strangeness in her, which make her a work of art in herself, seemed to
find the one perfect opportunity for their expression. The only actress
on our stage whom we go to see as we would go to see a work of art, she
acts Pinero and the rest as if under a disguise. Here, dressed in
wonderful clothes of no period, speaking delicate, almost ghostly words,
she is herself, her rarer self. And Mr. Martin Harvey, who can be so
simple, so passionate, so full 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 Pelléas; 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 Pelléas: 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