actor but a great stage-manager and great business man as well. In the latter capacity he showed his genius even before he appeared on our stage by making a careful study of theatrical conditions here and of the tastes and prejudices of our playgoers. In his production of plays he spent money lavishly, and he showed his respect for his public by giving as finished a performance in the smallest town as he did on a first night in New York. In other words, he conducted his affairs like a business man of intelligence and integrity and not as a mountebank, and the public responded by paying his highscaled prices without a murmur.

The theatrical gambler of to-day follows methods which, though distinctly uncommerical, are called Commercial by the philosophers of the "Hoot-Owl" school of thought. I do not know by what means he guesses at the value of the dramas that he produces unless it be that he "hefts" them with judicial hand after the manner of an actor "hefting" his part to see if it is a long one. I do know, however, that he places his new productions in a row like a string of race-horses and puts his money on the one that first forges ahead.

"But," cries Academic Thought, "how is the merit of a play affected by the number of persons who pay to see it? Some of the greatest books in the world have not sold well at first, and some have never sold. Some of the best pictures receive no attention whatever until the hand that painted them has ceased to work. Are not plays to be judged by the same rules?"

This brings us to the milk in the cocoanut. It is quite true that the value of a book is not affected by the number of its purchasers and that the merit of a picture remains the same until its colors fade, but in the theatre the audience is literally a part of the play, representing, in the opinion of experienced men, an equation of one-third. To obtain the highest artistic results in a dramatic representation it is necessary to have a paying audience that fills every portion of the theatre. It takes a Commercial manager to get this audience together. It is impossible to make benches laugh, and deadheads have but little better sense of humor than benches. It is impossible for even the wisest man

ager to predict the popularity of a play by reading the manuscript, and it frequently happens that a finished dress rehearsal fails to give him the information he so anxiously desires. Mr. Palmer told me that once, at the close of a dress rehearsal, he said in reply to the query of one of his actors: "What do I think of this play? I think it is the worst piece of rot I have ever listened to in my life, and I believe that I am on the eve of the greatest failure of my career." That was the prejudgment of one of the most thoughtful and successful managers of his generation of a play called "Jim, the Penman," with Agnes Booth in the cast!

I asked Charles Frohman once what salary he would be willing to pay a man who could determine with absolute infallibility the drawing powers of a play by simply reading the manuscript. To this query Mr. Frohman promptly made answer: "I trust that such a man will never show himself in the business, for he would rob theatricals of the element of uncertainty which I find so fascinating, and compel me to seek some other means of livelihood."

About a third of a century ago I was present at the dress rehearsal of what I still regard as the most brilliant comic opera of our time, presented before an audience of invited guests made up of critics, managers, actors, singers, and even a few of those birds of ill-omen, theatrical costumers, who in those days used to hover about dubious theatrical enterprises like so many banshees. The first act went without a laugh, and at the close of the performance opinion was divided among those experts as to whether the next night would see complete failure or stupendous success. On every hand I saw heads wagging doubtfully and heard voices wail that the piece was "above the heads of the public." (I have yet to hear fear expressed that a piece is "below the feet of the public.") The next night I saw the same performance given before a house filled with paying spectators, who are the only persons capable of judging an entertainment, and by the time the curtain fell on the first act we all realized that "Patience" was achieving a tremendous success and was not above anybody's head. The truth was also borne in upon

me that paying spectators could laugh even if benches and deadheads could not. And I will remark that in both these instances that I have named the ticket-rack was quick to register the verdict that neither managers nor experts could obtain for themselves.

If the Critic of the Box-Office is not to be depended on, show me a single drama that has won his approval that did not possess some very great merit, even if its faults were glaring. Boil down "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a paste-pot-and-shears version of a book that is no longer read, dealing with a theme that has ceased to vex our politics. It is a play that staggers under half a century of ridicule, but we have only to skim off its absurdities and non-essentials to find in the bottom of the retort a nugget of the pure gold of drama in the form of one of the greatest dramatic themes of all time-the selling of a man's body without selling his soul. It is not academic thought but the suffrage of a vast number of unsophisticated people that has enabled this play to bring back more actors to Broadway than any other attraction that ever went out on the road. At the risk of being called unsophisticated myself, I lift my voice in its praise. I will even go further and maintain that the introduction of the apocryphal tableau representing Little Eva and the faithful slave in heaven was a stroke of artistic and commercial genius on the part of some inventive fakir who has long since, I hope, gone to join them both in the world beyond. It was artistic because this fakir knew that the audience must be sent home happy and consoled after the sight of so much suffering. It was commercial because he wished his auditors to come again-which they did.

