tain an illusion. The situations in which Mrs. Voysin is placed largely contribute to the creation of effect upon the feelings of the spectator, but the actress supplied a continuity of performance that enforced the effect. A slight impediment in her speech constrained her to an obvious effort of articulation, and, especially in the denotement of passionate anguish, it led to some contortion of the face. The peculiarly exacting passages in the part of Mrs. Voysin are those in which the guilty woman, in the midnight colloquy with her husband, strives to maintain an appearance of ease and gayety and later makes her confession. It is essential that an actress should indicate,-not to her interlocutor on the scene, but to her audience,-that beneath her guise of gayety she is suffering with terrible apprehension and remorse; and, in the making of her confession of theft, which is bitterly shameful, she ought not to be glib. The confession is torn from her heart, and it should struggle through her utterance. Fluency of speech, apparent sequence of thought, ingenuity of reasoning are expedients to be avoided. Sincere feeling, in situations of agony, does not find facile utterance. There is an instructive stage tradition relative to Edmund Kean, that when he spoke the curse of Brutus upon Tarquin he seemed to rend it out of his throat as well as out of his heart.

"THE EASIEST WAY.”

"Truth is never gentle," says one of the speakers in the drama called "The Easiest Way," by Mr. Eugene Walter, which was performed for the first time in New York at the Stuyvesant Theatre (now, 1912, the Belasco), and which was seen and heard by a numerous assemblage that did not appear to be either edified by its commonplace ethical deliverance or shocked by the blatant impropriety of its theme. Aphorisms relative to truth are readily manufactured, and they have been supplied with profuse liberality by the makers and purveyors of tainted theatrical trash. The truth about Mr. Walter's play,-a composition which, while not particularly clever in any respect, is both specious in its reasoning and offensive in its substance and has enjoyed a wide popularity and much approval,—would be anything but gentle, if fully expressed. Respect for good taste, however, enjoins a decent reserve in discussion of sexual immorality. The story of the play is the story of episodes in the life of a courtesan. The position assumed, by implication, if not openly, by Mr. Walter, a professional dramatist, and, apparently, ratified by Mr. Belasco, also a professional dramatist and, still further, a theatrical manager of great experience and influence, declares that "the easiest way" in which a woman can obtain and hold a position on the stage and live in luxury off it is the way which lies through

the sacrifice of her chastity. And that impartment is tagged with the "moral lesson," so wonderfully fresh and striking!-that "the easiest way" will, at last, prove to be the hardest way, ending in misery, a wasted life, and a broken heart. That is the ethical meaning of the play, if it possesses any ethical meaning, and therefore it is a play which could have no other effect than to confirm in many minds, because of the managerial source from which it comes, an impression that the Theatre is an immoral institution.

Persons who obtain their subsistence by means of the Theatre might be better employed than in defaming the means whereby they live. To declare, as incidentally is done, that the female members of the dramatic profession who may happen to be pursued, with evil purpose, by wealthy, licentious men should repel such blackguards is only to declare a platitude. To say that young women should be virtuous and should live decently is only to state a truism with which all young women are familiar. The assurance that youth in poverty, particularly female youth,-is youth environed by trying circumstances can scarcely be deemed a novel contribution to contemporaneous knowledge. There was no need of either a drama by Mr. Walter or a sermon by Mr. Belasco to inculcate those truths. The persons, whether off the stage or connected with it, who live licentious lives do so because, as a rule, they prefer to do so; not because of those illuminations in