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Sheridan's, Wilde's-we are apt to for

get that what we have of them is not the manuscript the playwright first brought to the theater, but the thing as it grew in conference, altered in rehearsal, developed in performance, and finally took form in the prompt-book. Who knows what 'Macbeth' was like when the first rehearsal of it was called?

"Of course the printed classics are ready for the stage. An Ibsen play needs no tinkering. It is not only an expression of genius and a drama technically flawless, but a tried and tested play, already purified by the fire of rehearsal and performance. And yet there 's really no stopping us.' s." Here her voice sank to a stealthy whisper, as though she suspected every little bit of shrubbery of concealing an alert little dramatic critic. "Let me tell you that once I even did a bit of rewriting on Ibsen. In producing 'Hedda Gabler' I transposed two of the speeches! And what is more, no one ever caught me.

"But with the pseudo-Ibsens and the baby Ibsens the director must sometimes labor-labor systematically as he does with the actor-in-the-making. They are not always grateful; but what does that matter? I've never uttered all the burning thoughts I have accumulated on the vanity of one or two authors I have met, and I never will. Once, it is true, I did speak sharply to one of them. He sat contentedly through a performance of his play and then, at the end of the third act, came stormily back upon the stage. He was in a towering rage. The wonderful final speech, he complained, had been slaughtered, fairly slaughtered by the actor speaking it. 'Well, my dear sir,' I said, 'bear up. You did not write it.' "Ah, ha!" I observed, with the accents of a detective.

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"But that happened only once," she explained hurriedly. "Really, it is false, this idea that I have collaborated extensively with the authors who have written for us. I cannot write plays. If I could, I should write them."

I must have looked utterly unconvinced, but she changed the subject.

"After all, why concern ourselves with the authors' vanity when in the theater the vanity that poisons and kills is the vanity of the actor, the egregious vanity of the 'my-part' actor. The director's first business is to guard the interest, to preserve the integrity, of the play. The actor who does not work in this same spirit should be banished. He never should have entered the theater at all. His attitude is wrong. From the beginning he must have approached it in quite the wrong spiritthe spirit that takes, not the spirit that gives. He should be shown the stage-door for good and all without more ado. There are really no terms in which one can discuss this bane of the theater. It simply should not be. Night and day, from the first rehearsal to the hundredth performance, the director should dedicate himself to the utter obliteration of the 'my-part'

actor.

"The 'my-part' actor is the low creature who thinks of every scene in every play in terms of his own rôle. He sacrifices everything to his own precious opportunities. What makes it so hard to suppress him is the fact that he is forever being encouraged. Instead of being shot and fatally wounded by some discerning, but irritable, playgoer, as likely as not he will be rapturously applauded for his sins. The papers next day may report that his was the only performance that 'stood out."' Stood out, indeed, as if that were necessarily a compliment! I remember that the most conspicuous and warmly applauded performance in 'Sumurun' was an outrageously protruding figure that robbed of its proper values the more shy and reticent beauties of the other playing. It 'stood out' like a gaudy lithograph included by mistake in a portfolio of etchings.

"It is so easy for the unthinking to mistake for distinction the 'my-part' actor's protruding from the ensemble. Not at the first glance do we appreciate the lovely reticence of Venice."

"Well," I offered by way of mock consolation, "Wilde was disappointed in the Atlantic Ocean."

"What a dreadful analogy! No, we' need not be supercilious. We may be merely unimpressed by its pastel neutrality. I do not know what we expect; the brave colors of the Grand Cañon, possibly. So it is that we do not always appreciate at first the modest beauty of pastel playing. The lesser actor who tries hard to protrude from the ensemble is guilty of a misdemeanor; but, then, his sin is as nothing compared with the felonious selfassertion of the so-called star who not only basks in the center of the stage at any and all times, but sees to it that no one else in the company shall amount to anything. Thus are plays first twisted out of shape and then cast on the rubbish-heap. I remember once attending receptively the performance of one of our most popular actresses in one of her most popular plays. I was simply appalled by the quality of the company, compared with which she 'stood out' with a vengeance. Finally I saw a passage of exquisite light comedy. intrusted to an actor that the manager of a fifth-rate stock-company would have blushed to have in his employ. At the end of that scene I rose from my seat, made for the open air, and never returned.

