far otherwise ! It 
 occurs to him that they are all fools and the 
 world a brutal place, unappreciative of true 
 talent. So he continues to heed the beckoning 
 finger of the lady of the winged wheel. 
 
 Our friend the scientist, who it may be 
 guessed is not unacquainted with the practical 
 theater, for the sake of thoroughness in his 
 investigations studies not only the victims of 
 the disease but their fever products. To that 
 end during the past year or two he read many 
 score of manuscripts that poured into the man- 
 agers' offices. He states positively that forty- 
 eight out of fifty could be rejected on a reading 
 of the first act, thirty out of fifty on a reading 
 of ten pages, and at least twenty out of fifty 
 on a bare reading of the cast and scene plot.
 
 308 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Perhaps not one in a hundred had to be read 
 through to the end. They were read through 
 to the end always in the hope that some good 
 idea, some gleam of talent, might be discov- 
 ered and encouraged ; but it was not necessary 
 for the rejection of that particular play. Musi- 
 cal comedies bristling with bad puns, impossible 
 lyrics and naval lieutenants who sing tenor; 
 poor, feeble copies of the latest Broadway suc- 
 cess; plays without points and plays without 
 joints — by the hundreds they pour in upon the 
 managers. And always this is their lesson, 
 that the people who write them have no busi- 
 ness trying to write for the stage; in the good 
 old-fashioned phrase they have not been 
 " called." They have got the little yellow bug 
 into their systems and are sufferers from dis- 
 ease. The wonder is not that the managers 
 produce so few good plays, but so many ; that 
 they contrive to pick out any sheep from such 
 an endless herd of goats. 
 
 Perhaps the difference between the born 
 artist, who writes poems or paints pictures or 
 builds plays (plays are built, not written), be- 
 cause the dear Lord willed it so, and the fellow 
 who does it because he has got a microbe into 
 his system, is shown, the scientist says, most 
 clearly in the temper with which either man 
 suffers a rejection. Stevenson, you will recall, 
 records that if his " stuff " was returned to him
 
 THE GRAPHOMANIA MTMETICA 309 
 
 in his early years, why, then, he told himself, he 
 had not learned to write, and he went cheerfully 
 back to his practice. And such practice! He 
 imitated everybody. He wrote and rewrote and 
 rewrote again and then tore up. He " played 
 the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Words- 
 worth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Montaigne, 
 to Baudelaire and to Obermann." " In ' Mon- 
 mouth,' a tragedy," he says, " I reclined on 
 the bosom of Mr. Swinburne." Finally, after 
 years of such patient toil, he began to know 
 how to write. The born dramatist too is well 
 aware that his art is no less difficult to master, 
 no less exacting a task driver, and far more 
 difficult, indeed, to secure proper practice in ; for 
 it is only on the stage that his product can be 
 fully judged, and it is just on the stage that 
 he cannot place it till his product is finished and 
 matured. Nevertheless he will not be discour- 
 aged. He will " play the sedulous ape " to 
 Shakespeare and to Ibsen and to Dumas and 
 to Scribe. He will repose on the bosom of 
 Jones. He will build and rebuild and then 
 tear down. And if he should get his work 
 back from the managers, or if it should se- 
 cure a production and fail on the stage, he 
 would merely say that he had not yet 
 learned to build a play, and go back to his 
 practice. Thus the born dramatist. He needs 
 no advice; he will follow the star of his
 
 310 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 destiny willy nilly. And nothing can stop his 
 ultimate " arrival." 
 
 But the man who makes plays not from 
 born instinct, not because his imagination casts 
 everything into the dramatic mould, but be- 
 cause somebody else has written plays that 
 brought a fortune, or just because, maybe, it 
 seems a pleasant and " artistic " thing to do, 
 because, in short, he has inhaled the horrid 
 yellow germ — that man scorns practice, would 
 sit down and write a great drama at the first 
 try, would have it that a noble and intricate 
 and baffling art can be mastered in a moment 
 or by anybody. It is he who raises the cry of 
 ignorance and stupidity when his manuscript 
 comes back to him. It is he who blames the 
 public or the actors or both when his bad plays 
 fail. It is he who wanders in our Alley — so 
 says the scientist — with the voice of a martyr, 
 declaring against the hosts of the Philistines. 
 Samson's weapon seems to be less effective 
 now. Meanwhile, again says our scientist, 
 even as he is displaying this symptom of the 
 dread disease, the born playwright (who is, 
 after all, the only immune) is at home at his 
 practice, saying nothing, not at all sure that 
 he knows how to write a play, but keeping at 
 it just the same. 
 
