ABRAHAM LINCOLN has pleased everybody, and its triumph is the best justification of those few who held that the public was capable of liking much better plays than were offered to the public. Why has ABRAHAM LINCOLN succeeded? Here are a few answers to the question: Because the author had a deep, practical knowledge of the stage. Because he disdained all stage tricks. Because he had the wit to select for his hero one of the world's greatest and finest characters. Because he had the audacity to select a gigantic theme and to handle it with simplicity. Because he had the courage of all his artistic and moral convictions. And of course because he has a genuine dramatic gift. Finally, because William J. Rea plays Lincoln with the utmost nobility of emotional power. Every audience has the same experience at ABRAHAM LINCOLN, and I laugh privately when I think of that experience. The curtain goes up on a highly commonplace little parlour, and a few ordinary people chatting in a highly commonplace manner. They keep on chatting. The audience thinks to itself: "I've been done! What is this interminable small talk?" And it wants to call out a protest: "Hi! You fellows on the stage! Have you forgotten that there is an audience on the other side of the footlights, waiting for something to happen?" (Truly the ordinary people in the parlour do seem to be unaware of the existence of any audience.) But wait, audience! Already the author is winding his chains about you. Though you may not suspect it, you are already bound.... At the end of the first scene the audience, vaguely feeling the spell, wonders what on earth the nature of the spell is. At the end of the play it is perhaps still wondering what precisely the nature of the spell is.... But it fully and rapturously admits the reality of the spell. Indeed after the fall of the curtain, and after many falls of the curtain, the spell persists; the audience somehow cannot leave its seats, and the thought of the worry of the journey home and of last 'busses and trains is banished. Strange phenomenon! It occurs every night. ARNOLD BENNETT _April 1919_ ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN _Two Chroniclers_: _The two speaking together_: Kinsmen, you shall behold Our stage, in mimic action, mould A man's character. This is the wonder, always, everywhere-- Not that vast mutability which is event, The pits and pinnacles of change, But man's desire and valiance that range All circumstance, and come to port unspent. Agents are these events, these ecstasies, And tribulations, to prove the purities Or poor oblivions that are our being. When Beauty and peace possess us, they are none But as they touch the beauty and peace of men, Nor, when our days are done, And the last utterance of doom must fall, Is the doom anything Memorable for its apparelling; The bearing of man facing it is all.