EVERY one has heard the story of the American school-girl who, on being taken through Westminster Abbey, came upon the full-length statue of Lord Beaconsfield beside that of Mr. Gladstone, and exclaimed: "Why, there's George Arliss!"

Mr. Arliss' impersonation of Disraeli is unquestionably the most notable piece of character-acting now before the American public. The play, while it contains good lines and is touched by that pleasing sen-timent sentiment for the old times that are not very old which characterizes Mr. Parker's better work, is by no means a remarkable play. In the hands of an ordinarily good actor it would have been good for a run of a few months at

The very fact that the part is so little written, is merely sketched in the play-book playbook , gives an actor of Mr. Arliss' quick-silver-like quicksilver-like fancy an opportunity to create the part, in the broadest sense of the word. This he has done largely from a study of Disraeli's letters and novels, from a survey of portraits and reminiscences, of pretty much every-thing everything that remains to testify to the personality of Lord Beaconsfield. In his preliminary studies of the character, he went to work very much as a novelist, who was going to build a romance around the character of Disraeli, would have done. The play owes its most unusual popularity not to anything remarkable that Disraeli says or does, but to the remarkable degree in which George Arliss becomes Benjamin Disraeli. His per-sonal personal contribution to the play is so great that the piece is forgotten in the character. One often hears that this play has a fine ending. As a matter of fact, the play has no ending at all. When the actor takes Lady Beacons-field's Beaconsfield's hand and advances to meet an invis-ible invisible Queen, he makes a good curtain by sheer will power, or by something akin to it.

It matters very little whether an artist's presentation of a historic character is his-torically historically accurate, if it is convincing as a personality. In this case, however, it seems highly probable that the actor pro-duces produces in figure, face, and manner very much such a man as Lord Beaconsfield appeared

The lines of the play give the actor an op-portunity opportunity to display that light and brilliant irony which so maddened Disraeli's British opponents, his imperviousness to insult, his dispassionateness, and his tolerance of passionate passonate convictions in others—when they could be made to serve his purposes. His speech to the president of the Bank of Eng-land England is sufficient guaranty of the oratorical powers one might expect of him in the House of Commons. Although the play deals with the lighter side of Disraeli and the parlor side of politics, Mr. Arliss makes the audience believe in the public man. Just as one feels the presence of the Queen in the last act, though she does not appear, so throughout the play one feels the presence of the historical Disraeli.

"Disraeli" is now on the road—in its fourth season—after long runs in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Since Rip Van Winkle, no character part has so got through the heads of the unthinking millions and become a household word. People go to see the play, and then go again and take the children and the grandchildren. Mr. Arliss could probably play Disraeli to good busi-ness business for the rest of his natural life-time. Usually, when a man becomes identified with one part, it means that he has found the part of his life. Most actors, in the summing up, play only one part under many names; all their impersonations are first cousins, if not brothers. But Disraeli is not in the least better done than any one of a dozen other parts that George Arliss has played here. It is only very different from any of them. He has never done anything more subtle and finished than the Duke of St. Olpherts, in "The Notorious Mrs. Ebb-smith Ebbsmith ," which he played, when he first came to the United States, with Mrs. Patrick Campbell twelve years ago. His Disraeli, though a more sympathetic part to his au-dience audience , is no more sharply defined or fully realized than his Marquis of Steyne in Mrs. Fiske's production of "Vanity Fair," his Assessor Brack in "Hedda Gabler," or the degenerate youth he played in "Leah Kleshna." A delightful instance of his fa-cility facility in lighter parts was his portrayal of the young Englishman in Langdon Mitchell's play, "The New York Idea." All these characters have a different way of walking, standing, sitting; no two of them use their hands in the same way. The hands of the Marquis of Steyne and those of Disraeli are as different in look and habit as hands could well be. We certainly have no other actor who can get inside the skins of so many dif-ferent different kinds of people.

So far, Mr. Arliss has kept the upper hand of his own methods. Every actor with a mortal body has mannerisms; it is only when they become inevitable, when we can anticipate them, that mannerisms are dan-gerous dangerous . Mansfield's execution was warped by an irony often so untimely that it must have been unconscious. Mrs. Fiske's metal-lic metallic elocution tends more and more to give a certain sameness to all her parts. If the insatiable American public insists too long upon spending its inexhaustible dollars upon "Disraeli," it will prove its short-sightedness. Mr. Arliss is one of the few—alarmingly few!—actors from whom anything new can be expected, who is elastic enough to be cap-able capable of surprises. He has remained flexible and versatile, he has not been stamped by the parts he has played or compromised by his successes. He is not looking for a part " some-thing something like Disraeli or something like Steyne." What he has done is no indication of what he will do, except in point of excellence.

