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"But it is more destructive to the total effect than any other, because it draws the attention farther away from the action, and more surely destroys concentration of interest. There must be openings from stage rooms, but the backgrounds which they reveal should be as flat, as free from detail, and as neutral in tone, as possible, if the aim of the producer is to make sustained dramatic appeal to the deeper feelings, rather than merely appeal to the surface faculties.

"In interior settings Belasco is the most accomplished of all those who follow naturalness as a stage religion. One might examine the settings of nine-tenths of the American producers and find the same faults, but not carried to the same false perfection. How many times have we seen plays set in drawing-rooms, or artists' studios, or parlors, that were more like college students' rooms, hung with fish-nets, trophies, and trivial tidbits of sentiment! The simile is not a bad one : we are indeed in the college-room stage of theater setting. The sophomoric wisdom of our dramatic producers is reflected in almost every Broadway production, varying in degree only as the producer happens to have a genius for

THE NEW ART OF THE THEATER

In this scene from "Hamlet" is exemplified the revolt from what champions of the modernized stage-craft denounce as Belascoism.

detail, like Belasco, or merely an imitative faculty, like so many of his followers. If he is a Belasco he may give us at times such a tour de force as the Childs Restaurant scene of 'The Governor's Lady,'

but generally he will give us something overcrowded, overdetailed, and with scattered points of interest, that is both unbeautiful and unnatural, without Belasco's insinuating veneer of reality."

C

PLAY

RITICS of our theater have long insisted that it reveals an incapacity for "thought" in the American mind as compared with the European mind. It is suggested that our playwrights lack intellectual training. Again, it is hinted that the "artistry" of the playwright with us is inferior to the "artistry" of the European. That there is some essential difference between an American play and one made abroad is at any rate patent. Much has been written on the theme, but the authorities leave the matter an open one. The present theatrical season has forced the subject upon the attention of New York dramatic critics, who take advantage of the presentation of a new Jones play and a new Cohan production to ventilate their theories. Seldom is an opportunity to compare the American playwright with his European brother so tempting.

A conspicuous feature in the discussion is "The Song of Songs," a fiveact play made by Edward Sheldon out of the famous Sudermann novel. The scenes of the Sudermann story were put in Germany. Mr. Sheldon has Americanized everything-even the topography. We find ourselves in Atlantic City and in the metropolitan area. The result is a lightness of touch quite alien to the methods of the German, who is solid and heavily intellectual. That is the gist of the criticism in the New York Sun, which finds the dialog bright, fresh, spontaneous, and

AND A EUROPEAN

the situations swift and fetching. There is much to condemn in the piece from some standpoints, but the point to seize is that Americanization of the German work has made it more airy, more delicate. This is the tendency of the American playwright, we are told. The heavily intellectual may condemn, but the genius of the American mind is Greek rather than Gothic. It does not absorb itself in "problems" at the expense of movement on the stage. The American playwright, as revealed in Sheldon's work, has the mind that darts rather than rests contemplatively

PLAY

in the presence of its subject. That was the way with Clyde Fitch. It is the way with George Broadhurst. Here is the Sun's impression of the effects of lightness resulting from the Americanization of Sudermann:

"The Song of Songs" is the bequest of a Greek musician to his daughter Lily, a poor shopgirl. It symbolizes for her the voice of love singing in the heart, and she cherishes it until some day, when the man

is found, she may hear it in reality. An old roué meets the unsophisticated girl and induces her to marry him. Then a first lover comes again into her life and

A RETURN TO THE ELIZABETHAN SIMPLICITY

The aim of the stage director is to reflect the mood of the play through the use of backgrounds that suggest and stimulate in tune with the action of the piece. Note the severity of the "Hamlet" and its reflection of the ghostly atmosphere.

she becomes an innocent victim of circumstances. Her husband casts her off, and she, without home or friend, goes away with the lover.

"The four years that elapse are years of immorality and dissipation. She is living with the man in New York and is known as one of the gayest of the butterflies. Then she meets the man of her dreams, who loves and promises to marry her, altho he is aware of the circumstances of her life.

