aries, and, as a result, a
scene which naturally receives half a dozen curtain calls, went off with
comparative tameness. It was a striking demonstration of the importance
of picture on the stage as an externalization of dramatic facts.

If the theater-goer will keep an eye upon this aspect of the drama, he
will add much of interest to the content of his pleasure and do justice
to a very important and easily overlooked phase of technic. It is common
in criticism, often professional, to sneer at the tendency of modern
actors, under the stage manager's guidance, continually to shift
positions while the dialogue is under way; thus producing an
unnecessarily uneasy effect of meaningless action. As a generalization,
it may be said that this is done (though at times no doubt, overdone) on
a principle that is entirely sound: it expresses the desire for a new
picture, a recognition of the law that, in drama, composition to the eye
is as truly a principle as it is in painting. And with that
consideration goes the additional fact that motion implies emotion; than
which there is no surer law in psycho-physics. Abuse of the law, on the
stage, is beyond question possible, and frequently met. But a
redistribution of the positions of actors on the boards, when not
abused, means they have moved under the compulsion of some stress of
feeling and then the movement is an external symbol of an internal state
of mind. The drama must express the things within by things without, in
this way; that is its method. The audience is only properly irritated
when a stage moment which, from the nature of its psychology, calls for
the static, is injured by an unrelated, fussy, bodily activity. Motion
in such a case becomes as foolish as the scene shifting in one of the
highest colored and most phantasmagoric of our dreams. The wise stage
director will not call for a change of picture unless it represents a
psychologic fact.

Two men converse at a table; one communicates to the other, quietly and
in conversational tone, a fact of alarming nature. The other leaps to
his feet with an exclamation and paces the floor as he talks about it;
nothing is more fitting, because nothing is truer to life. The
repressive style of acting to-day, which might try to express this
situation purely by facial work, goes too far in abandoning the
legitimate tools of the craft. Let me repeat that, despite all the
refining upon older, more violent and crudely expressive metho