o present it in a conventional
fashion, for to give a Du Barri or a Napoleon, a Nelson or a Wellington,
not in accordance with the popular concept of such personages would be
to seek failure. Moreover, the writer is necessarily forced to belittle
the subject if not bold enough to take a simple episode in the life of
his hero or heroine, and even then, unless the miracle-working power of
genius is employed, the great figure comes out as a small puppet.

The player may be made to look up like Napoleon, may follow traditions
as to his gestures and mode of speech, but in none of the vast number of
plays concerning the wonderful monster has he ever appeared to be a
person of genius: whether handled facetiously, as in Mr Shaw's ingenious
play _The Man of Destiny_, or _Madame Sans-Gene_, pathetically as in the
play presented by Mr Martin Harvey, or formidably as in most works, he
never seems at all different from any commonplace man put into the like
circumstances. Exactly that in which he differed from all others is
exactly what cannot be put upon the stage. We have had Nelson, and of
course it was quite impassible to get any suggestion of the qualities
that made him Nelson.

The modern tendency in the matter seems to be to choose the
reprehensible--such, for instance, as Mlle. Mars, Madame de Pompadour,
Madame du Barri, and La Montansier, women in the career of whom no doubt
there were many dramas, similar, however, to the dramas in the lives of
other women of their class less famous and infamous. When, however, they
are put upon the stage they cease to be remarkable, and the characters
introduced to support them have the same fate; for instance, the Louis
XV. at the Savoy does not give the faintest idea of the ineffably vile
monarch, whilst no glimpse is shown of the quality which enabled a Du
Barri to obtain her tremendous power.

It is always a case of mountain and mouse in these plays; take as an
example the Sardou _Dante_ play produced with prodigious drum-beating a
while ago at Drury Lane. Who, if names had been altered, would have
guessed that the hero of the piece was the author of the immortal poems?
There has been hardly a historical play in modern times in which the
identity of the famous personages could be guessed except from the
names, the make-up, the costumes, and the specific facts; at the best
the pieces are _tableaux vivants_.

Perhaps there is nothing illegitimate in the ambition of the player to
pose