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I shrink when her sweet and juicy fingers clasped upon my immaculate collar, or when she seized the lapels of my white flannel coat to better perform a rite that, Heaven knows! I had just been surfeited with, though not as a principal.

"Oh, Tommy dear! I thought you would never, never come; and I was most scared stiff all the time," she said pitifully. "Poor little woman," I consoled.

"Did Bertha find her soldier?" "I am convinced she did!" I returned grimly.

"Oh, I am so glad! Were you surprised, Tommy dear?"

Was I? My mind ran back over the past to our starting point, three years before.

"N-no, not exactly surprised," I returned with a sigh as I tenderly wrapped the red cloak about my versatile little scarecrow.

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND HIS PLAYERS

By Brander Matthews

HE critic nowadays who looks upon the drama as lying wholly within the circle of literature and who fails to perceive its close and necessary connection with the actual theatre, is often moved to make it a matter of reproach to certain contemporary playwrights that they are wont to write plays to fit a special actor or a special actress. In thus finding fault the critic reveals not only his misunderstanding of the needful relation between the dramatist and the performers who are to personate his characters, but also an inability to appreciate the way in which the mind of the artist is often set in motion by accidents that seem casual and trifling.

In every art there is often a startling disproportion between the exciting cause and the ultimate result; and we might almost liken the artist to the oyster which is moved by a grain of sand to produce a pearl of great price. More than one of the most triumphant artistic feats of the Italian Renascence is what it is because the painter had to make the best of a certain particular wall-space over an altar or between two doors, or because the sculptor had to get his statue out of a given block of marble of unusual shape and size. The painter and the sculptor accepted the limitations of the wall-space and of the marble-block and found their profit in so doing; they made a stepping-stone out of that which would have seemed an obstacle to the less inventive and the less imaginative.

So the artist in play-making sees his opportunity and finds his profit in the special accomplishments of the actors of his own time. It is on these performers that he has to depend for the proper presentation of what he has imagined. They and they alone can bring his work before the public. Without them, all he may do must go for nought. Plainly enough, therefore, he would be lacking in common sense if he did not study their capabilities, and if he did not so compose his plays as to give them the utmost occasion for the full exercise of their ancillary art. Of course, the dramatist ought not to subject himself to the actors, nor ought he to limit what he is conceiving to the capacity of the special performers he may have in view. But he must always take account of them and keep them in mind, because the art of the drama is a twofold art and because the playwright and the players must work in unison, ever aiding each other, since they always depend on each other. The dramatist is quite as helpless without the actors as the actors are without the dramatist. Without them the playwright has only that barren appeal to posterity, which is certain never to reach its ears. Without him the performers can be seen only in old plays, which the public is sure to tire of, sooner or later.

This ideal harmony of these partners in art has not always been obtained, since both parties to the alliance are likely to be endowed with the occasional irritability and with the swift susceptibility of the artistic temperament. But the best results have

been achieved by both when they have labored together loyally. It is without sur prise, therefore, that we find it recorded that Sophocles, the foremost of Greek tragic poets, the supreme artist who "saw life steadily and saw it whole," was believed to have composed his chief characters for the acting of one particular actor, although we do not now know the name of this special performer, whose histrionic gifts stimulated the dramaturgic skill of the noble and austere poet. More than one of the surviving plays of Sophocles contains what would be called to-day a star-part, a character who has the centre of the action continually and in whose fate the interest of the story culminates. Molière, of course, devised a leading character in all his comedies for his own acting; and he was the most accomplished actor of his time. To certain of these characters he gave his own physical characteristics, his cough, for example, just as he gave lameness to other characters intended for the acting of his lame brother-in-law, Béjart. And the tragic heroines of Molière's younger contemporary, Racine, were the result of his intimate knowledge of the histrionic powers of Mlle. Champsmeslé.

It is a matter of inference rather than of actual record that Shakespeare considered as carefully as Sophocles and Molière the individuality of the several actors in the company of which he was a member. Apparently he was not himself a performer of large native endowment, however keen might be his insight into the principles of the histrionic art. So far as we know he confined his efforts to parts for which intelligence, dignity and delivery were sufficient equipment-the Ghost in "Hamlet," old Adam in "As You Like It," and the elder Knowell in "Every Man in his Humor." In other words, the greatest of dramatic poets was as an actor only respectable; and he seems to have yielded the chief characters even in his own plays to the more gifted of his fellow-players. It was not for his own acting that he wrote Hamlet but for Burbage's; and Burbage created the most of the star-parts in Shakespeare's tragedies. Perhaps this is the sole reason why we now find Hamlet "fat and scant of breath," although he is also "the glass of fashion and the mould of form."

A close scrutiny of Shakespeare's texts will reveal more than one fact about the actors with whom he was associated and for whom he wrote his comedies and his tragedies. One of his recent biographers has pointed out how the gauntness of Holojernes is evidence that there was a lean actor in the company-the same performer probably who was later to play the envious Casca. Sir Leslie Stephen made the striking suggestion that the group of gloomy plays, which followed fast in the middle of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist and which have been explained as due to his being then in the depths himself, may be explained perhaps rather as the result of the willing playwright's desire to supply certain of his professional colleagues with the sombre characters to which they could then best do justice. In like manner we might ascribe the swift succession of gay and joyous comedies which preceded only by a little space of time the gloomy group as due to Shakespeare's appreciation of the unusual gifts of some shaven boy-actor, in whom he perceived a marvellous ability to personate his sparkling and yet tender comedy heroines, Rosalind and Viola and Beatrice.

