^STUDIES OF 
 
 THE STAGE 
 
 BY 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 h 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER AND BROTHERS 
 
 MDCCCXCIV 
 
8/7 
 
 Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
To AGNES ETHEL, who once adorned 
 the Stage for an all too brief period, these 
 Studies are inscribed by her friend of 
 many years, the A UTHOR 
 
 4036 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THESE essays upon theatrical subjects differ 
 from most other papers about plays and play- 
 wrights, mainly because of the writer's different 
 point of view. While the theatrical critic in 
 general looks at the drama from his seat in the 
 orchestra, my standpoint has always been the 
 stage itself. Being, for my own part, a maker 
 of plays, I have considered the art of the drama- 
 tist with a fuller understanding of its technic, I 
 hope, and with a more intimate sympathy, I 
 think, than is possible to those who know the 
 stage only from the far side of the footlights. 
 In fact, I am quite willing to have this little 
 volume considered as an argument in favor of 
 the contention that dramatic literature must 
 approve itself as drama first, before it need be 
 discussed as literature. 
 
 COLUMBIA COLLEGE, 
 February, 1894. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chap. Page 
 
 I. THE DRAMATIZATION OF NOVELS i 
 
 II. THE DRAMATIC OUTLOOK IN AMERICA ... 39 
 
 III. THE PLAYERS 77 
 
 IV. CHARLES LAMB AND THE THEATRE .... 96 
 V. TWO FRENCH THEATRICAL CRITICS : 
 
 I. M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 126 
 
 II. M. JULES LEMAITRE ''. . 150 
 
 VI. ASIDES: 
 
 I. SHAKSPERE, MOLIERE, AND MODERN 
 
 ENGLISH COMEDY 176 
 
 II. THE OLD COMEDIES 190 
 
 III. A PLEA FOR FARCE 203 
 
" : " : 
 
 or r 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 *" O R 
 THE DRAMAfffitfFfOT OF NOVELS 
 
 * literary tasks seem easier 
 of accomplishment than the 
 making of a good play out 
 of a good novel. The play- 
 wright has ready to his hand 
 a story, a sequence of situations, a group 
 of characters artfully contrasted, the sug- 
 gestion of the requisite scenery, and oc- 
 casional passages of appropriate con- 
 versation. What more is needed than 
 a few sheets of paper and a pair of 
 scissors, a pen and a little plodding pa- 
 tience ? The pecuniary reward is abun- 
 dant; apparently the feat is temptingly 
 facile ; and every year we see many writers 
 succumb to the temptation. Whenever a 
 novel hits the popular fancy and is seen 
 for a season in everybody's hands, be it 
 Mr. Barnes of New York or She, The 
 Quick or the Dead? or Robert Elsmere, 
 the adapter steps forward and sets the 
 
story on the stage, counting on the re- 
 flected reputation of the novel to attract 
 the public to witness the play. But the 
 result of the calculation is rarely satisfac- 
 tory, and the dramatized romance is rare- 
 ly successful. Frequently it is an instant 
 failure, like the recent perversion of Rob- 
 ert Elsmere ; occasionally it is forced into 
 a fleeting popularity by managerial wiles, 
 like the stage versions of She and Mr. 
 Barnes oj New York ; and only now r and 
 again is it really welcomed by the public, 
 like the dramatizations of Little Lord 
 Fauntleroy and Uncle Toms Cabin. So 
 it is that, if we look back along the lists 
 of plays which have had prolonged popu- 
 larity, we shall find the titles of very few 
 dramatizations, and we shall discover that 
 those which chance to linger in our mem- 
 ory are recalled chiefly because of a for- 
 tuitous association with the fame of a 
 favorite actor; thus the semi -operatic 
 version of Guy Manner ing brings before 
 us Charlotte Cushman's weird embodi- 
 ment of Meg Merrilies, just as the artless 
 adaptation of the Gilded Age evokes the 
 joyous humor of John T. Raymond as 
 
Colonel Sellers. And if we were to make 
 out a list of novels which have been 
 adapted to the stage in the past thirty 
 years or so, we should discover a rarely 
 broken record of overwhelming disaster. 
 The reason of this is not far to seek. 
 It is to be found in the fundamental dif- 
 ference between the art of the drama and 
 the art of prose - fiction a difference 
 which the adapter has generally ignored 
 or been ignorant of. Perhaps it is not 
 unfair to suggest that the methods of the 
 dramatist and of the novelist are as unlike 
 as the methods of the sculptor and of the 
 painter. The difference between the play 
 and the novel is at bottom the differ- 
 ence between a precise and rigid form, 
 and a form of almost unlimited range and 
 flexibility. The drama has laws as un- 
 bending as those of the sonnet, while the 
 novel may extend itself to the full license 
 of an epic. It is hardly too much to say 
 that nowadays the novelist has complete 
 freedom in choice of subject and in meth- 
 od of treatment. He may be concise or 
 he may be prolix. He may lay the scene 
 of his story in a desert, and find his effect 
 
in the slow analysis of a single human 
 soul in awful solitude ; or he may create 
 a regiment of characters which shall per- 
 form intricate evolutions and move in 
 serried ranks through the crowded streets 
 of a busy city. He may riot in the great 
 phenomena of nature, forcing the tornado, 
 the gale at sea, the plunge of a cataract, 
 the purple sunset after a midsummer 
 storm, to create his catastrophe or to typi- 
 fy some mood of his hero. He may be a 
 persistent pessimist, believing that all is 
 for the worst in the worst of all possible 
 worlds, and painting his fellow -man in 
 harsh black-and-white, with a most mod- 
 erate use of the white. He may be a 
 philosopher, using a thin veil of fiction as 
 a transparent mask for the exposition of 
 his system of life. He may adopt the 
 novel as a platform or as a pulpit ; he 
 may use it as a means or he may accept it 
 as an end ; he may do with it what he will ; 
 and if he be a man to whom the world 
 wishes to listen or a man who has really 
 something to say, he gains a hearing. 
 
 In contrast with the license of the nov- 
 elist the limitations of the dramatist were 
 
never more distinct than they are to-day. 
 As the playwright appeals to the play- 
 goer, he is confined to those subjects in 
 which the broad public can be interested 
 and to the treatment which the broad 
 public will accept. While the writer of 
 romance may condense his work into a 
 short story of a column or two, or expand 
 it to a stout tome of a thousand pages, 
 the writer for the stage has no such 
 choice ; his work must be bulky enough 
 to last from half-past eight to half-past 
 ten at the shortest, or at the longest from 
 eight to eleven. In the present condi- 
 tion of the theatre in Great Britain and 
 the United States, there is little or no 
 demand for the comedietta or for the 
 two - act comedy ; a play must be long 
 enough and strong enough to furnish 
 forth the whole evening's entertainment. 
 The dramatist may divide his piece into 
 three, or four, or five acts, as he may pre- 
 fer, but except from some good and suffi- 
 cient reason, there must be but a single 
 scene to each act. The characters must 
 be so many in number that no one shall 
 seem unduly obtrusive ; they must be 
 
sharply contrasted ; most of them must 
 be sympathetic to the spectators, for the 
 audience in a theatre, however pessimistic 
 it may be individually, is always optimis- 
 tic as a whole. There must be an infu- 
 sion of humor at recurrent intervals, and 
 a slowly increasing intensity of emotional 
 stress. In short, the fetters of the dram- 
 atist are as obvious as is the freedom of 
 the novelist. 
 
 Perhaps the chief disadvantage under 
 which the dramatist labors is that it is 
 almost impossible for him to show ade- 
 quately the progressive and wellnigh im- 
 perceptible disintegration of character 
 under the attrition of recurring circum- 
 stance. Time and space are both beyond 
 the control of the maker of plays, while 
 the story-teller may take his hero by slow 
 stages to the world's end. The drama 
 has but five acts at most, and the theatre 
 is but a few yards wide. Description is 
 scarcely permissible in a play ; and it may 
 be the most beautiful and valuable part 
 of a novel. Comment by the author is 
 absolutely impossible on the stage ; and 
 there are many who love certain novels 
 
Thackeray's for example chiefly because 
 they feel therein the personal presence of 
 the author. It is at once the merit and 
 the difficulty of dramatic art that the 
 characters must reveal themselves ; they 
 must be illuminated from within, not from 
 without ; they must speak for themselves 
 in unmistakable terms; and the author 
 cannot dissect them for us or lay bare 
 their innermost thoughts with his pen as 
 with a scalpel. The drama must needs 
 be synthetic, while now the novel, more 
 often than not, is analytic. The vocabu- 
 lary of the playwright must be clear, suc- 
 cinct, precise, and picturesque, while that 
 of the novelist may be archaic, fantastic, 
 subtle, or allusive. Simplicity and direct- 
 ness are the ear-marks of a good play ; but 
 we all know good novels which are com- 
 plex, involute, tortuous. A French critic 
 has declared that the laws of the drama 
 are Logic and Movement, by which he 
 means that in a good play the subject 
 clearly exposed at first moves forward by 
 regular steps, artfully prepared, straight to 
 its inevitable end. 
 
 After all, art is but a question of se- 
 
lection : no man can put the whole of 
 life either on the stage or into a book. 
 He must choose the facts which seem to 
 him salient and which will best serve his 
 purpose. He must reject unhesitatingly 
 all the others, as valuable in themselves, 
 it may be, but foreign to the work in 
 hand. The principles differ which gov- 
 ern this selection by the dramatist and 
 by the novelist. Details which are insig- 
 nificant in a story may be of the greatest 
 value in a play ; and effects of prime im- 
 portance in the tale may be contrary 
 to the practice of the playwright, or 
 even physically impossible on the stage. 
 George Sand was a great novelist who 
 was passionately occupied with the the- 
 atre, although she was wholly without 
 the dramatic gift ; and in his biographi- 
 cal study of her career and her charac- 
 ter the late M. Caro noted her constant, 
 failure as a dramatist, both with original 
 plays and with adaptations of her own 
 novels, declaring in these words the rea- 
 son of this failure : " What is needed on 
 the stage is the art of relief, the instinct 
 of perspective, adroitness of combination, 
 
and, above all, action, again action, and 
 always action. It is natural and laughter- 
 forcing gayety, or the secret of powerful 
 emotion, or the unexpectedness which 
 grips the attention " all qualities which 
 George Sand lacked. 
 
 A mere sequence of tableaux vivants, 
 even if it include the characters and pre- 
 sent the situations of a successful tale, 
 is not necessarily a successful play, and 
 certainly it is not a good play. It is easy 
 enough to scissor a panorama of scenes 
 from a story, but to make over the story 
 itself into a play is not so easy. To get 
 a true play out of a novel, the dramatist 
 must translate the essential idea from the 
 terms of narrative into the terms of the 
 drama. He must disengage the funda- 
 mental subject from the accidental inci- 
 dents with which the novelist has pre- 
 sented it. He must strip it to the skeleton, 
 and then he must clothe these bare bones 
 with new flesh and fresh muscle in ac- 
 cordance with the needs of the theatre. 
 He must disentangle the primary action 
 and set this on the stage, clearly and sim- 
 ply. To do this it may be necessary to 
 
modify characters, to alter the sequence 
 of scenes, to simplify motives, to con- 
 dense, to clarify, to heighten. The more 
 famous the novel one might almost say 
 trfe better the novel the less likely is it 
 to make a good play, because there is 
 then a greater difficulty in disengaging 
 the main theme from its subsidiary de- 
 velopments ; and even when the play- 
 wright understands his trade, and realizes 
 the gulf which yawns between the novel 
 and the drama, the temptation to retain 
 this fine scene of the story, or that deli- 
 cately drawn character, or the other strik- 
 ing episode, is often too strong to be over- 
 come, though he knows full well that 
 these things are alien to the real play, as 
 it ought to be. The playwright is con- 
 scious that the play-goers may look for 
 these unessential scenes and characters 
 and episodes, and he yields despite his 
 judgment. Then in the end the play be- 
 comes a mere series of magic -lantern 
 slides to illustrate the book ; the real and 
 the essential disappear behind the acci- 
 dental and incidental ; and the spectator 
 cannot see the forest for the trees. The 
 
dramatizations of Scott, of Cooper, and 
 of Dickens, whatever their temporary 
 popularity might be, and their immediate 
 pecuniary success, were none of them 
 good plays, nor were they ever wholly 
 satisfactory to those who knew and loved 
 the original novels. And Scott, Cooper, 
 and Dickens are all sturdy and robust 
 story-tellers, whose tales, one would think, 
 might readily lend themselves to the free- 
 hand treatment and distemper illumina- 
 tion of the theatre. And Uncle Toms 
 Cabin has had much the same fate on 
 the stage: the rough-hewn dramas made 
 out of it have succeeded by no art of their 
 own, but because of the overwhelming in- 
 terest of the novel. I know of no stage 
 version of Mrs. Stowe's story, or of any 
 novel of Scott, of Cooper, or of Dickens, 
 which has either organic unity or artistic 
 symmetry. 
 
 The finer the novel, the more delicate 
 and delightful its workmanship, the more 
 subtle its psychology, the greater is the 
 difficulty in dramatizing it, and the great- 
 er the ensuing disappointment. The fre- 
 quent attempts to turn into a play Vani- 
 
ty Fair and the Scarlet -Letter were all 
 doomed to the certainty of failure, be- 
 cause the development of the central 
 character and the leading motives, as we 
 see them in the pages of the novelist, are 
 not those by which they would best be 
 revealed before the footlights. A true 
 dramatist might treat dramatically the 
 chief figures of Thackeray's novel or of 
 Hawthorne's romance. I can conceive a 
 Becky Sharp play and an Arthur Dimmes- 
 dale drama the first a comedy, with un- 
 derlying emotion ; and the second a trag- 
 edy, noble in its simple dignity ; but neither 
 of these possible plays would be in any 
 strict sense of the word dramatized from 
 the novel, although the germinant sug- 
 gestion was derived from Thackeray and 
 from Hawthorne. They would be origi- 
 nal plays, independent in form, in treat- 
 ment, and in movement ; much as " All 
 for Her " is an original play by Messrs. 
 Simpson and Merivale, though it was ob- 
 viously suggested by the essential ideas 
 of Henry Esmond and A Tale of Two 
 Cities, which were adroitly combined by 
 two accomplished playwrights feeling 
 
themselves at liberty to develop their 
 theme without any sense of responsibility 
 to the novelists. In like manner Mr. 
 Boucicault's admirably effective dramas, 
 the " Colleen Bavvn " and the " Long 
 Strike/'are founded, one on the Collegians 
 of Gerald Griffin, and the other on Mrs. 
 Gaskell's Mary Barton ; but the drama- 
 tist, while availing himself freely of the 
 novelist's labors, held himself equally free 
 to borrow from them no more than he 
 saw fit, and felt in nowise bound to pre- 
 serve in the play what did not suit him 
 in the story. I am told that the founda- 
 tion of Lord Lytton's " Richelieu " can be 
 discovered in a romance by G. P. R. 
 James ; and I have heard that a little 
 story by Jules Sandeau was the exciting 
 cause of MM. Sandeau and Augier's 
 " Gendre de M. Poirier," the finest come- 
 dy of our century. At all times have 
 playwrights been prone to take a ready- 
 made myth. The great Greeks did it, 
 using Homer as a quarry from which to 
 get the rough blocks of marble needed 
 for their heroic statues ; while Shake- 
 speare and Moliere found material for 
 
more than one piece in contemporary 
 prose-fiction. But it would be absurd to 
 consider any of these plays as a mere 
 dramatization of a novel. 
 
