is as if Augustus Thomas had
called the hero of his best play, not Jack Brookfield, but John Mason. In
the early period of Moliere's art, before he broadened as an actor, the
parts that he wrote for himself were often so much alike from play to play
that he called them by the same conventional theatric name of Mascarille or
Sganarelle, and played them, doubtless, with the same costume and make-up.
Later on, when he became more versatile as an actor, he wrote for himself a
wider range of parts and individualised them in name as well as in nature.
His growth in depicting the characters of young women is curiously
coincident with the growth of his wife as an actress for whom to devise
such characters. Moliere's best woman--Celimene, in _Le Misanthrope_--was
created for Mlle. Moliere at the height of her career, and is endowed with
all her physical and mental traits.

The reason why so many of the Queen Anne dramatists in England wrote
comedies setting forth a dandified and foppish gentleman is that Colley
Cibber, the foremost actor of the time, could play the fop better than he
could play anything else. The reason why there is no love scene between
Charles Surface and Maria in _The School for Scandal_ is that Sheridan knew
that the actor and the actress who were cast for these respective roles
were incapable of making love gracefully upon the stage. The reason why
Victor Hugo's _Cromwell_ overleaped itself in composition and became
impossible for purposes of stage production is that Talma, for whom the
character of Cromwell was designed, died before the piece was finished, and
Hugo, despairing of having the part adequately acted, completed the play
for the closet instead of for the stage. But it is unnecessary to cull from
the past further instances of the direct dependence of the dramatist upon
his actors. We have only to look about us at the present day to see the
same influence at work.

For example, the career of one of the very best endowed theatrical
composers of the nineteenth century, the late Victorien Sardou, has been
molded and restricted for all time by the talents of a single star
performer, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. Under the influence of Eugene Scribe,
Sardou began his career at the Theatre Francais with a wide range of
well-made plays, varying in scope from the social satire of _Nos Intimes_
and the farcical intrigue of _Les Pattes de Mouche_ (known to us in English
as _The Scrap of Paper_) to the tremendous h