The smoke was so thick and the din so heavy, that I did not see him when I came in and barely heard his shouted greeting. Such was the crowded condition of the regular resort on Saturday night; yet I found Keidansky tucked up in a corner of the cafÉ, "oblivious to the obvious," around him, with a pile of newspapers in his hands. "The group" had not as yet assembled, so my friend was reading.

"This has been a great week," he said with gladsome emphasis, after we had exchanged courtesies. I at once suspected what he meant.

"A great week," I said, "because you have been able to see humanity piteously dissected, human beings mercilessly analyzed, souls stript of their raiment, wounded and bleeding, our fellow-men on exhibition, crippled by custom and walking on the crutches of convention, our best arrangements of life held up to ridicule and scorn. A great week," I said, "because you have fed on tragedy like a fiend?"

"Yes, there is something sad about tragedy," answered Keidansky, ignoring my bitterness, "but the man who sees things clearly, who looks a long distance behind the scenes, the man who sees the worst and does not die, but lives to cast his observations into a perfect work, and to lift you up to the mountain-top with him, is not this man great and gladdening? Is there not cause for exultation in a really big tragedy? And this is saying but little about the Æsthetic pleasure of a story told in heart-breaking and soul-stirring manner," he added. "Some one must do this work, and it makes one feel real good when the right man comes along.

"The saddest stories are yet to be told, before there can be much more happiness in the world. We can never reach the heights until we realize the depths. As for myself, I give all the world to the man who can make it better than it is. And such works are making the longed-for improvement, by performing the miracle of making men and women think, doing this, not by any pedantic preachments, but by the power of suggestiveness and the large vision of the newer and truer art. Art with a purpose? But all art has this purpose. And the less the purpose is consciously inculcated into art, the better is that purpose carried out. They call them problem plays, but was there ever a great play without some sort of problem in it? Without some burning question of life, and love, and death? What's that? Immoral? Was there ever a masterly and mastering work that was not immoral, according to the popular judgments? Was there ever a work with a big purpose that conformed to the critics and to current lack of opinions? Could there be much of a purpose to anything that did not shock the world's conspiracy of cowardice they call morality? Gott ist mit dir! You must go abroad and take some cure. You have been reading the American dramatic critics. It was a great week, I say, with Ibsen and BjÖrnson, Sudermann and Pinero, and two wonderful artists to interpret them, but the pleasure was very much spoiled for me by some of these critics. Ah, these poor critics. Here are the papers, and I can still hear them choking and croaking and cackling, and my heart goes out to them and turns sick. What a wonderful lot of fellows they are. What endless platitudes and empty phrases—full of nonsense—they have delivered themselves of this week, yet I don't think they are any the wiser for it. I know one of the fraternity (there is sufficient disagreement between themselves to be called a fraternity) who is a perfect genius. With one stroke of his mighty pen he once annihilated Ibsen, Echegaray, Astrowsky, Paul Hervieue and Edward Martyn. It was all 'morbid trash,' he said of a series of their plays, and it is strange that these men are still heard of occasionally. That was after the John Blair experiment, and I walked into this critic's office and made a few extemporaneous remarks. He said I ought to have more respect for a man who can get as much advertising for his paper as he can. Of course, this was indisputable. It would take so little courage to do it, yet they dare not think their own thoughts, the dear, dear critics. No, there is not any use in trying to reason with them, but I sometimes would like to get them all together in one room and give them all a sound horsewhipping.

"One of the critics, who writes in silk gloves, swears in the most perfect, correct English, and compares every play he sees to something of Shakespeare, objects to 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' as an immoral play. The dissection of this woman's heart and mind, he protests, is not the proper business of the dramatist, nor is the inspection of his dissecting table after the job has been done a proper amusement for theatrical spectators. 'A process of repentance and purification' and that sort of thing, on the part of this unfortunate, must be indicated, if art is to approach this kind of life. The entire scheme of ethics is bad. Yet the critic admits that the performance was terrible and touching, and that Mrs. Campbell—Heaven bless her for coming to see us—won a remarkable and complete victory in the part; altogether he praises her very generously.

"Now, what I say is this. If we can be moved and stirred by an immoral play, there is either something the matter with our morality, or there is something radically wrong with our hearts. I must recall to you the lines of Stephen Crane. 'Behold the grave of a wicked man, and near is a stern spirit. There came a drooping maid with violets, but the spirit grasped her arm. "No flowers for him," he said. The maid wept: "Oh, I loved him." But the spirit grim and frowning: "No flowers for him."