 So the disease works in every city, in every 
 town that boasts an " opera house," in every
 
 THE GRAPHOMANIA MIMETICA 311 
 
 college that boasts an English department. 
 There seem to be no adequate preventive sani- 
 tary precautions, still less no cure. But per- 
 haps there is a compensation. For every re- 
 jected manuscript, every failure of false or 
 immature or ignorant work upon the stage, 
 every piece of knock-kneed philosophy or vapid 
 humor or clumsy craftsmanship sent to the dust 
 heap, above all every thwarted attempt of little 
 minded men to foist their feeble personalities 
 into the theater, but shows anew the trium- 
 phant intricacy and conquering truth of the 
 dramatic art.
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 
 
 ENTITLE a dramatic essay The Confes- 
 sions of a Critic and there will not be 
 wanting those to tell you it should con- 
 sist of a diet list and a record of the digestion. 
 Broadway hath no fury like an actress scored. 
 Players, hving, working, breathing in the con- 
 centrated atmosphere of personalities, whose 
 measure of success, even in cold dollars and 
 cents as salary, is personal popularity, quite 
 naturally find it hard to realize the utter im- 
 personality of the critic's judgments, of them- 
 selves as much as of the play. It is an un- 
 fortunate feature of dramatic and musical 
 criticism that names have to be used, the 
 names of sensitive men and women who yet 
 must be treated as if they were but parts in 
 a machine. That is one of their tragedies — 
 when critical comment is adverse! But their 
 comment on the critic, their references to his 
 digestion, being less public, are not one of his 
 tragedies. 
 
 His tragedies are of a more subtle kind; and 
 mostly they consist in dim forebodings, half 
 realizations that the stage conventions he up-
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 313 
 
 holds, the rules of drama he measures by, the 
 standards he affects are sham. And yet he 
 does not see how the stage can do without 
 them. Every attempt to do without them he 
 watches with a secret passionate expectation; 
 and it always fails. Ever the facts tell him he 
 is wrong; ever a blind, struggling instinct 
 within himself tells him he is somehow right. 
 He does not know which to believe, what to 
 believe. This sets his face eagerly toward the 
 future, which is surely a good, but otherwise he 
 can see no good to come of it. He too longs 
 to be a Master Builder. This young, urging 
 critical conscience of his (for such a symbol 
 may Hilda be, and let the rabid Ibsenites re- 
 joice!) demands its castle, its castle "on the 
 table." But it is a " castle in the air," indeed. 
 He cannot reach it. The parted mists again 
 close round its shadow battlements. And that 
 is his tragedy. 
 
 What are some of the dramatic conventions 
 he upholds, in moments of doubt, perhaps, with 
 the greater insistence, as something tangible, 
 at least? Set down in a row, they have a cer- 
 tain platitudinous impressiveness, like a cata- 
 logue of the virtues. " The necessary exag- 
 geration of the stage;" "the drama must be 
 a contest between wills ; " " a drama must ap- 
 peal to many classes, or rather to a common 
 element in the classes, because the individual
 
 314 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 loses his identity in the crowd, a new ' psychol- 
 ogy of the mob ' taking its place " — this, of 
 course, meaning the dominance of the so-called 
 *' primitive passions " ; " exposition is best 
 made by action, not conversation ; " '' it is not 
 the mission of the theater to preach ; " and 
 once again, " the necessary exaggeration of 
 the stage." These are not all. If they only 
 were! Art is indeed long, even in its list of 
 rules. But they fairly enough represent the 
 rest. 
 
 " The necessary exaggeration of the stage " 
 — over and over that phrase sings itself in the 
 critic's ears and worms itself into his written 
 words and comes to haunt him with a kind of 
 ironic fatality, because he recognizes it as at 
 once the truest and the most false — for there 
 are degrees of truth and falsity, let grammar 
 say what it will — of all theatric conventions. 
 That the stage has its exaggeration no sane 
 man will deny. That the exaggeration is still 
 necessary perhaps no sane one will. But that 
 it ought to be necessary, that the stage gains 
 by the exaggeration, that dramatic art is not 
 removed from life, weakened in its profound- 
 est appeal by the exaggeration, the critic 
 has his doubts. And, doubting that conven- 
 tion, he comes to doubt all the others, inter- 
 wrought as they are, dependent one upon the 
 other.
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 315 
 
 It does not matter if the play is " Othello," 
 or " The Great Divide," or " The Second Mrs. 
 Tanqueray." If the critic has not killed his 
 wife through jealousy, or tried to commit rape, 
 or wedded a woman with a purple past — and 
 most critics, mild, humdrum creatures at heart, 
 have done none of these things — there comes a 
 day when each of these plays profoundly dissat- 
 isfies, when it is so far from the still chambers 
 of reality in his breast that he watches the 
 stage with wonder, amazed that this drama 
 could ever have seemed to him beautiful or 
 real. Such an experience, often unanalysed 
 and always difficult of analysis, so vague is it, 
 so half-conscious, is deeply disquieting. It 
 leaves a sense of doubt and loss behind, the 
 loss of faith in that dramatic art which has for 
 him been the main attention of his life, the 
 field of his activities, the source of his inspira- 
 tions. The play is " Othello." How often has 
 he dilated on its marvelous technique, the 
 " inevitable march " of its action, the passion 
 and fire of it, the pathos and power. But sud- 
 denly this technical perfection has become 
 something which has blinded him, this passion 
 and fire something that has dazzled, so that he 
 has never before seen how coarse and poor and 
 false a thing lay beneath. Jealousy? Is this 
 jealousy, this fury of thwarted possession, this 
 homicidal rage of a negro, incited by a mon-
 
 316 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 ster in human shape? Shall he write scath- 
 ingly, in the approved fashion, of the Italian 
 Novelli's performance, which makes of Othello 
 an infuriated gorilla, almost like Bimi in Kip- 
 ling's gruesome story? That would please 
 his public, who regard " Othello " as he has 
 always done, babbling of its " dignity " 
 and *' nobility." But for once his hand is 
 stayed. 
 