"The great people of the theater have indulged in no such degradations. Duse's leading man, Ando, was as good as she was or nearly as good. At least he was the best she could find in all Italy. The companies that came to us with Irving and Terry were artists all."

And whatever they might say of her, I thought, they could never say she was a "my-part" actor who had gathered about her such players as Mr. Mack, Mr. Arliss, Mr. Cartwright, and Mr. Mason, to mention only a few of those who shone in the constellation of the old Manhattan Company.

"Certainly," I said, "when you gave "The Pillars of Society,' the best opportunity was Holbrook Blinn's."

"And when we gave 'Leah Kleschna,' my rôle was the fifth in importance. Do you know, the only dramatic criticism that

ever enraged me was an account of 'Mary of Magdala' that spoke zestfully of Mr. Tyrone Power as 'carrying away the honors of the play,' quite as though it had not been known all along that Mr. Power would carry away the honors of the play, quite as if we had not realized perfectly that the rôle of Judas was the rôle of rôles, quite as though that was not the very reason why Mr. Power was invited to play it. It was too obtuse, too exasperating, yet a common enough point of view in the theater, Heaven knows. It is the point of view of the actor who tries to thrust his own rôle forward, and he should be hissed from the stage. The successful actress who seeks to have in her company any but the very best players to be had should be calmly and firmly wiped out. From morning till night, from June to September, the director must war against the actor's vanity."

Yet how many have treated these familiar phenomena as an essential part of the actor's nature! "If he were n't vain, he would n't be an actor at all." That is the time-honored way of putting it. "Struts and frets his hour"-why, it has always been accepted as part of the thea

ter.

Something to this effect I countered vaguely as I walked toward the runabout which had called for me from the livery in the village below.

"I have no patience whatever with that ancient theory," said Mrs. Fiske. "Actors have been coddled with it entirely too long. They used to say," she added with a mischievous smile-"they used to say that a real newspaper man would always be half drunk.”

"Nous avons changé tout çela," I replied with an accent that cannot be described. The French of Stratford 'at-aboy, perhaps.

"And we must change all this," said Mrs. Fiske, cheerfully. "What shall we do with the 'my-part' actor in our national theater? What was the procedure Mr. F's aunt used to recommend? Oh, yes. "Throw 'im out of the winder.'

(The final article of this series will record some of Mrs. Fiske's observations on great
actors and the essence of acting.-THE EDITOR.)

A

Can We Defend the Panama Canal

in a Crisis?

By A NAVAL EXPERT

FOREIGN naval officer who had been sojourning in the United States remarked on the eve of his departure for his own country, "Keep your eye on America and the Panama Canal." These words were his manner of expressing doubt as to our ability to hold the canal should we ever be involved in war with a great power.

But have n't we fortified the canal with the most modern and largest guns in the world? Have n't forts been erected at both ends, with troops stationed there, and with dry-docks and machine-shops built and under construction? To be sure, these potential values do exist; but they are not enough to enable the canal to carry out any prolonged defense. At each end of the canal modern forts cover the sea-approaches. This means that hostile ships could not sail right up to the canal and begin going through. The forts would keep them away. The only question to their commander is how far must his ships keep away to be out of danger from the forts?

Forts do not move, so the range of the fortress artillery is the answer. The hos tile ships would merely take up positions at sea just beyond this range, say perhaps fifteen or twenty miles, where they would lie and blockade the canal-entrances. The next step would be to attack the canal by land. This would be simple. Hostile troops might land on either shore sufficiently far away to be out of range of our artillery, march inland, and proceed to descend upon the canal somewhere about its middle.

Roughly, the canal is about fifty miles long. Hostile troops moving against it could attack anywhere along this length.

The problem for our commander on the spot would be to hold such a battle-line fifty miles in length against attack from one side. The line to be held would be twice this length were the canal to be attacked from both sides.

