ay to ourselves this charge is laid
on almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of the
parts. And far more other people are now concerned than of old; not
least those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. All of
which leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth,
the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity--intensity
worthy of the name--at once. The intensity of the golden age of the
histrion was the intensity of _his_ good faith. The intensity of our
period is that of the "producer's" and machinist's, to which add even
that of architect, author and critic. Between which derivative kind of
that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it
would appear that you have absolutely to choose.

XXVII

I see much of the rest of that particular Paris time in the light of the
Institution Fezandie, and I see the Institution Fezandie, Rue Balzac, in
the light, if not quite of Alphonse Daudet's lean asylum for the _petits
pays chauds_, of which I have felt the previous institutions of New York
sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in
that field of the precarious, the ambiguous Paris over parts of which
the great Arch at the top of the Champs-Elysees flings, at its hours, by
its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone." They
gather, these chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence and enjoy
at its expense a degree of reflected dignity. It was to the big square
villa of the Rue Balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted with
vicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of M. Lerambert, an establishment
that strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and most
indescribable--or as describable at best in some of the finer turns and
touches of Daudet's best method. The picture indeed should not be
invidious--it so little needs that, I feel, for its due measure of the
vivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice to
its air as of an equally futile felicity. I see it as bright and loose
and vague, as confused and embarrassed and helpless; I see it, I fear,
as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me at
least, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions; it played
before us such a variety of figure and character and so relieved us of a
sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. It
was a rec