 For what is jealousy to him? What is it, 
 after all, to the finer conscience of his age and 
 race? Not a blind, brute passion that suspects, 
 that listens to no reason, that knows no faith 
 nor trust, that brands the beloved one with the 
 vilest epithet, that finally does murder, utter 
 and cruel. Such it may be to the apes; such 
 it doubtless was to the Cave Man; Nero may 
 have known it so. But for him it is something 
 quite otherwise. For him its terrible tragedy 
 comes not because it drives him through suspi- 
 cion and unfaith to murder, but simply because 
 it shows him as in a lightning flash the Sunder- 
 ing Flood that rolls between personalities, even 
 between two souls that love. Through jeal- 
 ousy, he stretches out pathetic hands over that 
 Sundering Flood ; but bridge it he never can. 
 Though his faith in his ])eloved be as ever- 
 lasting as the hills, he has seen that her real 
 self he can never touch, her real soul never 
 know. He can never see what she sees, he
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 317 
 
 can never feel what she feels. What has the 
 tragedy of Desdemonas murder by an infuri- 
 ated baboon to do with tliis spiritual tragedy 
 of the deep, still places of his soul? Less than 
 nothing. For once he leaves the theater with 
 a sense of great relief, glad of any escape into 
 reality, if only the garish reality of Broadway 
 and its gleaming signs. 
 
 And perhaps he goes home, stands irresolute 
 before his book shelves, and finally takes down 
 " The Treasure of the Humble." And therein 
 he finds the momentary comfort of agreement, 
 for he reads: 
 
 " To the tragic author, it is only the violence of 
 the anecdote that appeals, and in the representation 
 thereof does the entire interest of his work consist. 
 And he imagines, forsooth, that we shall delight in 
 witnessing the very same acts that brought joy to 
 the hearts of the barbarians, with whom murder, 
 outrage, and treachery were matters of daily occur- 
 rence. . . . Indeed, when I go to the theater I feel 
 as though I were spending a few hours with my an- 
 cestors, who conceived life as something that was 
 primitive, arid, and brutal ; but this conception of 
 theirs scarcely even lingers in my memory, and 
 surely it is not one that I can share. I am shown 
 a deceived husband killing his wife, a woman poi- 
 soning her lover, a son avenging his father, a father 
 slaughtering his children, children putting their 
 father to death, murdered kings, ravished virgins, 
 imprisoned citizens, — in a word, all the sublimity 
 of tradition, but alas, how superficial and material !
 
 318 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 ... I had hoped to be shown some act of life, 
 traced back to its sources and to its mystery by con- 
 necting" links, that my daily occupations afford me 
 neither power nor occasion to study. I had gone 
 thither hoping that the beauty, the grandeur, and the 
 earnestness of my humble day-by-day existence 
 would, for one instant, be revealed to me, that I 
 would be shown the I know not what presence, 
 power, or God that is ever with me in my room. 
 I was yearning for one of the strange moments 
 of a higher life that flit unperceived through my 
 dreariest hours ; whereas, almost invariably, all that 
 I beheld was but a man who would tell me at weari- 
 some length why he was jealous, why he poisoned, 
 or why he killed." 
 
 Solacing words, till suddenly the reflection 
 comes, " But what sort of plays has this 
 man Maeterlinck himself written?" " Mona 
 Vanna?" A tragedy of lust and murder — 
 the beauty but the blood of Renaissance Italy. 
 " The Death of Tintagiles? " A shiver in five 
 acts, the physical horror of death. " Pelleas 
 et Melisande?" The old, old story of Paolo 
 and Francesca, of physical desire, in which we 
 are '' shown a deceived husband killing his 
 wife." "The Blind?" One long assault on 
 the nerves, stabs in the dark, the refinement of 
 terror. What act of life is really here traced 
 back to its sources? Shadow wings there 
 are of things intangible; but for the most 
 part, in spite of his mysticism, Maeterlinck 
 as dramatist reverts to type, goes back for
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 319 
 
 the evening to his ancestors. The " static 
 theater " he preaches he but ineffectively 
 practices. 
 