"But 'the keepers of the walls took away my veil.' The boy's uncle, wishing to save him from a dangerous marriage, lures the girl into a debauch in which she reverts to the woman of bitter experience. For the boy remains the tragedy of love without illusion..

The

"For the girl the dream is over. song of songs shall never be hers to hear. She is sent back to her lover's house and there she burns the manuscript. The latter, who really loves her, begs her to marry him and she accepts. But her solace is that at least he has heard the song of songs.'

"It is this idealism of the girl that gives the play what unity it has a unity not of action but of thought. But it is an idealism that does not justify itself. Men and women have dragged their ideals into the gutter with them, but their ideals have never dragged them there. They are not cold moons that shine afar to taunt us with the dark. They have something of the ambience, the elusive tangibility of sunlight, that permeates, that lights, that we may feel tho we cannot hold."

Americanism on the stage in its most characteristic lightness of manner is exemplified to the critics by "Hello, Broadway!" which George M. Cohan, as producer, author, and his own star performer, offered for the first time the other day at the Astor Theater in New York. Even so intellectual a critic as that of the New York Evening Post must commend the general effects of artistry in this curious combination of elements. One may complain of the horseplay, of the "gags," of the unblushing appeal to matter as distinguished from mind, yet one cannot deny the title of artist, our contemporary thinks, to the creator of this thing. Europe could not have evolved it in a thousand years. It is essentially American, the humor being symbolized all through the horseplay in a way almost classical. There were effects in it worthy of Aristophanes, despite the dubious taste of others. To quote the critic's words:

"There are things in it extraordinarily good of their kind. The burlesque of 'Mr. Wu,' by John Hendricks (memorable as the man who sang the sentry's song in a recent revival of 'Iolanthe'), is admirable as burlesque, and as a spectacle both gorgeous and humorous. Equally colorful and refreshing (with the chorus fantastically done in purple and ermine) is the number in which is brazenly revealed the secret of the process by which a helpless and reluctant audience is hypnotized into accepting for encore after encore,

and into trying to sing themselves the 'song hit' of the piece.

"Effective, again, was the burlesque of the court scene in 'On Trial,' with two blue silk-and-velvet coryphées for policewomen, and a slim dancer, distractingly provocative in dress and behavior, as the widow of the murdered man. Moreover you saw exactly how the court-room changed in a twinkling into a lady's parlor."

This is the sort of thing which Europe finds utterly unintelligible; but to deny for that reason that there is no artistry in it all seems to the critic of the New York American to misuse a word grievously. One gets an idea of how they do the thing in England from "To-Night's the Night," a musical comedy just put on at the Shubert Theater. This piece has been extravagantly praised by the New York critics and it is created along strictly London lines with an occasional New York modification. The trouble with this class of amusement from the American point of view is that the English lack the amazing variety and versatility of a

Cohan. The New York American puts it in this fashion:

"We have been looking at it now for twenty years. And we may look at it for It seems always the ten or twenty more. same show, with variations. But it is usually a rather dainty show.

"They give it a new name each time it They trim it up and turn it out

comes.

or in. The pretty girls are changed. Some marry Dukes. Yet there are always pretty girls to take their places.

"Three men receive letters in a lady's hand, inviting them to a costume ball at Covent Garden. The three men go off in search of three pink dominoes. One man is married. One is engaged. The third and youngest, Henry, is unattached.

"Besides this trio, Henry's uncle, Montagu Lovitt-Lovitt, and an ex-tango teacher, Pedro, go to the ball, with pretty women. The expected complications then arise. The married man gets mixed up with his own wife and his friend's sweetheart. The engaged man has, of course, a like experience. While Henry is so tangled up between three pink ladies that he takes to a false nose-in vain-to hide his identity.

"The dénouement (a mere tribute in

this instance to public prejudice) occurs in the apartment of a light-hearted beauty known as Daisy. As ever, too, ‘all ends in songs.'

