The vicissitudes of the young boy along the vague, precarious way, the longing to find the reality of the dream—the heart that knew him best—a study in sentimentality, the pathetic wanderings of a "little boy lost" in the dream of childhood, and the "little boy found" in the arms of his loved mother, with all those touches that are painful and all that are exquisite and poignant in their beauty—such is the picture presented by John Barrymore, as nearly perfect as any artist can be, in "Peter Ibbetson." Certainly it is as finished a creation in its sense of form, and of color, replete with a finesse of rare loveliness, as gratifying a performance, to my notion, as has been seen on our stage for many years. Perhaps if the author, recalling vain pasts, could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the play is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with great difficulty to survive the nesselrodelike sweetness with which it is surfeited, he would recognize the real distinction that Barrymore lends to a rÔle so clogged by the honeyed sentimentality covering most of the scenes. Barrymore gives us that "quickened sense" of the life of the young man, a portrayal which takes the eye by "its fine edge of light," a portrayal clear and cool, elevated to a fine loftiness in his rendering.

The actor has accomplished this by means of a nice knowledge of what symbolic expression means to the art of the stage. He is certainly a painter of pictures and moods, the idea and his image perfectly commingled, endowing this mediocre play with true charm by the distinction he lends it, by sheer discretion, and by a power of selection. All this he brings to a play which, if it had been written nowadays, would certainly have convicted its author, and justly too, of having written to stimulate the lachrymal effusions of the shop-girl, a play about which she might telephone her girl friend, at which she might eat bon bons, and powder her nose again for the street. No artist, no accepted artist, has given a more suggestive rendering than has Barrymore here. It would be difficult to say where he is at his best, except that the first half of the play counts for most in point of strength and opportunity.

A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with wonder and with awe at the perplexity of life, seeking a solution of things by means of the dream, as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the neophyte—the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness of things real and temporal—vision and memory counting for all there is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of Peter into the drawing-room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent spices and herbs, and of actions so alien to his own? We are given at this moment the keynote of mastery in delicate suggestion, which never fails throughout the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side of symbolism and mystical insinuation.

One sits with difficulty through many of the moments, the literary quality of them is so wretched. They cloy the ear, and the mind that has been made sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of stimulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, a cold method—against a background of what could have been overheated acting or at least a superabundance of physical attack—the warmth of the play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them with a still spiritual ardor which is their very essence, extracting all the delicate nuances and arranging them with a fine sense of proportion. It is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one can imagine. For it is not given to many to act with this degree of whiteness, devoid of off colorings or alien tones. This performance of Barrymore in its spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, and intelligence, has not been equaled for me since I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and Eleonora Duse.

It is to be at once observed that here is a keen pictorial mind, a mind which visualizes perfectly for itself the chiaroscuro aspects of the emotion, as well as the spiritual, for Barrymore gives them with an almost unerring felicity, and rounds out the portrayal which in any other hands would suffer, but Barrymore has the special power to feel the value of reticence in all good art, the need for complete subjection of personal enthusiasm to the force of ideas. His art is akin to the art of silver-point, which, as is known, is an art of directness of touch, and final in the instant of execution, leaving no room whatever for accident or untoward excitement of nerve.

We shall wait long for the silver suggestiveness such as Barrymore gives us when Peter gets his first glimpse of Mary, Duchess of Towers. Who else could convey his realization of her beauty, and the quality of reminiscence that lingers about her, of the rapt amaze as he stands by the mantel-piece looking through the door into the space where he sees her in the midst of dancers under a crystal chandelier somewhere not very distant? Or the moment when he finds her bouquet neglected on the table in the drawing-room, with her lace shawl not far from his hands? Or when he finds himself alone, pressing his lips into the depth of the flowers as the curtain gives the finale to the scene with the whispered "l'amour"! These are moments of a real lyrist, and would match any line of Banville, of Ronsard, or of Austin Dobson for delicacy of touch and feeling, for freshness, and for the precise spiritual gesture, the "intonation" of action requisite to relieve the moments from what might otherwise revert to commonplace sentimentality.

Whatever the prejudice may be against all these emotions glacÉ with sugary frosting, we feel that his art has brought them into being with an unmistakable gift of refinement coupled with superb style. How an artist like Beardsley would have revelled in these moments is easy to conjecture. For here is the quintessence of intellectualized aquarelle, and these touches would surely have brought into being another "Pierrot of the Minute"—a new line drawing out of a period he knew and loved well. These touches would have been graced by the hand of that artist, or by another of equal delicacy of appreciation, Charles Conder—unforgettable spaces replete with the essence of fancy, of dream, of those farther recesses of the imagination.

Although technically and historically Barrymore has the advantage of excellent traditions, he nevertheless rests entirely upon his own achievements, separate and individual in his understanding of what constitutes plastic power in art. He has a peculiar and most sensitive temper, which can arrange points of relation in juxtaposition with a keen sense of form as well as of substance. He is, one might say, a masterly draftsman with a rich cool sense of color, whose work has something of the still force of a drawing of Ingres with, as well, the sensitive detail one finds in a Redon, like a beautiful drawing on stone. An excellent knowledge of dramatic contrasts is displayed by the brothers Barrymore, John and Lionel, in the murder scene, one of the finest we have seen for many years, technically even, splendid, and direct, concise in movement. Every superfluous gesture has been eliminated. From the moment of Peter's locking the door upon his uncle the scene is wrapped in the very coils of catastrophe, almost Euripedean in its inevitability. All of this episode is kept strictly within the realm of the imagination. It is an episode of hatred, of which there is sure to be at least one in the life of every young sensitive, when every boy wants, at any rate somewhere in his mind, to destroy some influence or other which is alien or hateful to him. The scene emphasizes once again the beauty of technical power for its own sake, the thrill of discarding all that is not immediately essential to simple and direct realization.

Little can be said of the play beyond this point, for it dwindles off into sentimental mystification which cannot be enjoyed by anyone under fifty, or appreciated by anyone under eighteen. It gives opportunity merely for settings and some rare moments of costuming, the lady with the battledore reminding one a deal of a good Manet. This and, of course, the splendid appearance of the Duchess of Towers in the first act—all these touches furnish more than a satisfying background for the very shy and frail Peter.

This performance of Barrymore holds for me the first and last requisite of organized conception in art—poise, clarity, and perfect suggestibility. Its intellectual soundness rules the emotional extravagance, giving form to what—for lack of form—so often perishes under an excess of energy, which the ignorant actor substitutes for the plastic element in all art. It has the attitude, this performance, almost of diffidence to one's subject-matter, except as the intellect judges clearly and coolly. Thus, in the sense of esthetic reality, are all aspects clarified and made real. From the outward inward, or from the inward outward, surface to depth or depth to surface—it is difficult to say which is the precise method of approach. John Barrymore has mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes him one of our greatest artists. The future will surely wait for his riper contributions, and we may think of him as one of our foremost artists, among the few, "one of a small band," as the great novelist once said of the great poet.