eir general
conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin
Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, _The Exile_. It is useless
to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,
unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape
and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience
wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and
uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the
playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like
Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a
new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be
dramatically acceptable.[5] But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and
Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only
he failed to act "in a concatenation according."

There are a few figures in history--and Napoleon is one of them--which
so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage,
better, perhaps, than their bodily presence. In _L'Aiglon_, by M.
Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his
far-off island, under the Southern Cross. Another such figure is Abraham
Lincoln. In James Herne's sadly underrated play, _Griffith Davenport_,
we were always conscious of "Mr. Lincoln" in the background; and the act
in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions
to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it
gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit,
without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of
representation. There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under
the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the
influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I
remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau,
wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the
multitude. The execution of _Ben Hur_ is crude and commonplace, but the
conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest
rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one
personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of
anti-climax.

The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his
accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of t