the play counts for
most in point of strength and opportunity.

A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with wonder and with awe
at the perplexity of life, seeking a solution of things by means of
the dream, as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first
to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be
loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly
of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the
neophyte--the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness
of things real and temporal--vision and memory counting for all there
is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who
shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of
Peter into the drawing-room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a
boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent spices and herbs, and
of actions so alien to his own? We are given at this moment the
keynote of mastery in delicate suggestion, which never fails
throughout the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side of
symbolism and mystical insinuation.

One sits with difficulty through many of the moments, the literary
quality of them is so wretched. They cloy the ear, and the mind that
has been made sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of
stimulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, a cold
method--against a background of what could have been overheated acting
or at least a superabundance of physical attack--the warmth of the
play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them with a still
spiritual ardor which is their very essence, extracting all the
delicate nuances and arranging them with a fine sense of proportion.
It is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one can imagine. For
it is not given to many to act with this degree of whiteness, devoid
of off colorings or alien tones. This performance of Barrymore in its
spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, and intelligence, has not
been equaled for me since I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and
Eleonora Duse.

It is to be at once observed that here is a keen pictorial mind, a
mind which visualizes perfectly for itself the chiaroscuro aspects of
the emotion, as well as the spiritual, for Barrymore gives them with
an almost unerring felicity, and rounds out the portrayal which in any
other hands would suffer, but Barrymore has the special power to feel
the value of reticence in all go