life of the people. It expresses their very spirit."_

Havelock Ellis.

An idle observer of theatrical conditions might derive a certain
ironic pleasure from remarking the contradiction implied in the
professed admiration of the constables of the playhouse for the
unconventional and their almost passionate adoration for the
conventional. We constantly hear it said that the public cries for
novelty, and just as constantly we see the same kind of acting, the
same gestures, the same Julian Mitchellisms and George Marionisms and
Ned Wayburnisms repeated in and out of season, summer and winter.
Indeed, certain conventions (which bore us even now) are so deeply
rooted in the soil of our theatre that I see no hope of their being
eradicated before the year 1999, at which date other conventions will
have supplanted them and will likewise have become tiresome.

In this respect our theatre does not differ materially from the
theatres of other countries except in one particular. In Europe the
juxtaposition of nations makes an interchange of conventions possible,
which brings about slow change or rapid revolution. Paris, for
example, has received visits from the Russian Ballet which almost
assumed the proportions of Tartar invasions. London, too, has been
invaded by the Russians and by the Irish. The Irish playwrights,
indeed, are continually pounding away at British middle-class
complacency. Germany, in turn, has been invaded by England (we regret
that this sentence has only an artistic and figurative significance),
and we find Max Reinhardt well on his way toward giving a complete
cycle of the plays of Shakespeare; a few years ago we might have
observed Deutschland groveling hysterically before Oscar Wilde's
_Salome_, a play which, at least without its musical dress, has not, I
believe, even yet been performed publicly in London. In Italy, of
course, there are no artistic invasions (nobody cares to pay for them)
and even the conventions of the Italian theatre themselves, such as
the _Commedia del' Arte_, are quite dead; so the country remains as
dormant, artistically speaking, as a rag rug, until an enthusiast like
Marinetti arises to take it between his teeth and shake it back into
rags again.

Very often whisperings of art life in the foreign theatre (such as
accounts of Stanislavski's accomplishments in Moscow) cross the
Atlantic. Very often the husks of the realities (as was the case with
the