They are all studied-but only in a certain sense. They are studied in the deep sense. The real work has gone before and the true integral meaning of the scene been fixed in mind of the actress. Yet that these very particulars are not slavishly learned is apparent from the fact that they are not always the same in two successive representations. This gives them spontaneity. When we read how Rachel counted her steps and dropped, just so, each fold of her dress, whenever the same action recurred, we feel, either that she has been misreported, or that to-day her genius can be eclipsed. For step-counting and rigid adherence to a fixed formula of gesture must be looked upon as nothing short of slavishness in the highest walks of the profession.

That Madame Modjeska should play

remembered that the Polish stage, like that of Germany, is supplied with admirable translations of his dramas. Germany and Poland appreciate Shakspere far better than England and America, if we measure appreciation by the number of his plays acted during the current year. It was a financial sacrifice on the part of Madame Modjeska to offer "Romeo and Juliet" to a lukewarm community. Dumas is far better appreciated. In respect to the favorite play by Dumas which has shown Madame Modjeska to the greatest number of American audiences, it must be said that no actress has equally purified and ennobled the character of Marguerite Gautier, or as we call her, Camille. The atmosphere of baseness that surrounds the heroine in that drama must be adhered to-for

without it the play does not exist. But it is Madame Modjeska's privilege as an actress to show with great realism the pathos of Camille's fate, and yet as a woman to invest her with so ideal a dignity that the spectator absolutely forgets to think of her as belonging to a dishonorable class. Had the actress been one whit less delicateminded or less intelligent, realism would have triumphed over the ideal, and we should have felt the same disgust that must arise in clean minds on reading the play called "La Dame aux Camélias." We should have seen an exhibition of the questionable taste that inspires Mademoiselle Croizette when, on the classic boards of the Théâtre Français, she copies faithfully the contortions of death, said to have been learned from physicians and from personal study in the hospitals of Paris.

It may well be a feather in the cap of any actor to have learned English in so short a time and to have made a creditable appearance. Madame Modjeska had more to cope with than a foreign accent. She was wanting in that sine qua non-a European reputation. Considering that fact her success was great. For beyond all doubt the bulk of theater-goers in this country care little for, and know little about, the stage. They are much more influenced by a reputation than by real merits, for they respect the former and are not critical enough for the latter. This must be the explanation for the singular and deceptive success which attends the first season of any celebrity in the United States. The mass of people go once for the novelty; few go often because they really appreciate the artist. Each representation of "Romeo and Juliet" was a fresh combat with the prejudices roused by her accent, by the poor support that appears to be inevitable in "star" acting, and by the want of theatrical education on the part of audiences. Applause was not ready to burst forth; it was extorted by sheer force of excellence from our unemotional fellow-countrymen. No European successes pointed the way, as was the case with Rachel, Ristori and Salvini. The frankly ignorant and the weakkneed would-be connoisseur were forced to return a verdict on their own responsibilities. An actor who can win unbiased plaudits after this fashion has roots in past energies of one kind or another. Acting is not an art for prodigies. Madame Modjeska comes of a family of actors. Her father was a musician of note and she has not neglected, in the study of her own pro

fession, kindred arts that seem at first blush wholly unconnected with the stage. It was while reading Homer that she had her first dawning consciousness of what art is. Music has taught her things in her own profession that the composer little dreamed of. Sculpture has given her ideas of scenic effects akin to those that ruled the Athenian stage, and poetry has taught her to feel the beauty of what she is to act before she puts the ideas into plastic forms and adds action to the highest efforts of literature. That is why she moves unwilling or indifferent audiences. The acting of Madame Modjeska stands on the same high level with the best in literature, music and the fine arts.

