LET us admit it: any sort of person can have adventures at the theatre. Certain persons, indisputably, react with gratitude to a runway enabling them to get on friendly terms with the showgirls' slippers. Certain others accept their thrill from surgical instruments, sanitary plumbing, table cutlery, or whatnot of the paraphernalia so expensively offered by the Belasco School of Naturalist Scenic Art. It is pre-psychoanalytic to animadvert upon that sort of person's taste for that sort of theatricalization— however virtuous the insurgency that animadverts. It is equally sub-intelligent to cavil at another and important audience that feels a moral obligation to be intelligent—even in a theatre. "Oh! the specialized audience!" I hear from the press row. Yes-perhaps-but specialized only in intelligence.

In Europe, everywhere to-day there is true definition, illuminating example of the new art of the theatre. With us there is, rather, a heterogeneous mass of prattle, of critical fluencies, piled helter-skelter on and about and over the new movement of the theatre. I, classified under that Audience with honorable intentions, have sometimes felt that the Movement was moving in every direction at once - save towards us the Audience and towards the professional theatre.

And now for a bomb from Philistia! That an artist is sufficient unto himself is the precious cant of the ineffectual. It is impossible to be any sort of artist without a public. Psychology knows that art must be two halves of a whole, expression and perception; else it is nothing,-life that was still-born. Standing over our heads, as it were, the artist of the theatre must express for our half, more explicitly, more completely than in any other way of art. If the artist of the theatre lacks the capacity for unceasing reference to an audience, he falls short of great artistry, however interesting his production may be to himself and to the actors in his setting.

Several of our artist-directors do offer a schematic presentation, showing some acceptance of the new rules of the ideal unity of the art of the theatre. Yet, too often I, the Audience,

find the new art of the theatre aiming at the meretricious ideal of being merely the Very Newest-too often am I subjected to something like a merciless dislocation of the brain inflicted by detached samples of current but unrelated theatre art, labelled Acts one, two, and three.

But the other day, with Fate's chilly fingers running down my spine, in a potent last tableau, in New York, in a commercial theatre, I had an epochal realization- I had at last seen a play. That fecund, first inspiration of Gordon Craig, "To see a play," was fully, after twenty years, understood by me, the Spectator. I had seen a play of three acts and a tableau, which was a tonal sequence, as related in artistic presentation as a symphony of one theme. There had not been one of those illegitimate and ineffective capitals, italics and underscorings that hallmark too many stylizations of the Art theatres. The appeal was logical, directly to the sophisticated, asking for no allowance for any handicap of young art or new hazards. We were asked to accept none of the Little Theatre's art substitutes for dramatic sequence, nor any trace of the smuggeries and inane reportorial reproduction of the Belascoed Stage Standardization Factories.

I had fallen upon a scenic production quite past the power of any amateur, any dilettante, however professional-an achievement of the maximum of artistic unity, of persistent historical illusion, of cooperation between the artist and me-the Audience-played upon the whole gamut of color and line with definite emotional expression and inevitable conclusion.

I can think of few stage settings, which without acting could convey any persuasion of order or consequence. I believe that had I seen these three acts and final tableau unlabelled, without the Napoleonic signatures, I could have placed and dated the personages and drama in each frame.

It was a piece of pictorial history that played itself in line and mass, in color and texture that, with no elaboration of the trivial, told you this was exactly where the adventurous wife of the world's one Great Adventurer played it out. No reproduction, however sensitive, however modernly motivated, could have given us this feeling of intensive history. It had to be re-creation. And it was.

Too often in the continental expression of the new art of the theatre there is a complicated abstraction passing for simplicity. The assumption that Macbeth can be illuminatingly acted before a purple curtain presupposes that everybody in the audience knows for himself just how Scotland in that century housed and

accoutred her noblemen; or, if they don't know, that their ignorance will in no way detract from their edification. In regard to the bravest of the Englishmen, Gordon Craig, I have often felt that, while generous in the matter of abstract loveliness, he wanted to delete the actors.

Reinhardt is, of course, a super-illusionist, assuming that everybody else is equally susceptible to illusion, if only the tricks of magic be played by a master-magician. Yet in Sumurun I could not have imagined anything happening until it did happen. Then, Sumurun's perfect children's story-book illustration showed for the magic it was.

Granville Barker, backgrounded by immense prestige, has given me keen moments, intellectual thrills, but it took all of his congregated resources to do it. Without the physical and dramatic effectiveness of a whole company of good actors, the talents of Robert Edmond Jones and Norman Wilkinson, the superhumanness of Shaw's humans- above all, without the superpresence of O. P. Heggie—I would have been interested, but not thrilled.

Here, in Josephine, though the play was pale, thin, almost sulkily conceived and acted, there was an inspired, a devoted attention to the emotional values of the scenes meant to be played in the frames, an acceptance of the necessity for furnishing their human habits and needs with human habitation.