THE term character part, as it has sur-vived survived from the old drama, is misleading to-day. Practically all modern plays are chiefly concerned with character, and all the parts are character parts. Even Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, to be played successfully, would now have to be played as character parts, not, as the old tragedians played them, as great personifications of certain human passions. In the old plays the character part, which was the most human in the piece, was always subordinate. The star parts were provided with big scenes, moving situations, and long speeches, but were very thinly clad with the vesture of human nature. The actor who played these parts needed to have no very definite ideas about them, or about anything else; he depended almost entirely upon his beautiful voice, his elocution, and his personal beauty or magnetism, as the case might be. Actors like the Kemble men are almost a van-ished vanished race. Our actors have to depend much more upon ideas and much less upon special endowments of voice or person than did those who pleased the taste of former generations. As one result, we have fewer great personal-ities personalities on the stage, but there are certainly more actors of intelligence. Another result of the humanization of the drama is that in our plays the plot interest is much more neg-ligible negligible than it used to be, and the character interest much stronger. This is true not only of "high-brow" plays, but of the most popular forms of entertainment. Indeed, just now it is very "high-brow" to like melo-drama melodrama , and a thorough-going plot play has the attraction of an exotic.

THE most successful—and the best—play now running in New York, "Potash and Perlmutter," has scarcely a plot at all. It is rather loosely made from Montague Glass' well known stories published in the Saturday Evening Post. Here is a New York play at last. It could not happen anywhere else in the world, though there is not an American in the piece and the only character who speaks conventional English is a Russian refugee. This is not the New York of Babylonian towers and sky-effects which the settlement-house school of poets write about, but it is the city with which the humble resident of Manhattan Island has to reckon and to which he has to adapt himself. The apartment-houses are built for—and usually owned by—Potash or Perl-mutter Perlmutter ; the restaurants are run for them; the shops are governed by the taste of Mrs. Potash and Mrs. Perl-mutter Perlmutter ; and, whether one likes it or not, one has to buy garments fundamentally designed to enhance the charms of those ladies.

Of course, Potash and Perlmutter are not the only people in New York. There are also a few Greeks and Italians, and a few people from Cork. But our flavoring extract is Potash and Perlmutter. Whose is the hand that dresses the shop windows along Fifth Avenue? Potash's Whose ladies recline in the limousines that pant in the traffic block? Perlmutter's. In this play you have a group of the people who make the external city, who are weaving the visible garment of New York, creating the color, the language, the "style," the noise, the sharp contrasts which, to the inlander, mean the great metropolis. People who are on their way to some-thing something are always more conspicuous and more potent than people who have got what they want and are where they be-long belong . This city roars and rumbles and hoots and jangles because Potash and Perlmutter are on their way to some-thing something . Our gorgeous flower shops and diamond shops and fur shops are bril-liant brilliant largely because Potash and Perl-mutter Perlmutter have their romances and their softer hours; and we import more champagne than any other city in the world chiefly because, as Mawruss says, "between friends and partners there should be no stinginess."

Here is another play made by the actors. The jangling partners are a wonderful pair, and the cast is good throughout. Alexander Carr, as Mawruss Perlmutter, has the most difficult part in the piece, and produces a really perfect piece of character-acting. Potash, played by Barney Bernard, is a simpler part, but could scarcely be better done. Potash is the old-fashioned Jewish

Both partners are marvelously made-up. Potash's face ought to carry any play; when he is threatened with bankruptcy, it be-comes becomes fairly green with misery. Perlmutter is just as sick, but he has acquired the notion that a man must be a good loser, and had better look as if he could pay fifty cents on the dollar. It is a deeply touching moment when Potash says: "And to think it's come to this, that I can't buy my own partner a vedding bresent." When Mrs. Potash la-ments laments that they will now have to give up "the new apartment on Riverside Drive, with such a fine view of Grant's Tomb," one would be sorry for her, if one did not know that every lady of her race will eventually get such an apart-ment apartment , even if we have to build Grant another tomb to ex-tend extend the territory.

Senator Murphy, the Tammany poli-tician politician , is a fair sample of the Irishmen who attend to our city government. Marks Pasinsky, the buyer from "Tcha-caw-go," with his suffused eye, his high, feminine voice, and his giggle, is familiar enough. The downtown res-taurants restaurants are full of Pasinskys all the year round. Mozart Ra-biner Rabiner , the salesman, is another old ac-quaintance acquaintance . When he has to stop over at a small town where the hotels are poor, Mozart is always the last man in the hotel "'bus." He sees everybody else inside: "After you, sir; after you, madame." Then he takes a place at the back of the 'bus, shining with nobility, and perhaps even holds the door shut. When the 'bus stops before the hotel, Mozart, having been the last man in, is the first man out, dashes to the clerk's desk, and gets the best room. The hotel men know Mozart.

The women's parts are not so well taken as the men's. Miss Louise Dresser plays Ruth Goldman, the costume de-signer designer , well; but she has not a long enough perspective on her part, and does not make the most of its possibilities. This part is worth the best the management can do for it. The designer is the heroine of the New York garment trade; she cries out for the novel-ist novelist or the dramatist who has color enough to paint her romance. For she is a romantic figure. She is the girl who has the cabin de luxe on the French liners, stops at the Élysée Palace Hotel, declares her partiality for "Showpan," and encourages struggling artists.

Potash says of his designer, that she has "the figure of a Venus de Milo and the business head of a Rockefeller." Though she toys with the idea of a romantic life with the Russian musician, she is shrewd enough, in the event, to marry Mawruss Perlmutter and to put the romance into the business.