s wonders to perform." The play,
I must confess, does not seem to me, as it seems to certain French
critics, "une piece qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre ... la tragedie des
maitres antiques et de Shakespeare." To me it is rather an insubstantial
kind of ingenuity, ingenuity turning in a circle. As a tragic episode,
the dramatisation of a striking incident, it has force and simplicity,
the admirable quality of directness. Occasionally the people are too
eager to express the last shade of the author's meaning, as in the
conversation between Neste and Vivarce, when the latter decides to
commit suicide, or in the supplementary comments when the action is
really at an end. But I have never seen a piece which seemed to have
been written so kindly and so consistently for the benefit of the
actors. There are six characters of equal importance; and each in turn
absorbs the whole flood of the limelight.

The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting was a version of
"Au Telephone," one of Antoine's recent successes at his theatre in
Paris. It was brutal and realistic, it made just the appeal of an
accident really seen, and, so far as success in horrifying one is
concerned, it was successful. A husband hearing the voice of his wife
through the telephone, at the moment when some murderous ruffians are
breaking into the house, hearing her last cry, and helpless to aid her,
is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is
brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as
uncomfortable as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has
absolutely no artistic value, because terror without beauty and without
significance is not worth causing. When the husband, with his ear at
the telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one is forcing the
window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certain
sympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerves
with the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in "La
Mort de Tintagiles" of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the door
softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death. In his acting
Mr. Charles Warner was powerful, thrilling; it would be difficult to
say, under the circumstances, that he was extravagant, for what
extravagance, under the circumstances, would be improbable? He had not,
no doubt, what I see described as "le jeu simple et terrible" of
Antoine, a dry, hard, intellectual grip on horror; he