"Straight from the Gaiety it came once more; with bevies of graceful, languorous, well-drilled London belles, and a few clever artists. It was as smart and nicely cut and trim as ever. The songs were of a long familiar school. The turns were of a tried and tested brand.

"In these Gaiety productions the manner has always been more important than the matter. It is so in the case of 'Tonight's the Night.' It will be so twenty years from now, whatever the old show may then be called."

An American playwright is forever changing while his European competitor lacks the versatility for that. His method is not light enough. His touch, while artistic, is subdued to what it works in. Another illustration is afforded by the Henry Arthur Jones play recently offered to the New York public at the Harris Theater. "The Lie" is in the familiar manner of Jones, precisely as "Androcles" is in the familiar manner of Shaw and "Strife" is in the familiar manner of Galsworthy. Even Ibsen was too great to be able

to get away from himself, and the critics of the New York press find the same fault with Henry Arthur Jones. "The Lie" inspires these reflections in the New York Evening Sun:

"It is the very dear friend in 'The Lie' who starts all the trouble and who at the last makes a very unsatisfactory reparation. It is he who quite innocently leads the hero into believing that the girl he loves-the granddaughter and ward of a superannuated, decrepit, pauperized specimen of beggarly English aristocracy at its worst-is guilty of a woman's most natural and unpardonable offence.

"It is really her pretty, intriguing, fortune-hunting younger sister who is the mother of the child, and it is through shielding her in her trouble that the elder has fallen in the way of the mistake. But the mischief once started the younger sister-herself having designs on the hero strengthens the impression and eventually lands him herself in far off Cairo, in whose suburban deserts he is building other momentous engineering work with a gigantic dam, sewer, windmill or some engaging ease and assurance.

"Mr. Jones's characters are nearly all of the theater. The friend is the conventional Cayley Drummle done to a turn.

99

The hero is cut from an ancient pattern and in this instance is a younger de luxe edition of Mr. Jones's central figure in his one-act play "The Goal,' recently pro

duced at the Princess Theater. The heroine is the customary model of sebaceous, treacly goodness. The most natural of all the characters are the younger sister and the muddle-headed old baronet, who for all his familiarity to theatergoers is a graphically drawn, realistic type. And the former for all her arrant roguery cannot help winning our admiration because of her spontaneity, and because in an environment of bush-beating hypocrites she goes directly to the point and gets what she wants while the others want it.

"These characters the author sets in motion by the simplest mechanics of the stage. But it is the mechanics of the skilled craftsman who knows how to muffle his hammer."

One could take up play after play presented in New York this season only to find the essential difference between our native theater and that of Europe to reside in this matter of lightness of touch. The Shaws, the Galsworthys and the Brieux are "heavier than air," while our Sheldons, our Thomases and our Broadhursts are lighter.

A

TOPIC of general conversation in operatic circles last month was the retirement of Otto H. Kahn from the directorate of the Century Opera Company, observes that well-informed organ of the dramatic profession, the N. Y. Telegraph. Mr. Kahn's contributions to its support, says the metropolitan organ, were more than generous and took directions other than financial he supplied sympathy and comprehension. This Century Opera Company, we are further reminded, was founded at a luncheon of the City Club

in a moment of civic enthusiasm. The idea of opera in English appealed to a great many, while the idea of cheap opera aroused a passion of anticipation among more. As for the "cheap" part of it, the New York newspaper has no doubt that some shrewd and saving souls imagined they were going to get "Metropolitan" performances at theater prices. They must have known that, if such were to be the case, somebody would have to pay the difference. "There was a general feeling," adds the N. Y. Times, "that the project de served to succeed, but obviously this feeling has not been strong enough to induce the public to support opera at low prices." Is this a reflection upon the musical taste of the public? The question is asked in various ways by those who discuss the topic and they

seem to have come to the conclusion that the trouble was lack of prestige.