 The difficulties and disadvantages of 
 trying to make a play out of a popular 
 tale, when the sequence and development 
 of the story must be retained in the 
 drama, are so distinctly recognized by 
 novelists who happen also to be drama- 
 tists, that they are prone to stand aside 
 and to leave the doubtful task to others. 
 Dumas did not himself make a play out 
 of his romantic tale, the Corsican Brothers. 
 And in the fall of 1887 there were pro- 
 duced in Paris two adaptations of suc- 
 cessful novels which had been written by 
 accomplished dramatists, U Abbe Const an- 
 tin, by M. Ludovic Halevy, and L Affaire 
 Cletnenceau, by M. Alexandre Dumas fils; 
 and in neither case did the dramatist 
 adapt his own story. He knew better; 
 he knew that the good novel would not 
 make a good play ; and while the novice 
 rushed in where the expert feared to tread, 
 the original author stood aside ready to 
 take the profit, but not to run the risk. 
 
I trust that I have not suggested that 
 there are no novels which it is profitable 
 or advisable to adapt to the stage. Such 
 was not my 'intent, at least. What I 
 wished to point out was that a panorama 
 was not a play ; that to make a play out 
 of a novel properly was a most difficult 
 task ; and that the more widely popular 
 the story, the less likely was the resultant 
 piece to be valuable, because of the great- 
 er pressure to retain scenes foreign to the 
 main theme as necessarily simplified and 
 strengthened for the theatre. 
 
 Sometimes a story is readily set on the 
 stage, because it was planned for the the- 
 atre before it appeared as a book. M. 
 Georges Ohnet's " Serge Panine," for ex- 
 ample, was first written as a play and 
 afterwards as a novel, although the piece 
 was not performed until after the story 
 had achieved success. Charles Reade's 
 Peg Woffington is avowedly founded on 
 the comedy of " Masks and Faces," which 
 Reade had written in collaboration with 
 Tom Taylor, and of which it may seem 
 to be a dramatization. Reade also found 
 it easy to make an effective play out of 
 
his Never Too Late to Mend, because this 
 novel was itself based on " Gold," an ear- 
 lier piece of his. 
 
 Nor is this ex-post-facto "dramatization 
 the only possible or proper adaptation of 
 a novel. A story of straightforward emo- 
 tion may often be set on the stage to ad- 
 vantage, and with less alteration than is 
 demanded by the more complex novel of 
 character. Mr. R. L. Stevenson declares 
 that " a good serious play must be found- 
 ed on one of the passionate cruces of life, 
 where duty and inclination come nobly 
 to the grapple ; and the same is true of 
 what I call, for that reason, the dramatic 
 novel." Now it is this dramatic novel, 
 handling broadly a pregnant emotion, 
 which can most often be dramatized suc- 
 cessfully and satisfactorily. And yet, even 
 then, the story is perhaps best set on the 
 stage by a playwright who has never read 
 it. This may sound like a paradox, but I 
 can readily explain what I mean. A well- 
 known French piece, " Miss Multon," is 
 obviously founded on the .English novel 
 East Lynne. I once asked M. Eugene 
 Nus, one of the authors of " Miss Multon," 
 
how he came to adapt an English book ; 
 and he laughingly answered that nei- 
 ther he nor his collaborator, M. Adolphe 
 Belot, had ever read East Lynne. At a 
 pause during a rehearsal of another play 
 of theirs, an actress had told M. Belot 
 that she had just finished a story which 
 would make an excellent play, and there- 
 upon she gave him the plot of Mrs. 
 Wood's novel. And the plot, the primary 
 suggestion, the first nucleus of situation 
 and character, this is all these dramatists 
 needed ; and in most cases it is all that 
 the dramatist ought to borrow from the 
 novelist. It is thus that we may account 
 in part for the merit of Mr. Pinero's play 
 " The Squire," which is perhaps more or 
 less remotely derived from Mr. Hardy's 
 Far from the Madding Crowd. Not to 
 have read the story he is to dramatize is, 
 however, a privilege possible to but few 
 playwrights. 
 
 The next best thing is to have the need- 
 ful power to disengage the main theme 
 of the story and to be able to reincarnate 
 this in a dramatic body. A good exam- 
 ple may be seen in " Esmeralda," the com- 
 
edy which Mr. William Gillette helped 
 Mrs. Burnett to make out of a tale of 
 hers. But this has been done so rarely 
 on the English-speaking stage that I must 
 perforce seek other examples in France. 
 As it happens I can name three plays, all 
 founded on novels, all adapted to the 
 stage by the novelist himself, and all really 
 superior to the novels from which they 
 were taken. M. Jules Sandeau's Made- 
 moiselle de la Seigliere is a pretty tale, 
 but the comedy which the late eminent 
 comedian, M. Regnier, of the Comedie- 
 Frangaise, aided M. Sandeau to found 
 upon it is far finer as a work of litera- 
 ture. Le Marquis de Villemer of George 
 Sand is a lovely novel, but it lacks the 
 firmness, the force, and the symmetry to 
 be found in the play which M. Alexandre 
 Dumas fils helped her to construct from 
 it, and which, therefore, won the popular 
 favor denied to most of her other dra- 
 matic attempts. And in like manner M. 
 Dumas himself recom posed his Dame aux 
 Camelzas, and made a moving novel into 
 one of the most moving plays of our time. 
 In all three cases the drama is widely dif- 
 
ferent from the story, and the many heed- 
 ful modifications have been made with 
 marvellous technical skill. Hardly any 
 more profitable investigation could be 
 suggested to the 'prentice playwright than 
 first to read one of these novels, and then 
 to compare it faithfully with the play 
 which its author evolved from it ; and the 
 student of the physics of play-making 
 could have no better laboratory work than 
 to think out the reasons for every change. 
 Such a student will discover, for in- 
 stance, that the dramatist cannot avail 
 himself of one of the most effective de- 
 vices of the novelist, who may keep a se- 
 cret from his readers, which is either re- 
 vealed to them unexpectedly and all at 
 once, or which they are allowed to solve 
 for themselves from chance hints skilfully 
 let fall in the course of the narrative. 
 But the dramatist knows that to keep a 
 secret from the spectator for the sake of 
 a single, sudden surprise is to sacrifice to 
 one little and temporary shock of dis- 
 covery the cumulative force of a heroic 
 struggle against a foreseen catastrophe. 
 To take an example from one of the most 
 
accomplished of Greek playwrights, the 
 strife against awakening doubt, the wrest- 
 ling with a growing conviction, the agony 
 of final knowledge which we see in " CEdi- 
 pus," and the indisputable effect these 
 have on us, are the result of not keeping 
 a secret. The great play of Sophocles 
 has the interest of expectation, though 
 every spectator might foresee and fore- 
 tell the outcome of the opening situa- 
 tions. True dramatic interest is aroused, 
 not by deceiving or disappointing the au- 
 dience as to the end to be reached, or 
 even by keeping it unduly in doubt as to 
 this, but by choosing the least common- 
 place and most effective means of reach- 
 ing that end. And true dramatic inter- 
 est is sustained, not by a vulgar surprise, 
 but by exciting the sympathy of the spec- 
 tator for the character immeshed in dan- 
 gers which the audience comprehend 
 clearly by exciting the sympathy of the 
 spectator so that he becomes the accom- 
 plice of the playwright, putting himself in 
 the place of the persons of the play, and 
 feeling with them as the dread catastro- 
 phe draws nigh. 
 
The novelist may play tricks with his 
 readers, because he knows that they can 
 take time to think if they are in doubt, 
 and can even turn back a chapter or two 
 to straighten out the sequence of events. 
 But the dramatist knows that the spec- 
 tators have no time for retrospection and 
 for piecing together, and therefore he is 
 not warranted in leaving them in the dark 
 for a minute. And it is this total diver- 
 gence of principle that so many novelists, 
 and so many of those who attempt to 
 dramatize novels, absolutely fail to ap- 
 prehend. In her needless biography of 
 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant 
 found fault with the screen scene of the 
 " School for Scandal " because we see Lady 
 Teazle conceal herself. " It would, no 
 doubt," she wrote, " have been higher art 
 could the dramatist have deceived his au- 
 dience as well as the personages of the 
 play, and made us also parties in the sur- 
 prise of the discovery." This criticism is 
 simply a master-stroke of dramatic in- 
 competence, and it is astounding that 
 any one able to read and write could con- 
 sider that most marvellous specimen of 
 
dramatic construction, the screen scene 
 of the " School for Scandal," without see- 
 ing that the whole effect of the situation, 
 and half the force of the things said and 
 done by the characters on the stage, 
 would be lost if we did not know tHat 
 Lady Teazle was in hiding within hear- 
 ing of Joseph's impotent explanations, 
 Charles's careless gayety, and Sir Peter's 
 kindly thoughtfulness. 
 
 In a play there must be as little as pos- 
 sible of either confusion or doubt. As 
 the French critic said, the laws of the 
 drama are Logic and Movement logic in 
 the exposition and sequence of events, 
 movement in the emotions presented. 
 And here we come to another dissimilar- 
 ity of the drama from prose-fiction the 
 need of more careful and elaborate struct- 
 ure in a play. A novel a man may make 
 up as he goes along haphazard, but in a 
 play the last word must be thought out 
 before the first word is written. The plot 
 must move forward unhesitatingly to its 
 inevitable conclusion. There can be no 
 wavering, no faltering, no lingering by the 
 wayside. And every effect, every turn of 
 
the story must be prepared adroitly and 
 unostentatiously. M. Legouve calls the 
 play-goer both exacting and inconsistent, 
 in that he insists that everything which 
 passes before him on the stage shall be 
 at once foretold and unforeseen. The 
 play-goer is shocked if anything drops 
 from the clouds unexpected, yet he is 
 bored if anything is unduly announced. 
 The dramatist must now and again take 
 the play-goers into his confidence by a 
 chance word to which they pay no atten- 
 tion at the time, so that when the situa- 
 tion abruptly turns on itself, they say to 
 themselves, " Why, of course, he warned 
 us of that. What fools we were not to 
 guess what was coming!" And t'hen they 
 are delighted. 
 
 In considering Lord Tennyson's " Queen 
 Mary " when it first" appeared, Mr. Henry 
 James remarked that the " fine thing in a 
 real drama is that, more than any other 
 work of literary art, it needs a masterly 
 structure, a process which makes a de- 
 mand upon an artist's rarest gifts." And 
 then Mr. James compressed a chapter of 
 criticism into a figure of speech. " The 
 
five-act drama," he said, " serious or hu- 
 morous, poetic or prosaic, is like a box of 
 fixed dimensions and inelastic material, 
 into which a mass of precious things are 
 to be packed away. . . . The precious 
 things seem out of all proportion to the 
 compass of the receptacle ; but the artist 
 has an assurance that with patience and 
 skill a place may be made for each, and 
 that nothing need be clipped or crimped, 
 squeezed or damaged." It is this infinite 
 patience and this surpassing skill that the 
 ordinary theatrical adapter of a novel is 
 wholly without. He does not acknowl- 
 edge the duties of the dramatist, and he 
 is hardly conscious even that a play is a 
 work of literary art. Few of those who 
 try to write for the stage, without having 
 penetrated the secret of the drama, realize 
 the indisputable necessity of the prelim- 
 inary plan. They do not suspect that a 
 play must needs be built as carefully and 
 as elaborately as a cathedral, in which not 
 only the broad nave and the massive 
 towers but every airy pinnacle and every 
 flying buttress contribute to the total ef- 
 fect. As the architect, who is primarily 
 
25 
 
 an artist, must do his work in full accord 
 with the needs of the civil engineer who 
 understands the mechanics of building, 
 so the dramatist, who deals with human 
 character and human passion, is guid- 
 ed in his labor by the precepts and 
 practice of the mere play-maker, the ex- 
 pert who is master of the mechanics of 
 the stage. The accomplished architect 
 is his own civil engineer, and the true 
 dramatist is a playwright also, a man fully 
 conversant with the possibilities of the 
 theatre and fully recognizing its limita- 
 tions. " To work successfully beneath a 
 few grave, rigid laws," said Mr. James in 
 the criticism from which I have already 
 quoted, " is always a strong man's high- 
 est ideal of success." This serves to ex- 
 plain why the sonnet with its inexorable 
 rules has been ever a favorite with great 
 poets, and why the drama with its metes 
 and bounds has always had a fascination 
 for the literary artist. 
 
