ural pauses,
intervals of silence,--moments when few words are spoken and much mental
struggle is supposed to take place," finding these methods "especially
effective at critical junctures." Perhaps no other modern dramatist
relies so frankly upon sheer pantomime as Mr. Gillette does; and,
certainly, no other has ever made a more skilful use of it. But the
tendency can be observed in all our later playwrights, and it will
surely increase as the possibilities of the picture-stage come to be
better understood.

What the stage-manager is forever striving to attain, in addition to
these salient effects, is variety of impression. He seeks to achieve a
harmony of tone and to create an intangible atmosphere, in which the
spirit of the play shall be revealed. To secure this, he often calls in
the aid of music. When Sir Henry Irving produced 'Much Ado about
Nothing,' the note of joyous comedy that echoed and reechoed thruout the
performance, was sustained by sparkling rhythms, old English
dance-tunes, most of them, that frolicked gaily thru the evening. In Mr.
Belasco's production of the 'Darling of the Gods,' the accompanying
music was almost incessant, but so subdued, so artfully modulated, so
delicately adjusted to the action, that perhaps a majority of the
audience was wholly unconscious of the three Japanese themes which had
been insisted upon again and again. To evoke the atmosphere of Japan as
soon as possible, Mr. Belasco also had a special curtain designed for
the play, which co-operated with the exotic music to bring about a
feeling of vague remoteness and of brooding mystery.

But all these effects, audible or visible, may be resented as mere
stage-tricks, unless they really belong where they are put, unless they
are intimately related to the main theme of the play, and unless they
are really helpful in evoking and sustaining the current of sympathy.
They are excrescences if they exist for their own sake only; they are
still worse if they interfere with this current of sympathy, if they
distract attention to themselves. The stage-manager must ever be on his
guard against the danger of sacrificing the major to the minor, and of
letting some little effect of slight value in itself interfere with the
true interest of the play as a whole. At the first performance of Mr.
Bronson Howard's 'Shenandoah,' the opening act of which ends with the
firing of the shot on Sumter, there was a wide window at the back of the
set, so t