as to make a good many of us forget that the action which takes place in this restaurant might just as well have taken place in the Aquarium or on top of the Jungfrau. There was another play. For weeks, the author, the producer, and several assistants (I am now quoting press authority) had been searching the city for the exact model of a hall bedroom in a theatrical boarding-house such as the playwright had in mind. They found what they were looking for. When the curtain rose on the opening night, the public, duly kept informed as to the progress of the quest, naturally rose with enthusiasm to the perfect picture of a mean chamber in a squalid boarding-house. The scene was appalling in its detail of tawdry poverty. Except for the fact that the bedroom was about sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and fifty feet high, the effect of destitution was startling.

But there is a more dangerous realism. Our stage has progressed beyond this actuality of real doors with real door-knobs. We have attained as far as the external realism of human types. As exhibited on the stage to-day, the shop-girls, the 'crooks,' the detectives, the clerks, the traveling salesmen, the shady financiers, are startlingly true to life in appearance, in walk, in speech. For that, one ought presumably to be thankful. Presumably it is progress to have shop-girls, clerks, financiers, 'crooks,' and their pursuers, instead of Pinero's drawing-room heroines and bounders, or Mr. Bernstein's highly galvanized boulevardiers. If people with the look of Broadway, with the tang and speech of Broadway, walk the boards, what more would one have?

'Soul,' says Emmeline, and she lashes out at the beautifully made puppets on the stage. External realism has gone as far as it may, but beneath the surface everything is false. The life of these amazingly lifelike figures is false,

the story is false, the morals and the conclusions are false. At bottom it is tawdry melodrama. New tricks of the trade have been mastered, but the same crude, childish views of life confront us, and the same utter lack of that form which is the joy of art. The American stage never had an excess of form. We have less now than we ever had.

As I think back over the last few paragraphs I find that I may have given an utterly wrong impression of how the theatre affects Emmeline and me. It would be deplorable if the reader should get to think that we are highbrows. It is quite the other way. Between the acts and at home, the two of us may be tremendously critical, but while the business of the stage is under way we are grateful for the least excuse to yield ourselves to the spirit of the thing. Provided, only, there is nothing in the play about a young woman who beards a king of finance and frightens him into surrendering a million dollars' worth of bonds. Financiers and their female private secretaries I cannot abide. Otherwise, I delight in nearly everything: in The Old Homestead, in George M. Cohan, in Fanny's First Play, and in the farce-comedies where a recreant husband, surprised by his wife, steps backward into his own suitcase. Emmeline confesses that she has seldom seen a proposal of marriage on the stage without wanting to sniffle sympathetically.

Because I take pleasure in seeing frivolous young men step into their own suitcases I am not averse to musical comedy. Emmeline rarely accompanies me; not because she is afraid that it is the kind of a play a man should not take his wife to, but because it does not interest her. She is fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, and she likes The Chocolate Soldier; but of our own native musical comedy I think she has seen only one example. I have described this

piece elsewhere, and if the editor of the Atlantic has no objections, I can repeat in substance what I then wrote.

The play was called The Girl from Grand Rapids. The principal characters are an American millionaire and his daughter who are traveling in Switzerland. They come to the little village of Sprudelsaltz and are mistaken by the populace for the German Kaiser and his Chancellor who are expected on a secret mission. The American millionaire, in order to outwit a business rival who belongs to the Furniture Trust, consents to play the part. He accounts for the apparent sex of his Chancellor by declaring that the evil designs of certain French spies have made it necessary for his companion to assume this peculiar disguise. The Chancellor falls in love with the young British attaché, who has come to Switzerland for the purpose of unearthing certain important secrets relative to the German navy. At their first meeting the supposed German Chancellor and the British naval attaché sing a duet of which the refrain is, 'Oh, take me back to Bryant Square.' Ultimately the identity of the pseudo Kaiser and his Chancellor is discovered. They are threatened by the infuriated Swiss populace in fur jackets and tights, and are saved only through the intervention of a comic Irish waiter named Gansenschmidt. They escape from Switzerland and in the second act we find them at Etah, in Greenland, where the millionaire's daughter is compelled to wed an Eskimo chieftain who turns out to be the British naval attaché in disguise. The third act shows an Arab carnival in the Sahara. Repeatedly, in the course of the evening, Emmeline asked me why I laughed.

