its mental outlines.  That atmosphere, which is of its essence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical plays.  It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the secret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest.  He will make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after the manner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of nature.

ON CROSSING STAGE TO RIGHT

If you look into the actors’ prompt-books, the most frequent direction which you will find is this:  “Cross stage to right.”  It is not a mere direction, it is a formula; it is not a formula only, but a universal remedy.  Whenever the action seems to flag, or the dialogue to become weak or wordy, you must “cross stage to right”; no matter what is wrong with the play, this will set it right.  We have heard so much of the “action” of a play, that the stage-manager in England seems to imagine that dramatic action is literally a movement of people across the stage, even if for no other reason than for movement’s sake.  Is the play weak?  He tries to strengthen it, poor thing, by sending it out walking for its health.

If we take drama with any seriousness, as an art as well as an improvisation, we shall realise that one of its main requirements is that it should make pictures.  That is the lesson of Bayreuth, and when one comes away, the impression which remains, almost longer than the impression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the actors.  As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being “natural”; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest.  But here, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does not aim at the realistic representation of modern life.  Maeterlinck should be acted in this solemn way, in a kind of convention; but I admit that you cannot act Ibsen in quite the same way.

The other day, when Mme. Jeanne Granier’s company came over here to give us some lessons in acting, I watched a little scene in “La Veine,” which was one of the telling scenes of the play:  Guitry and Brasseur standing face to face for some minutes, looking at their watches, and then waiting, each with a single, fixed expression on his face, in which the whole temperament of each is summed up.  One is inclined to say:  No English actor could have done it.  Perhaps; but then, no English stage-manager would have let them do it.  They would have been told to move, to find “business,” to indulge in gesture which would not come naturally to them.  Again, in “Tartuffe,” when, at the end, the hypocrite is exposed and led off to prison, Coquelin simply turns his back on the audience, and stands, with head sullenly down, making no movement; then,