one assisted at the creation of its people and at the projection of its passions with the intensity usually reserved for the deepest of one's own experiences, and in the theatre one had amazingly the sense of participation in mysteries. The piece was so self-contained, so self-established, that one felt, as in listening to music, a great and justifying hinterland taking shape and movement; and the night watcher of the stars could have had no serener sense of the absolute before him.
Yet of the speech and gesture, the exits and entrances, the attitudes and dialogue of drama, this piece possessed nothing. The eternal conflict of man in the madhouse of the world was there, as it is in every expression of man's life; but the form and structure of conventional drama would have been an impertinence. The stage accepted this piece and was strengthened by it; just as this season it accepted a pageant of history in Abraham Lincoln, or a pageant of poetry in the Medea and in The Faithful. That it has accepted, at the same time, the work of the artists of the theatre who are creating not only a new art, but a new theatre as well, is some indication of the vitality which the theatre still possesses. The attack on the theatre is in reality an attack on its old limitations; it will come as readily from those who recognize beauty in pantomime or dance as from those who find the demoniac vitality of our time in the superb vulgarity of Mr. Jolson. When they ask enough of the theatre, ask specifically that the theatre stop its dance of death and give them these qualities of energy and beauty, the renaissance will be complete. It is certainly beginning.
One does not like to pass the month without some reference to the revival of Florodora, because that production, in addition to being pleasing enough and offering much to the comic genius of George Hassell, is a lesson in the changes of taste which are a little too hastily called progress. This has been an exceptionally unhappy year for musical comedy, in spite of the musicianly scores of Fritz Kreisler and André Messager. Here (and here only) music is not enough; and book is not enough. The work of genius will presumably last for ever, but in the truest sense, a musical comedy must comprehend and satisfy the current temper of its audiences and must hold the mirror up to artifice.
