visible soldier and an inarticulate ghost was neither enlivening nor terrifying. It would have been as hard to laugh as to shudder in the face of such tedious loquacity.
We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable of the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh, weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations of the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck's "Intruder" was played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia, they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for these varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented, degenerates swiftly into farce—into very bad farce, too, as Swift said of the vulgar malignities of fate.
The Dublin players brought to this
