remarking with a smile of satisfaction that, when the curtain should go up, and before a word had been uttered, everybody in the house would know that the story was laid in Southern France.  When the late James A. Herne brought out a play in which husband and wife took opposite sides on the slavery question, the curiously stiff and old-fashioned furniture used in the first act seemed to strike the key-note of the drama; the spectators could not but feel that those who lived amid such surroundings were precisely the persons who would behave in that way.

The stage-manager is encouraged to try for these pictorial effects, because the stage is now withdrawn behind a picture-frame in which the curtain rises and falls.  It is no longer thrust out into the midst of the spectators, as it was in Shakspere’s time; nor does it now project beyond the line of the curtain, curving out alongside the stage-boxes, as it did until the third quarter of the nineteenth century.  It is now separated from the audience by the straight row of footlights, within the lower border of the frame; and the electric light which reaches every corner of the stage, has put it into the power of the stage-manager to modify his illumination at will, and to be confident that no gesture will be lost no matter how he may arrange his groups against his background.  He can darken the whole stage, slowly or suddenly, as he sees fit.  Much of the intense effect attained by Sir Henry Irving in the trial-scene of the ‘Bells’ was due to the very adroit handling of the single ray of light that illumined the haunted burgomaster, while the persons who peopled his fatal dream were left in the shadow, indistinct and doubtful.  Perhaps the most moving moment in Mrs. Fiske’s production of Paul Heyse’s ‘Mary of Magdala’ was after night had fallen, and when the betrayer knocked at the door of Caiaphas, who came forth with a lantern and cast its rays full on the contorted face of the villain,—­that face being the sole object visible on the darkened stage, as the High Priest hissed forth the single word, “Judas!”

The expert playwright of every period when the drama has flourished abundantly, has always adjusted the structure of his play to conform to the conditions of the theater of his own time; and the more adroit of the dramatists of to-day have been swift to perceive the necessity for a change of method, since the thrust-out platform has been succeeded by the stage behind the picture-frame.  They are relinquishing the rhetorical devices which were proper enough on the platform-stage, and which now seem out of place on the picture-stage.  They find their profit in accepting as a principle the old saying that “actions speak louder than words.”  They are abandoning the confidential soliloquy, for example, which was quite in keeping with the position of an actor in close proximity to the spectators,—­in the midst of them, in fact,—­and which strikes us as artificial and unnatural now that the actor is behind the mystic line of the curtain.  They are giving up the explanatory “aside,”—­lines spoken directly to the audience, and supposed to be unheard by the other characters on the stage.