NCE we expected little of our American playwrights and were surprised when they gave us more. Now our expectations run higher, and we are proportionately disappointed when they fall below them. The American playwrights had ended last season unusually well. Mr. Fitch had shown in The Woman in the Case that at last he could write a play of straightforward, concentrated, and cumulative interest. The dramatic narrative marched, and every detail hastened its progress or lighted its course. In Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots, Mr. Thomas's touch was lighter, surer and airier than it had ever seemed before in farce. He was discovering the worth and the interest of quick, bright, human dialogue, and using means and methods that, until he had studied French plays and the Parisian theatres, he would have disdained as "talky." As for Mr. Ade, was he not nightly conquering an audience with the humorous zest, the freshness of view, the amused sympathy for some of the little things and the little people in American life that he had brought to The College Widow? Between the acts there was hardly time to run over all the big things that were predicted of him. Here and there even a minor American playwright had popped up his head, and found to his amazement that the public had a welcoming smile for him.

Fitch, Ade and Thomas all had a commission or two for the new season. Few notable plays were on their way from Europe. There had not been many in London or Paris or Berlin, and not every play that pleases or stirs those capitals, as our managers have at last discovered, has enough breadth of interest and general stamina to endure an Atlantic. voyage and subsequent American journeyings. Managers, therefore, taking their cue from their audiences, were warming to the American playwright. Distinctly, the new season was to be his inning. He began, too, at the very be

ginning. Before it was a month old, Mr. Thomas's De Lancey, Mr. Fitch's Her Great Match, and Mr. Ade's The Bad Samaritan and Just Out of College had all been acted. Three of the four were more or less disappointing. The other, The Bad Samaritan, was a sorry failure. For three weeks in two cities the public, critical and uncritical, went by persistently on the other side. Then a shivering manager interred it quickly but decently, and much of Mr. Ade's prestige as the rising American playwright was buried with it. The other three plays bid fair to last the season and traverse the country.

De Lancey was a disappointment because Mr. Thomas has done little more in it than a capable job of theatrical tailoring. He was commissioned to write a play for John Drew-middle-aged John Drew, a little stiff now in the joints of comedy and several shades more mannered in acting, but still with the happy knack of impersonating himself and persuading us that he and the process are interesting. To the last letter of the last syllable Mr. Thomas fulfilled his commission. He accepted Mr. Drew as he is, and the world in which he lives here and now in New York, and contrived to make a light comedy that should be background and frame for both. It lacks any sort of distinction, but that may be the fault of the world it had to portray and the chief figure in it. There is only one character, Mr. Drew himself labelled De Lancey. The others are puppets that approach and address him when Mr. Thomas pulls the wires. There is a halting and creaking plot, but it is not easy to build dramatic narratives about middle-aged bachelors, who hunt twice a week and keep up good social connections meanwhile. One partial virtue it has the virtue of dialogue, that is almost always human and pertinent, and that now and then is crisp with wit or salt with humour. True, there is talk for talk's sake while Mr. Thomas is waiting for another Drew-ish idea to come to him. There is talk at the audience, lest it grow

uneasy or begin to scrutinise the play. There is talk of the kind that has come neatly off the tip of Mr. Drew's tongue these twenty years, and that exists in his plays for no other reason. But there is also talk that reveals and brightens character, that goes back and forth in keen, spontaneous interplay, that has the savour of real men with a sense of humour, and of a real world where there is still wit. Mr. Thomas has learned the value of such speech as a dramatic means, and he is using it more and more freely and aptly. Otherwise De Lancey is chiefly interesting to those that regard Mr. Drew as a winter diversion.

Her Great Match was a disappointment because there was no more in it than we have long taken from Mr. Fitch as a matter of course. Did any one doubt that he could write a play for Maxine Elliott that would fit her as nicely as one of her own frocks and have almost as many pretty frills on it? Mr. Fitch is the most expert ladies' tailor, histrionically speaking, in America. Is there one who has seen many of his plays who mistrusted his ability to conduct a fortune-telling booth at a fashionable bazaar, or fill a conservatory, peopled by two, with moonlight and sentiment? He is past master in such things. Of course, he shows us the nice little ways of a young German prince, who is a very good sort if he does blunder into a suggestion of morganatic marriage to the American girl he loves, and the big, ugly ways of the parvenus who have their own bad ends to serve in such a "great match." Such ways are Mr. Fitch's stock in trade, and international marriages are one of his newest wares. There is much pretty detail in Her Great Match, and the touch of an artist in it here and there. There is as pretty an atmosphere of romance, as romance goes in twentieth-century drawingrooms and conservatories. (Youth is not twenty centuries old yet by a long shot, and Mr. Fitch knows it.) His hand is still light and sure with our snipping talk that means most when it says least and carelessly. At his best he is still sure to figure in the footnotes of the history of American manners about 1905.

