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OT quite a generation ago the company of the Théâtre Français visited London and surprised the countrymen of Shakespeare with an object-lesson in what can be done by a stock organization trained to a repertory of masterpieces. Matthew Arnold voiced the intelligent judgment as to the event, and his words apply with even greater force to America to-day. "We have in England," he wrote, everything to make us dissatisfied with the chaotic and ineffective condition into which our theater has fallen. We have the remembrance of better things in the past, and the elements for better things in the future. We have a splendid national drama of the Elizabethan age, and a later drama which has no lack of pieces conspicuous by their stage qualities, their vivacity and their talent, and interesting by their pictures of manners. have had great actors. We have good actors not a few at the present moment. But we have been unlucky, as we so often are, in the work of organization. . . . The pleasure we have had in the visit of the French company is barren, unless it leaves us with an impulse to [organize the theater], and with the lesson how alone it can be rationally done. Forget -can we not hear those fine artists saying in an undertone to us, amid their graceful compliments of adieu-' forget your claptrap, and believe that the State, the Nation in its collective and corporate character, does well to concern itself about an influence so important to national life and

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manners as the theater.... The people will have the theater; then make it a good one. . . The theater is irresistible; then organize the theater !"

These words may be taken as dating the origin of a movement, felt throughout the English-speaking world, toward a revival of our national repertory. But, as always, we have been "unlucky in the work of organization." In England the movement toward a National Theater, ably headed by Mr. William Archer, has as yet had no result, though a Shakespeare memorial theater is somewhat indefinitely promised. In America successive efforts have been made to induce Congress to grant an appropriation for the purpose. All have been without result. As a people we instinctively despise the theater, misled by the lingering leaven of Puritanism. As a nation, moreover, we underestimate the value of permanently organized institutions, preferring to rely on a spontaneous public spirit, led by private enterprise. Universities, schools of art and music, museums, orchestras, and operahouses have all been created by individual effort and private endowment. The drama alone has been neglected. It is, as the excellent John Hare once styled it, the Cinderella of the arts.

There have been, it is true, many individual efforts in its behalf; and their progress in recent years, though slow and groping, has been evident to all careful observers. We have been living in a transition period, with many obscure cur

rents and counter-currents; but there has been an ever-present movement toward an artistic theater, a repertory theater.

The final decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the dissolution of the old

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stock company systein. It died a very natural death. In our anger at its loss we have laid the blame to this, that, or the other malign influence, from the alleged greed of the theatrical syndicate to the supposed decadence of popular taste. The simple truth, unpicturesque as it is unpalatable to a consciously virtuous indignation, is that no one has been at fault. thing that ended the old stock company was nothing more nor less than the railway, in its marvelous modern develop ment. When transportation was slow, difficult, and expensive, it would have spelled ruin to send an entire company, with the scenery, costumes, and properties of its many productions, "on the road." The elder "stars" traveled alone, relying on the local stock companies in the cities they visited for the necessary actors, scenery, and properties in all their varied performances. The cheapening and quickening of transportation revolu tionized all this. The best artistic results, at least superficially, and by far the greatest commercial gains, are now obtained by creating an entire production in New York, and, after its initial run, which establishes its reputation, sending it on the road. Thus the actor, instead of playing in three to five ragged and ill-rehearsed productions weekly in the leading cities, plays in a single well-staged and well-rehearsed production for from one to three years throughout all the cities of the land.

With the decadence of the company of Augustin Daly, the stock system ended. Loyal efforts were made to continue it, notably by Daniel Frohman's Lyceum Company and Charles Frohman's Empire Company. But the change in economic conditions was too powerful. The thing itself has long been dead; and now the very name is no more.

With the faults of the modern star system we are all unhappily familiar. The long run followed by the road tour has made artistic versatility almost impossible. The actor's stock in trade is his personality, not his virtuosity; and an actor who assumes another personality than his own

does so at the risk of his popularity. “I love John Drew," a matinée girl remarked with an air of connoisseurship; "he is always so witty." And when this admirable comedian lately appeared as a waiter, and with a beard, a large proportion of his adherents took umbrage at what they regarded as the debasement of their idol. On the other hand, the long run has tended to make even the single performance mechanical and dead. And the fact that the actor appears, not to a chosen public in a few large cities, but to all grades of play-goers in all sorts of places, has made it more difficult to gain a hearing for plays of novelty and originality—to appreciate which requires special cultivation and susceptibility. It is as if, in literature, the cloth-bound novel and the high-class magazine had been abolished in favor of the paper novel and the ten-cent illustrated. Alfred Harmsworth, now Lord Northcliffe, is reported to have said that he laid the foundation of his journalistic fortunes by having "East Lynne" rewritten one hundred different times, changing the names of the characters and the locale. The modern method in the theater is much the same. In what form have we not had the historical swashbuckler and "The Prisoner of Zenda "?