 Does ** the necessary exaggeration of the 
 stage " mean, then, that only such actions and 
 episodes are dramatic as show men and women 
 in violent conflict or emotion? The clever 
 climax is that which brings down the curtain 
 when the audience is most curious to learn what 
 will happen next. Must their curiosity always 
 be aroused by the sight of two men facing each 
 other on the stage with fists clenched, must 
 their curiosity be to discover whether the hero- 
 ine escaped from the villain's chambers with 
 her metaphorical white robe still unstained? 
 Is to be dramatic to show the exceptional, to 
 catch life at its most violent points ? And must 
 there always be conflict, *' the conflict between 
 wills " ? Has the stage no place for the humble 
 picture of daily life, where conflict may not 
 exist at all, for the lyric reaches of tranquillity 
 and reflection, for the soul, where the tragedies 
 are not of blood and action? Ellen Terry on 
 her last visit to America produced a drama 
 from Holland called " The Good Hope." Its 
 most memorable scene showed the fishers' 
 wives sitting at their work, trying to converse 
 of commonplace things. But always the Sea, 
 the gray, hungry Sea, would creep into their 
 discourse, and one by one they would forget
 
 320 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 to work, forget to speak, gazing out at the 
 Monster that was raging in storm. Then 
 they would pull themselves away from the 
 tacitly forbidden topic, only once again to 
 yield, for the Monster lay at the back of 
 all their thoughts; for them it was God 
 and Devil, destiny and devourer. In this 
 scene, at once tragic and humble, quiet as life 
 itself, with no bustle of '' action " nor clash 
 of wills, was the finest worth of the play. 
 And the play failed. But must it always 
 be so? 
 
 Max Beerbohm calls the play where " noth- 
 ing happens," where a picture of life and 
 character supplants the story of violent and 
 improbable action, "adramatic." There are be- 
 ginning to be such plays even in America. In 
 the novel and short story the " adramatic " 
 tale has long been familiar, and, far from being 
 despised, it is now valued quite as highly as 
 the romance or the story of suspense. The 
 writer of fiction does not have to seize hold 
 on violent emotions, to set his people into the 
 clash of conflict, to seduce and murder and 
 steal and cheat. But the play-house lags far 
 along behind. How seldom is a play written 
 without a " villain." Yet how seldom for you 
 or me or those we know are the serious events 
 of our lives, even the catastrophes, brought 
 about by the purposeful plotting of some fiend
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 321 
 
 in human shape. Even Ibsen could not get 
 along without his villains till almost the end 
 of his career, though he struggled hard 
 and did much toward reform. We smile at 
 the stock figures of vice and virtue in popular 
 melodrama; but our Broadway plays are 
 only a step higher. We are still far from 
 realizing that in reality each man is his own 
 hero and villain, that the true conflicts are 
 within. 
 
 Not long ago Maude Adams played "Twelfth 
 Night" at Harvard University on the bare 
 stage of Sanders Theater, after what the Har- 
 vard English department supposed to have been 
 the Elizabethan mianner. To me there was 
 something almost pathetic in thus stripping 
 the play down to its essentials, for it emerged 
 a fragile, child-figure, almost trivial in its 
 puny prettiness. Scenes of roaring farce there 
 were, such farce as only Shakespeare ever 
 wrote, and the infinite grace of language, and 
 that vivid life-likeness to the characters that 
 is, after all, what makes Shakespeare supreme. 
 But grace of language and vividness of char- 
 acter are qualities that may be found quite as 
 well in the poem or the novel. What is essen- 
 tially of the stage in the play, the unfolding of 
 a story or the setting forth of an aspect of life 
 in terms of living act and gesture, seemed sud- 
 denly not only trivial but absurd. This con- 
 
 21
 
 322 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 fusion of brother and sister, this pretty 
 masquerade of Viola as a boy, so utterly impos- 
 sible, so infantile and foolish, seemed in spite 
 of the grace of its manner almost unworthy of 
 serious attention. I caught myself looking 
 with amazement at the men and women about 
 me, so learned in literature, whose beaming 
 smiles denoted complete satisfaction. Was 
 something wrong with me, I wondered? Or 
 was it that the stage in their lives occupies a 
 much less important place than in mine, that 
 their adult and deeper interests lie elsewhere, 
 are otherwise satisfied, so that an evening in 
 the theater is for them — as for how many of 
 us ! — a kind of lapse into make-believe land, 
 into the easy faith and careless unreality of 
 childhood? Should that be the attitude of all 
 of us toward the theater, should we all be Eliz- 
 abethans, grown-up, unreflecting children in 
 the play-house, even to-day, putting aside our 
 sense of reality, our deeper desires, when we 
 enter its portals and ignoring what advance 
 the drama has painfully won through succes- 
 sive generations? Judging not historically 
 but absolutely, should we find " Twelfth 
 Night " wholly great, wholly satisfying, should 
 we fail to detect in its theatrical falsities 
 and unreality signs of the childhood of the 
 race? 
 
