situation,-comprehending the outlaw's detection as such by the Girl, the awakening of furious jealousy, her turning him out into the storm, her subsequent harboring of him, and the game of cards with the outlaw's life and liberty staked against the Girl's whole future,— is handled with consummate skill and moulded to splendid results, and there the acting of Miss Bates rose to a magnificent climax of emotion, fully expressed and yet artistically controlled and directed, a triumph of intellectual purpose.

(On November 28, 1912, at her country home, near Ossining, New York, Miss Bates was married to Mr. George Creel, of Denver, Colorado.)

VIII.

THE ACTING OF MRS. FISKE.

"MAGDA."

THE play of "Magda" which Mrs. Fiske revived at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, on February 27, 1898, provides opportunity for effective acting, and especially for the manifestation of that morbid, self-torturing, splenetic temperament which finds its best denotement in the intense, half-repressed, and half-spasmodic manner which came in with Clara Morris, which received

new impulse from Mme. Duse, and which Mrs. Fiske thought it desirable to adopt. Judicious observers were content with Mrs. Fiske's original manner, and they viewed her selection of Magda with keen regret. She played the part exceedingly well, but it was difficult to understand why an actress who can be so charming in better things should have condescended to such a character. Mrs. Fiske, it may be said, did all that can be done with Sudermann's wearisome type of fever and flurry, ill-balanced mentality and disordered nerves. In the one blithe passage of the play,-the coming of Magda to her old home, the winning sweetness and the bright humor of the actress irradiated the scene, like

a sudden burst of sunshine. No one could be more charming than Mrs. Fiske was, in moments of happy buoyancy and playful exhilaration. She was exceedingly effective, likewise, in the expression of bitter scorn of the betrayer of Magda, in her utterance of satirical mockery of him, and in her assumption of exultant triumph when repelling his belated advances. Every opportunity of this kind was fully improved, and no doubt the prevision of the actress, as to what she could give of personal utterance in these situations, was a controlling influence in her selection of the character. Her faculty of impersonation, her individual force, and her incisive method were again exemplified; but those had long been known, and it did not require a Magda to prove them.

One of the great beauties of her embodiment was its fine discrimination of manner toward the different interlocutors, a discrimination revealing keen perception of character, great knowledge of the world, and acute perception of the effect of experience upon individuality. Almost the only defect,-if not, indeed, the only one,was a rapidity of enunciation which, overshooting its mark, produced an occasional effect of incoherence. Nature may be too natural. On the other hand, the speech about the development of a woman's nature, under the stress of sin and suffering,-meretricious though it is, and full of falsehood and flummery,—was beautiful with passionate eloquence and crystal clarity.

If anything could redeem this character it would be such acting as that of Mrs. Fiske, and it is recorded that her audience followed her performance with interest, and evinced sympathy with her portrayal of revolt against commonplace life, and especially with her humorous strokes of satire upon average stupidity. Most persons, perhaps, find the world dull, and are glad of anything that relieves its monotony.

"LITTLE ITALY."

Mrs. Fiske, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York, on March 30, 1899, produced a sombre play called "Little Italy," by the late Horace B. Fry, and acted the principal part in it. On the same evening, by way of emphasizing her vocational versatility, she revived an English adaptation of Sardou's "Divorçons," and acted Cyprienne. In "Little Italy," which is reminiscent of the quality of "Cavalleria Rusticana," she impersonated a poor Italian exile, who, from an environment of poverty and trouble, goes involuntarily to her death, in a wild, vain effort to leave the trammels of her sordid life and return to the sunshine, indolent peace, and dream-like happiness of her native land. The scene is the "Italian quarter" of New York. The woman is the wife of a coarse Italian shopkeeper, with whom she is badly matched and with whom she dwells in discontent. The dramatic situation is made to ensue

from her hearing music in the street, made by her lover, who is a vagrant from Italy. That situation involves a colloquy between the wife and the lover and their agreement to return home together. The lover awaits her in the street, but, in endeavoring to escape furtively, by means of a lift, the woman is killed; and, at the close, the husband and the lover are confronted, in a strife of agony and fury, in the presence of her dead body.

The author of the play-which is neatly constructed and smoothly written, in one act, had, of course, observed that humble life affords no exemption from the misery that is sequent upon unhappy marriage, or from the tragedy that is possibly attendant upon thwarted love and broken faith. His drama is more picture than action, and it suggests more than it displays. To use the kitchen-lift, or dumb-waiter, as a means of causing accidental death was to employ a rough and dubious expedient and to imperil the effect of tragic horror by taking the risk of derision. In the world of fact such things, no doubt, do happen, but, in the realm of art, the instrument of fate must never be absurd. The essential charm of Mr. Fry's work, a charm so delicate that it might readily pass unnoticed, is its suggestiveness of vague, tearful, desolate emotion, the strange longing for home and rest, for other days and other scenes, that may suddenly be awakened by the scent of a flower, or the sound of