Another play for which the democracy has been casting its ballots for nearly half a century, as recorded on thousands of ticket-racks, is "Ten Nights in a Barroom." Put that in the retort, and what do we find in the shape of real drama? The great, world-wide domestic tragedy of drunkenness.

To speak of entertainments of a higher order of appeal, though lacking in the power to rouse the elemental passions of simple-minded folk, I may quote the boxoffice criticism of "Ben-Hur" and "The

Music Master," the two great successes of recent years, both of which are still playing to enormous audiences.

"Ben-Hur" was first produced November 29, 1899, at the Broadway Theatre, in New York, and during the first eighteen weeks of its engagement the line of voters at the box-office was never broken between eight in the morning and ten at night. Up to December, 1916, the play has been presented 5,446 times to gross receipts of $7,572,543, to an attendance of more than 11,405,400 people.

"The Music Master" was first presented in the autumn of 1904, at the Bijou Theatre, in New York, and during the twelve years that followed, although it has not been produced continuously all that time, three million auditors have paid as many dollars to see it. Three years after its first presentation it was given at the Academy of Music for four weeks, to gross receipts of $97,967.50.

All of these entertainments are regarded by thinkers of the "Hoot-Owl" school as "mere box-office successes,” for theirs is a philosophy that considers only the manager's profits and never takes into account the other side of the window where the voters stand in unbroken line waiting for a chance to register their opinions on the ticket-rack, nor the enormous amount of clean, wholesome entertainment that they have received for their money. And in that very quality of cleanliness every one of these dramas accurately reflects the taste of the American public.

I do not pretend for a moment that these audiences are made up exclusively of the so-called "educated" classes, but it is those learned in life rather than in books who really love the drama and can tell the difference between good acting and bad. Just now the academic mind is supplying us with an immense number of books dealing with the stage, and of all those that have been written since Commercialism became a crime I have read scarcely one that was not penned by the hand of ignorance. The Gospel that nearly all of them preach is that the righteous manager should produce dramas that nobody wishes to see instead of sinking into the slough of Commercialism with those that fill his theatre.

boat's deck as are flowers by the wayside from a carriage. Bending cocoanut-palms were strangely like their photographs, but the feel of a winter's sun soaking warmth on our shoulder-blades was a curious surprise.

There was an ugly tin-roofed customshed and a beautiful pink-walled customhouse with shutters terra-cotta color, its open door inky black in the brilliant light. Little groups of men were on the dock dressed in white clothes and speaking in the crisp accents of England. About them were a great number of negroes

wearing ragged garments weathered into hues of quality. They were meeting the boat with two-wheeled, unpainted carts to which were harnessed, mainly with rope, the smallest, most disreputable horses in the world, or sad and drooping donkeys. Above were the branches of strange, feathery cedar-trees; underfoot an unfamiliar sandy white earth.

For we had sailed down New York Bay and in due course arrived at Nassau in the Bahamas! The gentleman who had been asked to look out for us told the stuttering black truckman, with his absurd cart and horse, and the bowing black hack-driver where to take us, and just how much incomprehensible English currency we were going to pay them.

We were driven into shimmering white streets dotted with figures almost lost in the sunlight, save for negro necks and arms and feet. An old black woman was passed who carried two long, crooked green sticks jointed like bamboo. "That must be sugar-cane," we said together. In a shop-window at the corner were for sale two unused, new, muzzle-loading shotguns. The walls of the shop were yellow, and by its windows and doors hung blue-green shutters of heavy panelled wood. Masses of purple blossoms

hung over a beautiful sagging gate. We drove beside a thick, high wall of gray stone which had been painted with various pigments now weathered into thin washes of faded color. There was no dust and an extraordinary absence of odor. Nothing smelled at all either good or bad. Negroes suddenly seemed to have the only proper complexion. They fitted into the environment and the whites were out of color value.

We came into a house with a cool, shadowed porch completely shuttered with permanent shutters which the people there call "jalousies." Outside the open windows glared a more brilliant daylight than our summer afternoons. Against the garden wall blazed scarlet blossoms we learned to know as hibiscus. There was a new sound in the air-the shuffle of bare feet on the road outside. A trim and saucy little lizard, quite soberly clad in gray, whisked into sight by the window, ceased to move, then bowed politely three times and blew out a yellow pouch on his throat. We were duly welcomed to the edge of the tropics. Our next acquaintance was a royal palm, which grew in the garden across the way, where two rooms we hoped to occupy were being indolently whitewashed by an antique negro well