young, warm, and engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to which the footlights are scarcely a barrier.  As if unconsciously, she fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she is representing.  And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savour and grace, alive to the finger-tips.  Yet it is not with these personal qualities that I am here chiefly concerned.  What I want to emphasise is the particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English, though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage in the present day.  We have nothing like it in England, nothing on the same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results.  Are we capable of realising the difference?  If not, Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.

A THEORY OF THE STAGE

Life and beauty are the body and soul of great drama.  Mix the two as you will, so long as both are there, resolved into a single substance.  But let there be, in the making, two ingredients, and while one is poetry, and comes bringing beauty, the other is a violent thing which has been scornfully called melodrama, and is the emphasis of action.  The greatest plays are melodrama by their skeleton, and poetry by the flesh which clothes that skeleton.

The foundation of drama is that part of the action which can be represented in dumb show.  Only the essential parts of action can be represented without words, and you would set the puppets vainly to work on any material but that which is common to humanity.  The permanence of a drama might be tested by the continuance and universality of its appeal when played silently in gestures.  I have seen the test applied.  Companies of marionette players still go about the villages of Kent, and among their stock pieces is “Arden of Feversham,” the play which Shakespeare is not too great to have written, at some moment when his right hand knew not what his left hand was doing.  Well, that great little play can hold the eyes of every child and villager, as the puppets enact it; and its power has not gone out of it after three centuries.  Dumb show apes the primal forces of nature, and is inarticulate, as they are; until relief gives words.  When words come, there is no reason why they should not be in verse, for only in verse can we render what is deepest in humanity of the utmost beauty.  Nothing but beauty should exist on the stage.  Visible beauty comes with the ballet, an abstract thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama begins; and then words bring in the speech by which life tries to tell its secret.  Because poetry, speaking its natural language of verse, can let out more of that secret than prose, the great drama of the past has been mainly