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HERE never was any truth in the statement that real art cannot be popular. It is the invention of minds too small to take the correct measurements of other minds. Most caterers in esthetic pleasures have no understanding of their publics.

Real public taste is not to be confounded with the popularity of the tone concoctions of an unlettered East-Side boy or the ten-thousand-dollar-prize scenario of the little village stenographer. It is true, though, that these deformities strike more surely the popular mood. The things they stand for are the things the popular mind dreams of. It is like running across some old friends from home or those of one's own blood. One warms up to them, taking them for what they are, and asking no questions. But one does not necessarily say that they are the finest in the world and that there could be no wish for anything better.

The fortunes of "L'Enfant Prodigue"

at the Little Theater in New York will prove whether the public knows a really good thing when it sees it. At the moment of writing it is not possible to gage these. Still, seeing that the play had had a run of one hundred and fifty nights in London, one may venture to forecast for it a still longer run here. This, of course, is tantamount to saying that New York's audiences, or spectators, one would rather say in the matter of "Pierrot the Prodigal," stand on a higher level than London's. That is true. The mentality of a public is known by the magazines it reads, and the English magazines are almost as far behind ours as ours are behind what they might be.

But let us dispense with criterions and comparisons. Here we have for basic facts that the audiences at the Little Theater know precisely when art is art and not burlesque. In certain situations there is less than a step between the two. The mind does not have to wander anywhere

from the one to the other. It is all in the eye; it is just how you look. You see what you look for, and thereby will you be judged. Now, the houses at "Pierrot" have proved that audiences know how to look for the right thing in the right place at the right moment.

Miss Marjory Patterson as Pierrot

Pierrot sits down to write a love-letter. He throws up his head, and with quill in mouth sits and thinks and thinks. He puts the quill to paper, but only for a moment; back the thing goes to his mouth, and he thinks again. Three or four times this is repeated. Then he lets himself go. The pen travels over the paper at a furious rate; the arm works straight from the shoulder, the head and body joining in rhythmic motion. Presently the writingtable also goes. It moves away from un

der the writer's hand. He hastens after it, continuing to write all the time. Again. the table moves away, and again he chases it, without a break in the writing. And now comes the marvel of marvels: there is not a titter from the audience. They sit inspired with a rare reverence. They see it all. They know that it is not done for the sake of making the table move, but that the table cannot help moving under the tremendous impetus, the onrush of thought and emotion. They see it all very clearly, and they sit with bated breath. It holds them in a spell. Here was not only just one more young lover writing just one more love-letter, but it was young love writing the love-letter. It was the love-letter visualized. Perhaps it would be said that the fine music accompanying the action helped the people to understand it. Let that be so, by all means. It doubly confirms the truth that there is a ready public for real art. It is clear that a public that can be talked to in music must needs have a decent understanding of art values.

Another scene of large significance, and equally running the risk of being turned into a cheap laugh where it fails of appreciation, occurs in the second act, when Pierrot and his Phrynette are settled in their dove-cote in the big city. The bills begin to come in after a time in the form of great strips of paper of the size of parlor rugs. No items are mentioned, no figures are flaunted to the eye, so many hundred francs for a dress, so many for a hat; but it is the visualization of a woman's extravagance, a thing of all time and every clime. And this scene again was duly honored by the house. They understood it; they never laughed.

Here, then, in "Pierrot the Prodigal" we have true art in that it deals not only with things, but with the significance of them. We had so learned to center our admiration on photographic minuteness of externals and adjuncts, as exemplified by the Belasco stagings, that we had forgotten what art was, forgotten that there was art. A writer in a medical journal finds a flaw in "The Boomerang," because in the

doctor's office in that play he cannot see a sphygmomanometer.

The poignancy and largeness of the art in "Pierrot the Prodigal" lie, of course, in the fact that it is a pantomime. It is the delight of art to dispense with labels, as it is of the goddess to dispense with linen. Venus petticoated could not be herself. Art under labels could not be art. In "Pierrot the Prodigal," in which not a word is spoken or a voice ever once raised, art is wholly itself all the way. It is art untrammeled, and such is its wizardry that by bare suggestion it calls things into being, together with the soul of things, or, as Herder and Carlyle would say it, the divine idea underlying them. A look, a pose, and we have a whole character, a whole story, and a big one.