If it is necessary to place the blame for our plight anywhere, it must be on the shoulders of the public which permits itself to be fed on such pabulum—the public which has hitherto refused to organize the theater, either as a national institution or by means of private enterprise. From time to time, it is true, individuals have done heroic service, and they have seldom failed of loyal support. At the period when our submission to the new economic conditions was most absolute, Mrs. Fiske, ably backed by her husband and manager, unfalteringly held the banner of independent artistic effort high. The farcically intellectual plays of Bernard Shaw, long neglected by the commercial managers, were given to the public by Mr. Arnold Daly, who risked on "Candida" the only five hundred dollars he had in the world; and they were welcomed with a popular enthusiasm greater than they have evoked in any other country. Richard Mansfield used the popularity which his great gifts were so long

in achieving to keep alive several of the great Shakespearean plays and to produce one poetic masterpiece each by Ibsen, Molière, and Schiller. Mme. Nazimova has exerted the force of an extraordinary personality, and some little art, in the task of recommending the prose plays of Ibsen to our public. Mr. E. H. Sothern and Miss Julia Marlowe have devoted themselves to the Shakespearean repertory, and to the poetic drama generally, achieving the artistic leadership of the American stage, and winning the most generous critical recognition in England for the unrivaled sincerity of their acting and the consummate beauty of their poetic speech. But such efforts until now have been sporadic, and mainly valuable as showing that there does exist a public which welcomes the best.

The demand that the theater be organized, meanwhile, was becoming louder and more frequent. It was also widespread. Chicago actually organized a New Theater, taking the name from the movement in New York, which had already begun. But the promoters underestimated the obstacles to be overcome, and the venture failed, promptly and disastrously. This failure was a severe blow to the cause. The commercial managers, who well knew the difficulties of the project, had always ridiculed it; and now they were made to appear in the right. In Boston, meantime, two men, Lorin Deland and Winthrop Ames, began a more guarded and thorough campaign. Before attempting an artistic theater they tried the experiment of conducting a stock company of the more recent and humble order, playing old plays with weekly changes of bill. They gained much valuable experience and lost no money. Then Mr. Ames accepted the post of Director of the New Theater in New York.

The first movement toward the New Theater in New York was the work of the late Heinrich Conried. He had become generally known as manager of the German Theater in Irving Place. This he conducted in the manner of the innumerable repertory theaters of the Continent. Many of his productions, notably of Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, were mediocre, but his modern productions, from Ibsen and Tolstoy to

Blumenthal and Kadelburg, were highly artistic and entertaining. His real and vital service was in illustrating in New York the possibilities of the repertory stock company-which had never reached so broad a development among us before, and which, in any form, was unknown to the rising generation of play-goers. His success brought him the post of Director of the Metropolitan Opera-House, where he displayed commercial abilities by no means inferior to his abilities as an artistic producer. Always he had hoped to manage a repertory theater in English, and he had the acumen to recognize that, failing a permanent endowment from the Nation or the city, the only possibility of such an institution lay in the financial backing of the leading citizens of the metropolis. In the stockholders of the Metropolitan. Opera-House he found these already organized in the furtherance of an artistic project, and he induced them to undertake for the drama what they had done for music. It has not been possible to make "the Nation in its collective and corporate character concern itself about the theater," but the drama has been organized," as have been learning, music, The drama has ceased to be the Cinderella of the arts," or rather Cinderella has, for the time at least, come into the possession of her crystal coach.

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The New Theater has met strong and determined opposition. Contrary to the wishes of its founders and director, it has been very generally regarded as a rebuke to the commercial managers. Nothing could be more illogical, more absurd. do not expect the publishers to endow our libraries, the art dealers to endow our museums. Why should we expect the business men of Broadway to give us a theater the prime aim of which is artistic, not commercial? Far from being inimical to the commercial stage, the New Theater should prove a most valuable ally. It is a well-known fact that the theaters of Broadway are maintained with little or no profit, and often at a very considerable loss, merely as the means of creating reputations for productions the profits on which are reaped on the road. The New Theater, if successful, will create many such properties, and the road profits will accrue to the managers who secure the