of the 'Bells' was due to the very
adroit handling of the single ray of light that illumined the haunted
burgomaster, while the persons who peopled his fatal dream were left in
the shadow, indistinct and doubtful. Perhaps the most moving moment in
Mrs. Fiske's production of Paul Heyse's 'Mary of Magdala' was after
night had fallen, and when the betrayer knocked at the door of
_Caiaphas_, who came forth with a lantern and cast its rays full on the
contorted face of the villain,--that face being the sole object visible
on the darkened stage, as the _High Priest_ hissed forth the single
word, "Judas!"

The expert playwright of every period when the drama has flourished
abundantly, has always adjusted the structure of his play to conform to
the conditions of the theater of his own time; and the more adroit of
the dramatists of to-day have been swift to perceive the necessity for a
change of method, since the thrust-out platform has been succeeded by
the stage behind the picture-frame. They are relinquishing the
rhetorical devices which were proper enough on the platform-stage, and
which now seem out of place on the picture-stage. They find their profit
in accepting as a principle the old saying that "actions speak louder
than words." They are abandoning the confidential soliloquy, for
example, which was quite in keeping with the position of an actor in
close proximity to the spectators,--in the midst of them, in fact,--and
which strikes us as artificial and unnatural now that the actor is
behind the mystic line of the curtain. They are giving up the
explanatory "aside,"--lines spoken directly to the audience, and
supposed to be unheard by the other characters on the stage.

In Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's artfully articulated play, 'Mrs. Dane's
Defence,' a most ingenious specimen of story-telling on the stage, the
harassed heroine, left alone at a crucial moment, did not express her
emotion in a soliloquy, as she would have done even fifty years ago. She
revealed her agitation solely by the sudden change of her expression and
by her feverish movements, which not only betrayed her anxiety, but were
really more eloquent than any mere words were likely to be. Even more
remarkable examples of the skill with which significant action may be
substituted for speech, can be found in 'Secret Service'; and Mr.
Gillette has explained that, in the performance of his own plays, he is
"in the habit of resorting largely to the effects of nat