"Now, this is it. 'If the spirit was just, why did the maid weep?' If our standard of morality is right, why do our hearts go out for Paula Tanqueray, for Nora Helmer, for Mad Agnes? Is it because we have become so humane as to be far ahead of our morality? What does it mean, anyway? We are told that the contents of the plays seen here last week, are not fit subjects for the drama. Well, art might as well go out of business, if it is not going to look life squarely in the face, if it is not going to sound the very depths of things, and mirror conditions as they are to-day, for modern humanity. The play in particular, it is clear, must deal with the intense efforts, the dramatic essences of life; the play in particular will have nothing to do unless it takes up the crucial conditions, the large realities, the stirring struggles, the sterling aspirations of the clashing life of to-day under the new and as yet unadjusted surroundings. The drama must take up shame and crime, error and suffering, or there is no plot for a great play anywhere. The few pretty, romantic, silly stories have been told over and over again. Now we have grown. There is a larger life before us, and we want something stronger. We must have plays to educate our critics,—if that is possible.

"'He who is without sin among ye, let him cast the first stone.' If Christ had said nothing else, would not this have made him a great man? Yet after eighteen hundred years it is necessary for another Jew, a Portuguese Jew named Pinero, to say the same thing through the medium of a play, because the Christians say that Christ's teachings are immoral. And then the stones of the critics are thrown at Pinero."

Here I said something about the relation between art and morality, but Keidansky protested.

"Art has nothing to do with morality," he said, "and therefore it teaches such great moral lessons. It re-creates and reproduces Nature and life in forms of beauty and power. And because it approaches elementary conditions without bias and preconceived notions, and illumines its material with the touch of human genius, it shows us life in its largeness, right in its relativeness, and raises us above our established moralities. Because art is the spontaneous expression of the humane, the true, the good and the beautiful in our souls, it helps us to see the larger rights, the greater justice, and helps us to make, change and advance our morality. Art touches the commonplace and makes it divine. It makes a saint out of a sinner by showing causes, and casting a kindly light over human weakness.

"In real life 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' is a shameful scandal, to be exploited by sensational newspapers, and we avoid the parties concerned and run away from them; but art raises the story to the height of the tragic and the epic, and we suffer and grieve with Paula, and even the cold critic, who tries so hard not to be humane, is moved. In life we are even afraid to mention the names of such people; but art makes us weep for Camille, sympathize with Sapho, be sad, or gay, with the vagabond FranÇois Villon, sigh for Denise, grieve with Don JosÉ, and follow Manon Lescaut through the desert of North America. Art helps us to realize that there is no sin but error, no degradation but dulness of the mind, no vice but lack of vision.

"I don't want to speak to you because you did not go to see BjÖrnson's 'Beyond Human Power' and Mrs. Campbell's acting in that piece. Yet since you did not go you ought to be enlightened. You have read the story? Did you see how the critics dodged the issues of the play, beating about the bush and puzzling each other? A case of faith and reason, you know, and you mustn't talk about these things. A blind leader of the blind, a man who 'lacks the sense of reality' and sees only what he wishes to see; a woman of intellect who wastes her love on him; unbelieving children of a miracle worker; the clash between the new and the old; the decrepitude of orthodoxy; the contrast between the master and his disciples and who can never realize the impossible, unnatural ideals; the faith that kills. The play has all the tragedy of a dying religion, and the last act is as powerful as anything I have ever seen anywhere. What does it mean? To me it indicates the dying of the old Christianity, and I believe that BjÖrnson, unlike Ibsen, is a Christian. The quiet, subdued, subtle work of Mrs. Campbell was worthy of the play.

"And there was Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House.' I shall never forget the performance of it. What a simple story, how concise and terse, not a superfluous word in the whole of it, yet how strong and stirring! It is primarily a picture, a powerful dramatic picture without a shadow of preachiness in it. You say there is a problem in it? Yes, but it's in the picture, the picture is the problem. Here is a perfect work of a great master, if there ever was one. There are whole cities made up of such dolls' houses, with women as playthings, toys, means of amusement, slaves of conventionality and of slavish men, yet the critics are croaking and raising the cry of 'immorality.' Save on the New York East Side Ghetto, Ibsen is comparatively unknown in America, but it is not true that the American people are not interested in his plays whenever they are given and that they would not go to see them if more of them were performed. In saying so the critics say what is not true, as was manifest from the enthusiastic audiences at the last week's performances. There is a Yiddish translation of the play by the poet Morris Winchewsky, and it was performed by Mr. and Mrs. Jacob P. Adler, but I have never seen it. Mrs. Fiske's 'Nora' is positively great. Her delicacy, her mastery of light and shade, her manner of speech and poise, and on the whole her perfect conception of the character is a stroke of genius. Why did you not see it? Do you want to go? You can pay for my lunch. Ibsen and BjÖrnson have impoverished me this week."

"So you don't think much of the American critics?" I asked at this point.

"On the contrary," he said, "with the exception of some, I think they are all good advertising agents."