adequate to express ideals compounded of youth, adventurous spirit, courage, gallantry, chivalrous sentiment, and romantic feeling. Yet even in the field of romantic drama he somewhat lacked the grand manner, the large, broad gesticulation, and the clear, copious, scrupulously correct delivery which cause perfect illusion, and therefore make romance seem reality.

A SIGNIFICANT EARLY SUCCESS IN "THE DISREPUTABLE MR. REGAN"

IN the first period of Sothern's career, among the most significantly indicative of his personations was one little regarded at the time and now apparently forgotten. -his skilful and touching assumption of Regan, in "The Disreputable Mr. Regan," a short play written by Richard. Harding Davis, first produced at the Lyceum Theater in November, 1892. Regan is a criminal, and as such is pursued. He unwittingly kills his pursuer, and then takes refuge in a garret of an uninhabited tenement-house, where he finds a little child who is dying of starvation. The spectacle of this poor and helpless creature's wretched condition awakens his benevolence, and notwithstanding that he is almost wild with terror, he tries to help the sufferer. In the course of his ministrations, which are kind, but ineffectual, he hears the cry of a newsboy, who is offering the evening papers for sale in the street, and thus learns that he is proclaimed a murderer and that the police are seeking him. He determines to effect his escape, if possible, but his pity for the miserable child is so great that he cannot bring himself to leave the place, although he is in deadly peril. Looking from the window, he sees police officers. For a moment he wavers between the urgent impulse to fly and the human impulse to remain. He cannot desert the dying child. If he calls the officers, the child may perhaps be saved. His humanity prevails. He signals the police and surrenders himself. The child meanwhile has died. The situation thus indicated, though grossly improbable, is obviously a

good one for an actor: conflict of opposed emotions is the essence of some of the strongest and most pathetic passages in the literature of the drama; but the heroic, self-sacrificing virtue of Regan is even more improbable than the exceedingly artificial situations in which he is placed. Fiction has had much to say about the soul of goodness in things evil. Fact has failed to substantiate the assumption. If, however, the tender sensibilities of an habitual criminal be deemed natural and his ingeniously devised circumstances be accepted as credible, the dramatic effect rationally follows, and the sympathy of the spectator is spontaneously and unreservedly given. The play is virtually a monologue, and Sothern was thus constrained to meet one of the most severe of all tests in acting-that of soliloquy. He met it ably and with success. evinced deep feeling, well controlled, and a fidelity to nature indicative of habits of close observation. More than all, he signally denoted capability of sustained impersonation. Looking back to that performance, I can but think that it foreshadowed his resolute purpose to venture in the higher realm of serious, even tragic, drama.

REPRESENTATIVE PERFORMANCES

HAMLET TO DUNDREARY

He

It was the opinion of Garrick that "without a considerable feeling of comedy, tragedy itself will be imperfectly represented." Edwin Booth, in conversation with me, expressed the same conviction. Sothern, in tragedy, has exemplified this truth. It is the absence of an attempering "feeling of comedy" that has made many stage spouters ponderous in their tragical endeavors. Sothern's flexibility and lightness in comedy have served him. well in tragedy. That he is not, however, naturally a tragedian, because deficient in the great ground-swell of passionate emotion, the clangor of sympathetic and thrilling voice, and the somber, commanding personality which are essential for complete tragic expression, was sufficiently indicated by his endeavors to act Macbeth

and Antony. His Macbeth lacked power, imagination, poetry, the sense of being haunted by evil spirits, the agony of remorse, and the frenzy of desperation. His Antony was intelligent, well intended, earnestly executed, but it was puny and feeble. The most remarkable of his performances, because of its disclosure of his mental constitution, his character, sensibility, and control of the expedients of dramatic art, is that of Hamlet. The part, an incarnation of misery, is one with which he never could have been truly sympathetic and one to the exhibition of which his style was not naturally appropriate, his temperament being eager, blithe, and whimsically satirical, and his mind resolute, practical, and executive. He has, nevertheless, by what must have been an inveterate exercise of will, wrested himself out of the direction of his natural artistic propensity, and acted Hamlet in such a way, judging it in its maturity and at its best, as to please a numerous public, and also to prove his title to the respect, and sometimes the admiration, of exigent critical judgment.

Representative performances by Sothern subsidiary in importance to that of Hamlet, yet of exceptional, though not invariable, merit, and exhibitive of him at his best, are those of Richard Lovelace, Villon, Rodion, Benedick, Malvolio, Heinrich, and Dundreary. Lovelace, in the drama written by Laurence Irving, is a consummate type of the idolatrous lover-the lover whose whole being is absorbed in devotion to a poetic ideal. The treachery of a rival, his bosom friend, has separated him-forever, as he believes-from the woman he loves, and for several years he dwells lonely and miserable in a lodging that she has once occupied, brooding on the past and worshiping the memory of a lost love. At the last, discovering that his friend has betrayed him, he passes from apathy into frenzied action, precipitates a duel with that traitor, and by his own contrivance is wounded unto death. Sothern evinced quick and deep sympathy with this ideal and complete grasp of the circumstances in which it is displayed, and

