Inquiries and Opinions Part 9

To act Ibsen is worth while, so the actors themselves think; and it is significant that it is to the actors, rather than to the regular managers, that we owe the most of our chances for seeing his plays presented on the stage. That Ibsen offers opportunities not provided in the pieces of any other modern dramatist is the belief of many an actor and of many an actress longing for a chance to rival the great performers who have gone before, leaving only their fame behind them. So it is that the 'Pillars of Society' is set up in our theaters now and _again_, and that 'Ghosts' may revisit our stage from time to time. So it is that the ambitious leading lady, abandoning the _Camille_ and the _Pauline_ of a generation or two ago, yearns now to show what she can do as _Nora_ and as _Hedda Gabler_, unable to resist the temptation to try her luck also in impersonating these women of the North, essentially feminine even when they are fatally enigmatic.

VIII

The actors and actresses do get their chance now and again to appear in an Ibsen part, in spite of the reluctance of the regular managers to risk the production of Ibsen's plays in their theaters. This reluctance is not caused solely by an inability to appreciate his real merits; it is magnified by a healthy distrust for the cranks and the freaks who are most vociferous and least intelligent in praise of him,--for Ibsen, like Browning and like Maeterlinck, has suffered severely from the fulsome adulation of the short-haired women and the long-haired men, who are ever exuberantly uncritical. Perhaps the unwillingness of managers to venture their money in staging these Scandinavian social dramas is due also to a well-founded belief that "there is no money in them,"--that they are not likely to attract American playgoers in remunerative mult.i.tudes,--that they cannot be forced to the long runs to which the theater is now unfortunately committed.

Ibsen is like all other great dramatists in that he has intended his plays to be performed in the theater, by actors, before an audience; and, therefore has he adjusted them most adroitly to the picture-frame stage of the modern playhouse and filled them with characters amply rewarding the utmost endeavor of ambitious players. But the influence of the actor and of the circ.u.mstances of the theater is only upon the outward form of the play, while the influence of the spectator is upon its content solely. This influence has been potent upon every true dramatist, who has had ever in mind the special audience for whom his plays were intended, and at whom they were aimed. Sophocles composed his stately tragedies for the cultivated citizens of Athens, seated on the curving hillside under the shadow of the Acropolis; Shakspere prepared his histories and his comedies to hold the interest of the turbulent throng which stood about the jutting platform in the yard of the half-roofed Tudor theater; and Moliere, even when he was writing to order for Louis XIV, never forgot the likings of the fun-loving burghers of Paris. No one of the three ever lookt beyond his own time or wasted a thought upon any other than the contemporary audience in his own city.

Even tho their plays have proved to possess universality and permanence, they were in the beginning frankly local in their appeal.

But who are the spectators that Ibsen saw in his mind's eye when he imagined his plays bodied forth in the actual theater? He was not a citizen of a great state, as Moliere was, and Shakspere; he did not dwell in a great city, exercising his art in close contact with the abounding life of a metropolis. He was a native of a small country, not even independent, and without large towns; he was born in a petty village and there he grew to manhood; in his maturity he wandered abroad and for years abode in exile, an alien, if not a recluse.

Are not the memories of youth abiding? and can any one of us free himself wholly from the bonds of early environment? The audience that Ibsen has ever had in view when he was making his most searching tragedies of modern life, the audience he has always wisht to move and to rouse, morally and intellectually, was such a group of spectators as might gather in the tiny and isolated village where he had spent his boyhood. Ibsen himself may not have been conscious that this was the audience he was seeking to stimulate; indeed, he may never have suspected it; and he might even deny it in good faith. But the fact remains, nevertheless, obvious and indisputable; and it helps to explain not a little that might otherwise remain obscure. It enables us to suggest a reason for a certain closeness of atmosphere sometimes felt in this play or that, and for a certain lack of largeness of outlook, in spite of the depth of insight. It makes us more tolerant toward a certain narrowness, which is often provincial and sometimes almost parochial.

It is not merely that Ibsen's social dramas are all of them intensely Norwegian, peopled solely with natives and having the fiords ever present in the background. It is not merely that he has shrunk from all international contrasts, and from all cosmopolitanism;--and here, no doubt, he has chosen the better part. It is not that he himself has not shaken off the pettiness of the little village where he received his first impression of his fellow-man. It is that altho he has seen the world outside and altho he is thereby enabled to measure the smallness of what he left behind, he cannot forget the inhabitants of Grimstad, individually and collectively. They supply the const.i.tuent elements of the audience which he is ever addressing, consciously or unconsciously.

