'It is only just to the actor, Mr. E. S. Willard, to say that his genius outruns that of the author. The art of the player is of more original, finer, subtler stuff than that of the playwright; it has the power to evoke sentiments and passions from the vast deep of the entranced fancy, of which the author neither schemed nor dreamed; it creates images of wondrous power and beauty, which become forever fixed upon the mind of the spectator sitting at the play.

Mr. Willard has to do in this drama with materials not too new, only newly made over. He is a stage father as familiar almost as the stage itself. But he appears before his audience in shape so strange, with power to charm the senses so assured, with genius to beguile the feelings so subtle, as to make it appear as if he were the first of stage fathers whose child was wronged, whose home was desolated, whose heart was broken.

Mr. Willard's entrance upon the stage proclaimed his indisputable right to the center of it; it recalled Kean's original entrance before the floats of Drury Lane. Mr. Willard's gaunt, wasted figure; his unconsidered garb; his distraught manner; his introspective look; his unconsciousness of the unfitness of himself to his surroundings; his contempt for things material; his absorption in the single idea that possessed his mind, even as did his love for his daughter possess his heart - all made up a picture of such intense interest as to catch and fix in an instant the eye, the ear, the mind, and the heart of the audience.

Greater actors than Mr. Willard his audiences may have seen, but I doubt if for many years they have seen a more original one. He has, as Cyrus Blenkarn, whistled down the wind the most cherished traditions of the theater. At the end of the second act, when he hears of the shame and flight of the child that he has loved with a love greater than that of Rachel for her children; when he hears that she is lost to him, to home, to honor, the old wonted curse of the stage father is anticipated and not vainly. It follows, of course, but it is as no other stage father's curse ever was. The stricken man, standing amid the ruins of his home, with all that made home precious, sweet, and beautiful, rudely shattered, does not pray God to destroy his enemies, but to five to him the power to do it. He cannot trust the consummation of his vengeance even to the divine arm; his own must strike the blow; he himself must wreak the vengeance.

The author's manner of phrasing the mixed supplication and imprecation, fine as it is, is of little power compared with the actor's manner of pronouncing it. He should, by all the law and custom of the acted drama from Thespis to the last melodramatic star, rush madly to the footlights, fall heavily upon his knees, upreach his clasped hands, and, banishing all tones not thunderous, vociferously tear good passion to tatters, splitting the ears of the groundlings and terrifying them with noise.

Mr. Willard does nothing of the kind. He does not approach the footlights; he does not fall upon his knees; he does not vociferate his prayer; but standing erect, in the centre of the stage, his thin hands - stained with the clay - outstretched to the farthest limit, he speaks in a low, measured monotone which is as deep as the nethermost depths of human misery, suffering and wrong; and, so standing and speaking, he seems as one fit to command from heaven itself the boon of vengeance for which he supplicates The man appeared for the moment to the overwrought imagination of the spectator to be himself the awful minister of retributive justice; he seemed to fill the stage, to pervade every part of it. He appeared more than a man, an overpowering image of one on whom sin and sorrow and suffering had laid their hands to dignify, strengthen and ennoble. He seemed as great as fate itself, and those who heard his supplication knew that it would be answered, that Cyrus Blenkarn's enemies would be made even as he prayed they should be, as wax in his hands. It was not the author's words, but the actor's art, that assured to the audience the consummation of his prayer far in advance of it realization.

We cannot always have actors on the stage of genius or talent like that of Mr. Willard's, but we can, if audiences so will it, have always plays which, like The Middleman, elevate, not debase, the stage.