It

The reader knows that what we own, or hold through lease rights, in Panama is a ten-mile strip, five miles on each side of the canal. In this day of modern artillery this width is ridiculously narrow. should have been at least ten miles wide on each side. This we could have had for the mere asking, and had a council of national defense existed at the time we acquired the canal strip, endowed with proper powers, its recommendations in the premises would no doubt have had a potent influence in determining this very important question. A wider strip would have enabled us to extend lines out farther than the present five-mile limit. Every reader must have gathered from the news accounts of the present fighting in Europe that the lines of the contending sides have considerable flexibility. Today one reads that the victorious troops of this or that country gained the enemy's trenches for a width of three miles and a depth of one mile. The next day or week the side that lost makes counter-assaults, and often regains part of the lost ground, and so on. This bending in and out of the lines as if they were rubber bands is, after all, only a figure of speech. Lines do not bend. A line-that is, a dug trench-stays where it was dug; but by having a series of these trenches, one after another, and by having plenty of troops in the rear to man them, the equivalent to flexibility is obtained. In other words, the assaulting troops never reach the last

trench; there is always another just beyond that blocks the way.

But in Panama, if we had to do any heavy fighting like that in western Europe, our little five-mile strip would not give great flexibility. In fact, we might find our lines bent right back to the canal in certain places. Another thing to remember is, that though we held a line of trenches, any point in the rear of such line reachable by the enemy's artillery would certainly be destroyed. It must be remembered that the canal strip is clear jungle, with absolutely no frontier protection of forts except the ones at the extreme sea-ends, these being fifty miles apart.

The major part of the Panama Canal is a great lake made by damming the River Chagres to a height of eighty feet above the sea. It is imperative that no artilleryshells fall on this dam or any of the lockgates, for, if these were destroyed, the lake and for that matter, the canal would rush into the sea. The lake requires more than two years to fill, and any material damage to the canal that would let this sheet of water flow out would render the canal useless for the remainder of the war.

If the navy could always be sure of getting to Panama and returning to home waters whenever it pleased, all would be well. There would be no more need to keep one's eyes on Panama than for the English to keep their eyes on the Suez Canal. England controls the entrance to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with dominant sea-power, and the canal passes through country that in a way is her dependent or far from the base of strong enemies. The reason for this is that as a sea route can be kept open by naval strength only, such naval strength must be able to defeat any force it encounters on this route. If it can do this, the logical inference follows that it can defeat any force at the end of its route, and thus keep the canal open by the very fact of its existence.

Suppose we were at war with a Pacific power, and its objective seemed to be the canal. Suppose in addition that some

strong European power were to take a menacingly neutral attitude toward us, as has grown to be fashionable in this war. Greece's attitude toward the Entente powers, and Bulgaria's toward the Central powers for the two years before she entered the war, are examples. Such a power could have an agreement with our Pacific enemy to ply us with questions of one sort or another just at the time that the Pacific power was ready to launch an expedition. toward the canal, so as to cause us to be in great doubt as to whether this European power was going to break with us or not. No sane naval board would despatch its fleet to Panama in such circumstances; it would be suicidal. There is no need to multiply examples; we might be at war with an Atlantic and Pacific power at the same time, or with two or more Atlantic powers. The combinations are numerous where it would be strategically unwise to despatch the fleet to the canal. Nor is it ever wise to concentrate a fleet at a port like Panama, deficient in certain resources, with the risk of fighting a battle, unless we are sure of having such superior strength as to make winning a certainty.

Of course, aside from the idea of sending the main fleet, there is the possibility of stationing submarines at the canal for its defense. But while they would give a certain amount of protection, it is far from settled that they could prevent hostile landing operations. In fact, we need only recall the Gallipoli enterprise, where an army was landed and again embarked, notwithstanding that Turkey had submarines and Germany successfully sent additional ones, which, though they succeeded in sinking a few Entente ships, were not able to jeopardize in any way the main operations. To think, therefore, that by stationing a few submarines at the canal its safety would be secured is indeed to build on sand.

From this we see that the very moment our fleet finds itself unable to reach the canal readily Panama becomes an isolated. station or stronghold, and, if seriously attacked, is doomed to fall. As a rule, a wolf hunting far in advance of the pack

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United States war-ships in the Pedro Miguel locks of the Panama Canal, Panama

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