It is their limited horizon he wants to enlarge; and it is their lethargy he is longing to shatter.

IX

Perhaps there is no injustice in holding that much of Ibsen's arrogant and aggressive individualism and self-a.s.sertion, is the result of his own youthful solitude and struggle in the little village where the druggist's ambitious apprentice who wrote poetry and who had opinions of his own, soon managed to get on a war-footing with most of his neighbors,--as the late Professor Boyesen recorded from his own observations at the time, explaining that "a small town, where everybody is interested in what his neighbor has for dinner, is invariably more intolerant of dissent, more tyrannical toward social rebels, than a city of metropolitan rank." And even when Ibsen removed to Christiania he did not get out of this atmosphere of pettiness. As Professor Boyesen remarked, again from personal experience, "One hundred thousand village souls do not make a city." And the same compatriot of the dramatist, in dealing with the 'Enemy of the People' declared that "each trait bears the indelible mark of a small society, which stunts and cripples the sons of men, making them crabbed and crooked, when in a richer soil many of them might have shot boldly up in the sunlight."

Norway seems to be a land of villages, with a people not yet enlarged and awakened from stifling bigotry. Its social organization still presses painfully on those who wish to do their own thinking; and half a century ago in Ibsen's impressionable youth, the pressure must have been tragic. There is no call for wonder that he should have reacted violently against these fettering restrictions. There is no need to speculate on the reasons why he has failed to feel the extraordinary delicacy of the problem of the equilibrium between the opposing forces, which have a cramping socialism on the one side and an exuberant anarchy on the other. His choice was swift and he exerted his strength unhesitatingly against the chains which had clanked on his limbs in his early manhood. He knew only too well and by bitter experience the hardness of the crust that encased the Norwegian community and he felt the need of blows still harder to break thru and let in a little light.

And this is why he is so emphatic in his individualism; this is why he is so fiercely violent in his a.s.sertion of the right of every man to own himself and to obey his own will, contemptuous of the social bond which alone holds civilization together.

It is Boyesen, a fellow Norwegian and an ardent admirer of Ibsen's, who has most clearly stated Ibsen's position: "He seems to be in ill humor with humanity and the plan of creation in general (if, indeed, he recognized such a plan), and he devotes himself, with ruthless satisfaction, to showing what a paltry contemptible lot men are, and how aimless, futile, and irrational their existence is on this earth, with its chaotic strivings and bewildered endeavors." ... "Furthermore, he utterly undervalues what we call civilization, which he regards primarily as an ignominious compromise--a surrender and curtailment of our natural rights and liberties, in return for a paltry security for life and limb." ... "He has apparently no appreciation of the tremendous struggle, the immense suffering, the deluge of blood and tears, it has cost to redeem the world from that predatory liberty which he admires, and to build up gradually the safeguards of organized society which he so detests."

In other words, Ibsen is not what is called "an advanced thinker"; he is really the most extreme of reactionaries, because he wants to go back to the beginnings of civilization. He is willing to give up the chronometer and to return to the sun-dial.

It would be unfair, of course, to sustain what is here alleged by quoting speeches from his plays, since Ibsen is too completely a dramatist to use any one character merely as a mask thru the mouth of which he might voice his private opinion. But when we consider the whole group of the social dramas and when we disengage the philosophy underlying them and sustaining them, we may venture to deduce the private opinion of the author. And in his letters to Georg Brandes we find this opinion fearlessly exprest: "I have really never had any strong feeling of solidarity; in fact, I have only in a way accepted it as a traditional tenet of faith,--and if one had the courage to leave it out of consideration altogether, one would perhaps be rid of the worst ballast with which one's personality is burdened." In another letter he wrote: "I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not greatly concern me."

As Brandes points out, this att.i.tude of Ibsen's is partly a reminiscence of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist. There is in Ibsen's writing an echo of that note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871. And the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching almost simultaneously in his correspondence with Brandes: "The state must be abolished.... Undermine the idea of the commonwealth; set up spontaneity and spiritual kins.h.i.+p as the sole determining points in a union; and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of some value." This sounds very like a return to Rousseau, almost a century after the futility of Rousseau's theories had been made manifest to all.