There is also a business motive in my playgoing. I am learning how to build a complicated dramatic plot. Years ago I set out to write a play. Like all people of slipshod habits I have sudden

attacks of acute systematization, and when I began my play, I assigned so much time for working out the plot, so much for character-development, so much for actually writing the dialogue. The scheme did not quite work out. I forget the details; the point is that at the end of a year I had written all my dialogue, but had made little progress with my character-development and had done nothing whatever on my plot. Since that time I have moved ahead. My characters are to me fairly alive now. But I still have a plot and incidents to find for my play. Emmeline says that my quest is a vain one. She is convinced that I have no gift for dramatic complication, and that the best I can hope for is to do something like Bernard Shaw. But I refuse to give in. I go to see how other men have done the trick, and some day, who knows, I may yet find a skeleton on which to hang my polished and spirited dialogue.

Between the acts there are two things which one naturally does. I read in the programme what men will wear during the winter, and I scan faces, a habit which I find growing upon me in all sorts of public places and which will some day bring me into serious trouble. People are rather stolid between the acts. It is a very rare play in which the sense of illusion carries over from one act to the next and is reflected in the faces of the spectators. The perfect play, as I conceive it, should keep the audience in a single mood from beginning to end. Between the fall and the rise of the curtain the spell ought to hold and show itself in a flushed, brighteyed gayety, in a feverish chatter which should carry on the playwright's message until he resumes the business of his narrative. But as a rule I am not exalted between the acts, and I perceive that my neighbors are not. It is not a play we are watching, but three

A

or four separate plays. When the curtain descends we lean back into an ordinary world. The business of the stage drops from us. We resume conversation interrupted in the Subway. A young woman on the left furnishes her companion with details of last night's dance. Two young men in front argue over the cost of staging the piece. One says it cost $10,000, and the other says $15,000, and they pull out their favorite evening papers from under the seat and quote them to each other. Emmeline wonders whether she looked down far enough into Harold's throat when he said, 'Aaa-h-h.'

It is not entirely our own fault if we lose the sense of continuous illusion between the acts. There is little in the ordinary play to carry one forward from one act to the next. We still talk of suspense and movement and climax, whereas our plays are not organic plays at all, but mere vaudeville. They do not depend for their effect on cumulative interest, but on the individual 'punch.' Drama, melodrama, comedy, and farce have their own laws. But our latest dramatic form combines all forms in a swift medley of effects that I can describe by no other term than vaudeville. George M. Cohan is our representative dramatist, not because he has flung the star-spangled banner to the breeze, but because he has cast all consistency to the winds. Who ever heard of a melodramatic farce? Mr. Cohan is writing them all the time. They are plays in which people threaten each other with automatic pistols to the accompaniment of remarks which elicit roars of laughter.

I know of course that Shakespeare has a drunken porter on the stage while Macbeth is doing Duncan to death. But George M. Cohan is different. I have in mind a homeless little village heroine of Mr. Cohan's who is about to board a train for the great city with its

pitfalls and privations. Emmeline was quite affected by the pathetic little figure on the platform, with the shabby suitcase until six chorus men in beautifully creased trousers waltzed out on the train platform and did a clog-dance and sang, 'Good-bye, Mary, don't forget to come back home.' I can't conceive Shakespeare doing this sort of thing. It is gripping while it lasts, but when the curtain falls, one chiefly thinks how late it will be before one gets home.

But if the playwright's story does not always hold me, the people on the stage seldom fail to bring me under the spell. I am not a professional critic and I have no standards of histrionic skill to apply. It may be, as people say, that our actors are deficient in imagination, in the power of emotional utterance, in facial eloquence, in the art of creating illusion. Perhaps it is true that they seldom get into the skin of their characters, and never are anything but themselves. But precisely because they are themselves, I like them. I like their lithe, clean-cut length, their strong, clean-shaven faces, their faultless clothes. I like the frequency with which they change from morning to evening dress. I like the ease with which they order taxicabs, press buttons for the club waiter, send out cablegrams to Shanghai, and make appointments to meet at expensive roadhouses which are reached only by automobile. The nonchalance with which George M. Cohan's people distribute large sums is a quickening spectacle to me.