The people at large were not impressed because the names of the singers were not great in the Metropolitan Opera House sense. It lacked the glamor associated with famous names. The theme is expounded thus in the editorial columns of the New York Times: "There is no reason why opera should ever be placed on the basis of charity. "The Century experiment has proved again that opera without renowned singers, even when as well done as some of the performances of the recent Autumn season, cannot be made to pay expenses.

The competition in music in this town is enormous, and most of the people who can afford to pay but little for opera prefer to hear Caruso and his renowned associates in the cheaper seats of the Metropolitan to sitting in the comfortable stalls of the Century at performances which are admirable and well balanced, but avowedly second rate when judged by the Metropolitan standard. It is a great pity that we cannot have 'popular' opera, but the fact that we cannot unless some philanthropists are willing to foot the bills has been proved once more. What New York will not support with enthusiasm other cities will inevitably neglect. There has been a general manifestation to praise and to commend the performances to one's neighbors, and there is even an expression of hope now that the enterprize will be revived next Fall. But the hope is faint."

Mr. Kahn, on the other hand, writes to those connected with the musical enterprize from which he has resigned as director that he will be willing, "if it is desired and if circumstances war

rant," to become again actively connected with it. Meanwhile he is prepared, if it is needed, to duplicate any subscription which may be secured towards a fund of fifty thousand dollars a year for three years to maintain popular-priced opera in English—a sum which he considers more than sufficient. Mr. Charles H. Strong, the President of the Century Opera Company (and of the City Club), continues to be sanguine that the effort will be renewed by next autumn with an ample guarantee fund.

All this does not go to the heart of the mystery of the collapse of the Century Opera Company, according to the N. Y. Review, an authority upon things operatic and theatrical in New York. Who will deny, it asks, that much of the prominence attained by the Metropolitan Opera Company is due to its prestige? Was it not a fact that the success of Oscar Hammerstein as a grand opera impresario was largely due to the fact that he himself gave his organization a standing and a prestige which made it command respect from the very start?

"It must be granted that we have made great musical progress in the United States, and that the army of sincere, earnest operagoers who attend the opera increased; but it is equally certain that solely because they love music has vastly there are not enough of these to support grand opera which has no prestige either

of a social or artistic character."

T

HERE is not an unlimited number of radioactive elements and, in spite of the addition to their number of those derivative elements which flash into existence for a few days and sometimes only for a fraction of a second and then change into something else, the number is probably less now than was suspected a few years ago. The test for a radioactive element, tho simple, is searching. All matter is probably slightly radioactive; but, before an element can join the radioactive group of uranium, radium, actinium, thorium, it has to show itself capable of ionizing gas, that is a gas, continuously and without assist

ance.

The "ionization" may be roughly defined as manifesting itself in the increased ability of the gas to conduct a current of electricity, and the inference is that something is discharged or shot off from the radioactive substance which converts the molecules of the gas into carriers of electricity. It has, however, been suggested that while this is the conclusive test of radioactivity, yet an element might belong to a radioactive series or family group and yet not respond to this test. For example, one of the radium family, Radium D, can not be found to give measurable radiation. But it belongs to the family and gives complete evidence of its relationship by decaying to half its original substance in forty years. Again, helium as an element may be classed as radioactive since it is present at the larger number of radioactive births, and is suspected of being entirely derived from radioactive substances; but of itself it gives out no further ionizing

radiations. The connection with a radioactive family is in its case, as in that of others, taken as sufficient evidence of innate powers of radiation. This matter is further elucidated in The Chemical Bulletin of the University of Manchester:

"There is one element, and that an element of very wide distribution—namely, sodium-which it would be very convenient to class as radioactive. But tho tested by methods which would reveal a radioactivity several thousand times smaller than that of uranium, it declines to reply

to these tests with any discoverable radiation. Professor F. C. Brown, who has

examined its case afresh, suggests that the radiation and ionization powers may not be the sole and necessary criterion of ra

BY SUPERPHYSICS

toms.

dioactivity; it may be possible that an atomic disintegration should be in progress without, so to speak, the recognized sympSome such speculation as this is needed to reconcile the growing divergence between the computed age of the world when measured by the accumulation of sodium in the ocean, or by the accumulations of the last descendants of radioactive elements, such as helium or lead.

