Scandal_ in which
most of the other parts were filled by actors and actresses of the older
generation, who attempted to recall for one performance the triumphs of
their youth. Joseph Surface is a hypocrite and a villain; but the youthful
grace of Mr. Irving so charmed a lady in the stalls that she said she
"could not bear to see those old unlovely people trying to get the better
of that charming young man, Mr. Joseph." Something must have been wrong
with the economy of her attention.

The chief reason why mannerisms of walk or gesture or vocal intonation are
objectionable in an actor is that they distract the attention of the
audience from the effect he is producing to his method of producing that
effect. Mansfield's peculiar manner of pumping his voice from his diaphragm
and Irving's corresponding system of ejaculating his phrases through his
nose gave to the reading of those great artists a rich metallic resonance
that was vibrant with effect; but a person hearing either of those actors
for the first time was often forced to expend so much of his attention in
adjusting his ears to the novel method of voice production that he was
unable for many minutes to fix his mind upon the more important business of
the play. An actor without mannerisms, like the late Adolf von Sonnenthal,
is able to make a more immediate appeal.

IV

At the first night of Mr. E.H. Sothern's _Hamlet_, in the fall of 1900, I
had just settled back in my chair to listen to the reading of the soliloquy
on suicide, when a woman behind me whispered to her neighbor, "Oh look!
There are two fireplaces in the room!" My attention was distracted, and the
soliloquy was spoiled; but the fault lay with the stage-manager rather than
with the woman who spoke the disconcerting words. If Mr. Sothern was to
recite his soliloquy gazing dreamily into a fire in the centre of the room,
the stage-manager should have known enough to remove the large fireplace on
the right of the stage.

Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, when she acted _Hamlet_ in London in 1899, introduced
a novel and startling effect in the closet scene between the hero and his
mother. On the wall, as usual, hung the counterfeit presentments of two
brothers; and when the time came for the ghost of buried Denmark to appear,
he was suddenly seen standing luminous in the picture-frame which had
contained his portrait. The effect was so unexpected that the audience
could look at nothing else, and thus Hamlet and th