 Some of the limitations of the drama 
 are inherent in the form itself, and are 
 therefore immutable and permanent. 
 Some are external, and are therefore tern- 
 
porary and variable. For example, it has 
 always seemed to me that inadequate at- 
 tention has been given to the influence 
 exerted on dramatic literature by the size 
 of the theatre and by the circumstances 
 of the performance. This influence was 
 most potent in shaping the Greek drama, 
 the Elizabethan plays of England, and the 
 French tragedy under Louis XIV. The 
 unadorned directness of /Eschylus im- 
 presses us mightily; the same massive 
 breadth of treatment we find also, al- 
 though in a minor degree, in Sophocles 
 and Euripides ; on all three dramatists it 
 was imposed by the physical conditions 
 of the theatre. Their plays were to be 
 performed out of doors, by actors speak- 
 ing through a resonant mouthpiece in a 
 huge mask, and lifted on high shoes so 
 that they might be seen by thousands of 
 spectators from all classes of the people. 
 Of necessity the dramatist chose for his 
 subject a familiar tale, and gave it the 
 utmost simplicity of plot while he sought 
 a gradually increasing intensity of emo- 
 tion. The movement of his story must 
 needs be slow ; there was no change of 
 
scene, and there was no violence of ac- 
 tion. Thus it happens that the impassi- 
 ble dignity of the Greek drama was due, 
 not wholly to the aesthetic principles of 
 Greek art, but to the physical conditions 
 of the Greek theatre. The so-called rule 
 of the three unities the rule that a 
 play should show but one action in one 
 place and in one day, a rule that later 
 critics deduced from the practice of the 
 Greeks was not consciously obeyed by 
 ^Eschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, al- 
 though the most of their plays seem to 
 fall within it, simply from force of circum- 
 stances. 
 
 As different as may be were the large 
 and splendid open-air representations of 
 these great Greek dramas before the as- 
 sembled citizens of a Greek state, and 
 the cramped and dingy performances of 
 Shakespeare's plays in the rude theatre 
 of Queen Elizabeth's day, when the stage 
 was but a small platform set up at one 
 end of the half-roofed court-yard of an 
 inn. Then there was but a handful of 
 spectators, standing thickly in the pit or 
 seated in the shallow galleries close to 
 
the actors. The stage was unencumbered 
 with scenery, and author and actors felt 
 themselves free to fill it with movement ; 
 and so the plays of that time abound in 
 murders and trials, in councils and in 
 battles. The audience had perforce to 
 imagine the background of the story, and 
 so the authors did not hesitate to change 
 the scene with careless frequency. As the 
 noble marble theatres of Greece imposed 
 on the dramatist an equal severity, so the 
 mean, half-timbered playhouses of Eliza- 
 bethan England warranted the noisy vio- 
 lence and the rushing eloquence and the 
 fiery poesy which seem to us to-day chief 
 among the characteristics of the dramatic 
 literature of that epoch. 
 
 Crossing the Channel to France, we 
 find that the decorum and pseudo-dignity 
 of tragedy under Louis XIV. are due, in 
 part at least, to the court plumes and 
 velvet coats which the actors wore even 
 when personating the noblest of Romans 
 or the simplest of Greeks ; and also to the 
 fact that the stage was circumscribed by 
 a double row of benches occupied by the 
 courtiers. Through the ranks of these 
 
2 9 
 
 fine gentlemen, coming and going at their 
 will, and chatting together freely, the Cid 
 and Phedre had to make their way to a 
 small central space where they might 
 stand stock-still to declaim. Swift mo- 
 tion and even vigorous gesture were im- 
 possible. The wily Racine found his 
 account in substituting a subtle self-an- 
 alytic and concentrated psychologic ac- 
 tion for purely physical movement, a 
 choice consonant to his genius. On the 
 production of Voltaire's "Semiramis," it 
 is recorded that an usher had to break 
 through the ring of spectators seated and 
 standing on the stage, with a plaintive 
 appeal that they would make way for the 
 ghost of Ninus. Under conditions like 
 these it is no wonder that in time French 
 tragedy stiffened into a parody of itself. 
 
 The physical conditions of the stage 
 are different in every time and in every 
 place; they are continually changing; but 
 the true dramatist makes his work con- 
 form to them, consciously or unconscious- 
 ly. The poet who is not a true dramatist 
 seeks to model a modern drama on an 
 ancient a fundamental and fatal defect. 
 
The attempt of Voltaire to imitate Soph- 
 ocles was foredoomed to failure. The 
 endeavor of many later English poets to 
 use the Shakespearean formula is equally 
 futile. Mr. Stedman has shrewdly point- 
 ed out that Tennyson's " Queen Mary" 
 differs from the work of the Elizabethan 
 dramatist in that it is the result of a 
 " forced effort, while the models after 
 which it is shaped were in their day an 
 intuitive form of expression." 
 
 This forced effort is really due to a 
 misunderstanding of the older dramatists. 
 If Sophocles had lived in the days of 
 Voltaire, he would have written in ac- 
 cordance with the physical conditions of 
 the French theatre of that era. If Shake- 
 speare had lived in the days of ^Eschylus, 
 he would have produced Greek plays of 
 the most sublime simplicity. Were he 
 alive now, we may be sure that he would 
 not construct a piece in mimicry of the 
 Elizabethan dramatists, as Lord Tennyson 
 chose to do. He would use the most 
 modern form : and, incomparable crafts- 
 man as he was, he would bend to his bid- 
 ding every modern improvement music, 
 
costume, scenery, and lighting. Were 
 Caesar and Napoleon men of our time, 
 they would not now fight with the short 
 sword or the flint-lock, but with the 
 Winchester and the Catling. 
 
 This, I take it, is one of the chief char- 
 acteristics of the true dramatist that he 
 sees at once when a form is outworn, and 
 lets the dead past bury its dead ; that he 
 utilizes all the latest devices of the stage, 
 while recognizing frankly and fully the 
 limitations imposed by the physical con- 
 ditions of the theatre. As I have already 
 suggested, these limitations forbid not a 
 few of the effects permissible to the nov- 
 elist. No dramatist may open his story 
 with a solitary horseman, as was once the 
 fashion of fiction; nor can he show the 
 hero casually rescuing the heroine from 
 a prairie on fire, or from a slip into the 
 rapids of Niagara ; and he finds it impos- 
 sible to get rid of the villain by throwing 
 him under the wheels of a locomotive. 
 Not only is the utilization of the forces 
 of nature very difficult on the stage, 
 and extremely doubtful, but the descrip- 
 tion of nature herself is out of place ; and 
 
however expert the scene-painter, he can- 
 not hope to vie with Victor Hugo or 
 Hawthorne in calling up before the eye 
 the grandeur or the picturesqueness of 
 the scene where the action of the story 
 comes to its climax. 
 
 Time was when the drama was first, 
 and prose-fiction limped a long way after ; 
 time was when the novelists, even the 
 greatest of them, began as playwrights. 
 Cervantes, Le Sage, Fielding, all studied 
 the art of character-drawing on the boards 
 of a theatre, although no one of their 
 plays keeps the stage to-day, while we 
 still read with undiminished zest the 
 humorous record of the adventures and 
 misadventures of Don Quixote, Gil Bias, 
 and Tom Jones. Scott was, perhaps, the 
 first great novelist who did not learn his 
 trade behind the scenes. It seemed to 
 Lowell that before Fielding "real life 
 formed rather the scenic background than 
 the substance, and that the characters are, 
 after all, merely players who represent 
 certain types rather than the living types 
 themselves." It may be suggested that 
 the earlier novels reflected the easy expe- 
 
clients and artificial manners of the theatre, 
 much as the writers may have employed 
 the processes of the stage. Since Field- 
 ing and Scott the novel has been expand- 
 ing, until it seeks to overshadow its elder 
 brother. The old interdependence of the 
 drama and prose -fiction has ceased; 
 nowadays the novel and the play are in- 
 dependent, each with its own aims and 
 its own methods. 
 
 While, on the one hand, there are not 
 lacking those who see in the modern 
 novel but a bastard epic in low prose, 
 so -there are not wanting others, novel- 
 ists and critics of literature, chiefly in 
 France, where the principles of dramatic 
 art are better understood than else- 
 where, who are so impressed by the num- 
 ber and magnitude of the restrictions 
 which bind the dramatist, that they are 
 inclined to declare the drama itself to be 
 an outworn form. They think that the 
 limitations imposed on the dramatist are 
 so rigid that first-rate literary workmen 
 will not accept them, and that first-rate 
 literary work cannot be hoped for. These 
 critics are on the verge of hinting that 
 
 3 
 
nowadays the drama is little more than a 
 polite amusement, just as others might 
 call oratory now little more than the art 
 of making after-dinner speeches. They 
 suggest that the play is sadly primitive 
 when compared with the perfected novel 
 of the nineteenth century. They remark 
 that the drama can show but a corner 
 of life, while prose-fiction may reveal 
 almost the whole of it. They assert 
 boldly that the drama is no longer the 
 form of literature best suited to the treat- 
 ment of the subjects in which the think- 
 ing people of to-day are interested. They 
 declare that the novelist may grapple res- 
 olutely with a topic of the times, though 
 the dramatist dare not scorch his fingers 
 with a burning question. The Goncourts, 
 in the preface of their undramatic play, 
 4< La Patrie en Danger," announced that 
 " the drama of to-day is not literature." 
 
 It is well to mass these criticisms to- 
 gether that they may be met once and 
 for all. It is true that the taste for analy- 
 sis which dominates the prose-fiction of 
 our time has affected the drama but little ; 
 and it is not easy to say whether or not 
 
the formulas of the theatre can be so en- 
 larged, modified, and made more delicate 
 that the dramatist can really rival the 
 novelist in psychologic subtlety. Of 
 course, if the novel continues to develop 
 in one direction in accordance with a 
 general current of literature, and if the 
 drama does not develop along the same 
 lines, then the drama will be left behind, 
 and it will become a mere sport, an empty 
 spectacle, a toy for children, spoonmeat 
 for babes. 
 
 A book, however fine or peculiar, deli- 
 cate or spiritual, goes in time to the hun- 
 dred or the thousand congenial spirits for 
 whom it was intended ; it may not get to 
 its address at once or even in its author's 
 life-time; but sooner or later its message 
 is delivered to all who are ready to receive 
 it. A play can have no such fate ; and 
 for it there is no redemption, if once it is 
 damned. It cannot live by pleasing a 
 few only ; to earn the right to exist, it 
 must please the many. And this is at 
 the bottom of all dislike for the dramatic 
 form that it appeals to the crowd, to 
 the broad public, to all classes alike, rich 
 
and poor, learned and ignorant, rough 
 and refined. And this is to me the great 
 merit of the drama, that it cannot be dil- 
 ettante, finikin, precious, narrow. It must 
 handle broad themes broadly. It must 
 deal with the common, facts of humanity. 
 It is the democrat of literature. The- 
 ophile Gautier, who disliked the theatre, 
 said that an idea never found its way on 
 the stage until it was worn threadbare in 
 newspapers and in novels. And he was 
 not far out. As the drama appeals to 
 the public at large, it must consider seri- 
 ously only those subjects which the pub- 
 lic at large can understand and are in- 
 terested in. There are exceptions, no 
 doubt, now and again, when an adroit 
 dramatist succeeds in captivating the 
 public with a theme still in debate. M. 
 Sardou, for example, wrote " Daniel Ro- 
 chat" ten years before Mrs. Ward wrote 
 Robert Elsmere, and the Frenchman's 
 play was acted in New York for more 
 than a hundred nights. M. Alexandre 
 Dumas fils has again and again discussed 
 on the stage marriage and divorce and 
 other problems that vex mankind to-day. 
 
 
And in Scandinavia, Henrik Ibsen, a 
 dramatist of exceeding technical skill and 
 abundant ethical vigor, has brought out 
 a series of dramas (many of them suc- 
 cessful on the stage), of which the most 
 important is "Ghosts," wherein he con- 
 siders with awful moral force the doctrine 
 of heredity, proving by example that the 
 sins of the fathers are visited on the chil- 
 dren. With instances like these in our 
 memories, we may suggest that the lit- 
 erary deficiencies of the drama are not in 
 the form, but in the inexpertness or in- 
 ertness of the dramatists of the day. 
 There are few of the corner-stone facts of 
 human life, and there are none of the 
 crucible-tried passions of human charac- 
 ter, which the drama cannot discuss quite 
 as well as the novel. 
 
 Indeed, the drama is really the noblest 
 form of literature, because it is the most 
 direct. It calls forth the highest of liter- 
 ary faculties in the highest degree the 
 creation of character, standing firm on 
 its own feet, and speaking for itself. The 
 person in a play must be and do, and the 
 spectator must see what he is, and what 
 
he does, and why. There is no narrator 
 standing by to act as chorus, and there 
 needs none. If the dramatist know his 
 trade, if he have the gift of the born play- 
 wright, if his play is well made, then there 
 is no call for explanation or analysis, no 
 necessity of dissecting or refining, no 
 demand for comment or sermon, no desire 
 that any one palliate or denounce what 
 all have seen. Actions speak louder than 
 words. That this direct dramatic method 
 is fine enough for the most abstruse intel- 
 lectual self-questioning when the subject 
 calls for this, and that in the mighty 
 hand of genius it is capable of throwing 
 light in the darkest corners and crannies 
 of the tortured and tortuous human soul, 
 ought not to be denied by any one who 
 may have seen on the stage the " OEdipus " 
 of Sophocles, the " Hamlet " of Shak- 
 spere, the "Misanthrope" of Moliere, or 
 the " Faust " of Goethe. 
 
THE DRAMATIC OUTLOOK IN 
 AMERICA 
 
 j)HE "decline of the drama" 
 is a phrase frequently used 
 and rarely defined. It is a 
 vague term, and many a 
 man who employs it would 
 not find it easy to declare its exact 
 meaning. More often than not the critic 
 of the acted drama is a constant praiser 
 of the past, which he did not see, and a 
 pert contemner of the present, of which 
 he is forced to see too much. To our 
 surprise, as we study the history of the 
 theatre, we find that this has almost al- 
 ways been the case, and that the drama 
 has almost always been in a decline, just 
 on the verge of dying, with barely strength 
 enough to draw its last breath. And yet 
 it still lives, and it bids fair to survive to 
 a ripe old age. 
 
 In seeking to find a precise definition 
 
for the phrase " decline of the drama " we 
 may begin by acknowledging that it can- 
 not indicate any diminution in the popu- 
 larity of the theatre ; it is within the ob- 
 servation of even the youngest veteran 
 that there is a steady increase of play- 
 houses and play-goers. Nor does it mean 
 that the theatres are any less magnificent 
 than they were, for they have never been 
 more commodiously arranged or more 
 sumptuously decorated than they are 
 now. And in like manner we may say 
 that there has been no falling off in the 
 splendor of theatrical spectacle ; indeed, 
 it is often a reproach to the modern stage 
 that it is prone to sacrifice acting, which 
 is the vital essence of theatric art, to 
 adornment, which is but external, super- 
 ficial, and accidental. But this reproach, 
 again, is no new thing ; and it is more than 
 two centuries since Dryden, in the pro- 
 logue to "The Rival Ladies," character- 
 ized the stage of his day in a terse couplet : 
 
 "You now have habits, dances, scenes, and 
 
 rymes, 
 
 High language often ay, and sense some- 
 times." 
 
