at the end, he turns half-round and walks straight off, on the nearer side of the stage, giving you no more than a momentary glimpse of a convulsed face, fixed into a definite, gross, raging mood.  It would have taken Mr. Tree five minutes to get off the stage, and he would have walked to and fro with a very multiplication of gesture, trying on one face, so to speak, after another.  Would it have been so effective, that is to say, so real?

A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when and how not to do things.  Their blood helps them, for there is movement in their blood, and they have something to restrain.  But they have realised the art there is in being quite still, in speaking naturally, as people do when they are really talking, in fixing attention on the words they are saying and not on their antics while saying them.  The other day, in the first act of “The Bishop’s Move” at the Garrick, there is a Duchess talking to a young novice in the refectory of a French abbey.  After standing talking to him for a few minutes, with only such movements as would be quite natural under the circumstances, she takes his arm, not once only but twice, and walks him up and down in front of the footlights, for no reason in the world except to “cross stage to right.”  The stage trick was so obvious that it deprived the scene at once of any pretence to reality.

The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the difference between what is dramatic and what is merely theatrical.  Drama is made to be acted, and the finest “literary” play in the world, if it wholly fails to interest people on the stage, will have wholly failed in its first and most essential aim.  But the finer part of drama is implicit in the words and in the development of the play, and not in its separate small details of literal “action.”  Two people should be able to sit quietly in a room, without ever leaving their chairs, and to hold our attention breathless for as long as the playwright likes.  Given a good play, French actors are able to do that.  Given a good play, English actors are not allowed to do it.

Is it not partly the energy, the restless energy, of the English character which prevents our actors from ever sitting or standing still on the stage?  We are a nation of travellers, of sailors, of business people; and all these have to keep for ever moving.  Our dances are the most vigorous and athletic of dances, they carry us all over the stage, with all kinds of leaping and kicking movements.  Our music-hall performers have invented a kind of clowning peculiar to this country, in which kicking and leaping are also a part of the business.  Our melodramas are constructed on more movable planes, with more formidable collapses and collisions, than those of any other country.  Is not, then, the persistent English habit of “crossing stage to right” a national characteristic, ingrained in us, and not only a matter of training?  It is this reflection which hinders me from hoping, with much confidence, that a reform in stage-management will lead to a really quieter and simpler way of acting.  But might not the experiment be tried?  Might not some stage-manager come forward and say:  “For heaven’s sake stand still, my dear ladies and gentlemen, and see if you cannot interest your audience without moving more than twice the length of your own feet?”