^{page note 48 *} Matilda Heron toured her Camille up and down the country for several years, and supposedly made a large fortune from it. So what? To us today—and not simply because of the unforgettable glamour of Garbo, Camille is not only “dated”; it is the essence of romance. But this is a journal of history; however tentative, this is an historical study.

^{page note 50 *} But for me the fineness of dramatic invention and construction was demonstrated by personal experience some twenty-five years ago when, as a director of our University Theatre, I misguidedly chose the play for a Homecoming production as an example of “hiss-the-villain, cheer-the-hero” melodrama. Throughout rehearsals a group of young but sensitive amateurs struggled against the basic reality of dialogue and character to concentrate upon the more melodramatic pieces of action; at the last dress-rehearsal my “Octoroon,” a really talented girl, reduced cast, crews, and director to actual tears in the final scene of her death; the performance left us all nervous wrecks—it was touch-and-go throughout. We won, in a sense; the audience hissed, they cheered, they did not weep. But I have never forgiven myself for not repeating the play and trying it “straight” before I retired from direction.

^{page note 56 *} For two more examples of longish runs resulting from the presentation of supposedly “contemporary” plays (however much we today may be amused by the melodramatic clicking of the locomotive-wheels in the one or equally mechanical clicking of the well-oiled, well-made play in the other), let us note the 110-per-formance-run of Augustin Daly's tie-the-hero-to-the-tracks sensation, Under the Gaslight, starting in August of 1868, and his first success as producer two years later at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, when he kept Meilhac and Halévy's Frou-Frou playing for just one week less.

^{page note 59 *} Several critics and scholars have argued that the general effects upon the art of acting, probably the art of the theatre, were eventually bad. So far as the English stage is concerned, I myself certainly argued at length in my dissertation and with some heat and conviction in published parts of it the same point. Here I am concerned only with stating the historical fact that the new system of enlarging the travelling star or pair of stars into a whole touring company, complete with “effects,” grew up within our period.

^{page note 62 *} When John McCullough awoke him in a New York hotel on the night of April 14, 1865, to tell him of the news of the assassination of Lincoln flashed from the capitol and of the name of the suspected criminal, he told Forrest, “But I don't believe it.” Showing little interest in the event but a typical desire to take stage center himself, old Forrest rumbled, “I do. All the God damned Booths are crazy.”