In Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’s artfully articulated play, ’Mrs. Dane’s Defence,’ a most ingenious specimen of story-telling on the stage, the harassed heroine, left alone at a crucial moment, did not express her emotion in a soliloquy, as she would have done even fifty years ago.  She revealed her agitation solely by the sudden change of her expression and by her feverish movements, which not only betrayed her anxiety, but were really more eloquent than any mere words were likely to be.  Even more remarkable examples of the skill with which significant action may be substituted for speech, can be found in ‘Secret Service’; and Mr. Gillette has explained that, in the performance of his own plays, he is “in the habit of resorting largely to the effects of natural pauses, intervals of silence,—­moments when few words are spoken and much mental struggle is supposed to take place,” finding these methods “especially effective at critical junctures.”  Perhaps no other modern dramatist relies so frankly upon sheer pantomime as Mr. Gillette does; and, certainly, no other has ever made a more skilful use of it.  But the tendency can be observed in all our later playwrights, and it will surely increase as the possibilities of the picture-stage come to be better understood.

What the stage-manager is forever striving to attain, in addition to these salient effects, is variety of impression.  He seeks to achieve a harmony of tone and to create an intangible atmosphere, in which the spirit of the play shall be revealed.  To secure this, he often calls in the aid of music.  When Sir Henry Irving produced ’Much Ado about Nothing,’ the note of joyous comedy that echoed and reechoed thruout the performance, was sustained by sparkling rhythms, old English dance-tunes, most of them, that frolicked gaily thru the evening.  In Mr. Belasco’s production of the ‘Darling of the Gods,’ the accompanying music was almost incessant, but so subdued, so artfully modulated, so delicately adjusted to the action, that perhaps a majority of the audience was wholly unconscious of the three Japanese themes which had been insisted upon again and again.  To evoke the atmosphere of Japan as soon as possible, Mr. Belasco also had a special curtain designed for the play, which co-operated with the exotic music to bring about a feeling of vague remoteness and of brooding mystery.

But all these effects, audible or visible, may be resented as mere stage-tricks, unless they really belong where they are put, unless they are intimately related to the main theme of the play, and unless they are really helpful in evoking and sustaining the current of sympathy.  They are excrescences if they exist for their own sake only; they are still worse if they interfere with this current of sympathy, if they distract attention to themselves.  The stage-manager must ever be on his guard against the danger of sacrificing the major to the minor, and of letting some little effect of slight value in itself interfere with the