286

talent is seen in the case of Mr. Sidney Homer, the composer, and Madame Louise Homer, the singer, whose daughter is making a successful career as a concert singer. The likelihood of musical talent appearing in such a case is 100 per cent., whereas the chance of its appearing where only one parent is musical is very slight.

IT

"SEX-LINKED" CHARACTERISTICS

T should here be said that, in all that has been written above regarding the inheritance of dominant and recessive traits, it makes no difference at all which parent brings which trait to the union. But there are certain other traits which are “sex-linked," which means that they

are dominant in males and recessive in females. Some of these traits are the following: near-sightedness, color-blindness, pattern baldness, tendency to spontaneous bleeding (in people whom surgeons call "bleeders"), wanderlust, and the "run away to sea" instinct that frequently appears even in boys born on the inland prairies. These traits can be "carried" by the mothers, but "come out❞ only in the sons.

ALL

MULATTOES

LL the foregoing examples have dealt with the simplest form of Mendelian inheritance. For certain other traits, however, the subject becomes somewhat more complicated, though in fact it never deviates from the underlying "rule of two" above mentioned. In the trait of human skin color, for example, the black color of a full blooded Negro requires "two pairs of duplicate genes for black pigmentation which, though separately heritable, are cumulative in effect." This fact explains why matings "across the color line" produce so many shades of brown between the extremes of black and white. Without detailing the mathematical calculations involved, it is enough here to say that the direct cross between black and white produces the mulatto, whose skin color is medium brown. The union of two mulattoes

produces offspring whose mathematical expectation, with respect to skin color, is as follows:

1 Chance in 16 of being pure white
1 Chance in 16 of being pure black
4 Chances in 16 of being light brown
4 Chances in 16 of being dark brown
6 Chances in 16 of being mulatto

Probably most readers will be surprised to learn that it is thus possible for a child of two mulattoes to be a pureblooded white man, so far as the pigment of his skin is concerned, and equally possible that he may be a pure-blooded Negro in that respect. But here again the reader must be reminded that we are

dealing with only one trait, namely, pigmentation of the skin. Other heredi

tary traits, in which the Negro quality is dominant over its White alternative, would show in these children and indicate their mixed origin.

Of course, everything so far said in this article refers in each case to the inheritance of a single, specific trait, as curly hair or dark eyes. But if one inquires regarding the mathematical probabilities of any particular person inheriting both of any two such traits, the range of chance becomes much wider and the likelihood correspondingly more remote. Thus, when ten different characteristics are combined in the parents, there are more than a million possible combinations of those characteristics in the offspring. Therefore, in human matings, about the best that people can do, who have an inherited defect that they do not wish to transmit to posterity, is to consider the Mendelian behavior of that defect and find out whether the heredity of the prospective partner indicates that this defect is likely to reappear in the offspring. If the defect is recessive, it will not appear in the children if the partner is normal for that trait, and it will not appear in the grandchildren if the children choose normal partners. choose normal partners. If the defect is dominant, as, for example, congenital cataract, the situation is more difficult, for even with a normal partner, half the children are likely to inherit the defect.

Sex itself is a hereditary trait and is controlled by genes for the trait, operating under the Mendelian ratios. For sentimental reasons, and often for practical reasons, most persons have a preference concerning the sex of their children, especially a preference as to the relative number of boys and girls, and the order of their birth. Perhaps the question most frequently asked of eugenists is whether enough is now known of hereditary laws to give parents any option in this matter. Briefly, the answer is no. On the contrary, the human species is more definitely at the mercy of chance in this respect than some of the lower animals. The only hope that mankind may ultimately attain command of such a choice lies in the field of biological chemistry, and there is no certainty of eventual success even there.

three will look like Gentiles," the exact scientific fact is expressed by saying that "every child of such a union has one chance in four of looking like a Jew, and three chances in four of looking like a Gentile." Practically, it usually does work out just that way, but exceptions do happen, though this does not vitiate the rule at all but only indicates that sometimes four children are not enough to give chance a broad enough field to prove the rule. the rule. If the same parents had eight or twelve children, the rule would work out in living proof.

The other qualification is this: Mendel's Law is the way heredity operates within any species. But later scientists have discovered what they call "mutations," which means very occasional cases in which a fixed species suddenly throws off an individual who has some new characteristic never before seen in that species, and who "breeds true" for that characteristic. Many examples have been observed in several species of plants, and some few in the animal kingdom. Both the white man and the Negro are probably mutations from the aboriginal brown man. This article has taken no notice of mutations because they probably have not occurred in the human race more than a few times in its history and are, therefore, not important for present purposes.

