of a Shakespeare memorial should therefore, in my view, take would be to invite sculptors of every country to propose a design. The monument should be the best that artistic genius could contrivethe artistic genius of the world. There may be better sculptors abroad than at home. The universality of the appeal, which Shakespeare's achievement makes, justifies a competition among artists of every race or nationality.

The crucial decision as to whether the capacity to execute the monument is available should be entrusted to a committee of taste, to a committee of liberal-minded connoisseurs who command general confidence. If this jury decide by their verdict that the present conditions of art permit the production of a great memorial of Shakespeare on just principles, then a strenuous appeal for funds may be inaugurated with likelihood of success. It is hopeless to reverse these methods of procedure. If funds are first invited before rational doubts as to the possibility of a proper application of them are dispelled, it is improbable that the response will be satisfactory or that the issue of the movement of 1905 will differ from that of 1821 or 1864.

In 1864 Victor Hugo expressed the opinion that the expenses of a Shakespeare memorial in London ought to be defrayed by the British Government. There is no likelihood of assistance from that source. Individual effort can alone be relied upon, and it is doubtful if it be desirable to seek official aid. A great national memorial of Shakespeare in London, if it come into being at all on the lines which would alone justify its existence, ought to embody individual enthusiasm, ought to express with fitting dignity the personal sense of indebtedness and admiration which fills the hearts of his fellow-men.

SIDNEY LEE.

THE PUBLIC AS SEEN FROM THE STAGE

THERE are two sides to every question. There are two sides to every stage curtain-what is theatrically termed the 'back' and the front of the house,' or more generally known as 'before and behind the footlights'—and if of late years both sides of the curtain have been made familiar to the public gaze, it is not because it is the fashion to court observation, but on account of a passionate national curiosity to know the truth.

And when we have probed and sounded and investigated to our entire satisfaction, it has further become a modern habit to summarise any peculiar condition of things, to diagnose the disease as it were by the coining of a catchword. After that we are content to let things take their course.

Perhaps this is the result of the liberty of thought and expression that is the charter of the British people, encouraging every man to think aloud. Perhaps it is the natural outcome of party government under which a man, happy or unhappy of speech, may find himself the hero or scapegoat of the hour. We have seen how a ministry may get out of hand by the flick of a stinging word, and how a dreamer may be acclaimed as leader by his making of a motto.

A catchword is the current coin of the public Press, the small change of the man in the street. No longer merit lies in the righting of a wrong, but in the appropriate choice of a baptismal name, and so content are we with its christening that we forthwith forget what we have morally undertaken as sponsors. The man who invents an appropriate catchword is the man of the moment.

Sometimes an arrow is shot into the air at random by an unknown archer, as when the arrow of 'inefficiency' was loosed across England. It hit the lintel of a door in Pall Mall, and ricocheted to Dublin Castle, sparing, however, Scotland in its course. It dealt no more death than that, but it set the mode of shooting many arrows from the same bow, aimed at many institutions and professions in our country, and amongst them the drama and its interpreters were not spared.

Now the politician on the platform and the actor on the stage have this in common; both are canvassing for the suffrages of the voter; both are groping their way to the hearts and heads of heterogeneous

and ill-assorted crowds; both are dependent on the goodwill of the masses of whom the speakers know individually nothing. In each case it is necessary for success to gauge what best pleases the public. Here the similarity ends. For the politician has done his work when the poll is declared, and may for ever hold his tongue under a government that discourages discussion; but an actor has his battle to fight every time he sets foot on the stage, and to the observer who is interested in going to the root of things, it becomes a question of importance to know why the battle is so often lost.

It is with that object that I am going to try to make clear in a few words where I think the fight is being unevenly waged, where the rules of war are not being fairly observed, where, in short, to quote a vulgar catchword, the 'game is not being played,' albeit my task is fraught with some difficulty. I should in justice to myself quote facts and figures in illustration of my meaning, and occasionally even be obliged explanatorily to name actors and authors; but there is for some inexplicable reason something so sensitising about the atmosphere of a theatre to all those connected with it, that it is out of question to open the shutters and let in the sun on unpublished facts. It is as though the tempered glow of the electrician's art has destroyed for us the possibility of facing the light of day without blinking, and though I cannot flatter myself that anything I could say would produce the slightest ruffle on the surface of theatrical enterprise, yet I feel that if I set down here something based on and vouched for by someone's experience, to-morrow somebody else would be writing to the daily Press that he was the person concerned, and that his honour had been impugned.

As to the British lion, he can take care of himself, and is sufficiently indifferent to the twisting of his tail, provided his meal of raw meat is forthcoming.

Raw meat! the very word. I might have cast about for hours and not dropped upon one that characterises so well the fare he demands and pays for.

Raw meat, uncooked, unseasoned, without sauce piquant or gravy, that is what the British lion roars for and roars at. Serve him up a fillet neatly trimmed, fried in butter, garnished with a truffle, and he turns away from it with a growl as a nasty French dish'! But give him all the Ten Commandments broken up into biscuit, make it hot with mustard and cayenne, and his bellow of delight can be heard from St. Clement Danes to St. James's Church.