It is indeed a fact that the noblest efforts of civilization radiate from one common center; the drama, when exercised in the right spirit, shows its fundamental kinship with poetry and the arts. That such a claim is not too great for the drama in general, and, in particular, for this Polish genius, is proved by the effect which the acting of Madame Modjeska exerts on poets, musicians, artists. In Warsaw the best artistic and literary people make her house a rendezvous. She possesses many substantial, if not costly, testimonials of the admiration and personal esteem of men and women whose names are known all over Europe for genius in various fields of art. The poets and scribblers of Poland have sung her triumphs on the boards and her charms of character in domestic life. Painters find her acting a school of emotion expressed in tableaux, and sculptors can profit by the natural grace combined with intelligent posing with which she places herself on the stage. Her acting presents a series of delightful studies; she falls both naturally and through wise management into one graceful or expressive pose after another. In this she is helped by her physique; spare, without being thin; she is slender yet well knit, and endowed by nature with what painters call " fine lengths," that is to say, harmonious and noble proportions. Women who think much of dress are in ecstasies over her choice of materials, the beauty and appropriateness of her costumes, and the lady-like management both of her person and garments. Naturally enough this is no unimportant part, as all theater-goers are aware. Musicians will hear in the vibrations of her harmonious and well-trained voice that deep intensity which is sometimes lacking in their own

art, but, when it is struck, forms their greatest triumph. Indeed, for average theatergoers, Modjeska may be said to act too well. She is too intense, too varied, too sudden and unexpected in her changes of tone and position to be accepted at once and heartily by persons who are used, as American and English people are, to see every one about them thoroughly under selfcontrol, and who are often cautious to a ludicrous degree in expressing themselves. A Boston woman said of her: "If I only once dared to admire her acting, I should be carried away by it." That struck the note. We do not dare admire what clashes with our national reserve. Yet in spite of ourselves we Americans soon thawed from our reserve and steadily increased our applause from the first scene to the last.

In the late Mr. Lewes's book on actors and the art of acting, he says: "Rachel was the panther of the stage; with a panther's terrible beauty and undulating grace she moved and stood, glared and sprang. Scorn, triumph, rage, lust, and merciless malignity she could represent in symbols of irresistible power; but she had little tenderness, no womanly caressing softness, no gayety, no heartiness. She was so graceful and so powerful that her air of dignity was incomparable. But somehow you always felt in her presence an indefinable suggestion of latent wickedness." So far as can be learned from those who saw her, Rachel was hardly the superior of Modjeska in stage skill. According to Mr. Lewes, she was wanting in qualities in which the Polish actress is pre-eminent. Madame Modjeska is full of gayety, not violent or riotous, but well controlled, and her womanly manner is winning her admirers in this country almost as warm as those in Poland. Unlike so many women who have reached high levels in the dramatic art, she has lost nothing of her womanliness. Men, who are more sensitive than women to that lack, find her personality feminine, and women have no charge of masculinity to bring against her. But particularly does she not possess the slightest suggestion of wickedness. So far is she from such a character that in her hands rôles which exhibit depraved women are elevated and purified by her management of them. Goodness, rather

than wickedness, is the suggestion flowing from Madame Modjeska's theory and practice. Her tendency is upward, and the influence she carries with her before the foot-lights is highly moral as well as æsthetic. In this she is the superior of Sarah Bernhardt, the actress of the present with whom she is most likely to be compared. Moreover, she is a most conscientious artist, and in that like Ristori, while in other respects greater. She does not, like Rachel in her later days and like Sarah Bernhardt already, play indifferently at times-almost carelessly-until the moment comes for a telling point, in order to flash out then into action of the highest strain. Madame Modjeska gives sufficient attention to all parts of a rôle, and modifies and subordinates the parts in such a manner that the play becomes a finely molded, organic whole. Of course so thorough a workman leaves none of the minor things undone, those minor things which it is the tendency in all the arts to raise to the dignity of major questions. Thus she studies her costumes for Cleopatra or Juliet, looks up Greek bass-reliefs for Medea, and tries to bring realism into strong play without letting it usurp the interest of an audi

ence.

Modjeska may have her equal, possibly her superior in certain directions, but it is doubtful if Europe possess so well rounded a genius for the stage as she. Madame Walter of Berlin is said to be unrivaled in heavy tragedy; Janauschek has proved in America her marked tragic genius; Bernhardt has her rôles in which she is unsurpassed; but none of these can run the gamut of the emotions like Modjeska. It is noticeable that although the lack of public taste forces her to play the lighter tragedy of the late French Empire, she improves in her acting exactly in proportion to the beauty and depth of the play. Having seen her Juliet one thinks of Medea. How she would throw fire and terror into that wonderful drama! And her Cleopatra! No living actress, unless it be Bernhardt, could enact with equal power the "serpent of old Nile." It is a pity that such a rare bird of passage could not be caught and persuaded to stay with us. She alone would form a powerful school for the education of our youthful actors and actresses.