m modern
France; at least so held Mr. Yeats, pointing to such a source in
"Samhain" of 1902.

The other day [he writes] I saw Sara Bernhardt and DeMax in
"Phedre," and understood where Mr. Fay, who stage-manages the
National Theatrical Company, had gone for his model. For long
periods the performers would merely stand and pose, and I once
counted twenty-seven quite slowly before anybody on a fairly
well-filled stage moved, as it seemed, so much as an eyelash. The
periods of stillness were generally shorter, but I frequently
counted seventeen, eighteen, or twenty before there was a movement.
I noticed, too, that the gestures had a rhythmic progression. Sara
Bernhardt would keep her hands clasped over, let us say, her right
breast for some time, and then move them to the other side,
perhaps, lowering her chin till it touched her hands, and then,
after another long stillness, she would unclasp them and hold one
out, and so on, not lowering them till she had exhausted all the
gestures of uplifted hands. Through one long scene DeMax, who was
quite as fine, never lifted his hand above his elbow, and it was
only when the emotion came to its climax that he raised it to his
breast. Beyond them stood a crowd of white-robed men who never
moved at all, and the whole scene had the nobility of Greek
sculpture, and an extraordinary reality and intensity. It was the
most beautiful thing I had ever seen upon the stage, and made me
understand, in a new way, that saying of Goethe's which is
understood everywhere but in England, "Art is art because it is not
nature." Of course, our amateurs were poor and crude beside those
great actors, perhaps the greatest in Europe, but they followed
them as well as they could, and got an audience of artisans, for
the most part, to admire them for doing it.

With these words of Mr. Yeats, written ten years ago, in my memory, it
was arresting to hear ten years later a somewhat similar comparison of
the acting of the Irish Players to the acting of yesterday on the French
stage. A man who in the late eighties and early nineties had spent
seven years as an art student in Paris saw the Abbey Players in Boston.
In Paris he had gone frequently to the Theatre Francais, and only there,
he said, before he saw the Irish Players, had he seen acting so full of
dignity, but never at