Now since it is an established fashion to assert loudly that there are no actors or actresses in England, it is clearly the duty of one who has the temerity to break the patient silence of the theatrical profession, not to sacrifice the truth to the fear of plain speaking, and to endeavour to demonstrate how every individual reader may,

without conscious effort, collaborate with the actor in the higher development of his art.

Some years ago a distinguished dramatist is reported to have said that he did not want actors and actresses to interpret his plays, he wanted puppets that could be taught. In those days, I believe, he meant living puppets. Nowadays he has come to the conclusion that toy puppets are good enough for the British public. It is part of the responsibility of the successful man in any walk of life that he is made spokesman for the guild he represents, and the example set by that master of puppets has been quickly followed and echoed by other playwrights, intensifying the phrase originally used, however, into a chorus that there are no actors and actresses to be found here, at least none that can interpret the modern author.

In parenthesis, it may be mentioned that when you get a young dramatic author-that is, one young to the stage, newly fledged, and at his first theatrical production-he writes quite sentimentally to the actors and actresses in his appreciation of their services. At his second and third success he has already discovered how infinitesimal are their efforts compared with his creative power. Later, he complains there are no actors and actresses. Such is the ordinary routine of things theatrical.

Then as to the other side of the medal, as the French say, we have the managers and manageresses groaning and wringing their hands that there are no authors. There are geniuses ready to interpret, theatres ready to produce, money ready to finance the plays that are never written.

I do not know whether in the present upheaval of national economics the old saying has been disproved that the demand creates the supply, yet here we still have a glaring example of it. The English are in the position of the managers. They have the money to pay for their seats, the clothes to go in, the cabs to drive home in, but not the taste the theatrical sense-to bring to the appreciation of the drama.

What is meant by the theatrical sense is a sense apart from hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, seeing; it is a sixth sense that can throw itself into the make-believe of the story behind the footlights, and beat time with the actors' pulses. The French have it condensed-concentrated-like a particle of radium that illuminates a gigantic audience. The English do not possess it! It is said here by some that an artistic instinct is incompatible with the virility of a people, that the day we acquire an aesthetically perfected taste, we shall have sunk in the scale of nations and shall be no longer a firstclass power. I know not whether this be argued as cause or effect; but what I do know is that the Germans have the artistic sense, and we cannot call the hustlers' and' thrusters' of Europe a decadent nation.

The theatrical sense is the instinct, the intuition that perceives whither the author and actor want to lead the audience, and that allows itself to be led. Make a French audience laugh during two acts and a half—à se tordre as they would say-thrust an episode of tragedy in the second half of the third act, and watch a French audience seize the truth of it, of poignant drama in the midst of the most frivolous action of our daily life, and mark how earnest they at once become. What will an English audience do? Why, go on laughing, of course, or else complain that it is a silly play because you don't know whether you are to cry or to laugh.'

Here is an instance of it. In an early play in which Mme. Réjane appeared some years ago, she acted a scene of tragic farewell in the rooms of her lover. Men and women were moved, there was not a dry eye in the theatre. Suddenly she pulled a little mirror from her pocket and said 'Dieu, quelle téte, et je dine en ville!' and she powdered her face. There was not a man or woman in that theatre who laughed. Every one of us has lived through those awful moments when our hearts have been wrung-perhaps broken—and we hear the dinner-gong in the midst of our tragedy, and realise that we have to face the servants or they will know that 'something is up.'

If it be said that an English audience would not have laughed either, then here is an example of what happened to myself. I played on one occasion the part of a woman married to a husband who neglected and ill-treated her. She loved another man. With the jealous instinct of the woman who loves, she made a scene at her lover for his attentions to the young girl of the play, whom he eventually married-it is a tradition on the English stage that the hero always marries the ingénue, or else the young lady, aptly named by the Americans the 'Matinée girl,' would not go home happy to gaze at the photograph of the leading man. On our stage, too, the jealous woman is always a figure of fun. Shakespeare has invested the jealous male with dignity and pathos by the writing of a tragedy of Othello; but the public here roars with laughter and joy over the sufferings of the jealous female. In the midst of a comic scene of this description came a telegram to say that the husband was dead. The woman turned to the man, holding out the telegram to him, and all her yearning to acknowledge their attachment before the whole world, all her longing to get the sanction of the Church to her union with him, broke out into the cry: 'Don't you understand, I am free! I am free!'

On the first night, being no doubt played to specialists in playgoing rather than to the public, there was some enthusiasm when the curtain fell; but on the following night at the words 'I am free-I am free,' a woman cried aloud: 'Oh, I sye!' and the house, far from telling her to hold her tongue, chuckled in approval of her 'Oh, I sye!' And night after night the actress had to keep her hand on the throat of that woman and strangle her,