 Unless we do detect them, unless we de-
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 323 
 
 mand of our modern playwrights a method 
 and a reality commensurate with our growth 
 and development in other branches of human 
 activity, life will leap ever farther ahead of 
 the theater and the theater will become an 
 ever-lessening force to reckon with. How 
 relative are all our rules of dramatic construc- 
 tion is, after all, pretty apparent to-day. What 
 does the utter banishment of the " aside " and 
 the soliloquy mean if not that the modern 
 audience has done away with one more con- 
 vention, made one more " necessary exaggera- 
 tion " not only unnecessary but absurd ? What 
 does the tremendous success of " The College 
 Widow " mean if not that a play can be en- 
 joyed for its truthful pictorial quality, dis- 
 pensing almost entirely with the " contest be- 
 tween wills " ? What does the steady growth 
 of realistic American drama mean if not that 
 a public tired of endless repetitions of theatrical 
 story are hungry not for exaggeration but 
 reality, not for childish make-believe but truth? 
 What does the popularity of G. B. Shaw mean 
 if not that conversation on the stage may be 
 quite as interesting, quite as significant, as 
 " action " ? What does the success of " The 
 Servant in the House" mean if not that the 
 stage can preach? We used to draw hard 
 and fast lines between the classes of drama; 
 there was farce, comedy, tragedy, melodrama.
 
 324 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Now such distinctions are rapidly disappear- 
 ing, not so much because the classes tend to 
 flow together as because farce and tragedy 
 alike are recognized as unreal, inhuman, and 
 are vanishing from the earth, while melodrama 
 is sinking to the level of the ten-cent houses, 
 where it has a hard time to hold its own with 
 moving pictures. Now we have simply drama, 
 grave or gay, or sometimes both. Farce was 
 never even a necessary exaggeration, it was 
 a wilful perversion of life. At the present 
 time audiences will have nothing to do with 
 it. What once amused our fathers now seems 
 preposterous to us, a kind of insult to our in- 
 telligences. When we must be silly that way, 
 we join farce to music and are inane to rag- 
 time. Musical comedy is not to be scorned. 
 It is a valuable outlet for our trivial moods, 
 a safety valve on the boiler of our thoughtless 
 merriment. It protects the drama. Tragedy, 
 in the old formal sense, is as surely doomed 
 as farce. A. B. Walkley somewhere speaks of 
 Aristotle's " apology of tragedy as a cathartic." 
 But it is no longer a cathartic for the modern 
 man. Its blood and physical death are primi- 
 tive to the point of disgust. Even the stately 
 religious aspect of the Greek tragedy can 
 hardly redeem those lugubrious dramas from 
 their pre-Christian bloodthirstiness. Shall we 
 suppose that Christianity practiced, however
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 325 
 
 imperfectly, for nineteen hundred years has 
 had no effect upon us in our attitude toward 
 the drama, though every other attitude of our 
 lives has been moulded by it? Death is still 
 a tragedy, perhaps the greatest of all tragedies, 
 — the eternal tragedy of man. But death 
 comes to most of us now, like birth and growth, 
 rain and sunlight, as a part of the natural 
 order, not inflicted violently upon us by our 
 fellows. Its tragedy lies in the contemplation 
 and the wonder. Violence and murder are 
 very far away from most of us. There is 
 something pitifully archaic in the classic 
 tragedy. " Hamlet " ceases to be moving when 
 the dead begin to heap up on the stage. At 
 best, death in the modern drama inspires a 
 shudder of physical repugnance. What stirs 
 us lies all before or after. Not what end a 
 man meets but what use he makes of his life 
 before he dies is now what interests us, or 
 what effect he has left on those behind. The 
 tragedy of " Ghosts " is not the horrible death 
 of Oswald but the horrible cause of it. Here 
 is no human vengeance wreaking itself in 
 murder, even though under the Greek disguise 
 of divine agency. Nor does " Ghosts " pre- 
 tend to " purge the emotions through pity and 
 fear;" it is the scientific example of the dis- 
 secting room. A modern tragedy is Pinero's 
 " Iris," a remorseless study of the dissolution
 
 326 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 of a woman's soul. And the tragedy is just 
 here, that Iris did not die, that she went on 
 living. Perhaps death is not a tragedy, after 
 all. Perhaps for us heavy-eyed children of the 
 Twentieth Century life is the tragedy. Such 
 doubts, at any rate, have sounded the knell 
 for the so-called tragedy of the classic thea- 
 ter. A modern audience cannot endure its 
 unreality. 
 