There is no denying, however, that Ibsen's doctrine is most appealing to a dramatist, whose business it is to set on the stage the strivings of the individual. Perhaps the drama would be the one surviving art if anarchy should come,--just as it would be certain to die slowly if socialism should succeed. The self-subordination of socialism would be as deadening as the self-surrender of fatalism to that will-power which must ever be the mainspring of a play to move the mult.i.tude. Altho it cannot formulate what it feels, the mult.i.tude has no relish for extreme measures; it may be making up its mind to turn toward either anarchy or socialism; but it means to move very slowly and it refuses to be hurried.

Here is a reason why Ibsen's plays are never likely to be broadly popular in the theater. The anarchistic element they contain helps to make them more dramatic, no doubt, more vigorous and more vital; but it is dimly perceived by the plain people who form the crowd of theater-goers, and by them it is dumbly resented. The excessive individualism which gives to Ibsen's best plays their tensity of interest is also the cause of their inacceptability to the mult.i.tude shrinking from any surrender of the hard won conquests of civilization.

There is significance in the fact that Ibsen's plays have totally failed to establish themselves permanently in France, where the esthetic appreciation of his mastery of his art has been keenest and most competent, but where also the value of the social compact is most clearly understood. Not only in France, but in all other countries governed by the Latin tradition of solidarity, Ibsen's doctrine was certain to be unwelcome--even if it might be wholesome. Outside of Scandinavia it is only in Germany that Ibsen has succeeded in winning acceptance as a popular dramatist, perhaps because it was there that the doctrine of individualism was most needed. In Great Britain, and in the United States, where the individual has his rights, altho with no relaxing of the social bond, the performances of Ibsen's plays have been surprisingly infrequent when we consider their delightful craftsmans.h.i.+p, their indisputable power and their unfailing interest.

X

After all, it is not as a philosopher that Ibsen demands attention, but as a dramatist, as a playwright who is also a poet. If it is his weakness that his theory of life is overstrenuous, one-sided and out of date, it is his strength that he has opinions of his own and that he is willing to face the problems that insistently confront us to-day. As Mr.

Archer has put it tersely and conclusively, Ibsen is "not pessimist or optimist or primarily a moralist, tho he keeps thinking about morals. He is simply a dramatist, looking with piercing eyes at the world of men and women, and translating into poetry this episode and that from the inexhaustible pageant."

A moralist he must be, if his work is to have any far-reaching significance, any final value. Morality is not something a poet can put into his work deliberately; but it can be left out only at the poet's peril, since few works of art are likely to be worth while if they are ethically empty. Ibsen's inspiration is too rich for it to be void of moral purport, even tho the playwright may not have intended all that we read into his work. There is a moral in 'Ghosts' as there is in 'OEdipus,' in the 'Scarlet Letter,' and in 'Anna Karenina,'--a moral, austere and dispa.s.sionate. It contains much that is unpleasant and even painful, but--to quote Arnold's praise of 'Anna Karenina'--nothing "of a nature to trouble the senses or to please those who wish their senses troubled." Ibsen's play, like the tragedy of Sophocles, like the severe stories of Hawthorne and Tolstoi, is not spoon-meat for babes; it is not for young men and maidens; but as Goethe asked nearly a century ago, "What business have our young girls at the theater? They do not belong to it;--they belong to the convent; and the theater is only for men and women who know something of human affairs." It is for these men and these women that Ibsen, with stern self-control, has written his social dramas, that he may force them to look into matters they are willing enough to ignore and to front the facts of life, ugly as these may be.

More than once in the course of this essay has there been occasion to evoke the names of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Moliere, the supreme masters of the dramatic art. To venture upon any comparison with them is to measure Ibsen by the loftiest standard. In his technic alone can he withstand the comparison, for he is the latest and he has profited by all the experiments and achievements of the strong men who came before him; in mere craftsmans.h.i.+p he is beyond question the foremost of all the moderns. It must be said also that in his intellectual honesty, in his respect for the immitigable laws of character, he rarely falls short. He lacks the clear serenity of Sophocles, the depth and the breadth of the myriad-minded Shakspere, the humorous toleration of Moliere. The great Greek, the great Englishman, and the great Frenchman, are, all of them, liberal and sane and wholesome, whatever their subject-matter may be; and here it is that the Scandinavian is felt to be inferior. There are few of his social dramas in which we cannot find more than a hint of abnormal eccentricity or of morbid perversity; and this is the reason why the most of them fail to attain the dignity of true and lofty tragedy.

