ture with its mob in variegated hue, the gradations of massed color, the brilliant uniforms of officers and soldiers, and, surmounting it all, the hero in full armor as he rides in on a richly caparisoned charger? The majesty of war! That was the desired effect of all the plays of that period.

Or as in "Julius Caesar" where war serves to accelerate or diminish the tempo of the action. We see Brutus troubled by the ill omen of Caesar's ghost as the confusion in the ranks of both armies harrasses him with a constantly alternating hope of victory and fear of defeat.

In "Antony and Cleopatra" war is again a mere background-not a war of right eousness but constant conflict which serves to portray the gorgeous panoplies of Pompey; that brings the vacillating Antony back from Egypt to Rome and reconciliation with Caesar; war that again takes him back to the alluring Cleopatra; war that shows the latter's cunning wiles; everywhere war is present throughout the drama and yet never do we regard it as more than a setting that harmonizes with the carousal and infamy, infidelities and bloodthirstiness with which the play teems.

In "Richard III." again it is battlefield and camp, court and courtiers as a stage setting, but a stage setting only for the wretched king and his doings, not for the people. And even here among these great plays we have the glamor of war offered to us, of events and men, good and evil, on a large scale, but always glamorous. It never becomes really personal in its joys and sorrows and lessons.

Come now to another period and another type of war plays, centuries later, plays of our own country and our own dramatists. Following the close of the Civil War, and continuing for a generation, the American stage was rich with the work of writers who found in that conflict material for a thousand plays.

Some were tawdry in their melodrama and some were genuinely thrilling. The line is a narrow one. Romance and humor and plot and counterplot all had their turn. Good and bad together, they all had their vogue. The memories of the scenes and conditions portrayed were still vivid enough

in the minds of the spectators to waken

afresh, fervid sentiments of patriotism and sacrifice.

Of these the best were models of theatrical ingenuity and stagecraft, of skill in construction and perfect technic in detail. They were literary in form and fascinating in plot and characterization. No one need lament the talent that wrote and produced Bronson Howard's "Shenandoah," or "William Gillette's "Held by the Enemy" and "Secret Service," nor yet the capacity for appreciation that made audiences hang breathless on the plots, their hearts surging with patriotism and romance. They were plays of action, physical action, and the play of wits in national service for a great cause. Bravery was applauded and cowardice hissed. The downfall of vice and the triumph of virtue were as certain as sunrise.

Such was the atmosphere of this period of war drama-the wig-wagging of a signal from a Virginia mountain-top, the screech of fife and tap of drum, the military salute, and the waving of stars and stripes. Or perhaps it was the mother bidding good-bye to her only boy and with a brave smile wishing him god-speed as upheld by her strong sense of duty she bravely gave him to her country; or a group of young and pretty maidens eagerly raiding the village milliner's supply of red,

white and blue ribbon to make rosettes for their soldier-sweethearts; or, again, it was a scene when "lo, the conquering hero comes"-pale, with arm in a sling or perhaps the empty coat sleeve telling its own tale to those who smilingly greet his return. Always in martial tempo which makes the heart beat fast or else with the halo of romance which brings a tear to the eye and a quivering of the lip.

It is interesting to note that this so-called civil war crop of plays did not come to fruition until well after the period of reconstruction, so that they were all viewed in the light of a goodly perspective. They were, none the less, vital, interesting productions which though melodramatic in appeal warmed the cockles of the heart for Northerner and Southerner alike and helped them to visualize a shared suffering and a re-united people.

They had likewise English prototypes,

such as could be written around England's "little wars," scenes laid in savage lands. Africa or northern India or Afghanistan, for instance, in which British patriotism could express itself in sharp skirmish with "Fuzzy Wuzzy and the Missus and the Kid." Of such a kind was the dramatization of Kipling's "The Light that Failed," in which the opening scene visualized the life and spirit of war correspondents at the front. There is a thrill in the scene depicting the camp of the newspaper men engaged in the preparation and dispatch of "copy" under fire, and the same thrill follows back to London and stirs with the rumors of another war that sets the campaigners of the pen to digging out their saddle-bags and their mess-kits again with the lust for adventure and work.

