s and the Man_ and _The Devil's Disciple_, had been acted in
America by Richard Mansfield before the end of the century.

Considering these plays now, and their effect upon me--and not
forgetting, either, the passionate admiration, almost the worship, we
young men of twenty had in those days for the acting of Mrs. Fiske--it
would be easy to infer that the whole period of the Nineties for us
youngsters was a period of revolt and forward-urging, that we were
crusaders for what Henry Arthur Jones called "the great realities of
modern life" in art. Crusaders we were, to be sure. I well remember
long debates with my father, a man of old-fashioned tastes in poetry,
and a particular fondness for Burns, over the merits of Kipling's
poems. (Think of considering Kipling's poems revolutionary! Indeed,
think of considering some of them poems!). We debated from still more
divergent viewpoints over the novels of d'Annunzio. In college, in my
last year or two, some of us even adopted the views of Tolstoy in his
_What is Art?_ and under the urge of this new sociological passion we
took volunteer classes in night schools. I remember instructing a
group of Jewish youths in the principles of oral debate, or, rather,
debating the principles of debating with them, for being unblessed
with an expensive preparatory school and college education, and being
Jews into the bargain, they did not propose to take anything on faith.
I used to return to my room in the college Yard wondering just why it
was that these working lads, mere "foreigners", of a race infinitely
inferior, of course, to the Anglo-Saxon, and without the precious boon
of a Harvard training, had so much more real intellectual curiosity
and mental grasp than any of us "superior" youths. These classes
interfered seriously with my academic work, yet it seems to me now
that they were infinitely more profitable.

However, it was a curious paradox of the Nineties that while we were
discovering Pinero, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, we were also reading _The
Prisoner of Zenda_ and yielding ourselves with luxurious abandon into
the arms of honey-sweet romance. At the very time when the new,
realistic drama was leading us out of a pasteboard world into
something approximating an intelligent comment on life, the
cloak-and-sword drama was having a fine little reactionary
renaissance, the calcium moon was shining down on many a gleaming
garden and flashing blade, and ears were rapturously strained to