Perhaps it is with Wagner that Ibsen should be grouped, rather than with Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere. They are the two master-spirits of the stage in the nineteenth century. They are both of them consummate craftsmen, having a.s.similated every profitable device of their predecessors and having made themselves chiefs, each in his own art. And yet with all their witchery and all their power, we may doubt whether their work will resist the criticism of the twentieth century, because there is at the core of it an exaggeration or disproportion which the future is likely to perceive more and more clearly in the receding perspective of time.

(1905.)

THE ART OF THE STAGE-MANAGER

As civilization becomes more and more complex, we can find more frequent instances of "specialization of function," as the scientists term it.

Only a few years ago, engineering succeeded in getting itself recognized as one of the professions; and it has already split up into half a dozen branches, at least, and there are now not only civil engineers and mechanical engineers and mining engineers, but also electrical engineers--and even chemical engineers. The invention of the steel-frame building has brought into existence a special cla.s.s of artizans known as "housesmiths," a word probably unintelligible to our British cousins.

Sir Leslie Stephen, in his delightful 'Studies of a Biographer,' has a scholarly yet playful paper on the 'Evolution of the Editor'; and Mr.

W.J. Henderson, in his interesting book on the 'Orchestra and Orchestral Music,' traces the development of the conductor--the musician whose duties are as important as they are novel, and who is not now expected to be able himself to play upon any particular instrument.

"It is impossible to tell when the conductor made his appearance in music," Mr. Henderson a.s.serts. "At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the conductor was at first nothing more than a leader; he was one of the performers whom the rest followed." An inscription in verse on an engraving of a conductor, published in Nuremberg, early in the eighteenth century, declares that "silent myself, I cause the music I control." In the nineteenth century, the conductor had won full recognition as an instrumentalist of a new type, who, without any instrument of his own, played on the whole body of musicians under his command. Of late, he has become so prominent in the eyes of the public, and his personality has been so insisted upon, that there is danger often lest he may distract attention from the music to himself. As Mr.

Henderson records calmly: "We have beheld the curious spectacle of people going, to hear not Beethoven or Wagner, but Nikisch or Seidl."

What the conductor is to a performance of orchestral music, the stage-manager is to the performance of a play in the theater. (And in this paper the term "stage-manager" is to be understood as meaning the "producer" of a drama.) His art is as special, as necessary, as novel, and as difficult; and, if it is as yet scarcely recognized and rarely appreciated, this is due in part to the conditions under which his work must be done. The conductor is not only visible but conspicuous; the audience is likely to watch him rather than any one of the musicians he is guiding; whereas the stage-manager must ever be invisible, and is, indeed, most successful if his existence is unsuspected. When the conductor brings a concert to a close, he bows to the applause and then lays down his wand; and all is over. The stage-manager has wrought his wonders, and his labors are practically concluded, before the curtain rises on the first act at the first performance. In this respect, he is like the trainer of a college-crew, who cannot go into the boat with them when the pistol is fired for the race to begin. But everybody is now well aware what it is that the trainer has done for the crew; his portrait appears with theirs in the newspapers and he shares in their glory.

Only the expert ever thinks of giving due meed of praise to the hidden stage-manager who is responsible for a more arduous victory in the theater than any ever won on the river. His face is not familiar on the posters; and his name is not in large type on the playbill. All the credit he gets is contained in the single line which records that the play has been "produced" by him. Yet he has been responsible for the entire performance--for the acting and for the costumes, for the scenery and for the properties, for the lighting and for the incidental music; not so much indeed for any one of these things as for the harmony of the whole. If there has been a perfect coordination of all these elements, if there have been no jarring notes, if the spirit of the play has been brought out completely, if everything has gone right from beginning to end, if the whole performance has moved so smoothly as to seem spontaneous, the stage-manager deserves the highest praise for what he has wrought unseen. Yet his sole reward is his own consciousness of work well done, and the chance appreciation of the scanty few who may be competent to estimate the worth of his achievement.

The "producer" of the play, the person who a.s.sumes the responsibility for the performance in all its details, may be the dramatist himself; M.

