yet drawn with sufficient fidelity to fact to allow the performers to
produce a striking illusion of reality during the two hours' traffic of the
stage. It is, to be sure--especially in the standard English
translation--abominably written. One of the two orphans launches wide-eyed
upon a soliloquy beginning, "Am I mad?... Do I dream?"; and such sentences
as the following obtrude themselves upon the astounded ear,--"If you
persist in persecuting me in this heartless manner, I shall inform the
police." Nothing, surely, could be further from literature. Yet thrill
after thrill is conveyed, by visual means, through situations artfully
contrived; and in the sheer excitement of the moment, the audience is made
incapable of noticing the pompous mediocrity of the lines.

In general, it should be frankly understood by students of the theatre that
an audience is not capable of hearing whether the dialogue of a play is
well or badly written. Such a critical discrimination would require an
extraordinary nicety of ear, and might easily be led astray, in one
direction or the other, by the reading of the actors. The rhetoric of
Massinger must have sounded like poetry to an Elizabethan audience that had
heard the same performers, the afternoon before, speaking lines of
Shakespeare's. If Mr. Forbes-Robertson is reading a poorly-written part, it
is hard to hear that the lines are, in themselves, not musical. Literary
style is, even for accomplished critics, very difficult to judge in the
theatre. Some years ago, Mrs. Fiske presented in New York an English
adaptation of Paul Heyse's _Mary of Magdala_. After the first
performance--at which I did not happen to be present--I asked several
cultivated people who had heard the play whether the English version was
written in verse or in prose; and though these people were themselves
actors and men of letters, not one of them could tell me. Yet, as appeared
later, when the play was published, the English dialogue was written in
blank verse by no less a poet than Mr. William Winter. If such an