 Reality! Over and over that test has been 
 applied to the drama throughout this book, and 
 over and over men and women are applying it 
 in the theater to-day, even if the stage villain 
 does continue to flourish and bring about ab- 
 surd catastrophes, even if actors and actresses 
 do strut and pose and go through their " emo- 
 tional scenes " without any relation to normal 
 human conduct, even if playwrights do twist 
 and bend their stories into situations that carry 
 the largest amount of superficial excitement 
 and the least amount of significant truth. Why 
 this reality? Why this reiterated insistence on 
 fact? The stage is not reality and cannot be. 
 Pasteboard trees have no sap, E. H. Sothern 
 is not Don Quixote; indeed, Don Quixote him- 
 self never was. Granted that the drama is a 
 game, a make-believe, why in this world of too, 
 too stubborn facts shall we not permit it the 
 blessed license of fancy, shall we not bid it 
 bear us down the flowery paths of unreality,
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 327 
 
 making heroes out of common stuff and heaven 
 out of earth — or at any rate an evening of 
 f orgetf ulness ? No, the stage is not reahty; 
 in spite of its Hving, moving actors, its statues 
 come to Hfe and its language made oral, it 
 still demands an act of the imagination from 
 the beholder. But its supreme merit as an art 
 form lies in the reduction of this demand to 
 the least possible point, leaving scope for a 
 vivid, direct, and passionate appeal like no 
 other. It is above all other art forms capable 
 of carrying the semblance of reality ; above all 
 other art forms to carry the semblance of 
 reality rests upon it in consequence as a duty. 
 For the world now knows that reality is for- 
 ever in the making. What we called real 
 yesterday is unreal to-day; truth is what we 
 would have it, reality will only be perfect as 
 we shape it so. To deny the mission of the 
 stage, one of man's most cherished fields of 
 aesthetic endeavor, in this high task of re- 
 moulding the world " nearer to the heart's 
 desire," — the real world, not the make-believe, 
 — to call it from the work for which it is above 
 all other art forms fitted and set it the triv- 
 ial task of aping unrealities, is to deny the 
 laws of change and growth, to belittle the 
 power of the aesthetic imagination, hopelessly 
 to undervalue the worth of the dramatic 
 form.
 
 328 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 It would be, perhaps, a humorless proceed- 
 ing to obtrude a philosophic discussion of the 
 plastic nature of truth, the relativity of reality, 
 in a book on the Broadway Theater. And 
 perhaps, too, a philosophic discussion by the 
 present critic would be rather more of a con- 
 fession than he cares to make! Yet there is 
 something to be said for any attempt to apply 
 in action a philosophic method; belief in a 
 philosophy (as in a religion) is of very little 
 value except as it results in deeds. Fired with 
 the words of Dewey and Schiller and James, 
 a critic of the drama cannot greatly respect 
 himself if he does not seek to carry into his 
 own little field of investigation the sanitary 
 methods these men have adapted from the com- 
 mon-sense procedure of the ages and given a 
 philosophic sanction. And, for the critic of 
 the drama, what is most valuable and helpful 
 in the Pragmatic method is the assumption that 
 reality, which " is in general what truths have 
 to take account of," is not something absolute, 
 independent, changeless from the beginning, 
 but something plastic, not so much " discov- 
 ered " as " made " by us. Schiller says, " For 
 us Reality is really incomplete; and that it is 
 so is our fondest hope. For what this means 
 is that Reality can still be remade, and made 
 perfect! " And elsewhere he says, " Mere 
 knowing always alters reality, so far at least
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 329 
 
 as one party to the transaction is concerned. 
 Knowing always really alters the knower ; and 
 as the knower is real and a part of reality, 
 reality is really altered. Even, therefore, what 
 we call a mere ' discovery ' of reality involves 
 a real change in us, and a real enlightenment 
 of our ignorance. And inasmuch as this will 
 probably induce a real difference in our sub- 
 sequent behavior, it entails a real alteration in 
 the course of cosmic events, the extent of which 
 may be considerable, while its importance may 
 be enormous." 
 
 In his lectures on Pragmatism Professor 
 James points out that while we can admit of 
 no variation in our sensations, which bring in 
 to us the sense of reality, while " over their 
 nature, order and quality we have as good as 
 no control," yet which sensations we attend to 
 " depends on our own interests ; and accord- 
 ing as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite 
 different formulations of truth result." The 
 same battle with its " same fixed details " spells 
 victory for one side, defeat for the other. The 
 same world spells victory to the optimist, de- 
 feat to the pessimist. No new fact ever comes 
 to us without being sifted, tested, thrown into 
 perspective by the sum of our previous knowl- 
 edge, by our own reasoning. " When we talk 
 of reality * independent ' of human thinking, 
 then, it seems a thing very hard to find. It
 
 330 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 reduces to the notion of what is just entering 
 into experience and yet to be named, or else 
 to some imagined aboriginal presence in ex- 
 perience, before any belief about the presence 
 had arisen, before any human conception had 
 been applied. It is what is absolutely dumb 
 and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our 
 minds. We may glimpse it, but we never 
 grasp it; what we grasp is always some 
 substitute for it which previous human think- 
 ing has peptonized and coked for our con- 
 sumption." 
 