Sardou and Mr. Belasco have shown surpa.s.sing skill in bringing forth all that lies latent in the inert ma.n.u.scripts of their plays. He may be the actual manager of the theater; the late Augustin Daly was a stage-manager of striking individuality. He may be the actor of the chief part in the play; Mr. Willard and Mr. Sothern have revealed another aspect of their talent by the artistic manner in which they have staged both new plays and old. He may be at once author and actor and manager, like Mr. Gillette, a past-master of this new and difficult art. Or he may be simply a stage-manager and nothing else, a craftsman of a new calling, not author, not actor, yet able on occasion to give hints to playwright and to player. Here, again, is another resemblance to the conductor, who can impose his own will on the orchestra, altho he may not be able to play one of the instruments in it, and altho he may be quite incapable of composing.

That the task of the stage-manager is more difficult than that of the conductor is due to the fact that the composer has prescribed exactly what share each instrument shall take, the conductor having this full score in his possession; whereas the stage-manager receives from the author only the spoken words of the play, with but summary indications as to the gestures, the movements, the scenery, and so forth. He has not a full score, but only a sequence of themes incompletely orchestrated, and with the missing pa.s.sages to be supplied at his own discretion. And as the richness of the harmony depends largely upon his ability to amplify properly the hints of the author, the stage-manager is, in fact, almost a collaborator of the playwright; he is forced into a more intimate relation with the dramatist than that which the conductor bears toward the composer. To a collaboration of this sort, ordinary playgoers never give a thought, content to take the performance as they see it, and ready often to credit the actor, not only with the inventions of the stage-manager, but even with those of the author also. They accept the play as it is presented to them, just as tho it had happened, with no suspicion of the forethought by which the performance has been made possible.

George Henry Lewes, in his stimulating essays, 'On Actors and the Art of Acting,' has told us that audiences are inclined to overestimate the genius of an actor and to underestimate his trained skill. We are p.r.o.ne to accept the fallacy of the "inspiration of the moment," and to give little credit to the careful preliminary rehearsing which is at once a humble subst.i.tute for inspiration, should this fail to appear, and its solid support, should it happen to present itself. For the thoroness of this preliminary preparation the stage-manager is responsible; and it is at rehearsal that he seeks to bring about the perfect "team-play" which is absolutely necessary,--the subordination of individual display to the larger advantage of the whole performance. The reason why the so-called "all-star revivals" of old plays are often sadly disappointing, is to be found in the absence of this team-play, in the exaggerated self-a.s.sertion of the individual actors, whom the stage-manager has been unable to control. Few members of an "all-star" company can be relied upon for the "sacrifice-hits," which the best team-play may now and then demand. And this is why a wise dramatist, if he were put to the choice, would prefer to have his piece performed by a company of average merit directed by a stage-manager of skill and authority, than by far better actors under lax and inefficient stage-management. One of the varied qualifications needed by stage-managers is the insight to estimate the personality of the actors, so that the play may profit by what each of them can do best, while the exuberance of an aggressive individuality is restrained from interfering with the due proportion of the performance.

While it is the duty of the stage-manager to handle all the elements in his control so as to make the performance as perfect as possible, his most important function is to direct the actors themselves, to see that they read their lines intelligently, with just the emphasis requisite at that given moment in the unfolding of the story of the play, and to advise them as to the gestures and movements which should tell this story almost as plainly as the words themselves. Some actors scarcely ever need a hint at rehearsal, reading their speeches naturally the first time and finding for themselves the appropriate byplay,--"business," as technical phrase terms it. Other actors, in no wise inferior in power of personation, need to be guided and stimulated by advice; even if not inventive themselves, they may be swift to take a hint and to wring from it all its effectiveness. Rachel, probably the greatest actress of the last century, felt herself lost without the tuition of Samson, a comic actor himself, but a teacher of force, originality and taste. Mrs. Siddons, again, owed some of her most striking effects to her brother, John Philip Kemble. It was Kemble who devised for her, and for himself, the new reading and the business now traditional in the trial scene of 'Henry VIII,' where the _Queen_ at bay lashes _Wolsey_ with the lines beginning:

Lord Cardinal, to you I speak--

Kemble suggested that the _Queen_ should pause, after the first two words, as tho making up her mind what she should say. While she hesitates, the other cardinal, _Campeius_, thinking himself addrest by a lady, steps forward. The _Queen_, seeing this, waves him aside with an imperious gesture, which sweeps forward to _Wolsey_, at whom she hurls the next words,

To _you_ I speak!

and then the rest of the fiery speech pours forth like scorching lava.

