shine one moment and cloud the next, to blow hot and cold, to be proud, capricious, irritable, now gay and now rueful, sometimes to repress excitement and sometimes to give it a free way, and at the last to plunge headlong into delirium,—that is to be Mariana. Mrs. Campbell easily did this, and produced no other effect than that of extravagant theatrical artifice. There is no element of nobility or charm in the character, and there was no element of either power or beauty in the performance. There was abundance of glitter and of grace in it, associated with occasional sweet, caressing tones and momentary touches of demure mischief; and there was, toward the last, a glimmer of pathos. There was fine intelligence in the elocution,-more especially in the delivery of narrative, and there was a fervid vitality in the impersonation, evincing the sincerity of endeavor which always wins esteem, despite the fog and folly of a crazy play.

"PELLEAS AND MÉLISANDE."

A ritual service was duly said, on January 28, 1902, at the Victoria Theatre, New York, by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, over the remains of "Pélleas and Mélisande," -two feeble-minded persons untimely dead, of inanition, at an early age, and the solemn ceremony was viewed with becoming decorum by a numerous company of bereaved and sorrow-stricken friends. Mrs. Campbell appeared to be deeply affected-so much so

that once, in the candor of grief, she forcibly exclaimed: "I'm dreadful, like this!" and there could be no doubt that her words carried conviction to many suffering hearts. With reference to the dear deceased it was generally remembered that they had been born to troubles, verbal no less than amatory, as the sparks fly upward, and that their demise was the best thing that ever happened to them-because it at once delivered them out of dire distress. When two brothers love one and the same girl, and the girl gets married to the elder and subsequently becomes enamoured of the younger, finding him responsive, and so making her husband jealous and causing fratricide, the conditions of existence, in her family circle, are strained; and that is what had happened to Golaud, who was Mélisande's husband; to Pélleas, who was her innocent lover, and to Mélisande herself. Recalling those facts, the mourners were able to find consolationin spite of copious incidental dirges, of a kind well calculated to produce green-apple colic.

To speak gravely, the proceedings of Mrs. Campbell and her associates, in their interpretation of M. Maeterlinck's insane drama, revealed a ghastly spectacle of imbecility. Whatsoever things are silly, absurd, and idiotic; whatsoever things are indicative of freakish folly and mental aberration,-all those things concentrate in the fantastic devices and the puerile style of M. Maeterlinck's plays. Some of them, indeed, have no

meaning whatever. In "Pélleas and Mélisande" there is a thread of story, but the thread is so slender, the story so trite, the incident so trivial, and the language assigned to the several interlocutors so insipid that, at last, the patience of even the most tolerant auditor is overwhelmed and exhausted. Disciples of the Maeterlinck Fad have, of course, proclaimed that his prodigious genius aims to instruct mankind by means of "symbols," and that each of his pictures secretes a vast and comprehensive meaning. It may be so; but, to the eye and ear of sense, taking those pictures for what they are, and hearing the twaddle with which they are accompanied, his symbols are about as rationally significant as were the vegetable marrows with which Mrs. Nickleby's lunatic wooer pelted that old lady, across her garden wall.

Description could give no adequate idea of the absurdity of Mrs. Campbell's behavior as Mélisande,a behavior, no doubt, completely warranted by the part, -and only M. Maeterlinck's words can convey an adequate idea of the wretched bathos of which he is capable. One law of the Maeterlinck style appears to be that every platitude spoken shall be spoken twice, and, as almost every speech is a platitude, the iteration soon becomes indeed damnable. Of dramatic art in the representation there was not a trace, except for the acting of Mr. Titheradge, who once or twice succeeded in being impressive, in spite of the ridiculous

situations in which he was placed and the nonsense that he was obliged to speak. In Golaud's scene with a child, for example, he suggested Leontes, in a passage of "The Winter's Tale." Mr. Arliss, in a scene that Gilbert might have devised for Mr. Bunthorne, posed with a row of five old women, all dressed alike, and stated that he had "heard flies crawling on the door" but did not know why it was that he wanted to go down. cellar. Perhaps it was to get some fly-paper-or, possibly, to fetch beer. Mrs. Campbell frequently said that she was "unhappy," but it was not observed that her suffering as Mélisande impeded her in the display of various Burne-Jones gowns or in the assumption of numerous church-window attitudes. The meaning of her impersonation was inscrutable. For the most part, the heroine appeared to be distraught-and a performer who is distraught, in a Maeterlinck play, has only to look fixedly at nothing and to bleat. Obstetrical complications were mentioned as having occurred, toward the close of the farrago; an aged King produced an infant, swathed in wrappings of flannel, and Mrs. Campbell died beautifully, in a beautiful bed. It was all extraordinary, serving one good purpose, however, in denoting a kind of composition and of professional conduct which should be carefully avoided—because nothing is more desirable in drama than a total rejection of freaks and fripperies, and strict allegiance to healthful standards of beauty, simplicity, and truth.

"AUNT JEANNIE."

Mrs. Campbell appeared at the Garden Theatre, New York, on September 16, 1902, in a play called "Aunt Jeannie," by Mr. E. F. Benson, giving an exposition of adroit feminine duplicity and effective blandishments, and pleasing by a clever exhibition of eccentric character and fantastic art. In the person of Aunt Jeannie Mrs. Campbell represented a tempting widow who temporarily tangles herself in a mesh of troubles, by flirting with her niece's betrothed lover, in order to prevent that niece's marriage with a scamp. The widow's purpose is accomplished, but in the pursuit of it she grieves her niece and afflicts her own lover, and, for a time, she suffers the usual consequence of virtuous self-sacrifice. The play, mildly ardent in its episode of allurement, is, in the main, flabby and feeble,—the prolix recital of a sentimental love story,-probably a French novel, and destitute of movement. The story is wildly irrational. There was no need for the widow to resort to the indelicate expedient of flirtation: her scheme is as unnecessary as it is vulgar: and there was not the slightest need of withholding her confidence from the man to whom she has plighted her troth. The motive of Aunt Jeannie's duplicity, however, is a virtuous one, the deceiver, whom she dupes, befools, and exposes, having caused the miserable death of her niece's sister: so that Aunt Jeannie, as a character, is