There are some who declare that the 
 decline of the drama means that there is 
 a decadence of the art of acting. A cer- 
 tain speciousness in this assertion there 
 may be. Since the privileges of the pat- 
 ent theatres of London were abolished, 
 and since the introduction of the starring 
 system, no longer do we see the best act- 
 ors of a country massed in one or two 
 compact companies in the chief city. 
 They are scattered here and there through- 
 out the world. A great actor is not con- 
 tent with the local reputation which satis- 
 fied Burbage and Betterton. He is ready 
 to put a girdle round the earth in forty 
 weeks, playing now in London, a few 
 days after in New York, next week in 
 San Francisco, and a month later in Aus- 
 tralia. But although the leading per- 
 formers of the country cannot any more 
 be seen in a single evening, there has 
 been no falling off in the histrionic art. 
 Never has it been finer, firmer, richer, or 
 more varied than it is now. Never have 
 there been performers of greater skill 
 than there are to-day, either for tragedy, 
 comedy, history, pastoral, scene individ- 
 
able, or poem unlimited. It is idle to 
 call the bead-roll of the foremost actors 
 of our time; but even the youngest play- 
 goers have seen Booth, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. 
 Irving, Signor Salvini, Signora Ristori, 
 Herr Barnay, Madame Sarah-Bernhardt, 
 and M. Coquelin a galaxy not to be 
 matched readily in the palmy days of 
 which we hear so much and know so lit- 
 tle. There is no scarcity of the best act- 
 ing to-day, and the critic who may choose 
 to deny this assertion reminds me of 
 Douglas Jerrold's definition of a Conser- 
 vative as a man who refuses to look at 
 the new moon out of respect for that an- 
 cient institution the old one. 
 
 By a process of exclusion we are thus 
 led to declare that the decline of the 
 drama can mean only that the dramatic 
 is no longer the leading department of 
 literature. From the Elizabethan period, 
 through the Restoration and the reign of 
 Queen Anne, down almost to the end of 
 ' the last century, when Goldsmith gave us 
 "She Stoops to Conquer," and Sheridan 
 brought out " The Rivals " and " The 
 School for Scandal " during these two 
 
centuries the drama was the chief form of 
 literature in our language. It is not so 
 now, and it has not been so for nearly a 
 hundred years. The purpose of the pres- 
 ent paper is to point out certain of the 
 causes of this decadence ; and then to 
 suggest certain reasons why it may fairly 
 be presumed that the period of this decline 
 is at last complete, and why we may ex- 
 pect in the near future a revival of dra- 
 matic literature among English-speaking 
 peoples. 
 
 Like every other art, the drama has its 
 ups and downs, its years of famine and its 
 years of fulness. The undulatory theory 
 is as true of literary progress as it is of 
 light and of sound. One of these recur- 
 ring periods of depression in our dramatic 
 literature was coincident roughly with the 
 beginning of this century, but about the 
 time when the drama ought to have arisen 
 out of this slough several causes com- 
 bined to keep it down. These causes 
 were chiefly four the development of the 
 newspaper in England, the popularity of 
 the Waverley Novels, the Romantic revolt 
 in France, and the perfecting of the me- 
 
chanics of play-making by Scribe. Each 
 of these four causes may be considered 
 briefly and in turn. 
 
 The first and the least of these was the 
 development of the newspaper. British 
 journalism began to exert real influence 
 less than a hundred years ago, and the im- 
 petus of expansion did not come until 
 early in this century. A newspaper is a 
 slice of contemporary existence ; it is a 
 daily panorama of the life of the world, 
 with its joys, its griefs, its slow setting 
 forth of the inevitable, its sudden sur- 
 prises, and all its infinite tragedy. It 
 has even been suggested that Shakspere, 
 were he alive to-day, would be a journal- 
 ist and not a dramatist. I am not one of 
 those who have rashly abandoned Shak- 
 spere to adore Bacon, but I can see Lord 
 Verulam as the editor of the London 
 Times more easily than I can see the 
 author of "Hamlet." In no exact sense 
 of the word is the newspaper a competitor 
 of the play ; and yet the sudden extension 
 of journalism undoubtedly tended to de- 
 crease the public interest in the drama. 
 The newspaper called to it not a few 
 
young men who might otherwise have 
 written for the stage, at the same time 
 that it supplied to others the excitement 
 and stimulus which they had been wont 
 to seek in the theatre. 
 
 Almost contemporaneous with the de- 
 velopment of the newspaper was the en- 
 largement of the novel at the hands of 
 Sir Walter Scott. In the last century 
 Richardson and Fielding, Smollett and 
 Goldsmith, had laid a solid foundation for 
 English fiction ; but it was not until the 
 author of Waver ley built up an enduring 
 monument by his splendid series of ro- 
 mances that the novel rose to be a rival 
 of the play. Scott's instant triumph and 
 the all-embracing popularity which fol- 
 lowed it revealed to young men of literary 
 aspirations that the road to fame and to 
 fortune might lie through the publisher's 
 shop rather than through the stage-door. 
 It is much easier to write a novel than it 
 is to make a play ; and it is very much 
 easier to get a novel published than it is 
 to get a play produced ; and so the ten- 
 dency of the young men away from the 
 drama was strengthened. 
 
4 6 
 
 The expansion of journalism and the 
 extending of fiction had a twofold effect. 
 Both movements drew away literary as- 
 pirants who were possible producers of 
 plays, and who became journalists or nov- 
 elists. And on the other hand, from 
 among those who would have been play- 
 goers there was carried away a certain 
 portion able to stay its liking for the 
 drama with the accounts of fires and rob- 
 beries, of murders and battles, which it 
 found in the newspaper, and also a cer- 
 tain other portion able to satisfy its long- 
 ing for the romantic and the tragic with 
 the heart-breaking tales of the novelist. 
 
 Thus it came to pass that there was a 
 dearth of English dramatists. Mere adapt- 
 ers, patchers up of other men's plays, hew- 
 ers of wood and drawers of water for the 
 daily needs of the theatre these there 
 were then, as there are always. But real 
 authors, men who had studied life and 
 who could reproduce it on the stage, had 
 their attention turned from the theatre. 
 It was at this time in England that the 
 divorce was first declared between litera- 
 ture and the drama a divorce as ill- 
 
 
advised for both parties as the separation 
 of society and politics from which we suf- 
 fer here in the United States. 
 
 For a while the absence of new pieces 
 did not signify, and the theatres continued 
 to act the dramas they had ; they revived 
 old comedies ; they restored old tragedies ; 
 they repaired the cast-off plays of the past. 
 John Philip Kemble was then at the head 
 of the English stage, and he had no liking 
 for new dramas. Charles Lamb said Kem- 
 ble held that all the good plays had been 
 written. Kemble was a great actor, and 
 it was natural for him to think that Shak- 
 spere was none too good for his own act- 
 ing. Yet it may be doubted whether too 
 frequent revivals of Shakspere's plays 
 are signs of a healthy condition of the 
 stage if it be admitted that one of the 
 chief duties of the theatre is to reflect, as 
 best it can, the life of to-day. 
 
 At length, despite Kemble's careful 
 management, the stock on hand was used 
 up, and the public tired of dramatic rem- 
 nants. Then for the first time the void 
 in the English theatre began to be filled 
 by importation from abroad at first from 
 
4 8 
 
 Germany, whence came "The Stranger" 
 and " Pizarro " and other of Kotzebue's 
 tearful and turgid dramas. But the Ger- 
 man supply was soon exhausted, and re- 
 course was had to the French. Until the 
 beginning of this century the stage of 
 England had been self-reliant. It had 
 borrowed a play from France now and 
 again, but it had lent quite as much as it 
 had taken. Few even among professed 
 students of the stage know that in the 
 clearing-house where international bor- 
 rowings are recorded there is a balance in 
 favor of the English as against the French 
 up to the end of the last century. For 
 instance, there were two adaptations of 
 " The Rivals " acted in Paris, and three of 
 " The School for Scandal." But early in 
 this century the balance ceased ; England 
 began to borrow indiscriminately from 
 France ; and the fair exchange soon be- 
 came open robbery. 
 
 As it happened, France was able to 
 meet this demand. Its dramatic litera- 
 ture had just burst the bonds which had 
 swathed it for more than a century. " Her- 
 nani " had sounded his trumpet, and the 
 
hollow walls of Classicism had fallen with 
 a crash. The chill stiffness and the arid 
 discussion of the pseudo-classic drama 
 *had been swept aside by the fiery ardor 
 of the Romantic revolt. The tragedies 
 of the false Classics, as bare as a demon- 
 stration in geometry, gave place to the 
 dramas of the Romantics, as full of color, 
 of movement, and of passion as a tiger. 
 Hugo and Dumas and their fellows found 
 a dead dramatic literature which was 
 nothing but words ; and in its stead they 
 made a living drama which was chiefly 
 action. These bold, vigorous, captivat- 
 ing plays, made on the model of Shak- 
 spere and of Scott in a measure, were 
 hardy enough to stand the voyage across 
 the Channel to the land of Scott and 
 of Shakspere. And in due season there 
 were few theatres in Great Britain or the 
 United States where " Thirty Years of a 
 Gambler's Life " and " Lucretia Borgia " 
 and " The Tower of Nesle " did not see 
 the light of the lamps. 
 
 While the Romantics with their fever- 
 ish fervor were making over the French 
 theatre in their own image, Eugene Scribe, 
 
a workman of surpassing skill in the low- 
 er walks of the drama, was engaged in 
 perfecting the mechanics of play-making. 
 Taine has told us that the art of play- 
 making is as susceptible of improvement 
 as the art of watch-making. Scribe al- 
 most succeeded in inventing a machine- 
 made play and he did found a factory 
 for play-making. As M. Alexandre Du- 
 mas fils says, the dramatic art is wholly 
 an art of preparation : no man ever un- 
 derstood better than Scribe how to pre- 
 pare, how to twist, and how to untie the 
 knot which is the heart of a play. To 
 the presentation of the story, to the de- 
 velopment of the central situation, Scribe 
 was ready to sacrifice all suggestion of 
 poetry, the study of character, brilliancy 
 of dialogue, local color, style, and even, 
 if need be, grammar. His plays are plots, 
 and little more ; and his characters are 
 puppets, into which he has breathed only 
 enough of the breath of life to enable 
 them to fall easily into the situations 
 adroitly arranged for them. He might 
 lay the scene of a comedy in France or in 
 England or in Russia : there was no touch 
 
\ 
 
 of local color, no i 
 characteristics. The action of all his 
 pieces really passed in a vague, unbound- 
 ed region known to the wits of Paris as 
 La Scribte Scribia a sort of Bohemia, 
 which is a desert country by the sea, and 
 in which everything happens exactly as 
 the dramatist wishes. As Scribe's plays 
 took place in no particular country, there 
 was no particular reason why they should 
 not be acted in any country. They were 
 as appropriate to England or to Russia 
 as to France. And so it was : Scribe's 
 comedies and the comedies of the host 
 of collaborators who encompassed him 
 about were translated and transferred, 
 altered and adapted, in every capital in 
 Europe. Localized by the translator, 
 they were often by him presented as 
 original ; and the habit has not alto- 
 gether died out, for within the last ten 
 years a comedy has been acted in New 
 York which the authoress claimed as her 
 own, but which was only an adaptation 
 from Scribe. 
 
 The principles which Scribe discovered 
 were turned to account by certain follow- 
 
ers of the Romantic school, and there 
 arose a band of melodramatic writers skil- 
 ful like Scribe, and pictorial like Hugo 
 and Dumas. Chief among these is M. 
 Dennery, the author of " Don Cesar de 
 Bazan," " The Sea of Ice," and " The Two 
 Orphans." The dramas of these play- 
 wrights were also adapted, altered, and 
 stolen throughout the world. As Schle- 
 gel used to suspect a Spanish origin for 
 every play with an easy and varied in- 
 trigue, so for a while whenever we saw a 
 neatly constructed drama, symmetrical 
 and well articulated, we were inclined to 
 ask what Frenchman had had a hand in 
 its making, unwillingly and unwittingly. 
 When the Romantics had made them- 
 selves masters of the French stage, and 
 when Scribe had elaborated his system 
 of dramaturgic art, then and then only 
 did the French play go forth finally to 
 conquer the world. As the scanty band 
 of English dramatists, thinned by the 
 spread of the newspaper and the growth 
 of the novel, surrendered the control of 
 the English stage, the French were ready 
 to take it, and for fifty years they held it 
 
with a garrison. For fifty years and more 
 the literary quality of the plays produced 
 in England rarely called for criticism. 
 The best pieces of this period were the 
 "Virginius" and "The Hunchback" of 
 Sheridan Knowles, " The Lady of Lyons " 
 and " Richelieu " of Lord Lytton, the 
 "London Assurance" and "Old Heads 
 and Young Hearts " of Dion Boucicault, 
 and the " Masks and Faces " of Charles 
 Reade and Tom Taylor all effective 
 stage-plays, no doubt, but artificial, all of 
 them, and almost free from any vain at- 
 tempt to represent contemporary society. 
 In Emerson's words, " Life lies about us 
 dumb ; the day, as we know it, has not yet 
 found tongue." The English stage did 
 not try to give tongue to English thought ; 
 it was filled with impossible plays, in 
 which Gallic emotion was mangled to fit 
 the Procrustean bed of the British pro- 
 prieties. In the process of decanting the 
 French drama into English demijohns, 
 the lees were shaken up and the fine fla- 
 vor was lost, while an effort was made to 
 give body to the French wine by adding 
 British brandy. The plays known as 
 
"Peril" and "Diplomacy" are types of 
 this bastard hybrid, neither French nor 
 English, nor anything but mulish ; and 
 we may say of this adapted drama what 
 the Western wit said of the mule, that it 
 has no pride of ancestry and no hope of 
 posterity. 
 