If the older plays, either tragedies or comedies, seem to us sometimes richer in detail than the more modern pieces, we shall do well to remember that these earlier dramas have profited by the accretions of business and of unexpected readings due to the unceasing endeavor of several generations of actors and of stage-managers. The plays of Shakspere that are most frequently performed, the comedies of Moliere also, have acc.u.mulated a ma.s.s of traditions, of one kind or another, some of these being of h.o.a.ry antiquity. In 'Hamlet,' for example, in the graveyard scene, it was the habit of the _Second Grave-digger_ to take off his coat before beginning his work, and then to proceed to divest himself of an indeterminate number of waistcoats, to the increasing disgust of the _First Grave-digger_. Oddly enough, this same business is traditional in the 'Precieuses Ridicules,' the less important of the two comedians going through exactly the same mirth-provoking disrobing.

Probably the business was elaborated for some medieval farce long before Moliere was born, or Shakspere either. Of late, it has been omitted from 'Hamlet,' but it is still religiously preserved in the performances of the 'Precieuses' by the Comedie-Francaise, the company of actors that Moliere founded.

Many another tradition is also cherished at the Francais, the origin of which is lost in the mists of antiquity. In the 'Malade Imaginaire,' for example, _Thomas Diafoirius_ is always provided with an absurdly high child's chair, apparently the property of _Louison_; and in the 'Avare,'

after the miser has blown out a candle twice and finally pocketed it, the custom is for his servant to sneak behind him and to light the candle once again as it sticks out of his coat. Regnier, the cultivated and brilliant comedian (whose pupil M. Coquelin was in his 'prentice-days), published a text of Moliere's most powerful play, which he called 'Le Tartuffe des Comediens' because he had recorded in it all this traditional business. M. Coquelin has told me that he hopes to be able some day to edit other of Moliere's masterpieces on this principle.

And it is greatly to be wisht that some stage-manager of scholarly tastes would provide us with a record of the customary effects to be obtained in the performance of most of Shakspere's plays, as these have been acc.u.mulated in the theater itself. Perhaps this book might be able to tell us why it is that tradition warrants the same rather trivial practical joke in the performance of the 'Merchant of Venice,' and in the performance of 'Romeo and Juliet,'--the business of embarra.s.sing a servant by repeated bows of mock courtesy and protracted farewell.

In preparing for a revival of one of the masterpieces of Shakspere, the accomplished stage-manager of to-day considers all these traditions inherited from the past, discarding some of them and selecting those which appear to him worthy of preservation, and which will accommodate themselves to the general scheme of the whole performance as he has conceived it in his mind's eye. He makes such arrangements as he deems necessary, devising wholly new effects to fit the more modern methods of presentation, which are less purely rhetorical than they were in the eighteenth century, and more pictorial. When Herr Barnay impersonated _Mark Antony_ in the Meiningen revival of 'Julius Caesar,' the novel stage-management gave freshness to the Forum scene and greatly increased its force. As _Mark Antony_ ascended the rostrum, after _Brutus_ had asked the mob to listen to him, the crowd was too highly wrought up over the speech they had just heard to pay heed to the next speaker. They gathered in knots praising _Brutus_; and the murmur of their chatter was all the greeting that _Mark Antony_ received. Herr Barnay stood for a moment silent and then he began his appeal for their attention: "Friends--Romans--countrymen--!" but scarcely a citizen listened to him.

"Lend me your _ears_," he begged, "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him!"

And then the nearest group or two grudgingly turned toward the rostrum; and to these the adroit speaker addrest himself, coaxing, cajoling, flattering,--making frequent pauses, in every one of which the audience could see another band of citizens drawn under the spell of his eloquence. When he had them all attentive, he played on their feelings and aroused their enthusiasm; then, after a swift and piercing glance around to see if they were ripe for it, he brought forth _Caesar's_ will; and after that _Brutus_ was forgotten, and _Mark Antony_ held the mob in the hollow of his hand to sway it at his will. It matters little whether the credit of this most ingenious rearrangement was due to Herr Barnay himself, or to the unseen stage-manager; the spectator could not but recognize that a great play had received new illumination by it, and that a certain richness of texture had been disclosed which had hitherto lain concealed and unsuspected.