he Jew. 'Now, noble lord, listen. We were traveling together down he road'-'We were traveling to;ether down the road.' 'We came o a ditch'—'We came to a ditch.' 'I prang over the ditch, hop'-'You, ew, sprang over the ditch, hop.' My purse fell out, ka-flop'-'Your urse fell out, ka-flop.' And you rabbed it'-'No, I did not take it.'

'Ah, you son of the devil. Won't you confess?'

Thereupon, the lord of the manor intervened. "This has gone far enough. I, myself, listened and 'saw you instruct this man and give him a ruble to testify falsely against himself. And he gave prompt orders that the Jew should be driven off the estate.

third, and Mr. Granville-Barker's translation of M. Sacha Guitry's Deburau a fourth. Each of these plays has been produced with very great success in New York within the past six months. None of them has yet been produced in England. It will not astonish me if Mr. Arnold Bennett's unnamed Don Juan play or his Five Towns comedy, Body and Soul, or the five plays contained in Mr. Shaw's forthcoming volume, Back to Methuselah, are performed in America before they are performed in England. Mr. Masefield's austere piece, The Faithful, has not, to our grave discredit, been done in England, except at the semi-private performances of the Stage Society, but it was publicly performed in New York in 1919. In addition to these performances of plays by English dramatists not yet produced in this country, there are many successful productions of English plays, already seen here, either in New York or in the American provinces. provinces. Mr. A. A. Milne's Mr. Pim Passes By is enjoying great popularity in New York. So is

Mr. Galsworthy's The Skin Game and The Mob. Sir James Barrie's Mary Rose had hardly the favour in New York that it had in London, but I believe it is receiving more praise in other American cities, and the same is true, I am told, of The Beggar's Opera. In the autumn, Mr. Lennox Robinson's The White-headed Boy will be done in New York, with all of the present company, except Miss Sara Allgood, in the cast.

It is not easy to account for this state of affairs otherwise than by the assumption that audiences in New York are more willing to make experiments or to interest themselves in modern work than are audiences in London. Many of the disabling characteristics of the London theatre are to be discovered in the New York theatre, which is passing through a phase of financial adversity equal to, if not greater than, that now affecting the theatre here. Commercial managements there are not any more indifferent to large profits quickly returned than the same sort of managements in England. There are twice as many theatres in New York as there are in London, but the congestion in play-producing is not lessened by that fact. Rents are at least as high in America as in England. Spectacular pieces and the leggier entertainments draw crowds just as easily there as they do here, and I regret to say that thoroughly sloppy plays are not less popular in the cruder parts of the United States than they are in London. (It is odd, by the way, to observe with what fatuity the silly sort of superior person will declaim against the sentimentality of some American plays, as if these pieces were without appeal to English playgoers, as if, indeed, American managers, realising that a piece which

is too sloppy for New York can never be too sloppy for London, do not make a point of sending the more saccharinous of their plays to this country!) Yet in spite of the similarity in the general theatrical situation in London and New York, there remains this remarkable difference, that it is much easier for the author of a meritable play to secure production for it in America than in England. Consider the strange case of The New Morality, a charming and exceedingly amusing light comedy by a young American dramatist, the late Harold Chapin, who gave his life for this country during the war. This play, written for a distinguished English actress who has been too long absent from our stage, was produced, about nine years after it was written, for two performances in London by the Play Actors. It gave enormous pleasure to the audiences which witnessed it, and was enthusiastically praised by the critics. One would have imagined that managers would have engaged in a severe competition to secure the play, but, although it was offered to most of them, it was turned down! An American manager bought it, in spite of the fact that he had not a theatre available for evening productions, and it was performed for a number of matinées in New York and will, in due time, be put into a regular bill. How is one to account for this state of affairs? Has the war really left us all so sick in mind that we are in the condition of irritable convalescents, capable only of digesting pap?

And now we find Mr. Drinkwater's latest play, Mary Stuart, receiving its first performance, not in the country of its author, but in America. When the play is done in London it will be produced by an American actor, Mr. James K. Hackett, who

gave so fine a performance as Macbeth last year. I am sometimes accused of harshness in my judgments by people who forget that I praise as heartily as I damn, and perhaps there is some truth in the charge, though I can plead in mitigation of my offence that my severity is provoked by my deep regard for the English theatre and for the skill of the English actor. But whether the charge be true or false, this at all events is true, that I have sufficient interest and pride in English drama to feel resentful of the fact that English dramatists of repute are obliged to seek hospitality for their work in a foreign country. The generosity and kindliness of that foreign country is very consoling to those reputable dramatists, but the kindliness and generosity of strangers can never quite compensate for the disregard of one's own kin. I trust that London will see the first performance of Mr. Drinkwater's Oliver Cromwell, with Mr. Henry Ainley as Cromwell, but I fear at times that this distinguished play too will obtain its premiére elsewhere than in the city where Mr. Drinkwater is entitled to receive honour.