 The dramatic decadence in England 
 which began early in this century has 
 continued wellnigh to the present time. 
 Twenty-five years ago the drama in Eng- 
 land was almost at death's door. Not 
 only was there an insufficiency of Eng- 
 lish plays, but the stage was treated with 
 contempt ; play-going was unfashionable, 
 and the theatre was disintegrating from 
 lack of leaders and for want of organiza- 
 tion. But now a change seems to impend. 
 There is a revulsion of feeling in favor of 
 the stage, and by this dramatic literature 
 will probably profit. The time seems 
 ripe for a renascence. Of the four causes 
 which long tended to prevent this at least 
 three are less powerful than they were 
 half a century ago. Journalism may still 
 be as attractive as ever, but prose-fiction 
 in England is suffering from an over-sup- 
 
 
ply and from the reaction which always 
 comes after strenuous effort. There are 
 now no great British novelists, and the 
 British novel is apparently entering on a 
 period of depression not unlike that from 
 which the drama is emerging. 
 
 At the very moment when the demand 
 for plays is increasing, the source of sup- 
 ply in France is drying up. The Roman- 
 tic school has been dead for years, the 
 sc'hool of Scribe is dying, and so is the 
 little school of melodramatists who stood 
 midway between the other two. Rarely 
 are the new French plays suitable for ex- 
 port ; and the stock of old French plays 
 is absolutely exhausted. For the fifty 
 years in the middle of this century the 
 French dramatists brought forth thou- 
 sands of plays, emotional or amusing, in- 
 tense or ingenious, melodramatic or farci- 
 cal ; and of all these thousands every one 
 which had any possibility of success in 
 English has been translated and adapted 
 again and again. The vein is thoroughly, 
 worked out now ; and although a persist- 
 ent prospector may chance on a pocket, 
 it will be but a happy accident. 
 
The old French plays are used up, and 
 there are fewer new French plays than 
 there were. The young men who are 
 taking to literature in France feel them- 
 selves freer in writing fiction than in 
 working for the stage. As I have said 
 before, a novel is easier to write than a 
 play, and it is far easier to get before the 
 people. Quite recently the spread of 
 education, with the consequent growth 
 of the reading public, has at last made 
 the French novel as profitable as the 
 French play. Thus it happens that there 
 are not as many promising young play- 
 wrights in Paris as there were ten years 
 ago, and not half as many, perhaps, as 
 there were twenty years ago. Not only 
 are there fewer plays produced, but those 
 actually acted in Paris are far less likely 
 to please the American people. For one 
 thing, the French dramatists of to-day are 
 conscious of the realistic movement which 
 dominates the fiction of France, of Rus- 
 sia, and of America. The younger play- 
 wrights especially are aware of the increas- 
 ing public appreciation of the more exact 
 presentation of the facts of life. Now the 
 
more accurately a play conforms to life 
 as it is in France, the less available it is 
 for performance in America. What most 
 interests the play-goer in New York is 
 a representation of American life ; he 
 does not care to see a comedy turning 
 on the niceties and conventionalities of 
 merely Parisian existence. As Realism, 
 and its younger brother, Naturalism, 
 gain in power in Paris, fewer and fewer 
 French plays will be fit for the American 
 market. 
 
 The change now to be detected in the 
 French drama has already been dwelt 
 upon by French critics, although of course 
 they do not see its effect on the dramatic 
 literature of the two English - speaking 
 peoples. The drama of passion, such as 
 the Romantics wrote, and the drama of 
 ingenuity, such as Scribe devised both 
 admirably adapted for export are now 
 seldom to be seen on the French stage. 
 The three chief French dramatists of 
 this second half of the nineteenth century 
 are Augier, M. Dumas, and M. Sardou. 
 The plays of only one of these, M. Victo- 
 rien Sardou, a disciple of Scribe, are 
 
brought out successfully in Great Britain 
 or the United States. Of all the dramas 
 of M. Alexandre Dumas fils only one, the 
 " Dame aux Camelias," has held the stage 
 in America, despite a frequent attempt 
 to acclimatize others. And no one of 
 the modern comedies of Emile Augier 
 the most wholesome and honest of the 
 French dramatists of the day has been 
 acted- at any one of the leading theatres 
 of New York during the score of years 
 since I have been a constant play-goer. 
 Two plays of Octave Feuillet have been 
 profitable in America, and two only, the 
 "Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre" 
 and the "Tentation," most skilfully adapt- 
 ed by Dion Boucicault as " Led Astray." 
 Many, if not most, of the French plays of 
 to-day, the serious dramas as well as the 
 comic farces, are calculated solely for the 
 meridian of Paris. They are so Parisian 
 that they are not understood even in the 
 French provinces. They are as local to 
 the Boulevard des Italiens as are Mr. 
 Harrigan's amusing pieces to Mulligan's 
 Alley. And it would be as difficult to 
 transplant them to New York as it would 
 
be to make a French adaptation of "Squat- 
 ter Sovereignty." 
 
 Assertions like these are perhaps sur- 
 prising to not a few who have often heard 
 that our stage still relies on France for 
 its supply ; and it may be well to adduce 
 a few statistics. There were in 1887-8 in 
 New York four theatres having perma- 
 nent companies and giving plays worthy 
 of serious consideration. These were Wai- 
 lack's, Daly's, the Madison Square, and 
 the Lyceum. In these four theatres dur- 
 ing four years (1884-5-6-7) there have 
 been acted adaptations of only eight 
 French plays. In 1884 "Lady Clare," a 
 British perversion of the " Maitre de 
 Forges " of M. Georges Oh net, was the 
 sole example of French dramatic art at 
 these theatres. In 1885 there were acted 
 two versions of the " Andrea " of M. Sar- 
 dou ; another adaptation of the " Maitre 
 de Forges ;" a translation of the " Denise " 
 of M.Dumas; and an English play called 
 " Impulse," derived more or less remotely 
 from a French play called " La Maison 
 du Mari." In 1886 came "Our Society" 
 (based on M. Pailleron's " Monde ou Ton 
 
s'ennuie "), and " Love in Harness " (based 
 on M. Valabregue's " Amour conjugale "). 
 In 1887 we had a second arrangement 
 of " Denise," a version of M. Dennery's 
 " Martyre," and " In the Fashion," which 
 was an adaptation from Scribe. This is 
 the complete list of the plays adapted 
 from the French which were produced at 
 the four leading comedy theatres of New 
 York during these four years. And it 
 may be added that most of those adap- 
 tations failed to interest the public, and 
 that no one of them was a signal suc- 
 cess no one of them was acted for one 
 hundred nights. I note also that at cer- 
 tain other of the New York playhouses 
 where there is no permanent company, 
 and where the entertainment is provided 
 by strolling stars, during the same period 
 four other French plays were produced 
 " Lagardere," " Mile, de Dressier," the 
 "Chouans," and "Three Wives for One 
 Husband." No one of these achieved an 
 emphatic success. It is to be recorded 
 also that in these four years two comedies 
 by an American author, Mr. Bronson 
 Howard, " One of Our Girls " and the 
 
"Henrietta," were performed each for al- 
 most a whole season. 
 
 Figures are stubborn arguments, and 
 those I have adduced seem to me to show 
 that the theatres of New York are no 
 longer dependent for their plays on the 
 theatres of Paris. At least this is the 
 extremely satisfactory deduction which I 
 make from the figures. I know that sta- 
 tistics are edged tools, and that he who 
 produces them is playing with fire. lean 
 do no more than set them down and then 
 stand before them in the humble attitude 
 of Rufus Choate at the Italian opera, 
 when he said to his companion, " Inter- 
 pret to me this libretto, lest I dilate with 
 the wrong emotion." 
 
 What is true of New York is not untrue 
 of London : there, as here, the play adapt- 
 ed from the French is giving way to the 
 play originally written in English. How 
 great the change is in both cities could be 
 shown only by a comparison with the sta- 
 tistics of ten and fifteen years ago a com- 
 parison for which I have no space here. 
 One of the chief causes of this gradual 
 disappearance of the French drama from 
 
62 
 
 the English-speaking stage is the recent 
 recognition of international stage-right. 
 By an absurd anomaly the foreign novelist 
 could not control the printing of his story 
 in this country, while the foreign drama- 
 tist could protect the performance of his , 
 play. This reform has been achieved in 
 America by judicial decision, and in Eng- 
 land by a treaty with France. It has had 
 a double effect. First, the foreign drama- 
 tist, French or German, now insists on full 
 payment for his work, and thus the Eng- 
 lish-speaking dramatist is no longer forced 
 to sell his wares in unfair competition 
 with stolen goods. Second, the foreign 
 dramatist insists on receiving full honor 
 for his work, and thus the English-speak- 
 ing dramatist is no longer discredited by 
 the presumption that his play is adapted 
 from the French. Nowadays when a new 
 French comedy or a German farce is pro- 
 duced in London or in New York the 
 foreign author's name is on the play-bill, 
 and it is also on the check for the royalty. 
 The reason why so many foreign plays 
 continue to be brought out is, not far to 
 seek. It is partly because a habit often 
 
63 
 
 survives long after the exciting cause has 
 ceased, and partly because the conduct of 
 a theatre is a very ticklish task, full of 
 perplexity and danger, which managers 
 try to reduce to a minimum. To produce 
 a new play, absolutely untried, is always 
 a risky piece of business, for barely one 
 in three makes a hit and pays a profit. 
 Those in charge of theatres seek to avoid 
 this risk, as far as may be, by buying plays 
 which have already approved themselves. 
 If the London manager can get the pick 
 of Paris he discounts the hazard of a new 
 drama by a British author which may 
 or may not please the public. If tfre 
 New York manager can secure a piece al- 
 ready successful on the British stage or 
 the French, he is relieved from his doubt. 
 This reasoning of the manager is not with- 
 out weight, and there is no harm done so 
 long as he takes only the best foreign 
 plays; the American people like to "get 
 the best," be it a dictionary or a drama. 
 But national tastes differ, and there is no 
 certainty that the play which succeeded 
 in Paris or in London may not disappoint 
 play-goers in New York : and of this asser- 
 
6 4 
 
 tion American managers have abundant 
 proof every season, with a resultant in- 
 crease in the demand for American plays. 
 That there is already evidence of im- 
 provement in the quality as well as in the 
 quantity of the plays written in Great 
 Britain and the United States, I do not 
 think any competent and candid observer 
 would deny. I should not like to be 
 forced to maintain the thesis that even 
 now the average British play is better^ 
 than the average British novel, although 
 I am well aware that the average of the 
 British novel of the past few years is 
 low enough. But the conditions are now 
 favorable for dramatic development, and 
 I can see signs of its coming. There is no 
 need to count noses; but I may suggest 
 that " Claudian " and " Clito " are symp- 
 toms of a revival of the poetic drama ; I 
 may note that in the " Lights of London " 
 and in the "Silver King" there was the 
 promise of a new type of melodrama, 
 effective and affecting, sensational if you 
 will, but natural also, and not without the 
 ruddy drop of human blood which alone 
 gives vitality to the work of the pen ; and 
 
65 
 
 I may remark that in the authors of 
 " Sweethearts," of " Forget-me-not," and 
 of " The Squire " there is a little band of 
 English playwrights who have proved 
 their possession of the power to write 
 comedies as simple and as direct, as in- 
 genious in construction and almost as 
 brilliant in dialogue, as the comedies we 
 go to see in Paris at the Gymnase and the 
 Vaudeville. It is true that tradition tends 
 to keep up a tone of hard glitter in the 
 speech of English comedy; the dramatist 
 easily remembers that he is a follower 
 of Sheridan, and hence comes a certain 
 forced sparkle, a factitious smartness, a 
 profusion of cut-and-thrust epigram peril- 
 ously near to rudeness. The persons of 
 the play are prone to take the liberty Dr. 
 Johnson allowed himself, according to 
 Goldsmith, who, in discussing the doctor's 
 repartee, declared that whenever John- 
 son's pistol missed fire he knocked you 
 down with the butt. 
 
 The signs of improvement in dramatic 
 art, visible enough in Great Britain, are 
 to be detected also in the United States. 
 The Americans are a quicker people than 
 
the British and of a more artistic temper- 
 ament. The American novelist now sur- 
 passes his rival across the Atlantic ; and 
 perhaps the American dramatist will soon 
 attain to a similar superiority. It is wor- 
 thy of note here that the inquiry as to 
 the Great American Novel, which was 
 frequent enough years ago, when we had 
 few writers of fiction, is no longer heard, 
 now that we have novelists a plenty. 
 Perhaps the search for the equally myth- 
 ical Great American Play will be aban- 
 doned in like manner when we have as 
 many good plays as we have good nov- 
 els. Already has the American drama- 
 tist followed the American novelist across 
 the Atlantic. Sooner or later nearly 
 every successful American play is re- 
 produced in London, just as every suc- 
 cessful British play is reproduced in New 
 York. 
 
 Lowell tells us that Dryden's " come- 
 dies lack everything that a comedy should 
 have lightness, quickness of transition, 
 unexpectedness of incident, easy clever- 
 ness of dialogue, and humorous contrast 
 of character brought out by identity of 
 
6 7 
 
 situation." All these requisites of come- 
 dy can be seen in American novels and 
 in American short - stories, and they are 
 beginning to be discoverable more abun- 
 dantly in American plays. The tendency 
 of our novelists has been towards subtle- 
 ty, delicacy, and finish, while the tendency 
 of our playwrights has hitherto been far 
 too much in the direction of rude farce 
 and crude melodrama. American come- 
 dy when decorous was likely to be dull. It 
 is barely twenty -five years since Vanity 
 Fair, one of the earliest and sharpest of 
 American comic papers, had a sketch of a 
 dramatic critic ordering a second cup of 
 coffee, and saying, " Make it strong, for 
 I'm going to see an American comedy to- 
 night, and I must keep awake somehow." 
 I do not think that nowadays the dra- 
 matic critic finds an American comedy a 
 soporific ; ancl I know that the next morn- 
 ing the American dramatist is apt to 
 think the critic very wide-awake indeed. 
 Two of the chief qualifications of the 
 dramatist invention and ingenuity are 
 recognized characteristics of our nation. 
 A sense of humor is another quality not 
 
to be denied to us ; and our humor is 
 negative as well as positive : it can take a 
 joke as well as it can make one. The 
 jest's prosperity lies with the audience 
 quite as much as with the author. The 
 kind of humor which the American most 
 relishes turns on character. What we 
 are keenest to seize in a story or on the 
 stage is a touch of human nature. The 
 play-goer, like the reader of a short-story 
 in an American magazine, is quick to rec- 
 ognize a character which is at once new 
 and true, and he is prone to pardon all 
 else for its sake. 
 
