ead a reflective soliloquy without seeming in the least unnatural.

Modern methods of lighting, as we have seen, have carried the actor away
from the centre of the stage, so that now important business is often done
far from the footlights. This tendency has led to further innovations.
Actors now frequently turn their backs to the audience,--a thing unheard of
before the advent of the Drama of Illusion; and frequently, also, they do
their most effective work at moments when they have no lines to speak.

But the present tendency toward naturalness of representment has, to some
extent, exaggerated the importance of stage-management even at the expense
of acting. A successful play by Clyde Fitch usually owed its popularity,
not so much to the excellence of the acting as to the careful attention of
the author to the most minute details of the stage picture. Fitch could
make an act out of a wedding or a funeral, a Cook's tour or a steamer deck,
a bed or an automobile. The extraordinary cleverness and accuracy of his
observation of those petty details that make life a thing of shreds and
patches were all that distinguished his method from that of the
melodramatist who makes a scene out of a buzz-saw or a waterfall, a
locomotive or a ferryboat. Oftentimes the contemporary playwright follows
the method suggested by Mr. Crummles to Nicholas Nickleby, and builds his
piece around "a real pump and two washing-tubs." At a certain moment in the
second act of _The Girl of the Golden West_ the wind-storm was the real
actor in the scene, and the hero and the heroine were but mutes or audience
to the act.

This emphasis of stage illusion is fraught with certain dangers to the art
of acting. In the modern picture-play the lines themselves are often of
such minor importance that the success or failure of the piece depends
little on the reading of the words. Many young actors, therefore, cannot
get that rigid training in the art of reading which could be secured in the
stock companies of the generation past. Poor reading is the one great
weakness of contemporary acting. I can think of only one actor on the
American stage to-day whose reading of both prose and verse is always
faultless. I mean Mr. Otis Skinner, who secured his early training playing
minor parts with actors of the "old school." It has become possible, under
present conditions, for young actresses ignorant of elocution and unskilled
in the first principles of impersonation to