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212 years: something good to look upon and a concentration point for everything new, bold, and charming in the pictorial-decorative and the musical-rhythmic. Likewise I should mention Granville-Barker, although his theatrical experiments do not approach those of the first three mentioned in the strength and breadth of their accomplishment. But Max Reinhardt is probably inferior to Stanislawski in the one respect wherein Stanislawski's theatre stands first in the world; I refer to the completeness of the ensemble, where dramatic values and counter-values are harmonized with the delicacy and propriety of a landscape by Cézanne. Such harmonization as this can originate only in the Russian nature, giving the actor a rich sensibility and sympathy for his fellow performers. Also, in Moscow alone, and in no other spot of Europe or America, was it possible to give hundreds of rehearsals without concern for either time or money. The actors, who formed a sort of brotherhood, lived a completely cloistered communal life, sinking their civil or personal existence in the artistic one; and as a result they brought a truly religious intensity to bear even on rehearsals, carefully weighing the force of every tone, every movement of the head or hands.

But Reinhardt surpasses the two other great theatrical leaders I named with him in versatility and in the continual freshness of his creative powers. His imagination is as easily kindled by Tasso and Le Misanthrope as by a Shakespearean comedy, as easily by the ghostly pieces of Strindberg's last period as by a Chekhov or a Tolstoy. But he can also be fired by a travesty like Meilhac-Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld; and it argues an astoundingly broad theatrical ability in a director when we can expect him to build up either the last act of King Lear out of its very own elements or a finale of Offenbach's with its wind-up in a cancan. As I have said, Reinhardt is returning to Vienna, in the former imperial Redoutensaal. The repertoire chosen for the first season and it is well fitted to a small and intimate theatre like this hall—shows, in its expression of the many-sidedness of his theatrical tastes, just how well these tastes fit in with the older tradition of the Viennese theatre. He will produce the Clavigo of Goethe, one of Molière's comedies (l'Ecole des Femmes) and a Carlo Gozzi; this last will be in the style of the commedia dell' arte, with the masks or comic figures, Pantalone, Truffaldino, et cetera, parts for which the text is not determined, but is improvised by the actor. Of the moderns there will be a drama by Chekhov and, I believe, a comedy of my own, Der