of dramatist or actor. In the lack of a fruitful recognition of this the scene designer has come thrusting in where really he has no business. His interference has resulted in a most beneficent improvement of bad scenery into good. But, if it is to be a question of the development of drama itself-no, no; let him mind his paint-pots.

We may sense what is wrong, yet wisely be chary of dogmatising upon its putting right. Certainly it is futile to request dramatists to give actors better chances of acting, to turn out plays containing such and such ingredients in such and such proportion-as if the making of plays were one with the making of puddings or pills. And the actor's practical difficulty-once he forswears the ideal of a tame dramatist who will make him a play as his cook makes him puddings-is that he must act what he finds to act. Once in a while arises the actor-dramatist who, like Molière, continues in both crafts. There are modern instances; in America, William Gillette; in France, at this moment, Sacha Guitry. Their work is noticeable, if for nothing else (and, Molière on his pedestal apart, it is often noticeable for a great deal else), for the nice adjustment of the play's content to the actor's opportunity. Otherwise, it may be no more in the best plays than in the worst-if by 'best' is implied a rounded completenessthat the actor will be able to explore the sheer possibilities of his art as the theatre of the new illusion defines it. He could more often, strangely enough, find the occasion in plays in which the dramatist has himself been impatient of the form chosen and has surcharged it with thought or with feeling. It is, in fact, to the dramatist's experiments in the enlargement of his own art that the actor should look for the development of his.

One practical difficulty immediately arises. The theatre, as we know it, provides small opportunity for experiment of any sort. There is always the audience to be thought of, naturally not interested in the art's future, but expecting the entertainment offered to be both rounded and complete, however smooth, however bare with repetition the ways of it may be worn. the event the public does have to put up with a good deal of experimenting. Playwrights and actors both are encouraged to give their 'prentice hands practice

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at its expense to an extent that must make musicians, for instance, disciplined to a hard technical training, simply green with envy. They profit-though Heaven knows the theatre does not-by the public's ignorance of an art which it sets out nevertheless to enjoy. A pity that there should be no more encouragement of true experimenting, by the art's masters, not its 'prentices. For, of all the arts, drama can live least in the light of theory. The dramatist may project his play in imagination pretty completely; the individual actor can at best say what he means his performance to be; few will be rash enough to forecast an exact result for any free and fruitful collaboration of a whole company of actors with the dramatist and among themselves.

We are back to our first admission that this final process of the putting of the play on the stage is a very incalculable thing. And incalculable it must to some extent remain if its chief aim is to be the endowing of the play with anything we are to call life; for the term will escape æsthetic definition. We must join company with the musical critic who, in similar case, disposed of all argument by saying, 'I know a good tune when I hear it.' But no one who-with critical faculties equipped against mere fraud-has seen a play brought fully and freely to life on the stage, will ever again mistake the sham thing for the real; or ever again, one would suppose, be content with the sham; or, it is to be hoped, ever again, knowing the difference between the two, begrudge the actor his full share in the credit of the life-giving process.

What, then, is the actor's case; what should he claim from the modern drama; what has he to offer? The dramatist's chief gain from the theatre of the new illusion and the conventions which belong to it, has been -at the price of some limitation of his power to project things in the doing-a great extension of resource in picturing things as they are. There was more need, as well as more scope, for physical action upon the older stage, even as there was for the spell-binding sway of verse. But by the new illusion the attention of an audience can be focussed upon the smallest details without either words or action being used to mark them, light, darkness, and silence can be made eloquent in

themselves, a whole gamut of effectiveness has been added. It has brought new obligations-of accuracy, of sincerity, of verisimilitude in general, as we have noted. Then gain and loss both must be reflected in the actor's opportunity. His chances of doing are curtailed; in their stead new obligations of being are laid upon him. him. Can he not turn them to his profit?

One is tempted to imagine a play-to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle-from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being Iwould be left. The task set the actors of it would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do; to set up, that is to say, the relation by which all important human intimacies exist. If the art of the theatre could achieve this it would stand alone in a great achievement.

Plays of an approximate intention do indeed exist; but in England at least, they have never come to their own-even to such limited popularity as might be expected for them. There are reasons for this; the best being that the plays are mostly not English products. And while an English actor may reproduce the doings of a Frenchman or a Russian with sufficient fidelity, we cannot expect him to make real to us such an abstraction as his 'being.' So we have usually had the plays with the best part of them left out.

