It was a wise choice to combine those attributes into a stage figure, and David Warfield,--finding himself liberated, mind and heart, into a congenial character,--gained in embodying it the most substantial success of his professional career,--making of that figure a vital emblem of heroism that is never flamboyant and virtue that is never insipid; an image of paternal affection that typifies innate dignity of character and the sweet, gentle, lovely patience of pure self-abnegation. In earlier performances this comedian was almost exclusively photographic; but time, thought, and practice,--the forces that constitute experience,--gradually expanded and ripened his art, and in his performance of this part (when repetition had eliminated excessive nervous trepidation and made it “a property of easiness” to him) he showed intuitive insight and was deeply pathetic. That is true success; because the higher purpose of acting a play is not proclamation of the talents of an actor, but liberation and enforcement of the utmost of beneficial influence upon an audience that a play contains. Warfield in “The Music Master” conquered by the two great virtues of simplicity and sincerity. The principal artistic defects in the personation--defects conspicuous in all Warfield’s acting and to the elimination of which he seems to be curiously indifferent--were a hard, metallic voice and a poor method of elocution. The best dramatic expedient in the play is that by which the father’s dubious, inchoate recognition of the daughter is confirmed. At that point and in the sequent situation (“lifted” from “Belphégor”) the actor evinced sympathetic delicacy and tempestuous fervor. The closing scenes of the play are marred by episodes of irrelevant incident and by prolixity, obscurity and artifice, in the long-drawn passage of parental and filial recognition,--which, indeed, requires but a glance. Belasco has written the following reminiscence of the production of “The Music Master,” in which he shows just appreciation of the destructive result of those excessive expedients of stage “realism” which, in some of his earlier productions, impaired precisely the _effect_ they were designed to create: “We always spoke of _von Barwig_ as ‘the music teacher.’ Naturally that became the name of the play; but as the character grew our musician impressed us as a master, and our title was changed to ‘The Music Master.’