he touchingly expressed that sense of the sanctity in a lover's mind of a woman whom he truly loves that is characteristic of the passion in natures intrinsically noble. His feeling was genuine, and he imparted it by a perfect simulation of sincerity, and by an engaging simplicity of behavior artistic in a high degree and demonstrative of the fine faculty of impersonation. That faculty was again exemplified by his performance of Villon, a part which compels the assumption of many and widely contrasted identities or moods, and in which the versatility of the comedian was signally denoted. As Benedick, when he first assumed the part, he caused the effect of sincerity, and his artistic method was direct and simple, though somewhat marred by a tinge of burlesque : in later expositions of that part he sometimes permitted burlesque to become buffoonery, seeming to forget that Benedick is both a gentleman and a resolute and formidable soldier. As Rodion Rashnikoff, in a play by Laurence Irving based on a Russian novel, he ably and effectively embodied a half-crazed enthusiast of social reformation who deliberately murders an atrocious and brutal tyrant in the conviction that there is no divine government of the world and that his duty is to administer vengeance. One situation presents a rehearsal of the murder, devised by an astute detective officer and accomplished in the presence of the murderer, who becomes agonized and terrified in. viewing the details of his crime. In that scene Sothern displayed lively imagination and much variety of feeling, culminant in an effective frenzy: the part enabled the actor to manifest uncommon emotional power and to exemplify exceedingly well a condition of disordered mentality and a conflict of reason with cynical fanaticism. Sothern's Malvolio will be remembered as the best of his personations in Shaksperian drama, true to the author's conception of a perfectly credible character, a man of mind and ability half-crazed by conceit and "sick of self-love." In presenting himself as Heinrich, in "The Sunken Bell," a tumid, dreary fabric of

sententious platitudes and windy symbolism, a thing innately antagonistic to drama, the comedian condescended to a bad caprice of public taste, and succeeded only in showing how cleverly he could manage a weak, fantastic part. He happily has discarded that trash, and in his farewell performances he will present only the masterpieces of his professional achievement. Dundreary, as constructed and exemplified by Sothern's father, is a shrewd person who pretends to be a fool and a gentleman who pretends to be a fop. Beneath the apparent, and comic, vacuity of Dundreary there is sense and purpose. He is embodied whimsicality clothed with elegance. Sothern's performance was imitative of the original, but while it was not as good, it was elaborate, correct, and humorous, and it won deserved laughter and applause.

CAUSE AND NATURE OF SUCCESS

EVERY actor who has achieved eminence has done so by virtue of some qualities of personal force or innate charm, vitalizing the faculty of impersonation, and determinative equally of the direction of his development and the feeling of his auditory. Edwin Forrest, the idol of the multitude in his day, prevailed mostly by overwhelming animal magnetism; Edwin Booth by electrical tragic power, temperamental allurement, beautiful spirituality, exquisite grace superadded to proficient art and perfect elocution; Henry Irving by an irradiant intellectual fire, poetic temperament, a strange, weird, almost sardonic humor, and a puissant faculty of arousing and thrilling the imagination. Sothern has affected the public chiefly by gentleness of personality and that graceful. lucidity of impersonation which is resultant from clarity of art. The influence thus exerted has not been profound. It is potent for a time, but it is transitory, and it will not long be remembered. No one but a theatrical antiquary now thinks of Hildebrand Horden or William Mountfort on the old English stage, or recalls Edward Keach or Edwin Adams among modern American actors, all of whom owed their

evanescent repute to much the same causes which have largely contributed to the popularity of Sothern-chivalric spirit and deferential manner toward woman. Those merits, natural, not artificial, have been conspicuous in Sothern's romantic acting, . and they have particularly commended him to the female part of the theatrical audience, which is, perhaps, the most influential part of it. This comedian, however, is more a consequence than a cause -the consequence of salutary environment in youth, combined with natural bias toward intellect, purity, and good taste in art. He has made the best of his talents and opportunities. While follow.. ing old and good models, he has sought to make them contributive to pleasing results by the expedient of spectacle and by the avoidance of pedantic adherence to hide-bound stage tradition. He has produced a considerable number of new plays, and therein has done a useful service, though in only one of them-"Don Quixote"-has he exhibited a great subject and attempted a great character. That play failed, partly because the theme is not dramatic, and partly because both the dramatist and the actor treated the character in a prosaic manner.

In the lives of the great actors of the past mention is frequently made of certain superb moments and the magnificent, electrical, overwhelming utterance of certain speeches. The playgoer whose remembrance covers the last thirty or forty years can recall such thrilling moments in his own experience of the stage: Booth's delivery of Richelieu's menace of excommunication; Salvini's terrific utterance of Othello's inexorable purpose in "Like to the Pontic sea"; Irving's supernatural expression of the demoniac malignancy of Mephistopheles, when the Fiend threatens Faust with the whirlwind of ruin; Mansfield's "Jesu, have mercy!" when King Richard wakens from his dream. Sothern's acting has not furnished anything of that description to be commemorated and transmitted. But while it cannot justly be said that this actor has provided any splendid, inspiring example, or