 How different a thing does this make of the 
 term realism as applied to the drama from the 
 ordinary conception of theatrical realism ! Real 
 pumps, real water, real flower-pots may or may 
 not be a part of it, according to the popular 
 mood of the hour; it does not matter. All 
 art is representative, not necessarily imitative. 
 The realism I would mean now consists in 
 the representation on the stage of the impor- 
 tant facts of life which square with men's pos- 
 sible experience, with the reality which makes 
 up not the shell of our world but its heart and 
 fiber, with emotions, beliefs, impulses, actions, 
 so that by detaching these facts in the play- 
 house, boiling away extraneous matter, setting 
 them forth in the high relief of an art work, 
 the facts may be assimilated into the previous 
 knowledge of the beholder, enlarging his con-
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 331 
 
 ception of truth, altering for him his reahty. 
 Specifically, if a playwright concocts a "part " 
 for a star, devising a series of situations that 
 enable her to weep, to laugh, to coquette, to 
 do a little dance, and finally to fall happily and 
 automatically in her lover's arms, it does not 
 matter if he has a thousand real pumps pump- 
 ing real water in his play, or, as Clyde Fitch did 
 in " Captain Jinks," a faithfully copied setting 
 of some actual building known to the audience. 
 He is not a realist. He is adding nothing to 
 our sum total of reality. He is giving us 
 nothing of the stuff that significant truths have 
 to take account of. But if he presents on the 
 stage an actual picture of some corner of life 
 that he has observed (whether his pumps are 
 pasteboard or wood), either George Ade's 
 "" fresh water " college or Gorky's " Night 
 Refuge " ; or if he draws characters that live 
 because every word and emotion strikes a 
 response in our breasts, as in the plays of 
 Shakespeare; or if he shows us soul states 
 that disturb us as possible states of our own 
 souls, as did Moody in " The Great Divide," 
 he is in so far a realist, for he is dealing with 
 the stuff that significant truths have to take 
 account of. Shall we never have done with 
 this idea that realism in art means only point- 
 ing a camera at a pig-sty? Is Ade's " At- 
 water " any less real than Gorky's *' Night
 
 332 THE A^IERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 Refuge" because of its radiant cheerfulness? 
 The tone of the reaHsm depends on the temper 
 of the reahst, which is but another proof that 
 truth and reahty are man-made. The reahst 
 is any artist who deals not with material that 
 has no counterpart outside the theater, and so 
 is of no practical consequence to anybody, but 
 with the facts of the larger world. His own 
 temper, however, will color his presentation. 
 Our tempers will still further change what he 
 has given us. And thus the play-house can 
 aid in shaping reality, in moving this old world 
 on. When we demand reality in the drama 
 what we really demand is that the drama shall 
 be a part of our actual lives, not " a sleep and 
 a forgetting." " The College Widow " and 
 " The Night Refuge " gave us diametrically 
 opposed pictures, but because each of them 
 dealt with reality there followed from each a 
 distinct reaction; from the one toward cheer- 
 fulness and hope, from the other toward gloom 
 and despair; together they deepened the mys- 
 tery of this human life of ours, they altered 
 our sum total of reality. What reaction fol- 
 lows from " My Wife," or Ethel Barrymore's 
 recent vehicle, " Her Sister," or Belasco's 
 " Rose of the Rancho," or any one of a thou- 
 sand machines for the stimulation of easy 
 theatrical interest or excitement? None 
 whatever. They litter the stage. They are
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 333 
 
 theatrical rubbish, fit only for the slag heap of 
 eternity. 
 
 But if such dramas are quite demonstrably 
 false and worthless because by their failure to 
 square with the realities of life they have no 
 beneficial effects, they will not work, there is 
 another sort of drama that does work, that 
 does have a beneficial effect, although it, too, 
 fails to square at least with the objective reali- 
 ties of life. I refer, of course, to the poetic 
 drama, and to the romance of the supernatural, 
 — to " Peter Pan," or " Peer Gynt," or " The 
 Tempest." What are we to say of such plays? 
 Well, so far as they work, as they give us 
 uplift and pleasure without doing violence to 
 our beliefs about reality, such plays must cor- 
 respond to something within, not outside, our- 
 selves. It would make only for hopeless con- 
 fusion to call them, in a different or higher 
 sense, realistic. But a study of them will show 
 that when they are successful their verse, 
 though verse does not correspond to any ex- 
 ternal reality, does no violence to eternal real- 
 ity in the emotions it expresses, being only 
 successful when coupled with exalted moods; 
 or that their supernatural elements are so ad- 
 justed to the known real that they can be dis- 
 associated or taken as symbols. Ariel flies, but 
 Miranda walks on solid earth. Peter Pan is 
 a symbol to us grown-ups of the dear, lost days
 
 334 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 of childhood. As our own thoughts, behefs, 
 dreams, ideals, not only shape reality but are 
 a part of the reality shaped, the supernatural, 
 symbolism, poetry are, of course, realities, and 
 so far as they make us better or happier they 
 are true. In this larger sense " Peer Gynt " 
 is as realistic as " Hedda Gabler." Only we 
 must be sure that the dramas which try to 
 embody them do make us better or happier. 
 Else they are false as " Her Sister." 
 