Mr. Ade's two plays were disappoint

ing because they showed how considerable are his limitations, how tightly he is bound by them, and how fitful, impulsive and careless his real talents are. In his first two plays of joyous memory, The County Chairman and The College Widow, everything came in flashes-apt retort, whimsical turn, satirical gibe, comic exaggeration. Bits of incident alternated with dabs of sentiment. There was shrewd, fresh, humorous observation of characters of a sort and life of a kind, but it was all glimpses and glances. Ade's animation and spontaneity were of one that writes with a little thought of his audience. His charm was the charm of amused, half-affectionate sympathy for the Indiana village or the freshwater college that he was portraying. So beguiled, we across the footlights half forgot the patchwork of it all, the lurking flavour of the comic paper, with the jokes spoken and the pictures set in tableaus, and the intermittent slips into the commonplace and even the common. In a word, the flashes were so frequent that nobody much heeded what filled the intervals between, and so bright that nobody much cared what blemishes they hid.

In the two new plays, the flashes are few, and the intervals between them are very gaunt and very empty. There is an idea in each play. In The Bad Samaritan, it is genuinely fresh, whimsical and satiric. What seems easier, if you have "the goods," as Mr. Ade would say, than to turn philanthropist. Try it and find how the process spoils you and every one else whom it touches! Yet before half an act is over Ade is swamping his idea in cheap comic-opera and comic-paper details, and for three acts more it never fairly gets its head above the flood. Just Out of College also has an idea, but not quite so prepossessing or so fresh. After all, says the nonchalant Ade to his audience, the youngsters who come into this world with a few scarf-pins, sundry implements of sport, superabundant "nerve," and four years of "college life" are not such poor creatures as some of us fancy. Then he proceeds to strangle the idea with all the threadbare complications of "in-and-out" farce that he can remem

ber. For one act of Just Out of College, there is the old Ade of The College Widow, disporting himself with this idea, and still more with the humours of a busy morning in the office of Septimus Pickering, picklemaker of the old school in a provincial city. For the rest in the two new plays, shut your eyes and you might often be listening to the jokes of a comic paper, and not to the best of jokes in the best of papers. Open them, and you might be looking at the pictures their "artists" drew. There are fragments of "musical comedy" without music, and of the farces that depend for humour upon the sudden irruption of the wrong person through the wrong door at the wrong time. The plots are too preposterous to be plausible and not so preposterous as to be agreeably grotesque. The comic exaggeration is too distorted to be delightful, too commonplace to amuse. Instead of smiling at life with half-shut eyes, Ade is watching to see whether the spectators will smile at him, and not with him. He has discovered his audience and lost his spontaneity. To borrow his own slang, he fakes.

So much for the major American playwrights at the beginning of the new season. The minor we know well, though now and then the names may change. They can make gay little farces out of sprightly little novels, and put them prettily on the stage to entertain nice people after a nice dinner. Mrs. Grace Livingston Furness has done it rather more cleverly than usual in The Man on the Box. They can make sweet little sentimental plays out of sugary little novels with just a suspicion of a sob in them for those same nice audiences. Mr. Peple has done it in The Prince Chap. They can take their hammer and nails and knock the text of a musical play together while you wait, out of the chips and blocks and shavings that have been accumulating these twenty years in comic-opera workshops. Somebody has done it for Dolly Dollars and the other musical pieces of the new season. They might work with more delicate tools and fresher material. One or two of them dared to do so now and then in The Pearl and the Pumpkin.

From London, for a beginning, Hall Caine vouchsafed us his new play, The Prodigal Son. There were no signs of public excitement when it was first made known to us. There have been many since of public indifference. The playwright himself has sped from England to view at close hand the strange case of a public unmoved, even uninterested by a play from his hand, with every quality he is wont to impart to them. His diagnosis was quick and sure. The American stage manager, the American players, the American public does not understand The Prodigal Son. They will not understand, for example, that a scene in which there is much "gun-play," as they say in Arizona, is really in a quiet, almost a pastoral, key. Before such stupidity even gods and Caines may quail, and the poor reviewer is mute.

Failure to understand, though quite another sort of failure, has also wrecked, on this side of the Thames, Mr. W. W. Jacobs's first play. When London saw Beauty and the Barge a year ago, it took joy of it as of a new and unexpected thing. Here were new characters-the bargemen of the Thames, cap'ns, mates, "third hands" and all, riverside gardeners who were jealous of them, riverside landladies who ministered to them, riverside houskeepers who were amorous of them. As new was the atmosphere of deck and cabin, of bar and inn-parlour, through which they moved. Mr. Jacobs had shifted characters and atmosphere to the stage and lost little of the savour and the flavour that filled his tales of the same folk and the same places. The Thames flowed behind the footlights. The air of the theatre smelled salt. Nobody thought twice of the clumsy and rickety electrical framework Louis Parker had made for Mr. Jacobs's characters. But what are "haffable" bargees and their third hands to New York, or New York to them? Are not the puddles of Broadway more to be desired than all the reaches of Thames? A puzzled, and therefore a bored, audience damned Cap'n Jem Barley in a night, and all his train with him. Yet it was years since it had seen Nat Goodwin acting a character, and not himself, and acting it to the comical life.