But always still the glamor, the exciting, the romantic, the picturesque, true, indeed, but not the truth about war.

Between the war drama of the 19th century and the plays that are just now being born, inspired by the great world struggle

of to-day, there has been a broad chasm of changing conditions.

Our art, our literature and our drama are necessarily products of the times. Hence we have had in turn dramas dealing with the everyday lives of men and women; with the growing industrial unrest; and with moral and social conditions. This has given us the plays of Tolstoy, Isben, Sudermann, Hauptman, Schnitzler, Shaw, Strindberg, Augustus Thomas, Broadhurst, Veiller and others. Their themes have been the insurgent peasantry, the emancipation of women, the hypocrisy of society, the single standard of morality, the eternal "triangle," the laxity of individual standards of honesty in politics and in corporate business,

etc.

The continental drama, it is true, has had an occasional echo of the never-buried Alsace-Lorraine issue, and there have been numerous German comedies based on military life. But the latter are almost without exception plays of the parade-ground type. to accent the lure of the brass button and

the escapades of barrack life. When, however, George Bernard Shaw wrote "Arms and the Man," afterwards turned into light opera as "The Chocolate Soldier," he actually sought to put truth into the military play-one phase of truth, at least, and it is perhaps the only instance on the stage in which truth on this subject appears in this guise. The play is a delightful satire on the parade-ground. Shaw's real purpose is to satirize petty hero-worship. So delightful and insidious is the spirit of Bluntschli. who represents the common sense of the Swiss citizenship, that though the dangerous. militarist, Sergius, is apparently triumphant, the audience chuckles contentedly at the relics of feudalism in the military tactics of to-day.

In our own country, there have been shoals of musical comedy which has come to be the accepted prerogative of the "tired business man." There has also been a rich harvest of the underworld plays, which

fortunately have had as an antidote an occasional refreshing bit of the "Pomander Walk" and "Bunty Pulls the Strings" type. In spite of this phase, however, the predominating tendency of the drama of the past decade has been to make people think -to light the fuse to some social or industrial fire-brand of the moment.

In such vein was executed "In the Vanguard" by Katrina Trask, published just previous to the outbreak of the war and produced in New York last December. Preachment was so strong in this play that though powerful of argument and convincing to the reader the critics reported it to be so wholly void of dramatic action as to become tedious to the spectator, in spite of the producer's pictorial success and the actors' skill in portrayal. In this play the realization comes to the soldier, Philip, on the field of battle, that intent is murder and that war is nothing more nor less than intent to kill. On the self same night a

quartered in their cottage home. Finally they trim the tree and Subka recites the scriptural verses describing the first Christmas Eve. The brave mother is pleading for the protection of the innocent child and is forced to listen to the satiric ravings of the half-witted schoolmaster who insists: "it is entirely a question of the survival of the fittest! The survival of the fittest! That's what it is!" And again he mutters: "People are such cowards. Many of them never seem to understand that man's a fighting animal." Soon there is a knock at the door and the ribald threats of more drunken soldiery is heard. Rada pushes the little Subka into the adjoining room and, realizing how hopeless is their escape, takes her own life and that of her child.

Not a drama in form, but an intensely dramatic poem by the same author is "The War Makers." His theme here is whether "might is right and reason wins the day."

The powerful description of that dulled feeling of unrealness with which we from afar survey the news I cannot refrain from quoting:

It come along a little wire,
Sunk in a deep sea.

It thins in the clubs to a little smoke
Between one joke and another joke
For a city in flames is less than the fire
That comforts you and me.

Play up then, fiddles! Play bassoon!
The plains are soaked with red
Ten thousand fools out there
Clutch at their wounds and taint the air
And here is an excellent cartoon
On what the Kaiser said.

Everywhere, too, there has sprung up the one act war drama-some scarcely more than a fragment, as for instance a dramatic sketch by Carl Hauptman called "The Deadl Sing." This though pro-German in feeling and treatment, is poignant enough in scene