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MUSIC: DRAMA: ART: REVIEWS
to give us tools with which to work; that
it is only through our own experience that
we progress and that the best way to gain
this experience is not to trouble about
theories and methods of education, but to
teach each youngster to go to work and
do something and to regard each thing
done as the stepping-stone to whatever
comes next.
  'We have been so proud of our rapid
growth, our great achievements and our
borrowed culture that I am aware that it
is a large undertaking to convince the
American people that the simpler condi-
tions are, after all, the most genuinely and
permanently progressive. To hold such a
point of view would involve nothing less
than the entire revolutionizing of our atti-
tude toward life; but I have faith to be-
lieve that this revolution will yet come to
us and that our national common sense will
lead us, not in the direction of ironclad
system such as prevails in Germany, for
example, but in the direction of individual
development such as belongs to a youthful
and vigorous national life.
NOTES
RS. Fiske is a great woman,-un-
        questionably the greatest upon the
        American stage today. And in
        "Salvation Nell" she has a great
play,-a play that shows humanity in the
raw, and human passions, struggles and
weaknesses stripped of every merciful veil
of convention, tradition and the self-con-
trol which comes from knowledge and fear
of what people will say. It is the kind of
play of which the average theater-goer will
say: "What is the use of it? It is not
amusing; it is not pretty; it is not in-
structive,-and when I go to the theater,
I go for recreation or for instruction. I
can see this kind of life any time that I
want to go over to Tenth Avenue or down
around the docks, and it is the kind of life
about which I would rather my women-
folk knew nothing." All very true,-one
would not go to see "Salvation Nell" for
the purpose of gaining an hour's amuse-
ment or receiving a "moral lesson" that is
handed out in obvious phrases suitable for
easy consumption without too much ex-
penditure of thought. But anyone who is
genuinely interested in life, and who re-
gards great dramatic art as the most com-
plete means of expressing the protean hu-
man quality which alone is vitally signifi-
cant, will lose much if he neglects to see
this play. It is daring; it is brutally real-
istic; it shows a side of life that is not
pleasant or pretty, but it also shows that
in the lowest depths of human nature there
is the living germ of the desire for good,-
not perhaps the highest good, but the best
of which undeveloped man has any con-
ception and which he follows blindly be-
cause of the human instinct,-so deeply in-
grained that no vice or misery can choke it
out,-that makes for growth.
  This upward striving has, of course, its
clearest expression in the character of Nell
herself,-the poor forlorn little drudge
who, through following the best instincts
of her own nature, had come to dire
trouble and who yet has the strength sim-
ply to go on following the best, as far as
she could see it,-trying to live a decent
life, trying to bring up her child to be a
good man, trying to give what help she
can to those in deeper trouble than her-
self, and-most hopeless task of all-try-
ing to redeem to some semblance of man-
hood the fascinating, graceless ruffian
whom she loves.
  It is the strongest evidence of Mrs.
Fiske's understanding of her art that she
ýdoes not give to Nell any quality which
would be foreign to the nature of just such
a girl as she is. Womanly love, mother
love, the instinctive desire to live decently
and to do right so far as she knew,-are
all there; but she is nevertheless a girl of
the slums,-a creature of feeling pure and
simple, with little of the mentality that
would reason from cause to effect and so
choose and adhere to a certain line of
action for the good it would ultimately
bring her. Mrs. Fiske's portrayal of this
character is convincing throughout because
it is so unwaveringly true. She resists
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