Mr. Sutro, with his Walls of Jericho, we did understand, but even then not quite in the way of London. To many a Briton it was a tract for the social times that happened also to be an interesting play. To most of us in America it will be only an interesting play that happens also to have a moral. The moral is not too clear. It seems to imply that if you go to live in Queensland, or some other end of the earth, you will be virtuous, though you may not be too happy. In fact, you might be happier in the very smart set of London, whence most of Mr. Sutro's characters come, and where they were a truly "'orrible hexample." By this time we all know the West End when the stern moralist leads it on the stage. Mr. Jones used to make it prance under an ox-whip. Mr. Pinero preferred a lighter goad with a keener point. Mr. Sutro is their legitimate heir, but he prefers to drive his unhappy victims with very loud, very earnest, and highly moral outcries. As far as its sins go, it is the same old smart set. It likes bridge for high stakes. It smokes cigarettes. It borrows money and marries for it. It plays at half a love with half a lover. It takes no thought of its toys when it has had its sport with them. It talks much about the wickedness it may, can, would or should do, and never does it. Surest mark of all, it is incessantly making smart speeches. Mr. Sutro's characters make some very clever ones, and there is a happy diversity among the denizens of his Mayfair. Perhaps in these sins and the little corner of London where the playwrights (and the novelists) say they flourish, lurks the ruin of the British Empire. Maybe they are a weight on the moral chest of every right-thinking Briton. Anyhow, Mr. Sutro is terribly in earnest about them, and he makes you go away from the theatre thanking your stars that you do not live in Mayfair and that you are not morally as the dwellers therein are. Every one knows that that is a comfortable, truly British feeling. It will help a play through a year's run in London. But what have we in America to do with "Mayfair, England," as the programme called it, unless we happen to be "society editors," and so few

of us are? So far, too, our smart sets have somehow managed to keep off our moral chests.

But there is more than a smart set in The Walls of Jericho. There is a "great scene" that is a very good bit of melodrama―melodrama because it is never quite plausible while you look and listen, and still less plausible the morning after. Behold the Lady Alethea Frobisher who has done all the sins (or talked about doing them) that Mr. Sutro attributes to poor Mayfair. Behold, also, Mr. Jack Frobisher, late of Queensland, who hates these same sins, first because in his view they are a primose path to moral destruction, and second because he loves the Lady Alethea, his wife. Set them face to face-Mr. Frobisher with a large twofisted moral indignation and a habit of command; the Lady Alethea with an uneasy sense of being in the wrong, a fondness for her own way, and more than a touch of wounded pride. Mr. Frobisher orates ("Are you my wife or are you my mistress?"). The Lady Alethea winces and quivers ("I will not go to the 'purer air' of Queensland). The "great scene" is made, and heaps and heaps of Mr. Sutro's moral earnestness have gone into it. They do make it tell. We have jolted and snip-snapped up to it-Mr. Sutro is no master as yet of dramatic construction and we slip along from it to the end of the play where the lady thinks better of Queensland and of Mr. Jack. But it is a "great scene."

Bernard Shaw remains Bernard Shaw "an American playwright," as some one civilly explained the other day in London. Nightly does Mr. Shaw take his mental exercise in two of the theatres of our metropolis. Twenty others in as many cities will be his gymnasia before the season ends. The old feats that he has done for us in Candida, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell, he is doing for us once more. But they are stale beside the new joys of the mental athletics-not to say contortions that he is showing us in Man and Superman and in John Bull's Other Ireland. Once Man and Superman was "a play and a philosophy." Now it is only a play even a farce remade, plus intelligence and wit, according to the very

rules of that theatre upon which Mr. Shaw used to heap scornful prefaces. John Bull's Other Island is Ireland "as it is"-did it happen to be mostly peopled with Bernard Shaws?

Nightly does Mr. Shaw in one form or another play havoc with romantic love and other pretty conventions. Nightly does he strip the veneers off established ways and things and prick them in their nakedness. Nightly does he build his own topsy-turvy world, in which all men and all women speak with the voice of Bernard Shaw and act even as he fancies he would act were he as untrammelled. It is such a cocksure world, and it is such a diabolically clever one. It is so full of "things to take home," as the restaurants say of their oysters and frozen puddings. Elect ladies dispense them for days after

wards over their tea-tables. Verily, the crackling of thorns under a pot is a cheerful sound. And when the thorns do take fire now and then there is a flash that burns deep and clear into human nature. It is indeed Mr. Shaw taking his mental exercise with all men and all things for his apparatus and the world for his gymnasium. Was ever mental athlete more sprightly on the parallel bars, more nimble with the weights? Not for years in the theatre. Intelligence and wit are so rare there that we in New York have made a fad of them and of him that has brought them to us. Mr. Shaw's tongue may be curving in his cheek. His hand may be audibly chinking the royalties in his pocket. Each, as he looks at his audiences, is a becoming action. H. T. Parker.