Here again the modern acrobat, who is guided by a real feeling for his art, is in accord with the principles which the Greeks obeyed. In Attic tragedy, for example, there are no exhibitions of violence, no scuffles, and no assassinations, and this is not so much because the Greeks shrank from scenes of blood, as some critics have vainly contended, but rather because the actors in the Attic drama were raised on thick boots and were topped by towering masks, which made it almost impossible for them to take part in episodes of vigorous action, in hand-to-hand struggles, in murders before the eyes of the spectators, without danger of displacing the mask, and thereby distracting the attention of the audience from the immediate purpose of the dramatic poet. What could not be done gracefully the Greeks refrained from attempting. The exhibition of difficulty for the sake of difficulty, still more the failure to accomplish a "stunt" for the sake of calling attention to its difficulty--these things the Greeks abhorred. They would as surely have disapproved of the misguided artifices of the acrobats who make a practise of failing once or twice in order to multiply the immediate effect of their ultimate success as they would reprove the exhibition of a difficulty conquered for its own sake. It is only in the best acrobatic performances that we moderns are privileged to perceive what was a constant delight to the Greeks--the beauty of the human form, in its finest physical perfection, certain of its strength and easy in its grace. (1912.) XIII THE DECLINE AND FALL OF NEGRO-MINSTRELSY THE DECLINE AND FALL OF NEGRO-MINSTRELSY I Of all the varied and manifold kinds of theatrical entertainment negro-minstrelsy is the only one which is absolutely native to these States, and the only one which could not have come into existence anywhere else in the civilized world. Here in America alone has the transplanted African been brought into intimate contact with the transplanted European. Other nations may have disputed our claim to the invention of the steamboat and the telegraph, but negro-minstrelsy is as indisputably due to American inventiveness as the telephone itself. Here in the United States it had its humble beginnings; here it expanded and flourished for many years; from here it was exported to Great Britain, where it established itself for many seasons; from here it has made sporadic excursions into France and into Germany; and here at last it has fallen into a decline and a degeneracy and a decay which seem to doom it to a speedy extinction. Its life was little longer than that vouchsafed to man, threescore years and ten, for it was born in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, and in the second decade of the twentieth it lingers superfluous on the stage, with none to do it reverence.