After this it will be difficult for any one to accuse me of being a highbrow. Let me dispose of this matter beyond all doubt. I do not understand what people mean when they speak of intellectual actors and the intellectual interpretation of stage rôles. Possibly it is a defective imagination in me which makes me insist that actors

shall look their part physically. Not all the imaginative genius in the world will reconcile me to a thin Falstaff, suggestive of vegetarianism and total abstinence. I am not even sure that I know what an intellectualized Hamlet is. I insist upon a Hamlet who shall wear black and who shall recite slowly the lines which shake me so when I read them at home, instead of intellectually swallowing the lines as so many do. I cannot see how Mrs. Fiske's intellectuality qualifies her for playing robust, full-blooded women like Tess, or like Cyprienne in Divorçons. But I like Mrs. Fiske as Becky Sharpe and as Ibsen's Nora, because both were small

women.

I imagine it is a sign of Wagner's genius that he made all his women of heroic stature. He must have foreseen that by the time a singer has learned to interpret Brünhilde she is apt to be mature and imposing. Thus I feel, and I know that most of the people in the audience agree with me. Those who do not have probably read in their evening papers that they were about to see an intellectual interpretation. Whenever they are puzzled by the actor they ascribe it to his intellect.

When the final curtain falls, the play drops from us like a discarded cloak, people smile, dress, tell each other that it was a pretty good show, and hold the door open for the ladies to pass out into the glow and snap of Broadway. We do not carry illusion away with us from the theatre. In spite of the fact that we

have purchased our tickets in the conviction that every husband and wife ought to see the play, we do not correlate the theatre with life. Primarily it is a show. We do not ask much. If it has offered us a hearty laugh or two, a thrill, a pressure on the tear-ducts, this tolerant American public, this patient, innocent, cynical public that is always prepared to be cheated, feels grateful; and there ends the matter.

And Aristotle? And the purging of the emotions through pity and terror? I still remember a play called The Diamond Breaker, which I saw on Third Avenue when Benjamin Harrison was President. I remember how the young mining engineer was foully beset by his rival and tied hand and foot and dropped into the open chute that led straight into the pitiless iron teeth of the stonecrushing machine. I remember how the heroine rushed out upon the gangway and seized the young engineer by the hair; and the wheels stopped; and the girl fainted; the strong men in the audience wept. Is it my own fault that such sensations are no longer to be had? Or has the drama indeed degenerated, within these twenty years?

From the evening papers I gather that the crowd, after leaving the new ninestory Blackfriars Theatre, modeled after the Parthenon at Athens, invades and overruns the all-night restaurants on Broadway. Yet the trains in the Subway are jammed, and Emmeline has to stand more than half-way to Belshazzar Court.

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BACTERIOLOGY, child of Louis Pasteur, basis of aseptic surgery and preventive medicine, has become wellknown to the educated world during the past thirty years. The words 'germ and 'microbe' do not impress us with awe and dread as they once did, for realize that the kingdom of the bacteria is gradually being subjugated by man. We see this in changing medical practice, we see it in popular advertisements and in many other ways; but, surest of all, we see it in the steadily diminishing death-rates from communicable diseases as revealed by vital statistics the world over. Certain it is that one of the greatest events of the dawning twentieth century is the triumph of man over his microscopic foes.

While we contemplate this result with satisfaction we are apt to forget the many activities which are working together to bring it about. It is well to pause from time to time and consider what is being done, so that our ideas may be readjusted to the new methods which are continually being put into practice.

The world has so long entrusted the care of its health to doctors of medicine, skilled in the arts of healing, that we call these various protective agencies against disease by the general term 'preventive medicine,' forgetting for the moment that a large part of this work is not medical at all. Much of it, in fact, is something quite different,

and is better described by the term sanitary engineering, or by the broader word, sanitation. Even the term sanitary engineer has been misused, or at least has been used in a too limited sense. So many aspiring plumbers have styled themselves sanitary engineers that the title bids fair to become synonymous with 'the drain man.'

Broadly defined, sanitation covers all the arts which make for clean environment, and sanitary engineers concern themselves not alone with drains and sewers and sewage-treatment works, but with all of the many activities required to provide communities with pure water, fresh air, clean food, and, in general, clean surroundings. A task so vast naturally calls to its aid many sciences. These must be culled and the selected parts interwoven to form a new science, the science of public health. It is in response to this new demand of civilization that chairs of sanitary engineering are being founded in our universities, and that students who are being trained to become health officers are taught some parts of the arts of engineering as well as some parts of the arts of medicine.

A few years ago, sanitarians were assiduously cultivating newly discovered germs; now, they are also studying flies and mosquitoes and rats and squirrels and other insects and animals which may harbor and spread these germs. A few years ago, they were minutely analyzing samples of water; now they are also studying the currents in lakes and the laws of sedimentation