 It is just a hundred years since Royall 
 Tyler, afterwards Chief -Justice of Ver- 
 mont, wrote " The Contrast," the first play 
 by an American author which was acted 
 by a professional company. This Ameri- 
 can comedy had in Jonathan the earliest 
 of a long line of stage Yankees, and to 
 the performance of this part by Wignell 
 it owed most of its good-fortune. " The 
 Contrast" proved the possibility of put- 
 ting the life and the people, the man- 
 ners and the customs, of our own coun- 
 try on the stage, and since then the most 
 
6 9 
 
 enduring successes of our theatre have 
 been plays of American character. From 
 Hackett's Colonel Nirnrod Wildfire and 
 Chanfrau's Mose to the later Rip Van 
 Winkle of Mr. Jefferson, the Davy Crock- 
 ett of Mr. Mayo, the Colonel Sellers of 
 Raymond, the Judge Slote of Florence, 
 and the Joshua Whitcomb of Mr. Thomp- 
 son, the American play -goer has been 
 prompt to appreciate the presentation 
 of American character, however harsh 
 and inadequate and inartistic might be 
 the dramatic framework in which it was 
 to be seen. 
 
 It would be impossible to deny that the 
 plays in which these characters appeared 
 were often feeble, forced, and false, shab- 
 by in structure and shambling in action. 
 Here we have the weakest point in the 
 American drama. The playwright has 
 not taken the trouble to learn his trade. 
 There is a grammar of the dramatic art 
 which must be mastered like any other 
 grammar. The writer of a comedy should 
 have so thorough a knowledge of the 
 conditions of the theatre and of the me- 
 chanics of play-making that when he puts 
 
together his plot he does not need to 
 think about the rules any more than he 
 has to recall the laws of English gram- 
 mar whenever he writes a letter. This 
 technical knowledge should be digested 
 and assimilated until its application is 
 absolutely instinctive. No assumption is 
 more foolish than that a man ignorant of 
 the principles of play-making can write 
 a play, and that afterwards a stage-man- 
 ager or some other expert can " fix it up " 
 so that it is fit to be acted. Of course it 
 may happen that an inexperienced writer 
 has an intuitive sense of theatrical re- 
 quirements, and that he conforms to 
 them unconsciously, but such a case must 
 needs be rare. And perhaps this if the 
 parenthesis may be permitted this is 
 why no man knowing the stage, no actor 
 and no manager, no dramatic author and 
 no dramatic critic, has ever been led 
 astray by the heresy that Shakspere's 
 plays were written by Bacon or by any 
 one but Shakspere himself. More often 
 than not the novice is hopelessly ignorant 
 even of the elements of the art, and does 
 not understand the simplest necessities 
 
imposed by the physical conditions of 
 the theatre. Not long ago I had a play 
 sent to me to read, in one act of which 
 the heroine, running away from home, is 
 pursued by her sister, who follows her 
 down the street, and into one of the last 
 of a dozen little houses with gardens be- 
 fore them. Just how this long vista was 
 to be shown on the stage the author had 
 not considered. Nor did he remark that 
 a change of scene was necessary when he 
 caused the sister to follow the heroine 
 through the garden into the little house, 
 where a conversation began between them 
 which it was expected that the audience 
 should hear. 
 
 The best means of diffusing the need- 
 ful knowledge of theatrical technic is col- 
 laboration, by which the inexperienced 
 writer who thinks he has a subject for a 
 play may secure the help of the expert 
 who can teach him how to treat it. The 
 biography of Lord Lytton has shown us 
 that Macready was in reality part author 
 of " The Lady of Lyons," and of " Riche- 
 lieu ;" he was consulted at every step, and 
 it was due chiefly to his understanding 
 
of the stage that the plays were success- 
 ful. The most promising of British and 
 American dramatists of our day have 
 gone to school to Scribe and to M. Sar- 
 dou to spy out the secrets of their art. 
 Like watch - making, play -making is a 
 trade at which a man must serve his ap- 
 prenticeship; and nowhere may his Wan- 
 derjahre be more profitably spent than in 
 a tour of the Parisian workshops. Thus 
 may be acquired skill in construction 
 and constructive skill is almost the first 
 requisite for the dramatist, if we accept 
 the assertion of M. Dumas that the dra- 
 matic art is an art of preparation. 
 
 All great dramatists have studied the 
 theatre before they wrote for it. Many 
 of them have had a close connection 
 with a playhouse. Shakspere and Moliere 
 were players themselves, and managers 
 also, with a personal interest in the tak- 
 ings at the door a fact which forced them 
 to keep touch of the public very care- 
 fully. Their dramas act well : that they 
 also read well was a secondary consider- 
 ation. A play is something to be played ; 
 and what is kindly called a "drama for 
 
the closet " is a contradiction in terms ; 
 it is a play intended not to be played. 
 If a drama have not the well-knit story 
 and the artful sequence of situation which 
 permit the characters to reveal them- 
 selves decently and in order, no meteor 
 flashes of poetry, no aurora borealis of 
 eloquence, can save it from the deep 
 damnation of its taking off the boards. 
 There is no more frequent phrase in the 
 mouth of a manager, in returning a manu- 
 script play, than that it is " well written," 
 or that it has " literary merit ;" and no 
 phrases are falser. If the play is not well 
 made it cannot be well written, however 
 brilliant its dialogue. If the structure is 
 not sound and if the characters are not 
 rightly contrasted, there is no " literary 
 merit." Literature is not fine writing; it 
 resides rather in the conception of the 
 characters and in the concoction of the 
 story than in any elevation of language. 
 Theophile Gautier said that the skeleton 
 of every good play was a pantomime. 
 The deaf and dumb can seize the story 
 of " Hamlet " and enjoy it. All the At- 
 tic salt in Athens would not save the 
 
tragedy of " CEdipus " if its situations 
 were not as artistically arranged and as 
 pathetically effective as those of " La 
 Tosca," M. Sardou's latest one-part play. 
 That the drama is the highest form of 
 literary endeavor will be denied by no 
 true lover of Shakespeare and of Moliere 
 the foremost figures of the two great- 
 est modern literatures. The drama is 
 not only the highest, it is also the broad- 
 est of all literary forms ; it appeals to the 
 plain people as directly as to the Brahmin 
 caste. A playwright must please the pub- 
 lic at large under penalty of not being al- 
 lowed to please anybody. A novel may 
 have its thousand readers a year and not 
 slip out of men's memories. But if a 
 play does not interest and hold and move 
 a thousand spectators night after night it 
 is soon withdrawn and laid on the shelf 
 to be seen of men no more, In vain may 
 the dramatist revolt at this restriction 
 and envy the apparent privilege of the 
 novelist. At bottom it is best that " those 
 who live to please must please to live." 
 Nothing is worse for an artist than the 
 attempt to address only the " inner circle." 
 
The advice which Joubert gives to all 
 authors applies with double force to writ- 
 ers for the stage : " On doit, en ecrivant, 
 songer que les lettres son't la ; mais ce 
 n'est pas a eux qu'il faut parler " (in writ- 
 ing we must remember that the men of 
 culture are present, but it is not to them 
 that we should speak). The dramatist 
 must think of the boy in the gallery as 
 well as of the young girls in the boxes. 
 There is something wrong with the litera- 
 ture which appeals only to the few and 
 which scorns the suffrages of the many. 
 It is a puny play which is not broad 
 enough or deep enough or human enough 
 to please the great body of play -goers. 
 Mankind at large it is, and not any acad- 
 emy, which bestows enduring fame. No 
 clique or coterie can give a pass for the 
 long journey of immortality : that can be 
 had only by common consent, at an elec- 
 tion, after due discussion, in which every 
 man may say his say, the artisan as well 
 as the artist. The history of literature 
 teaches us nothing more forcibly than 
 that the critics are as often wrong as 
 the play-goers. It was the public which 
 
flocked to Corneille's " Cid " when the 
 French Academy denounced it as incor- 
 rect and contrary to the rules of tragic 
 poetry. 
 
 . In literature, as in government, I be- 
 lieve in the ultimate wisdom of the ma- 
 jority. Of course under a democracy the 
 people may be carried away for a while 
 by a demagogue in politics or by a char- 
 latan in letters, but this is for a season 
 only : on a sober second thought they act 
 as their own Supreme Court, and declare 
 their own work unconstitutional. It is 
 at once the danger and the glory of the 
 dramatist in this country that the future 
 of his art depends on the same condition 
 as the future of our institutions on the 
 enlightened common-sense of the Amer- 
 can people. 
 
 
THE PLAYERS 
 
 the interesting complex- 
 ity of metropolitan life there 
 comes a specialization of the 
 various social organizations. 
 There are clubs nowadays in 
 New York for each of the professions and 
 for each of the arts. The lawyer, the en- 
 gineer, the electrician, the railroad man 
 has now a place in the great city where 
 he can meet his fellows and talk shop, 
 each after his kind. Clubs for the allied 
 arts have been attempted, but with no 
 notable success. Literature, music, paint- 
 ing, and acting all pull different ways, es- 
 pecially when journalism is added as a 
 fifth wheel ; and the hardy vitality of The 
 Salmagundi and of The Authors shows 
 the decisive advantage of unity of pursuit 
 among the members of an association. 
 The times are ripe, therefore, for The 
 Players the club of the actor, of the 
 
theatrical manager, and of the dramatic 
 author. The Players is the theatrical 
 club as The Century was originally the 
 artistic, but in The Players the domina- 
 tion of the professional element is care- 
 fully guarded in the constitution. Out- 
 siders may be admitted freely, but a 
 majority of the board of directors must 
 always be chosen from the members who 
 are actors, managers, or dramatists, the 
 three divisions of the profession for whose 
 use and behoof the club was formed. 
 
 Nearly three centuries ago an English 
 actor, Edward Alleyn, bought the manor 
 of Dulwich and built there the college 
 which still exists ; and more than two 
 centuries ago an English actress, Eleanor 
 Gwynn, gave the land at Chelsea on which 
 stands the hospital erected through her in- 
 fluence. Not a score of years ago an Amer- 
 ican actor, Edwin Forrest, died, leaving 
 his large professional earnings to main- 
 tain a home for those of his craft who 
 should fall into poverty in their old age. 
 These are all noble benefactions, but I 
 doubt if any one of them is more useful in 
 its way than the club founded only four 
 
years ago by an American actor, Ed- 
 win Booth, and intended by him to be in 
 some measure a memorial of his father, 
 Junius Brutus Booth (one of the foremost 
 figures in the history of the American 
 stage), while at the same time it should be 
 the centre and home of all that is best in 
 the American theatre of to-day. 
 
 For years Mr. Booth had desired to de- 
 vote a proportion of his professional gains 
 to an enterprise of this sort, and in the 
 summer of 1887 the matter was thor- 
 oughly debated between him and certain 
 of his friends, one of whom, Mr. T. B. Al- 
 drich, made the felicitous suggestion that 
 the proposed club should be named The 
 Players. At midnight on the last day of 
 1888, The Players, then a hundred in num- 
 ber, found themselves in possession of as 
 sumptuous a house as any in New York. 
 Mr. Booth had bought a fine old-fash- 
 ioned dwelling, No. 16 Gramercy Park, 
 and this Mr. Stanford White had trans- 
 formed into a club-house of delightful un- 
 conventionality and indisputable comfort, 
 perfect in its most artistic decorations, in 
 its luxurious furniture, in its ample equip- 
 
8o 
 
 ment; and this perfect club-house Mr. 
 Booth made over to The Players by 
 deed of gift at the witching hour when 
 the clangor of many bells declared the 
 arrival of the year 1889. Thus The Play- 
 ers came into being full -armed for the 
 struggle for existence, and not enfeebled 
 by debts and deficiencies. It began as a 
 proprietary club of a new sort, one in 
 which the proprietor generously present- 
 ed to the members a house ready for oc- 
 cupancy, that every man might at once 
 feel at home in it. 
 
 Since the midnight when The Players 
 gathered about Mr. Booth, before the 
 broad fire with its blazing yule-log, and 
 beneath Sully's noble portrait of Jun- 
 ius Brutus Booth, looking down with 
 eyes of tenderness and subtle pity, the 
 club has prospered. Its membership has 
 increased rapidly until now it includes 
 nearly every actor of reputation, almost 
 all of the scanty band of American play- 
 wrights, and most of the theatrical man- 
 agers of New York, with many from other 
 cities. The attendance at the regular 
 weekly suppers, when Saturday night 
 
stretches swiftly into Sunday morning, 
 often reaches as high as sixty or seventy. 
 The desire of the founder of the club is 
 in course of accomplishment. 
 
 The constitution declares that " any 
 male person over the age of twenty-one 
 years shall be eligible to membership who 
 is an actor, manager, dramatist, or other 
 member of the dramatic profession, or 
 who is engaged in literature, painting, 
 sculpture, architecture, or music, or who 
 is a patron or connoisseur of the arts." 
 Those connected with the dramatic pro- 
 fession are the most numerous class in 
 the club ; and they are the most frequent 
 in attendance, especially on the midnight 
 gatherings of Saturday, when the actor 
 may rest, after two performances, serene 
 in the consciousness of a clear forty hours 
 before him. The next largest delegation 
 is that of the authors, painters, sculptors, 
 and architects practitioners in the kin- 
 dred arts with whom the player- folk fore- 
 gather gladly ; as Mr. Story says in verse : 
 
 "Yet it seems to me 
 
 All arts are one all branches on one tree 
 All fingers, as it were, upon one hand." 
 6 
 
The mere outsider admitted under an elas- 
 tic definition of " a patron or connoisseur 
 of the arts," is in a minority, although 
 there is no need to accept Mr. Story's 
 saying in prose, that an amateur is " a 
 person who loves nothing," and a con- 
 noisseur "a person who knows nothing." 
 Early in the history of The Players a ten- 
 tative classification of its members into 
 four divisions was rashly made by a scof- 
 fer : first, the Players proper actors, man- 
 agers, and dramatists ; second, the artists ; 
 third, people who lived near Gramercy 
 Park ; and fourth, millionaires. Of mill- 
 ionaires there are perhaps a sparse dozen 
 on the rolls of the club, but it is a rarity 
 to see one within the doors. There are 
 also two or three clergymen among The 
 Players, including Bishop Potter and the 
 Rev. Dr. Houghton, of the " Little Church 
 Around the Corner," who may be called 
 the chaplain-in-ordinary to the profes- 
 sion, and whose request for the closing of 
 the theatres on Good Friday night has 
 been acted upon by many of the mana- 
 gers. 
 