Mary Stuart is a long one-act play, rather longer, I fancy, than Mr. Shaw's The Showing-up of Blanco Posnett. The form of the play is novel. It is not exactly a dream play, but it has the appearance of one. The piece opens in Edinburgh (or Edinborough, as Mr. Drinkwater prefers to write it) 'in 1900 or later' with a long conversation between two men, Andrew Boyd (the elder of the two) and John Hunter about the marital troubles of the latter. Margaret Hunter, who does not come into the play, bears some spiritual resemblance, says Boyd, to Mary Stuart, and he attempts to soothe

the wounded husband with the comparison, but unsuccessfully. Then in an interesting and curious manner the scene is changed from the twentieth to the seventeenth century, and is a very adroit, but, I think, too summary, fashion, Mary's relationship to her three lovers, Darnley, Riccio, and Bothwell, is stated in terms of the last verse of Mary's song:

Not Riccio nor Darnley knew,
Nor Bothwell, how to find
This Mary's best magnificence

Of the great lover's mind. We see Mary at the period when, weary of Darnley and without illusions about Riccio, she is turning, not hopefully, to Bothwell in her quest for a fit mate for a great queen. Mr. Drinkwater portrays her, not as a wanton woman like the pseudo-virgin Elizabeth, but as a woman of high quality vainly searching for her proper consort. The odd thing about the play is that the sixteenth century scenes are more alive and natural than the scene in the twentieth century, possibly because Mr. Drinkwater appears to have more interest in historical than in contemporary figures, but more probably because his main theme is Mary, and not the love troubles of John Hunter. The figure of Mary is very clearly drawn, a remarkably well-realised character, full of dignity and repose, and possessed of much moving quality: a woman of stature and worth. The subsidiary characters of Darnley and Riccio and Bothwell are all built of flesh and blood, and not, as too 'commonly happens in historical plays, of nicely-decorated cardboard. The play, remembering the narrow limits within which it is contained, is a very notable achievement, and I shall look forward to its production here, with Miss Beatrice Beckley in the name-part.

To have received at a distance of two thousand miles, while reading his recently-published autobiography, the cabled announcement of the end of James Huneker, was to experience the shock of an old friend suddenly expiring before one's eyes, without the faintest prescience of his fate; in full harness, moreover, a moment ago sparkling with gaiety and warmth, sharp and spiced and stinging as though it were decreed that men went on living for ever. Huneker's relish for life and literature was of a type that either endeared him to you or sent you away reviling the country that produced him, and in which he was peculiarly at home, that encouraged all those qualities in him for which we in England have no equivalent; at least, none expressed in our art. A Dionysiac force in criticism, he has been well called, apart as the poles from our litterateurs, writing their criticism sadly, our zestless authoritarians. The show of candor and raciness by which certain writers pretend to reveal themselves fails to lessen the distance. There must be something behind it which they do not possess, knowledge rich and ripe; and no suspicion of writing down to the level of one's populace. We have had, in fact, none to put beside Huneker since Shaw's high humour and spirit were dashed in in the consulting-room of the author of Damaged Goods.

own

Because it is cheaper to publish American fiction in this country than

it is to print and publish the work of our own writers, we are at present enabled to learn a good deal about the position of the novel in the United States. But only by chance do we come to know anything of its current criticism of literature. James Huneker's volumes alone appear to have been issued with any regularity in an English edition. Not that this has always been a good thing for Huneker. It was a very indiscriminate sort of regularity, a periodical hotch-potch of all manner of essays dished up from the New York daily journal whose literary and artistic columns he had edited these many years. One might certainly say that the volumes which came over to us got steadily worse. Bedouins, for example, published a year ago, could have served no better purpose, so far as we were able to make the book out, than the diversion of those feverish folk on this side who have been affected by the American avidness for everything that, in Jack London's phrase, has 'a kick in it,' be it domestic pepper or that music which is said to send its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

If Bedouins chanced to be a reader's first introduction to Huneker, he would have been astounded to learn that its author was in his day chosen to present Mr. Shaw's collected essays and opinions on the theatre to the volume-desiring public, or that he was the author of a treatise on Chopin which musicians appear to regard

with the highest esteem. To quote To quote from Bedouins is none the less to get beneath the surface of sad lapse to the essential character of a style that first cracked and startled English ears many years ago in Iconoclasts: 'Joyfulness cannot be denied Botticelli; but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione; "Big George of Castelfranco. An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of sense and spirit. Music? Yes, there is the "coloured hearing" of Mendoza. The canvases of Botticelli sound the opalescent overtones of an unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin, whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor from invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance we but overhear. Garlanded in blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric moods; her gesture, surely a divine one, shows her casting flowers upon the richly embroidered floor of the earth. The light filters through the thick trees, its rifts as rigid as a candle. The nymph in the brake is threatening. Another epicene creature flies by her. Love shoots his bolt in mid-air. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene? What the fable? Music plucked down from vibrating skies, music made visible.

First printed in the pages of a newspaper, one wonders what kind of audience this sort of writing could have had. The reader's road to wisdom, if he accepted it, would seem to be by way of hyperbole and excess-infected by Huneker's prose, we paraphrase William. Blake unblushingly. That sentence, 'music plucked down from vibrating skies,'

confirmed a fear we had warded off long enough-that the American nature cannot be beaten in its materialism once it has taken the comfortable turn. Huneker revealed this even in his better moments, and what is more, he revelled in it. Music is not only to be 'plucked down from vibrating skies,' it is 'painted' or 'made visible', and once, in a story of his, when a green star drops over Judea it is 'as though music itself were slain.' The common identity of the seven arts was, of course, Richard Wagner's dominating theory, and he endeavoured all his life long to practise it. Huneker himself records how Camille Mauclair, a French artist, seriously proposed a scheme for the fusion of the arts. The fusion was to be cerebral: sculpture, architecture, music, drama, acting, painting, and dancing synthesised in the mind. But neither Wagner nor Mauclairnor any of the others who have been intrigued by the idea, Pater especially

would have tolerated an attempt at synthesis on paper-a daily paper at that, and set down by a critic!

Not only was a common identity of the seven arts attempted by Huneker, but of artistic genres and every pleasing thing that came within range of the five senses. And, so far as it went, he made the whole thing delightful-or revolting, according to the way you received him. There are folk who hear painting, see music, touch poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes, but Huneker beamed across the dinner-table with talk that actually identifies artistic masterworks and the wine, the dishes, the cigarsit is always at the dinner-table that we see him, perhaps because so many of the meetings and talks with the artists of several continents, as recorded in his autobiography, took