 Walter Pater, in his famous Conclusion to 
 " The Renaissance," said: " Great passions may 
 give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and 
 sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusi- 
 astic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which 
 come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it 
 is passion — that it does yield you this fruit 
 of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of 
 this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of 
 beauty, the love of art for art's sake has most; 
 for art comes to you professing frankly to 
 give nothing but the highest quality to your 
 moments as they pass, and simply for those 
 moments' sake." He feared at first that the 
 lofty Hedonism of these words might be mis- 
 construed and work injury. His is very far 
 from the Hedonism of the shop girl, buried 
 in a love scene by Laura Jean Libby. Pater 
 would not have found the highest quality in 
 a moment that detached him alike from objec-
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 335 
 
 tive reality and that sense of nobility, of spirit- 
 ual value, in the subjective dream which is 
 alone what gives it its truth. The subjective 
 dream, in fact, is always dangerous, even for 
 the greatest minds; its value has frequently 
 to be tested, in this common-sense world, by 
 reference to external reality. We yield easy 
 faith in the theater. We can afford to dis- 
 pense with this test only on rare occasions. 
 We are only too ready to accept " The Jest- 
 ers " for poetry, or to declare as we weep with 
 some " emotional actress " in a silly, artificial 
 play that we are experiencing a great spiritual 
 release. 
 
 Perhaps, indeed, there is really no such thing 
 as art for art's sake. Art presupposes two 
 human attitudes, — that of artist and of be- 
 holder. The artist himself may be the beholder, 
 but that does not alter the case. Art exists 
 in answer to a human need, for humanity. It 
 is man's reflection on himself and on his en- 
 vironment, on the sum total, that is to say, of 
 his reality. It is man's idea of what reality 
 is or his dream of what it should be. It can 
 be, therefore — nay, it must be, to be genuine 
 art — a potent factor in shaping reality. The 
 man who flees to it away from life, thus alter- 
 ing his own existence, himself a part of real- 
 ity, or the man who consciously uses it, as 
 Charles Rann Kennedy uses " The Servant in
 
 336 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 the House," as an agent in the world's work, 
 is alike confessing it a force to mould reality. 
 The more of reality the drama thus contains, 
 the more of truth, that is, to the facts of ex- 
 perience, the more powerful it may be in shap- 
 ing the truth, the reality, of to-morrow. If 
 in this book I have seemed sometimes scornful 
 of the poetic drama, insisting on a realism that 
 appeared to preclude the higher reaches of the 
 fancy and the imagination, it is not because 
 I do not respect poetry, but because I respect 
 it too highly to view with any patience the 
 usual masquerade of poetry in the play-house. 
 It is vastly more difficult to bring forth a truth 
 from within than to picture it from without. 
 But no difficulty will deter the destined poet. 
 If his vision is true, if it will bring real uplift 
 and strength to humanity, he will make it 
 known, and no words of any little critic can 
 stop him. But just now we seem neither to 
 have a poet with the needed power of vision 
 nor a public in the mood to find a greater help 
 in the inner vision than the objective reality. 
 We are only on the threshold of a drama of 
 any kind. To carry even external reality that 
 drama finds a puzzling task. The old con- 
 ventions of the stage, the exaggerations of the 
 actors, the preoccupation with violent emotions 
 and unusual episodes, with artificial excitement 
 and improbable fable, the traditional insistence
 
 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CRITIC 337 
 
 of the drama on the need for *' action," always 
 ** action," have done much to ahenate the 
 thoughtful modern man from the theater alto- 
 gether. And because, in men's minds, the 
 romance and the poetic play are associated not 
 so much with truth to an inner vision as 
 allegiance to just these unrealities of stage 
 convention, they are the least fitted at present 
 to lead the theater forward. Our stage must 
 creep closer to life, it must eliminate the smell 
 of the scene loft, not by substituting " real " 
 scenery but real episodes, real emotions, real 
 fable; it must strive ever, not to violate the 
 facts of experience and so lead us nowhere, but 
 to picture the facts of experience and so lead 
 us to a better understanding of them, to a new 
 shaping of reality. Only thus can the stage 
 escape the ultimate contempt of intelligent men 
 and women. We no longer go to the theater 
 — some of us — in the child-like spirit of the 
 Elizabethans, even of our own fathers. Our 
 attitude has changed, changed far more than 
 the drama. We have made much of the old 
 truth a lie. And unless the drama changes 
 to meet our new attitude it will sink every- 
 where to the level of heedless amusement, where 
 the vulgar and ignorant theatrical managers of 
 New York already suppose it to be. And that 
 change can only be made by incessantly apply- 
 ing the test of fact, by constantly throwing 
 
 22
 
 338 THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY 
 
 overboard every convention, however honor- 
 able with age, that brings into the drama for 
 the modern man the sHghtest taint of unreal- 
 ity. We do not know what the drama of to- 
 morrow will be; nor do we know what the 
 truth of to-morrow will be. But they will 
 surely be something different, and let us have 
 the courage to believe that through our human 
 efforts they will be something better. 
 
 The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.
 
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