'N "THE BLUE BIRD” of Maurice Maeterlinck, Tyltyl and Mytyl pay a visit to the Land of Memory. Here they come upon their grandmamma and grandpapa, who have been dead for several years, and who are sleeping soundly till the attention of their visitors awakens them. For it appears that all the dead drowse forever in a deep sleep, except when their friends on earth are thinking of them, and that such a thought awakens them and makes them live so long as it lasts and as often as it recurs. As soon as the living children remember their dead brothers and sisters, the whole troupe of them come plunging forth to play, with a ripple of delighted laughter; but they lapse to sleep again when Tyltyl and Mytyl fare forth to other regions. This passage was intended by M. Maeterlinck as an answer to the insistent question concerning human immortality; but by critical observers of the theater it might be taken as an allegory to explain what happens to the great plays of the past. For a play, however great inherently, lives only in those moments when it is being performed by actors on a stage before an audience; and at all other moments it is like the sleeping grandpapa of Tyltyl, waiting patiently to be awakened. As a repository of dramatic art, the library can never serve as a substitute for the theater. Plays are devised to be presented-not written to be read. It is never possible to read a play-but only the directions for a play. In cases where the dramatist happens also to be a poet, or at least a man of letters, the printed directions for his play may have a secondary value from the literary point of view; but the piece, considered solely as a contribution to the drama, lies in the library as in a morgue, and all too often is sub

mitted to dissection by those ghoulish body-snatchers, the academic commen

tators.

In view of this fact, it seems astonishing that—particularly in the Englishspeaking countries-no concerted and consistent effort is made to keep the few great masterpieces of the drama continuously alive upon the stage. We are, as Tennyson reminded us, the heirs of all the ages; but, since the dramatic art was non-existent throughout the ten dark centuries of Medievalism, our entire heritage of drama is gleaned from less than fifteen hundred years. Of plays that are unquestionably great-when acted in any language and at any timethere cannot be so many as one hundred in the world; and a practical tabulation would probably falter and fail before the computation had reached the count of fifty.

BY

ONCE A YEAR

Y A thoroughly equipped stock company, half a hundred masterpieces could be produced without undue difficulty, with a weekly change of bill, within the compass of a single year; and, each year, the same series of great plays could be presented in succession. By this arrangement, no year would ever pass without offering the public an opportunity to see "Othello" and "Hippolytus," "Hamlet" and "Edipus the King," "Les Femmes Savantes" and and "The School for Scandal," "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "The Playboy of the Western World" an entire repertory of indisputable masterpieces stretching all the way from Æschylus to Lord Dunsany.

Five million dollars would build a theater in New York and endow it in perpetuity for this particular purpose;

yet, though we live in an age that is avid for theater-going, in the midst of a public that squanders millions of dollars every year for dramatic entertainment, no concerted effort is made to waken into life the masterpieces of the drama and to keep them alive for the edification of coming generations. The amount of money that, every season in New York, is wasted conjointly by the producing managers and by the ticket-buying public over worthless plays that are presented elaborately on Broadway and carted off, within a week or two, to the oblivion which they deserve, would be sufficient to establish and endow a theater in which "The Trojan Women" of Euripides, for instance, could be acted for a week in every year for a thousand years to come.

English has latterly become the dominant language of the civilized world; and it has long been literally true that the sun can never set on men who, trippingly on the tongue, still speak the speech of Shakespeare. And since the greatest dramatist that ever lived happened, by a stroke of destiny, to be an Englishman, it seems particularly paradoxical that an indifference toward the perpetuation of his masterpieces, and those of the dozen other dramatists of the entire world who are not utterly unworthy to untie his shoestrings, should be especially marked in the United States and in the far-flung dominions of the British Empire. This indifference is neither paralleled nor understood in any of the major countries of continental Europe.

MOLIÈRE AT THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE

FOR

OR the purpose of specific illustration, let us compare and contrast the attitude of the French people toward the plays of Molière with the attitude of the English-speaking peoples toward the plays of Shakespeare. In 1899, when I was seventeen years old, I lived in the Quartier Latin; and, as a student of the theater, I naturally joined the claque of the Comédie Française. Night after night, I sat with the professional applauders in the parterre of the Théâtre Français, until I had become familiar with the

classic repertory of this time-honored institution.

