ur play, Coq; it can't be; the young duke is running away
with it, and I can't stop him; Flambeau is but a secondary figure after
all. What shall I do?" And Coquelin, who understood him, answered, "Take it
to Sarah; she has just played Hamlet, and wants to do another boy." So M.
Rostand "took it to Sarah," and finished up the duke with her in view,
while in the background the figure of Flambeau scowled upon him over
_grandes moustaches_--a true _grognard_ indeed! Thus it happened that
Coquelin never played the part of Flambeau until he came to New York with
Mme. Sarah Bernhardt in the fall of 1900; and the grenadier conceived in
the Porte St. Martin first saw the footlights in the Garden Theatre.

But the contemporary English-speaking stage furnishes examples just as
striking of the influence of the actor on the dramatist. Sir Arthur Wing
Pinero's greatest heroine, Paula Tanqueray, wore from her inception the
physical aspect of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Many of the most effective dramas
of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones have been built around the personality of Sir
Charles Wyndham. The Wyndham part in Mr. Jones's plays is always a
gentleman of the world, who understands life because he has lived it, and
is "wise with the quiet memory of old pain." He is moral because he knows
the futility of immorality. He is lonely, lovable, dignified, reliable, and
sound. By serene and unobtrusive understanding he straightens out the
difficulties in which the other people of the play have wilfully become
entangled. He shows them the error of their follies, preaches a
worldly-wise little sermon to each one, and sends them back to their true
places in life, sadder and wiser men and women. In order to give Sir
Charles Wyndham an opportunity to display all phases of his experienced
gentility in such a character as this, Mr. Jones has repeated the part in
drama after drama. Many of the greatest characters of the theatre have been
so essentially imbued with the physical and mental personality of the
actors who created them that they have died with their performers and been
lost forever after from the world of art. In this regard we think at once
of Rip Van Winkle. The little play that Mr. Jefferson, with the aid of Dion
Boucicault, fashioned out of Washington Irving's story is scarcely worth
the reading; and if, a hundred years from now, any student of the drama
happens to look it over, he may wonder in vain why it was so beloved, for
many, many years,