the
secret is found. This climax, to which the preliminaries gradually and
artfully lead, affords a great opportunity to an actor; and Willard
greatly filled it. The old inventor has been bowed down almost to
despair. Grief and destitution, the sight of his remaining daughter's
poverty, and the conflict of many feelings have made him a wreck. But
his will remains firm. It is not, however, until his last hope has been
abandoned that his success suddenly comes--and the result of this is a
delirium. That situation, one of the best in modern drama, has been
treated by the author in such a manner as to sustain for a long time the
feeling of suspense and to put an enormous strain upon the emotion and
the resources of an actor. Willard's presentment of the gaunt,
attenuated figure of Cyrus Blenkarn--hollow-eyed, half-frantic,
hysterical with grief and joy--was the complete incarnation of a
dramatic frensy; and this, being sympathetic, and moving to goodness and
not to evil, captured the heart. It was a magnificent exhibition, not
alone of the physical force that sometimes is so essential in acting but
of that fervour of the soul without which acting is a mockery.

The skill with which Willard reserved his power, so that the
impersonation might gradually increase in strength, was one of the best
merits of his art. Blenkarn's prayer might readily be converted into the
climax of the piece, and it might readily be spoken in such a way that
no effect would be left for the culmination in the furnace-room. Those
errors were avoided, and during three out of the four acts the movement
of the piece was fluent, continuous, and cumulative. In this respect
both the drama and the performance were instructive. Henry Arthur Jones
has diversified his serious scenes with passages of sportive humour and
he has freighted the piece with conventional didacticism as to the
well-worn question of capital and labour. The humour is good: the
political economy need not detain attention. The value of the play does
not reside in its teaching but in its dramatic presentation of strong
character, individual experience, and significant story. The effect
produced by _The Middleman_ is that of moral elevation. Its auditor is
touched and ennobled by a spectacle of stern trial, pitiable suffering,
and stoical endurance. In the purpose that presides over human
destiny--if one may accept the testimony equally of history and of
fiction--it appears to be necessary fi