This opens up a line of inquiry worth pursuing for our present purpose. The dramatist must allow for the means of expression that come naturally to the people he is picturing. And expression is a racial thing. But when the influence of a technic of play construction spreads abroad, it is apt to affect plots, characterdrawing and dialogue as well, everything but the actual language in which the derivative play may be written. For an instance, take the influence of French drama on English during the last century. We may rightly welcome for their good effect upon our native product French plays acted by Frenchmen, or even their translation; but a century's crowding of our theatre with adaptations has left the English drama full of plots, situations, and figures that may or may not-have some relation to life in France, but in England must rank as mechanism merely. The average farcical comedy

with its rooms with four doors (French rooms, as well as French stages, do as often as not have four doors), peopled by distorted shadows from the world of the French provinces and the half-world of Paris, the grande dame, the père noble, the raisonneur! Now even when an Englishman passes fifty and it grows hard to stop him talking, he seldom becomes a raisonneur. The word and the habit are equally French.

One result of all this, and not the least harmful, is that Englishmen have come to be thought of as a race of bad actors. Naturally they must seem so, when they are encouraged to deny their race in the practice of this most racial of all the arts. It is a nuisance for the English dramatist, no doubt, that his countrymen do not in the ordinary business-even in the extraordinary momentsof life express themselves with fluency. Well, it presents him with a difficulty he must learn to surmount.

He can, of course, call convention to his help. But he must honestly develop the convention and not try to borrow one ready made. There lies one to his hand; and the well-developed use of it might provide at least a partial solution of our problem, might do much to help the actor to his heritage again. Englishmen are not glib, but the essential strength of poetic speech is a tradition with them. By which one does not mean, of course, that they lisp in numbers, or imply that on formal occasions they cannot be academically dull. But in the natural speech of the people there is often that power of expression and concentration of meaning which is the essence of poetry, even though the form be prose. And great English writers, from Shakespeare to Hardy, have known how to sublimate it and make it memorable. The speech of the Wessex peasant is not Mr Hardy's invention, nor did Dickens conjure Sam Weller and Mr Peggotty out of the void. And for as forceful a passage as any in Cymbeline,' turn to the gaoler's philosophy of hanging and his 'O the charity of a penny cord!' Indeed, whether it be in form of verse or prose, Shakespeare (once he shook free of the fashionable affectations of his time and but for falling later into some affectations of his own) did but take the common speech of the people of one class and another as material for his magic.

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form or other it will be there. You will, if you analyse your feelings, be brought to some sense of responsibility for the conduct of the entertainment as a whole. exhibition of giggling bad manners by one of your neighbours can easily put this to a test. If you do not protest, you will at least feel ashamed.

But, watching a 'Movie,' what does its foolishness matter? The actors are far away, both in space and in time. What consideration need be shown to their flickering images on a screen? Equally, what enthusiasm can such images arouse, except in the minds of children (of whatever age) to whom illusion still is life and the discretionary enjoyment of art a thing unknown? This environment of irresponsibility may add to the cinema's popularity in an irresponsible age. But one doubts whether an art that cannot stimulate emotion and that asks for no more judgment or support from its audience than is involved in their paying or not paying, their staying or going, can ever take a very deep hold. One might even find refuge in fogeyism and question its right in the outcome-whatever æsthetic efforts may be spent in preparation-to be considered an art at all. But, art or no art, if the cinema is in the future to steal some part of the theatre's thunder, what had the theatre best do about it? We see well enough how the industrial part of the question is being answered. Landlords, dramatists, and actors are putting money in their purses while they can. What pre

paration, though, is the indisputable art of the drama making for a generation that is perhaps growing up to think of a play in relation to a Movie as the children of 1880, riding in express trains, thought of a coach-andfour?

If an art may have a policy it would seem as if the first thing needful were the envisaging of what the drama can do unapproachably, of what it can be at its best that neither kindred arts nor pseudo-arts can be. For in this must lie its strength to face a future, however ambiguous. Its history has been marked by defections, from which, in some ways it has gathered strength. Dancing and music deserted, to set up on their own account as ballet and opera. Drama on the whole does better without them.