 In the ample hall is a large marble 
 
83 
 
 mantelpiece, and on the bricks of the fire- 
 place beneath it is inscribed this quota- 
 tion, written by the founder of the club : 
 
 Good frende for friendship's sake forbeare 
 To utter what is gossipt heare 
 
 In social chatt, lest, unawares, 
 Thy tonge offende thy fellowe plaiers. 
 
 Opening out of this hall is an inviting 
 reading-room, with an upper alcove for 
 writing-desks. It is from the steps of 
 this alcove that one can get the best view 
 of the portrait of Mr. Booth, framed over 
 the fireplace of the reading-room. This 
 picture was presented to The Players by 
 Mr. E. C. Benedict. It was painted by 
 Mr. John S. Sargent, and it is one of the 
 most brilliant, vigorous, and vivid por- 
 traits of the nineteenth century. It is a 
 full - length, and it represents Mr. Booth 
 standing negligently before the yule-log 
 of the hall, much as he stood on the night 
 when he gave the house to the club. His 
 attitude is easy, and the countenance is 
 lighted by the kindly smile so often seen 
 upon the face of the tragedian. What 
 most endears this picture to The Players 
 
8 4 
 
 is that it is a portrait, not of the actor 
 merely, but rather of Mr. Booth himself, 
 as he is known to his fellow-members. 
 
 Between the fireplace and the window 
 hangs Mr. J. Alden Weir's fine portrait of 
 the late John Gilbert, the first of The 
 Players to die after the club was opened. 
 Below this is a portrait (by Zoffany) of 
 David Garrick as Abel Drugger in Ben 
 Jonson's play, now no longer acted. On 
 the other side of the room is another 
 picture of Garrick by Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds, set off by a George Frederick 
 Cooke by Sully and one of Naegle's por- 
 traits of Edmund Kean. Elsewhere in 
 the reading-room are a portrait of E. A. 
 Sothern by Mr. W. P. Frith, one of Thom- 
 as Apthorpe Cooper by Gilbert Stuart 
 (presented by the actor's daughter), and 
 one of Robert Palmer by Gainsborough. 
 
 In the great central hall hangs a he- 
 roic picture of Mr. Booth in the character 
 of Richelieu, painted by the Hon. John 
 Collier, and on the other side of the fire- 
 place an excellent replica of Sir Thomas 
 Lawrence's painting of John Philip Kem- 
 ble as Hamlet. On the opposite side of 
 
the room hang two of Sargent's pictures 
 one of Mr. Joseph Jefferson in the char- 
 acter of Dr. Pangloss, the other of Law- 
 rence Barrett in his every-day dress. Here 
 also are a portrait of Mrs. G. H. Gilbert 
 by Mrs. Dora Wheeler Keith, and one of 
 W. J. Florence as Sir Lucius OTrigger by 
 Mr. Carroll Beckwith. 
 
 Between the hall and the dining-room 
 are huge safes to hold the relics and the 
 stray curiosities which are beginning to 
 accumulate. The treasures stored up do 
 not as yet rival those in the Green Vaults 
 of Dresden. Though one may seek here 
 in vain for a wheel of the chariot of Thes- 
 pis, for the mask of Aristophanes, for the 
 holograph manuscript of a missing come- 
 dy by Menander, for the buskin worn by 
 Roscius, and for a return check to the 
 theatre at Herculaneum, still there are 
 not a few curiosities almost as curious as 
 these. There is the sword Frederick 
 Lemaitre drew in the last act of " Ruy 
 Bias." There is the crooked staff where- 
 on Charlotte Cushman leaned as Meg 
 Merrilies, when she foretold the fate of 
 Guy Mannering. There is the blond wig 
 
which Fechter chose to wear as Hamlet, 
 perhaps the most chattered about of all 
 theatrical wigs ; that it is, in reality, red 
 and not at all blond is not surprising to 
 those who have mused on the unrealities 
 of life, as Hamlet himself was wont to do. 
 There is a ring that once belonged to 
 David Garrick, and a lock of hair that 
 once belonged to Edmund Kean. There 
 is a spring dagger, formerly the property 
 of Edwin Forrest, the blade of which kind- 
 ly retired within the hilt when the owner 
 went through the motions of stabbing 
 himself. There is a crucifix used by Sig- 
 nora Ristori in the character of Sor Te- 
 resa. Here also are the second, third, and 
 fourth folios of Shakespeare's works, the 
 first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's, the 
 first folio of Ben Jonson, and the first of 
 Sir William Davenant with an autograph 
 poem. Here are many autographs of high 
 theatrical interest. Here, finally, are cer- 
 tain stately pieces of silver, among them 
 a salver and pitcher presented in 1828 to 
 Junius Brutus Booth, and the loving-cup 
 presented to William Warren a few years 
 before he died. 
 
8 7 
 
 Here and there throughout the house 
 are to be seen Shaksperian mottoes, even 
 in the most unexpected places. That 
 which adorns one of the mantelpieces in 
 the grill-room is, " Mouth it, as many of 
 our Players do." It is into this grill-room 
 that the passage opens which the safes 
 with the relics guard on either hand. The 
 grill-room extends the full width of the 
 house, and it has a broad piazza, whereon 
 the tables are set on pleasant summer 
 days, that the members may lunch and 
 dine in the open air. This grill-room, 
 with its oaken beams overhead, its high 
 wainscot, its branching silver candelabra 
 skilfully adapted to the electric light, its 
 novel chandelier of silver-mounted stag- 
 horns, its blue tiled fireplaces at either 
 end, its restful vista of a green garden be- 
 yond, its framed play-bills, and its many 
 portraits, beneath which the walls are al- 
 most hidden, is the most beautiful room 
 in the house and the most original. 
 
 It is seen to best advantage on Ladies' 
 Day. The Players have but two annual 
 feasts : one is Founder's Night, when the 
 members assemble on New-year's Eve at 
 
88 
 
 midnight in commemoration of the open- 
 ing of the club on the first day of 1889; 
 and the other is Ladies' Day, when the 
 wives and daughters of members are 
 made welcome ; this is on the afternoon 
 of Shakspere's birthday, the 23d of April. 
 Then is the grill-room in its glory, with 
 the fair greenery of spring outside, with 
 deep red roses on every table, with the 
 moving groups of the ladies eager for the 
 annual inspection of the paradise from 
 which they are barred on every other day 
 in the year. Such a gathering of beauti- 
 ful and distinguished women as is seen on 
 Ladies' Day at The Players is a rare sight 
 even in New York. 
 
 From the evening when the club-house 
 opened its doors, The Players have been 
 well bestowed. On that first New-year's 
 Eve, though the paint was scarce dry, so 
 delicate had been the taste and so adroit 
 the skill of the decorator, the house had 
 no offensive air of raw newness. It ap- 
 peared to be mellow from the very begin- 
 ning ; and as the members for the first 
 time entered into their own, they found a 
 fire crackling cheerfully in many a fire- 
 
place, pictures peopling the walls, and 
 books ready to the hand, just as though 
 the club had been in existence for years. 
 The books and a majority of the pict- 
 ures are in the room which serves as li- 
 brary and as the chief portrait gallery. It 
 is a long room, occupying most of the 
 second floor. The bookcases rise to the 
 height of a man's head, and the books are 
 ready to the hand. From the walls above 
 the portraits of the great actors and ac- 
 tresses of the past look down upon their 
 successors of the present. It was the in- 
 tent of the founder that the home of The 
 Players should be a centre of light and a 
 haven of rest for the active members of 
 his profession. Here in the library, with 
 its inviting arm-chairs, and its atmosphere 
 of repose, one may keep the best of good 
 company that of the silent friends of the 
 past which stand on the shelves on all 
 sides rejecting no advances. It is an oasis 
 where the most active of us may gladly 
 loaf and invite his soul. " There were 
 times," wrote Thoreau, recalling his so- 
 journ at Walden, " when I could not af- 
 ford to sacrifice the bloom of the present 
 
moment to any work, whether of the head 
 or of the hands : I love a broad margin 
 to my life." 
 
 In the oaken cases which stretch from 
 one fireplace to the other is the private 
 collection of Mr. Booth, the working li- 
 brary of a Shaksperian tragedian. Be- 
 yond and between the farther mantel- 
 piece and the rear window is a major part 
 of the theatrical collection of Lawrence 
 Barrett ; and opposite are the dramatic 
 books of John Gilbert, a welcome gift 
 from his widow. Other friends have filled 
 most of the other shelves ; and the gath- 
 ering grows apace. Among the treasures, 
 for example, is a collection of some thirty 
 thousand play-bills, and over a hundred 
 volumes of original editions of the elder 
 dramatists, presented by Mr. Daly. In a 
 shrine over a cabinet are half a dozen 
 death-masks, from the unequalled collec- 
 tion of Mr. Laurence Hutton ; and thus 
 we may see how the author of " The 
 School for Scandal " looked after he had 
 departed this life, and the author of 
 " Faust," and the author of " The Rob- 
 bers." There .are death - masks also of 
 
David Garrick and of Edmund Kean, of 
 Marie Malibran and of Ludwig Devri- 
 ent, of Boucicault and of Lawrence Bar- 
 rett, sad memorials of departed beauty, 
 genius, and power. 
 
 Above the shelves where the dust set- 
 tles on their biographies and on the com- 
 edies and the tragedies they acted, are 
 the portraits of the players of the past. 
 No other collection of theatrical pictures 
 approaches this in extent or in importance 
 save that of the Garrick Club in London. 
 As the gallery of the Garrick was begun 
 by the purchase of the pictures got to- 
 gether by Charles Mathews, so that of 
 The Players had its germ in the portraits 
 gathered by Mr. John Sleeper Clarke, a 
 comedian who has acted with abundant 
 success more than one of Mathews's char- 
 acters. To the small collection of his 
 brother-in-law, Mr. Booth added many 
 others ; and since the club has opened, 
 and since the fact has become known that 
 it will gladly accept and care for portraits 
 of actors, not a few have been presented, 
 as always happens when the public is 
 aware that gifts of this sort are welcome. 
 
The twoscore and more portraits in the 
 library are all theatrical in their subjects 
 except that there is here a picture 
 (supposed to be by Rembrandt Peale) of 
 George Washington, who, under George 
 III., was the active leader of his majesty's 
 opposition. It was for this painting that 
 Mr. Aldrich suggested the properly the- 
 atrical legend, " Our Leading Man." 
 
 Among these pictures there are, as all 
 dramatic collectors will be pleased to 
 learn, at least a dozen of the portraits 
 painted by Naegle to be engraved for the 
 Lopez and Wemyss series of plays Char- 
 lotte and John Barnes, for example, Mr. 
 and Mrs. Francis, Mr. and Mrs. Duff, Wil- 
 son, Wood, and Kean. There is also a 
 portrait of Kean by Naegle, painted at a 
 single sitting, so the story goes, and under 
 peculiar circumstances. Some admirers 
 of the actor wanted him to sit to the art- 
 ist for a picture as Richard III., but he 
 refused repeatedly. At last they invited 
 Kean to supper after the play, and made 
 him acquainted with Naegle, to whom he 
 took a fancy before the feast was half 
 over. When urged again to let the artist 
 
paint his portrait as the crookback, the 
 actor craftily consented to pose at once, 
 if the painter had his instruments and if 
 he had his costume. Now these neces- 
 saries were secretly in readiness, Naegle 
 having provided against good - fortune, 
 and his friends having bribed Kean's 
 dresser to be in attendance with the royal 
 robes and plumes. So it is that Richard 
 III. gazes down on us now a little un- 
 steadily, as though flushed with wine 
 rather than with victory. 
 
 It was before this portrait of Kean that 
 Mr. Joseph Jefferson placed himself one 
 evening when he had a night off and 
 wished to rest. He helped himself to a 
 biography of Kean from the shelf, and he 
 settled himself down in an easy-chair ; 
 and there he read for two hours or more, 
 glancing up now and again from the 
 printed page, where the story of the way- 
 ward actor's life was told, to the painted 
 canvas from which the man smiled back 
 in full enjoyment of existence. Down in 
 the grill-room there hangs a broad play- 
 bill of Drury Lane Theatre announcing 
 that David Garrick would play Hamlet 
 
on Wednesday, February 10, 1773; and 
 there below the name of Garrick is the 
 name of Mr. Jefferson, who is set down to 
 play the King. The Joseph Jefferson 
 who now delights us as Bob Acres once 
 pointed with pride to this play-bill, and 
 remarked that the Joseph Jefferson who 
 played with Garrick was his great-grand- 
 father. 
 
 Among the other portraits in oil which 
 fill the library and overflow out upon the 
 staircase hall are those of Charles Mayne 
 Young, Edwin Forrest, Mrs. Nesbit, and 
 James Wallack by Middleton, of Henry 
 Wallack by Inman, of E. S. Connor and 
 R. C. Maywood by Sully, and of John 
 Howard Payne by Wright. In the pri- 
 vate dining-room, which is on the same 
 floor as the library, there are half a dozen 
 landscapes, two of them being scenes 
 in Louisiana, painted by Mr. Jefferson. 
 From the windows of this private dining- 
 room may be had a grateful glimpse of 
 the grass and the shrubbery of the shaded 
 garden of the Tilden Library next door. 
 " The country is lyric," said Longfellow 
 < ( the town dramatic " ; and of necessity 
 
95 
 
 the theatre is urban, but The Players are 
 fortunate in catching a breath of rusticity 
 from Gramercy Park in front, and from 
 the quiet gardens behind. In other re- 
 spects, the club-house is much like other 
 club-houses ; it is seemly and comfortable, 
 restful and satisfactory. It is interesting 
 in itself, and for what it contains, and for 
 those who frequent it. It is a place to 
 delight all who can echo Horace Wai- 
 pole's assertion : " I do not love great 
 folks till they have pulled off their bus- 
 kins and put on their slippers ; because I 
 do not care sixpence for what they would 
 be thought, but for what they are." 
 