We know at once it is a love-sick youth when Pierrot rises from the meal he cannot eat to look out through the window, on the alert for the sight of somebody. Presently, when that somebody comes in, in the person of the dainty little laundry. maid, we know from the poise of her head and the roll of her eye as Pierrot kneels at her feet in supplication what a heartless, supercilious jade she is. And there never was such a tale of parental sorrow for an erring youth as we get from the father and mother of Pierrot over their evening meal after he had stolen their savings and run away with that worthless coquette. They cannot eat. There is no room for food, with so many tears choking them. And then the most powerful presentation comes in the scene toward the end, when, disillusioned, dishonored, ragged, and bedraggled, Pierrot crawls back home to seek the forgiveness of his parents. As the youthful figure kneels, with head bent. and arms outstretched into space, while the stern and unyielding father stands with his back turned, there is the very embodiment of penitence, grief, and longing. These emotions are not merely expressed, but they are there themselves. In that pose, at least, Miss Marjory Patterson, who plays the part of Pierrot, approaches the heights trodden by the Russian dan

cers.

given with the program. They do not need the words. They see in that providential accommodation a reflection on their intelligence, in the first instance, and then it mars the pleasure of their own intelligent following of the play.

And now to forget for a moment that "L'Enfant Prodigue" is the creation of a fine French mind, to forget that it is different from all other plays in that it is a pantomime, and to take it only by its story values, we get at still another truth. And that is, that it is not always the preten

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Amos Cosgrove met Billy Lunt on the Shore Road, and drew him in under the lee of the rigging-loft, out of the wind.

"Billy," he said, coming at once to the point, "th' ain't no two ways about ityou've got to reform."

Startled, Billy looked up.

"Reform?" he repeated blankly.

"That's what I said," replied Captain Amos, with great firmness; "an', what 's more, you ain't got no time to lose. I ain't goin' to set by in silence an' see no foreigner run off with one of our best girls if I can help it. You git busy."

Billy was a young sailor, home for the winter, with the understanding that he was to become master of his father's barque when she returned to port in the spring, and he had utilized his holiday by falling under the spell of Lydia Bascom, a niece whom Captain Amos's housekeeper, Mrs. Bascom, had invited over from Mount Horeb for a long visit. All had gone well until late in December, when a young man named Harding had come into port in charge of Captain Azariah Baker's big schooner. He had remained, finding in Blackwater, with Lydia, an attractiveness that far outshone the rest of the habitable globe. To Captain Amos the situation seemed ominous. Billy was a clean-minded, good-looking young man whom every one liked, and to most people, as to Billy himself, the idea of reformation in connection with him would have seemed ridiculous; but Captain Amos had his own ideas of life, and no one had ever doubted his shrewdness.

"It does beat all nation," he went on musingly, "how good, nice-minded young girls will pass the straight sticks by an' pick up the crooked ones. You can see with half an eye that them tall yarns that

agination, an' she 's set him up on a pinnacle, so to speak, for bein' what any man would know he ain't. He 's just a plain, common liar, Billy, an' a man that 's that is hopeless. I 'm some worried. Now, that 's the p'int I'm makin' now: you 've got to beat him at his own game-be a leetle mite more of a bad man than him. You can't split tacks with that sort o' critter when it comes to women: you got to beat 'em tack for tack. So I say you 've got to reform.”

"That 's what I'd call reforming backward," said Billy, with a doleful smile, "if I've got to brag and lie about things I've never done or seen."

"Jus' so," replied Captain Amos, coolly; "you 've got my p'int exact'." For half an hour he explained his brilliant idea in detail, and at the close added: "Now, mind: be open 's the day, an' don't hide nothin' "he smiled slightly- "'T won't hurt you none. Jus' beat him at his own game, like I said. You can do it; you ain't got no facts to hamper you. Of course you don't have to lie outright; jus' hint at some things an' be pretty familiar with others. It'll come easy when you git in the swing of it. An' I 'll work one end, an' kind o' lead you on. Come up to-night, an' le' 's see how it works."

THERE was about Billy a new and unfamiliar air when he entered Captain Amos's living-room that evening-a suggestion of swagger that was wholly unlike his usual quiet demeanor. He greeted Harding, who was already there, with a heartiness that surprised that young gentleman and made him vaguely uneasy, accustomed as he was to Billy's ordinarily cool manner. Captain Amos was leaning back in a chair, with his feet on the stove, and Mrs. Bascom, Lydia, and her friend