Many critics have expressed wonder at the violence and coarseness of "Titus Andronicus," and they have been unable to reconcile these crudities with the gentler spirit and the loftier view of life revealed in the later tragedies. Here again an explanation may be found in a consideration of the playwright's relation to the players. The "Titus Andronicus" which we have in Shakespeare's works is now believed to be his revision or amalgamation of two earlier dramas dealing with the same subject, both of which had been often performed and both of which had just then come into the control of the company of actors to which Shakespeare belonged. He was at that time only a beginner, with none of the authority which is the result of a series of successes. He was but a 'prentice playwright whose task it was to patch up old pieces and to make them more worthy of performance by his comrades. Even if he had revolted against the inartistic vulgarity of the earlier tragedies-of-blood which he had to make over, even if he had wished to modify and to soften their harsh and repellent features to accord with his own finer taste, he would not have been permitted to do so, because

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SOME EXAMPLES OF THE ENGLISH SCHOOL AT THE METROPOLITAN

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MUSEUM OF ART

"O one who is observant of such matters, a sense of satisfaction must be felt in noting the order that is being evolved, quietly but intelligently at the Metropolitan Museum.

A conservatory of the results of civilization and high accomplishment in art, it is rapidly becoming a factor of great significance in the midst of our material life-indeed it has become so; and it is only in its infancy. There is a controlling purpose here which is carried out by a corps of competent and enthusiastic lieutenants that speaks highly for the administrative head. It is no mere whimsey to say that while at the Wall Street end of the town men are busy accumulating the transient and material, at the Museum extremity they are transmuting this into the spiritual and enduring-and the portion of VOL. XLV.-15

material treasure thus expended will give greater and more constant returns than may ever be derived from financial values alone.

In continuing this review of the paintings at the Museum we have remarked an increasing effort to group the pictures by schools, segregating as much as practicable, under existing conditions, the works of a particular country in a room or rooms devoted solely to the art of that nation. This, however, has not been completely achieved in any one case; but it is encouraging to note the disposition on the part of the authorities to attain this end after the years of heterogeneous hanging that have alike confused the visitor and sacrificed the effectiveness of many of the exhibits. A result of this new effort is seen in gallery 20, which is entirely hung with works of the English school; and although there are placed here, at present, many loans and valuable ones, we may speak only of the canvases which are the property

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the associated actors who were his employers would not have accepted his new version if they found it shorn of the bombast and of the rant and of the brutal extravagance which characterized the two old plays and which gave the performers occasions for overacting, the effect of which had been tested by long usage.

Accepting the fact that Sophocles and Shakespeare, Molière and Racine, and all the chief dramatists in the long history of the theatre, have always composed their plays with a keen appreciation of the histrionic ability of the actors by whom their pieces were to be performed, there is interest and profit in an inquiry as to the exact measure of the influence which the actors may have exerted upon the authors. And here we can find help in considering the performers of our own time, since the histrionic temperament as such probably varies very little with the lapse of centuries. The actor is apparently to-day the same kind of human being that he was yesterday and the day before yesterday. In his attitude toward his own calling, toward the exercise of his own art, Roscius probably was not unlike Garrick. What they wanted, each of them, was a play in which he had a good part; and in his eyes a good part was one in which he could act to his heart's content. A good part is one in which the actor has something to do or somebody to personate. Therefore the influence of the performers on the playwright has been wholesome in so far as their demand for good parts has tended to stiffen the dramatic action, to intensify the passionate climax of the play, to present boldly the essential struggle or conflict of wills which is ever at the core of a fine play. And this pressure of the actors on the author has tended also to persuade the poet to a larger and a deeper reproduction of human nature, so that he could provide the performers with characters that richly rewarded their faculty of impersonating creatures wholly unlike themselves. No doubt the playwright has not infrequently yielded too much to the desires of the players and has been satisfied merely to compose a vehicle for the self-exhibition of the actors. Of course, the author can claim no mercy if he is willing to subordinate himself wholly to the actor and to put together what is but little better than a framework for the display of some special

actor's tricks. This is what M. Sardou has not disdained to do more than once for Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, surrendering the proper independence of his art so that she could show off all the artificialities of hers. "Fédora," for example, was so tightly adjusted to the cleverness of the French actress that it lost the most of its effect when acted by Signora Duse, because she found in its tricky ingenuity no opportunity for the poignant veracity she revealed in a simpler and sincerer study from life like "Cavalleria Rusticana."

Yet an adroit and self-respecting dramatic poet can get the utmost out of the varied powers of an actor of versatile genius without any enfeebling complaisance and without any unworthy self-surrender. And if proof of this assertion were needed, it could be found in "Cyrano de Bergerac." It is not too much to say that if the masterpiece of M. Rostand had never been acted or published, and if it were suddenly to be discovered after its author's death, the general opinion would then be that it was a most ingenious specimen of the poetic drama, probably composed without any expectation that it could ever be performed, since the central figure was so various and so many-sided, now grotesque, and then lyric, now broadly humorous and then loftily heroic, that the author could never have hoped to find any actor multifarious enough to impersonate the character and to reveal its contrasting aspects.

But we happen to know that this brilliant play was written especially for a brilliant actor and that it was put together with an eye single to his extraordinary range of personation. M. Coquelin is an incomparable comedian who has played countless parts, some lyric and heroic, some humorous and grotesque. He has a variety so marvellous that "he seemed to be not one, but all mankind's epitome." There was in "Cyrano de Bergerac" no demand made on the actor that M. Coquelin had not already met in some one of the hundred dramas he had appeared in earlier; and almost all of the separate effects he had achieved in his best parts were carefully combined in this one character. There was never a more skilful example of theatrical tailoring than M. Rostand's cutting and fitting of his poetic fabric to the exact size and shape of M. Coquelin's histrionic accomplishments, yet

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