"When the age of the world is measured by the relation between the sodium and chlorine in the sea and the amount of these brought down by the rivers, the figure arrived at is between seventy and one hundred million years, with a slight bias towards the lower figure. But this is vastly smaller than the age of the earth measured by radioactive timepieces. According to experiments made by Professor Rutherford and his colleags one gram of uranium gives out about the ten-millionth of a cubic centimeter of helium in a year. In the same time it gives rise to about the ten-billionth of a gram of lead. These two calculations can be used to check one another in examining the amount of helium which can be expressed from rocks containing it, or in the amount of residual lead in other rocks. Thence is computed the number of years which these helium or lead deposits had taken to accumulate.

"The thing about these computations is the very high figures which are assigned by them to the age of the geologic eras. Rutherford, by the helium test, found the age of a sample of Fergusonite to be 240 million years, and Strutt an Archæan rock of 715 million years. Holmes, by the lead method, found the Carboniferous era alone was 350 million years, and the era before the Cambrian rocks anything up to 1,500 million years."

At present there is not enough sodium in the sea to account for a deposition which has extended over a longer period than a hundred million years. But suppose that during geologic time other elements have been disintegrating into sodium. Then the rivers may at one time have contributed hardly any sodium at all to the sea and the average of their annual output may have been much smaller over the whole time

than it is now. Or suppose, on the other hand, that the sodium in the sea has disintegrated into other elements. That is a less acceptable idea, tho it lies within the limits of possibility. An explanation that would require fewer concessions is that the sodium on land has been increasing by virtue of the

presence there of some element which is the parent of sodium, tho this parent does not exist in the ocean or in the ocean bed. Professor Brown has an

other argument, not entirely dissimilar, based on the amount of chlorine in the ocean, which on the same kind of computation as that already exemplified gives an age of the ocean equal to a hundred and sixty million years. Such figures are benumbing when the multiplication by millions begins; but, as Sir J. J. Thomson, to whom that admission is due, has shown, there is a high degree of accuracy in the experimental calculations of the super-physicists and super-chemists:

"The earliest of the modern series of measurements was made by Loschmidt, who obtained for the diameter of the molecule of air a value equal to 1.18 of a millionth of a millimeter. Many additions and corrections were made to Loschmidt's figures; but the most authoritative were those of Meyer, which appeared in the last year of last century, and of which we need only say that the number of hydrogen molecules assigned by him to a cubic centimeter of the gas is represented by the figure 6, followed by nineteen o's.

"But even while these calculations were

establishing their claim to accuracy a new question was arising, which was whether molecules and atoms had an unchanging and unchangeable volume. Evidently the matter was in doubt if radioactive substances could be perceived to be decaying and disintegrating by losing atoms or parts of atoms, for this phenomenon

showed that the atom was not an indivisible grain of matter, but possessed struc

ture and constituents. The most elementary of these constituents, or at any rate the only constituents which can be examined, are the electrons, which are the particles of electricity standing on the borderland between energy and matter.

"These atoms of electricity can be weighed. In a method devised by Professor Milliken a microscopic drop of oil was kept, like Mahomet's coffin, between two electrified plates, its weight balanced by the electric charge it carried, and this experiment may serve to indicate roughly the way in which the weight of an atom of electricity can be estimated. Thence, since a hydrogen atom can be 'charged' by one electron, it became possible to weigh the hydrogen atom, and by this and other means its weight has been estimated with what is a remarkable agreement. The value recommended by Professor Smoluchowski, though it differs a little from that adopted by Rutherford and the British school of physicists, is such that the number of atoms contained in a gram of

hydrogen is represented by the figure 63, followed by twenty-three o's. That may be expressed pictorially by saying that a raindrop contains as many atoms as the Miterranean contains drops of water."