In that year, a recurrent item on the bill was "Les Précieuses Ridicules" of Molière; and I must have seen it at least a dozen times. Three actors then took turns in Molière's own part of Mascarille-Georges Berr, J. Truffier, and Coquelin cadet. No three men could possibly have differed more emphatically in their personalities and in their talents. Georges Berr was primarily a lyric actor, and his main talent was an exquisite ability to read such delicate verse as that of Rostand's "Les Romanesques.' fier was an intelligent and satirical comedian, with no poetry in his soul but with a vast amount of keen wit in his eyes. Coquelin cadet was a broad farceur, with a deep reverberating laugh and a masterful manner of falling over furniture with appropriate bodily indignity.

Truf

Mascarille was a totally different being as embodied in the personalities of these three performers; yet all three of them read the same lines with the same inflections and performed precisely the same business without additions or subtractions. Each of them sat down and rose again upon the self-same syllable; each of them executed the same gestures with his cane or with his hat; each of them, in short, gave a personal rendition of a standard performance, from which no striking deviation in detail would have been permitted, without protest, by the people on the other side of the footlightsthat is to say, the general public, the claqueurs, and the critics.

A strict adherence to traditional standards of technique is not at all fettering to the expression of individual personality. No form of verse, for instance, could be more rigid in its technical restrictions than the Petrarchan sonnet; yet, writing within the limits of this identic form, Wordsworth and Rossetti gave to the world great poems which are totally different in content, in tone, and in every detail of style. Similarly, Georges Berr, when he acted Mascarille, did not find it necessary to alter the business or the readings of the part in order to demon

290

strate to the public that he was a different kind of artist from his confrère, Coquelin cadet, or his predecessor, Coquelin ainé.

At the Français, one is always certain to see every part in every play of Molière performed, in all essentials, as it was performed on the original occasion, when the great dramatist himself was the leading actor of his company and directed the business of all the other actors. Since the death of the great comedian in 1673, there has never been a break in the continuity of theatrical tradition, during which either the actors or the public could possibly have forgotten the standard manner of performing the major plays of Molière. Thus, Coquelin cadet, J. Truffier, and Georges Berr had been taught the readings and the business of Mascarille by their great predecessor, Coquelin ainé, who in turn had learned them from the renowned comedian, Regnier. Regnier had acquired them from his predecessor, who had learned them from his predecessor, and so forth and so on, all the way back to Molière himself.

But, though Shakespeare antedated Molière by scarcely more than half a century, the inheritors of his language have never made a concerted and consistent effort to maintain unbroken the tradition of his practice on the stage. Never at any time in the English-speaking world has a national theater been established, with a governmental subsidy, that has paralleled, in its purposes or its accomplishments, the Comédie Française.

ENGLISH DRAMATISTS IN FRANCE

WING to a tragic accident of history,

the tradition of Shakespeare was drastically interrupted a quarter of a century after his death. When the Roundhead revolutionists came into power, one of their first acts was to prohibit, in 1642, the presentation of stage plays; and this Puritanical prohibition remained in force until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. For eighteen. years, there was no English theater; and eighteen years, in the history of the stage, encompasses not one generation, but several, of the theater-going public.

Throughout this interregnum, all the dramatists of England were constrained to live in France, and were alienated from the breast of Shakespeare by being nurtured at the bosoms of Corneille, Racine, and Molière; and when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660 and the theaters were re-opened, a bastard FrancoBritish taste was substituted for the purely English tradition which might, in other circumstances, have been inherited from the Elizabethan period.

In view of the sudden death-blow that was destined to be dealt to the Elizabethan theater in 1642, it is exceedingly unfortunate that the acting business of Shakespeare's plays was not recorded in the first folio of 1623. Both Heminge and Condell had been actors in his company and must have been familiar with his prompt-books; but, though they piously printed his lines, they neglected to write out his stage-directions. Consequently, though the theater-going public of France knows accurately what Molière did at nearly every moment in every one of his important parts, no scholar in the English-speaking world has any way of finding out what Richard Burbage did in "Hamlet." Our theatrical traditions, irregular and often interrupted as we try to trace them back through the centuries, come to a full stop in 1660.

The earliest Hamlet of which we have an authentic record is that of Thomas Betterton, who first played the part in 1661; but, since he was only seven years old when the theaters were closed in 1642, he could scarcely have seen the play before he undertook the composition of his own performance. It is probable, however, that his manager, Sir William Davenant-who was reputed falsely to be an illegitimate son of Shakespeare-had seen Joseph Taylor act the part, before the interregnum; and Taylor had learned the business from Burbage.

SHAKESPEARE AND SHAW

ROM Betterton's day to Henry

Foving the acting business of

Shakespeare's plays-with frequent alterations to suit the changing tastes of