Belasco records that he early observed and condemned “the incongruity between the stage way of doing things and the way of life itself,”--the implication being that, in acting, actual life should be literally copied. That is an error. There always is, and from the nature of things always will be, a certain incongruity between actual life and an artistic transcript of it. A literal copy of actual life shown on the stage does not usually cause the effect of actual life: it causes the effect of prolixity and tediousness. Belasco lays much stress on his early and sedulous practice of making himself acquainted, by observation, with all sorts of grewsome facts, assuring his readers that he visited lunatic asylums in order to study madness; talked with condemned murderers immediately prior to their execution and later witnessed the hanging of them; observed the effects of surgical operations performed in hospitals; contemplated deaths occurring there as the result of violence elsewhere; obtained from a friendly, communicative physician knowledge of the manner of death which ensues from the action of several sorts of poison, and was favored, in a dissecting room, with a view of a human heart which had just been extracted from a corpse,--his purpose in this line of inquiry having been to ascertain the multifarious manners in which persons suffer and die, and thus to qualify himself, as actor and stage manager, to imitate them himself or instruct others in the imitation of them. His notion, obviously, is that the actor ought to be acquainted with these things, and, when depicting death, should correctly and literally simulate the particular variety of the throes of dissolution which is appropriate as a climax to the mortal ailment or lethal stroke that destroys him. All this is well enough in its way, but it is only a little part of the knowledge required by the actor, and a special objection to Belasco’s way of introducing it is the implication that such minute preparation was peculiar and original with him. The doctrine of “realism” is often oppugnant to dramatic art, and an extreme adherence to it has been a primary cause of whatever is defective in Belasco’s dramatic work. “Surely,” he exclaims, “people do not die as quietly as they do upon the stage.” It all depends on the “people” and the circumstances, whether on the stage or off. Death, in fact, sometimes comes so gently that its coming is not perceived. On the other hand, “people” do not always die quietly on the stage. Edwin Forrest, as the dying _Hamlet_, made a prodigious pother in his expiration and was a long time about it, and he maintained that a man of his size and massive physique could not die from poison without manifestation of extreme agony. I many times saw that muscular _Hamlet_ die, and the spectacle, while [Illustration: From an old photograph. Author’s Collection. HENRY J. MONTAGUE (1844-1878)]