the mob. Both
classes demand a plausible excuse for stage happenings. The picture of
an insane husband strangling his wife and child might be accepted as
the logical sequence of some startling train of events. But to enter a
playhouse and watch a couple of murders for no other reason than that
the murderer was a madman, is not enlivening. It is ghoulish.

I have devoted much space to Mr. Frank Keenan and his plan. I was
sorry for him until I thought it all over. Then I couldn't help
feeling a bit sore. It was all very foolish. The bubble was pricked so
quickly! It is a consolation to reflect that the New York critics did
everything in their power to push along a project that would have been
of great value to this metropolis. It was foredoomed to failure,
because it depended upon the iniquity known as "quick returns." _De
mortuis nil nisi bonum._ (I think I have, though!)

That a one-act play is fully able to create a veritable sensation, as
keen as any that a five-act drama might evoke, was instanced at the
Manhattan Theater, when Mrs. Fiske produced a little drama, written by
herself, and called "A Light from St. Agnes." I think I may say that
it was the finest and most artistic one-act play that I have ever
seen--and I've seen a few in my day. It aroused a matinee audience, on
a warm afternoon, to an ecstasy of enthusiastic approval, because it
appealed directly to the artistic fiber.

It was not a case for cold analytic judgment. It was not an occasion
when long-haired critics could draw a diagram, and prate learnedly of
"technique" and other topics that often make critics such insensate
bores. "A Light from St. Agnes" was recognized intuitively as great.
The soul of an audience never makes a mistake, though the brain
frequently errs. A brain might perhaps prove that this play was
artistically admirable, but the soul reached that conclusion instantly
and unreasoningly. The effect was marvelous.

I wonder if you quite grasp my meaning. You know there are some things
that refuse to be reduced to diagram form. They decline to answer to
the call of a, b and c. They won't be x'd and y'd algebraically. Very
material people of course rebel at this. They want everything cut and
dried. They would dissect the soul with a scalpel, and reduce psychic
effects to the medium of pounds and ounces. That is what certain
reviewers tried to do with "A Light from St. Agnes."

Their material eyes saw that the end of the little play w