Last year I learned that Rollo Peters could be spiritual, significant in mysteries of mediæval terror-that he could exactly translate Maeterlinck into terms of the theatre. No one who saw his La Mort de Tintagiles could doubt that he had survived the pathological insincerities of the cubist-futurist-vorticist symbolism and superseded the neo-Gordoncraigites' nursery ineptitudes in the presentation of the mystic. But I did not know that his development could show an art of clear-cut historicity, of sophistication, of immensities of perspective in the sense of futurity, of the minutest differentiation of personality in costume expression, of satisfaction in line, of courageous but exact harmony in color, of a bare, clean truth of dramatic realization.

At Josephine I knew when the curtain went up that Rollo Peters knew It knew that the essential righteousness of art is technique. There was no fumbling in his approach, no glue nor daubing in his lovely veils of paint, nò eccentric turning off the right line. I was instantly edified. I knew that the play, so far as the artist could direct it, would proceed in order. I began

to chant my personal creed and prophecy, There is no Art without a Craft.

I have suffered much at the hands of the pseudo-New-Art in theatres, big and Little. I did not let myself go. I told myself he is very young-they tell me only twenty-five. . . . all youth is cocksure, dogmatic-we shall see.

But I could not cherish any successful sort of apathy in that room in the Rue Chantereine. I felt the gay insouciance of Spring coming in-coming in quite à la mode to find everything inside as deliciously becoming as everything outside those two blue overskirted windows, directly in front of us, exactly, where, as windows, they ought to be the most important things in a stage room. Not even the gloom and lead of the play could damage this careless prelude in an ivory key bordered by Spring's own pearl-gray green, fixed by the plaited blue perfection of the curtains and a green-blue carpet too good to be true anywhere out of the Directoire.

It was all this ménage of the gracefully mature, coquettish bride - a new beginning, unconsidered, capricious, perhaps, but of the invariable French suitability, of a quiet, steel-engraving elegance of line and finish—a room meant to be dominated, vitalized by a presence of vivacity and hot languors, by beauty of dark ringlets sure to be accented by the high glow of an orange frock.

I wonder why this Josephine did not wear orange? Perhaps she did not want to hark back to that Mlle. de la Pagerie, who was born among orange trees, whom Beauharnais found warmsweet and cruel-gay-who was born not anybody very much in particular, yet born to be crowned Empress of the French.

Why is it that in all of the undying dramatic art of the world there is never any tricky surprise, always, from the very beginning, this sense of doom? It is in all the Greek tragedies. It is the secret of the thrall of Maeterlinck; it is the might of the mightiest of the new Little Ones-Dunsany. It is the formula of all the immortalities. I knew that Dunsany belonged-was of them, when he gave it to us in the third line of The Golden Doom:

"It is like thunder or the fall of a dynasty."

And here we had it, in Rollo Peters' scenic artistry, like the ominousness of weather-that one of the universal appeals which can nowhere miss fire- the sense of the whole, of the outside, which makes the placing of windows the first essential in any

dramatic art of the interior. That is why you knew that all the inquisitive Fashion of Paris was listening just outside of those delightful little windows in the petit salon of the new Madame Buonaparte. That is why you felt all France, outside, dying to peek within those elegantly caparisoned windows in a grand salon of the Tuileries in the third act — trying to see for themselves just what their own First-Consul was planning — for their own good; why Italy trembled and waited in the heat-waited for dusty, marching armies to tramp outside those splendid, reiterated arches in the Palazzo in Milan; why all the World was outside crowding up to look behind that royally hung, gloriously purple window at the end of the nave in the Notre Dame Tableau, where the new Master of Europe was crowning himself.

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This was all here, in that light-hearted little room of the Rue Chantereine, that fascination of being in the secret of Fate from the very beginning. And it was all in the art of the artist-director. The proof is that I wanted the stage empty for me to people with a dark and dashing, languorous, summer-showery, tropical Josephine and a sallow, imperative, thin little Man of Destiny the emphasis all to be thrown on the subtle, supersensed light woman, foreboding tragedy as only the gay can achieve that intimation.

And this is the only time, save at a Wagner opera, that I can remember having wished the actors out of the picture. Gordon Craig couldn't do it, though I felt how beautifully he was trying to make me wish it.

As soon as the second act revealed itself I gave the artist a naïve confidence. I knew that not one trick of palpable artifice would interrupt my sense of illusion. I was in the hands of a master. The second act was a high altar raised to Beauty and her dramatic handmaiden, atmospheric truth. It was Italy, a rich old, unsanitary civilization, a sensuous art derived from Greece, through hot and knowing Romans, an exquisite symmetry of things flowering all over an utterly pagan religion of little domesticated gods, re-named the Catholic Saints. The army and the choking dust, the very weather of Italy, were in the magnificence, the home-sick discomfort, of the sparsely furnished palazzo with its hot splendor leaping up into blue-to the flag-blue of the Mediterranean sky, arrogant with a gold sweep of stars above the restless sea-blue of the floor and the blaring trumpet call of one high red note-a curtain in a portal. For the presentation of apposite beauty communicable to the audience by a creative faculty, owing nothing at all to reproduc