l of the warmth of charm, seemed until
almost the end of the play to have lost the simple fervour which he had
once shown in the part of Pelleas; he posed, spoke without sincerity,
was conscious of little but his attitudes. But in the great love scene
by the fountain in the park he had recovered sincerity, he forgot
himself, remembering Pelleas: and that great love scene was acted with
a sense of the poetry and a sense of the human reality of the thing, as
no one on the London stage but Mr. Harvey and Mrs. Campbell could have
acted it. No one else, except Mr. Arliss as the old servant, was good;
the acting was not sufficiently monotonous, with that fine monotony
which is part of the secret of Maeterlinck. These busy actors occupied
themselves in making points, instead of submitting passively to the
passing through them of profound emotions, and the betrayal of these
emotions in a few, reticent, and almost unwilling words.

II. "EVERYMAN"

The Elizabethan Stage Society's performance of "Everyman" deserves a
place of its own among the stage performances of our time. "Everyman"
took one into a kind of very human church, a church in the midst of the
market-place, like those churches in Italy, in which people seem so much
at home. The verse is quaint, homely, not so archaic when it is spoken
as one might suppose in reading it; the metre is regular in heat, but
very irregular in the number of syllables, and the people who spoke it
so admirably under Mr. Poel's careful training had not been trained to
scan it as well as they articulated it. "Everyman" is a kind of
"Pilgrim's Progress," conceived with a daring and reverent imagination,
so that God himself comes quite naturally upon the stage, and speaks out
of a clothed and painted image. Death, lean and bare-boned, rattles his
drum and trips fantastically across the stage of the earth, leading his
dance; Everyman is seen on his way to the grave, taking leave of Riches,
Fellowship, Kindred, and Goods (each personified with his attributes),
escorted a little way by Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and the Five
Wits, and then abandoned by them, and then going down into the grave
with no other attendance than that of Knowledge and Good Deeds. The
pathos and sincerity of the little drama were shown finely and
adequately by the simple cloths and bare boards of a Shakespearean
stage, and by the solemn chanting of the actors and their serious,
unspoilt simplicity in acting. Miss