themselves—that he is impressed by their suburban luxuries and ravished by their silly-clever wit—a wit which is only one of the means such people employ to make agreeable the banality of their lives—like curtains of flowered chintz and little electric wall-lamps. Furthermore, Mr Barry, having set out with a real problem, proceeds to develop it with theatrical situations. The young girl who loves the boy so much that she is willing to give him up entirely so that instead of being obliged to support her he may follow his architectural dreams, but never offers to share his struggles or to assist him with her $2000 a year! The father who having smothered his own artistic ambitions by a money-making career allows his son to do the same thing just at the moment when he is himself most keenly feeling his own futility, and who after becoming at the end of years one of the mainstays of a large soap company is unable to take a year's vacation without being in danger of losing his job! I don't know whether it was the presence in the cast of Mr Ferdinand Gottschalk, but the whole thing reminded me a little of the late Clyde Fitch. Clyde Fitch was par excellence the virtuoso of the external: like the America of the time, his true gift lay in playing with it. When I think of his plays, I think of people being kept awake by banging radiators, trying to eat wax oranges, turning on the wrong electric lights, of men diving under the table after dinner to retrieve the things the ladies have dropped. I think of beings who speak on ordinary occasions in the very accents of life, but who as soon as they are moved by any strong emotion begin to talk like the theatre of fifty years ago. When Fitch was on the surface he was excellent: he was a master of the property and the "line," but when he was serious he was almost always awful: his situations were wholly for and from the stage.—Mr Barry has a gift not unlike Clyde Fitch's; let him beware, as he hopes to be an artist, how he falls back on the same tricks.
At the Circus you saw beautiful horses and beautiful human beings—which is much. For the rest, I don't mind having dogs and seals and even elephants trained to do tricks, but I do object to sulky lions and tigers badgered into jumping over each other. Lions and tigers, like domestic cats, have no feeling for human games; they cannot enter into the spirit of the thing. Where a seal will dance about on a spring-board and bark eagerly for fish, a tiger