CHARLES LAMB AND THE THEATRE 
 
 AMERICANS take a peculiar 
 delight in the humor of 
 Charles Lamb, for he is one 
 of the foremost of Amer- 
 ican humorists. On the roll 
 which is headed by Benjamin Franklin, 
 and on which the latest signatures were 
 made by Mark Twain and Mr. Bret 
 Harte, no name shines more brightly than 
 Lamb's. By the captious it may be ob- 
 jected that he was not an American at 
 all ; but surely this should not be remem- 
 bered to his discredit it was a mere ac- 
 cident of birth. Elia could have taken 
 out his naturalization papers at any time. 
 It is related that once a worthy Scotch- 
 man, commenting on the well-known fact 
 that all the greatest British authors had 
 come from the far side of the Tweed, and 
 citing in proof thereof the names of Burns 
 and Byron and Scott, was met by the 
 
query whether Shakspere was a Scotch- 
 man also. Reluctantly enough it was 
 acknowledged that he was not although 
 he had parts not unworthy of that honor. 
 So it is with Charles Lamb. He was an 
 Englishman; nay, more, a cockney in- 
 deed, a cockney of the strictest sect; but 
 he had parts not unworthy of American 
 adoption. He had humor, high and dry, 
 like that which England is wont to import 
 from America in the original package. At 
 times this humor has the same savor of ir- 
 reverence towards things held sacred by 
 commonplace humanity. Charles Lamb 
 never hesitated to speak disrespectfully 
 of the equator, and he was forever gird- 
 ing at the ordinary degrees of latitude. 
 His jests were as smooth as they seemed 
 reckless. He had a gift of imperturbable 
 exaggeration ; his inventive mendacity 
 was beyond all praise; he took a proper 
 pride in his ingenious fabrications and 
 these are all characteristics of the humor 
 to be found freely along the inlets and by 
 the hills of New England and on the 
 prairies and in the sierras of the boundless 
 West. He had a full sense of his high 
 
 7 
 
standing as a matter-of-lie man. More- 
 over, he had a distaste for the straight 
 way and the broad road, and he had a 
 delight in a quiet tramp along the by- 
 path which pleased him personally a 
 quality relished in a new country, where 
 a man may blaze out a track through the 
 woods for himself, and where academic 
 and even scholastic methods have hard 
 work to hold their own. Even his mer- 
 cantile training, in so far as it might be 
 detected, was in his favor in a land whose 
 merchants are princes. And behind the 
 mask were the features of a true man 
 shrewd, keen, and quick in his judgments ; 
 one who might make his way in the New 
 World as in the Old. There is something 
 in the man, as in the writer, which lets 
 him keep step to a Yankee tune. Words- 
 worth wrote : 
 
 "And you must love him ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love." 
 
 The Americans loved Lamb early, as they 
 did Praed and Austin Dobson to name 
 two, as dissimilar as may be, of the many 
 British w r riters who have found their first 
 
full appreciation across the Atlantic. 
 Charles Lamb's only acted play met in 
 America a far different fate from that 
 which befell it in England ; and I have a 
 notion that his writings were aforetime, 
 and are to-day, more widely read in these 
 United States than in Great Britain. 
 
 " Truly was our excellent friend of the 
 genuine line of Yorick," said Leigh Hunt; 
 and although the phrase is not altogether 
 happy, it serves to recall two of Lamb's 
 chief characteristics his humor, and his 
 love of the stage in general and of Shak- 
 spere in particular. That Lamb was fond 
 of the theatre admits of no dispute, 
 though he was wont to chide his mistress 
 freely. For Shakspere he had an affec- 
 tion as deep as it was broad. Whenever 
 these two passions crossed each other, 
 the theatre must needs to the wall as in 
 the suggestive and paradoxical essay, "On 
 the Tragedies of Shakspere, considered 
 with Reference to their Fitness for Stage 
 Representation." Yet that essay yields 
 in charm to Elia's delightful papers : "On 
 Some of the Old Actors," " On the Act- 
 ing of Munden," and "On the Artificial 
 
Comedy of the Last Century." This last 
 essay it was which Macaulay thought 
 worth while to refute solemnly and at 
 length. I have an idea that if Lamb 
 could have read this posthumous refuta- 
 tion, he would have longed to get his 
 hands on Macaulay's bumps to examine 
 his phrenological development. 
 
 Lamb's humor has an Oriental extrav- 
 agance to be expected in one who signed 
 himself "Of the India House;" but his 
 phrase had always a clerkly and clean- 
 shaven precision not a little deceptive. 
 In him, as in any other humorist, unusual 
 allowance must be made for the personal 
 equation. A humorist sees things as no 
 one else does. He notes a tiny truth, and 
 he likes it, and straightway he raises it to 
 the n th , and, lo ! it is a paradox. He never 
 meant seriously that the Restoration Com- 
 edies are sound and wholesome works, as 
 refreshing in their austere morality as the 
 Fathers. Nor does he believe that it is a 
 sin to set Shakspere's plays on the stage, 
 though a simple-minded reader might 
 think so. The light plays of Wycherley 
 and of Farquhar did not offend Charles 
 
Lamb, and the wit delighted him. To 
 him the comedies of Shakspere lost 
 somewhat of their range and elevation 
 when seen across the footlights of the 
 stage. A true lover of Shakspere from 
 his youth up, he could see more in his 
 mind's eye than the most lavish and 
 learned of stage-managers could give him. 
 But there are relatively few students of 
 Shakspere, and the mass of common 
 humanity had no mind's eye ; it can see 
 only with the eye of the body, and if its 
 sluggish imagination is to stir at all it 
 must be moved by physical means. In 
 the theatre alone is found the sovran 
 magic which makes the familiar yet shad- 
 owy figures of Shakspere live and move 
 and start from the printed page into act- 
 ual existence in the flesh. 
 
 Lamb's liking for the drama and for 
 all things pertaining to the drama was 
 second only to his love for Shakspere. 
 The ever -delightful Tales from Shak- 
 spere, over which he toiled despairingly 
 little masterpieces which amply repaid 
 his travail are scarcely more labors of 
 love than the Specimens of English Dra- 
 
matic Poets who lived about the Time of 
 Shakspere. To Lamb, more than to any 
 other, is due the revival of interest in the 
 Elizabethan dramatists. It was the fresh 
 discovery of these old dramatic poets 
 that gave him the impulse to write " John 
 Woodvil." In the modern drama even 
 the inferior contemporary farces were 
 not despised, and some of them are re- 
 membered now only because Lamb saw 
 Munden act in them. Once or twice he 
 took up the pen of the regular dramatic 
 critic to bear witness against the play of 
 the hour. Even then he is as gentle al- 
 most as when he recalls the comedians of 
 an earlier day ; he was not one of those 
 fierce critics who, in Douglas Jerrold's 
 phrase, review a play " as an east wind re- 
 views an apple-tree." The acted drama, 
 the actual stage of the present, was al- 
 ways of interest to Lamb, and served not 
 seldom to suggest happy illustrations for 
 his notes on the poetic drama of the past. 
 It is difficult for any one who has had to 
 read much of the writings of other theat- 
 rical critics to speak of Charles Lamb's es- 
 says on histrionic subjects without falling 
 
into the extravagance of eulogy, the very 
 mid -summer madness of praise. There 
 were in his day two other lovers of the 
 theatre, able men both of them, having 
 knowledge of the stage and insight and im- 
 agination Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. But 
 what are they beside Charles Lamb ? Col- 
 eridge bids us "compare Charles Lamb's 
 exquisite criticisms on Shakspere with 
 Hazlitt 's round and round imitations of 
 them ;" and to Leigh Hunt such a com- 
 parison would be still less favorable. In- 
 deed, there is but one who has written 
 about the English stage at all worthy 
 to be set beside Charles Lamb, and he is 
 the author of an Apology for the Life of 
 Colley Cibber. Like Bos well, Cibber was 
 personally contemptible enough ; and like 
 Boswell, he had the unknown art to make 
 a great book, unequalled of its kind. 
 There are two grand portrait galleries of 
 the British theatre, and it is not easy to 
 say which is the more artful a painter of 
 players Colley Cibber or Charles Lamb. 
 Beside the full - length portraits of Bet- 
 terton, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Bracegirdle 
 speaking likenesses every one of them, 
 
soundly drawn and mellow in color, as 
 we see them in the Apology may be 
 placed the group from " Twelfth Night," 
 which we find in the Essays of Elia Mrs. 
 Jordan as Viola, Bensley as Malvolio, 
 Dodd as Sir Andrew, and Dickey Suett 
 as the Clown. And Gibber, of course, was 
 wholly without the boundless humor that 
 has depicted for us a few of the five hun- 
 dred faces of Munden, and captured on 
 canvas a glimpse of Elliston, " joyousest 
 of once embodied spirits." 
 
 Although only one of Lamb's dramatic 
 pieces got itself acted at last, all of them 
 were written for the stage. He never 
 gave in to the heresy of the unactable 
 drama. His plays were intended to be 
 played, as Shakspere's were, and Mar- 
 lowe's and Chapman's, and those of the 
 other great men whom he loved and 
 lived with. To him, as to them, a play 
 which could not be played was no play 
 at all. A " Drama for the Closet " is 
 surely a patent absurdity bon a mettre 
 au cabinet, in Moliere's phrase. Lamb 
 was too keen-sighted in matters of litera- 
 ture not to know that form is of the es- 
 
sence of art, and that therefore every lit- 
 erary effort must conform to its purpose. 
 He would never have accepted the latter- 
 day theory that there are two kinds of 
 drama that intended to t>e acted, and that 
 not intended to be acted. He was fond of 
 paradox, no doubt ; but it would be a 
 paradox too much for even his stomach 
 that a string of decasyllabic dialogues, 
 lacking the relief, the color, and the 
 movement needed by the stage, should 
 declare itself to be a drama. 
 
 Unfortunately, the serious drama of 
 Lamb's day was empty arid inept ; and so 
 he went back for his model to the Eliza- 
 bethans. He did not consider that the 
 change in the physical conditions of the 
 theatre forced a change in the form of 
 the drama. The turbulent throng which 
 stood of an afternoon in the uncovered 
 pit of the Globe Theatre to see a boy 
 Lady Macbeth act before a curtain declar- 
 ing itself to be a royal palace, was very 
 different from the decorous audience 
 which sat in Drury Lane to gaze in won- 
 der at the decorations and illuminations 
 contrived by De Lutherbourg for the 
 
" Christmas Tale " of David Garrick. The 
 stage has its changing evolutions, like 
 society ; but Lamb, though he might con- 
 fess the change, did not feel it. " Hang 
 the age!" he cfied; "I'll write for an- 
 tiquity." 
 
 Now Shakspere, if he were alive, 
 would not write for antiquity. As a prac- 
 tical man, he would make skilful use of 
 every modern improvement. Knowing 
 how needful it is to catch the eye of the 
 public, he would turn to advantage all 
 later devices of scenery and stage-mech- 
 anism and electric -lighting. Indeed, I 
 doubt not that were Shakspere writing 
 for the stage nowadays there would not 
 be wanting dramatic critics to say that he 
 was too "sensational!" and to intimate 
 that he catered to the taste of the gallery. 
 Of a truth if the digression may be par- 
 doned " Hamlet " is a very sensational 
 play ; it has a ghost and a duel and no 
 end of fighting, and an indiscriminate 
 slaughter at the end ; and before that con- 
 summation a young lady goes mad in 
 white muslin, and there is a clown at the 
 burying, and a fight over her grave. It 
 
has something more and other than these 
 physical facts ; it has that within which 
 passeth show. But it has the show-part 
 the mere appeal to the eye as very few 
 plays have. And in this quality " Mac- 
 beth " and " Romeo and Juliet " are but 
 little inferior to " Hamlet." They could, 
 every one of them, be acted in dumb 
 show before a company of miners just out 
 from the mouth of the coal-pit, and the 
 story would be followed with interest. 
 
 This is what Theophile Gautier had in 
 mind when he said that the skeleton of 
 every good drama is a pantomime. Ac- 
 tion, of course, is only the bare bones of 
 a play, and must be covered with the liv- 
 ing flesh of poetry. There can be no true 
 life in a piece unless it has a solid skele- 
 ton a play may even exist with but a 
 scant clothing of verbiage, as we may see 
 in any vulgar melodrama; but the finest 
 poetry cannot give life to a drama unless 
 the bones of its story are well knit and 
 well jointed. This is what the Eliz- 
 abethans intuitively understood, in spite 
 of the rudeness of their stage. This is 
 what Lamb seems never to have been 
 
able to achieve. In externals, "John 
 Woodvil " is at times strangely like a 
 minor work of a minor fellow - drama- 
 tist of Shakspere. We do not wonder 
 that Godwin, happening unawares on the 
 lines 
 
 "To see the sun to bed and to arise, 
 Like some hot amorist with glowing eyes ' 
 
 came to Lamb to ask in which of the old 
 dramatists they might be found. In in- 
 ternal structure, however, there is nothing 
 Elizabethan in " John Woodvil ;" there is 
 no backbone of action the story is in- 
 vertebrate. 
 
 Lamb knew his own deficiencies in this 
 respect, though he did not recognize their 
 extent or their importance. He wrote to 
 Mrs. Shelley, in 1827, while he was en- 
 gaged on " The Pawnbroker's Daughter," 
 that he could do the dialogue readily 
 enough, " but the damned plot I believe 
 I must omit it altogether. The scenes 
 come one after another like geese, not 
 marshalled like cranes or a Hyde Park 
 review. ... I want some Howard Payne 
 to sketch a skeleton of artfully-succeed- 
 
ing scenes through a whole play, as the 
 courses are arranged in a cookery-book, I 
 to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, 
 and the like trifles; to lay in the dead 
 colors, I'd Titianesque 'em up; to mark 
 the channel in a cheek (smooth or fur- 
 rowed, yours or mine), and where tears 
 should course, I'd draw the water down ; 
 to say where a joke should come in, or a 
 pun be left out ; to bring my personae on 
 and off like a Beau Nash, and I'd Frank- 
 enstein them there ; to bring three to- 
 gether on the stage at once they are so 
 shy with rne that I can get no more than 
 two, and there they stand until it is the 
 time, without being the season, to with- 
 draw them." 
 
 This is a free confession that Lamb did 
 not know the rudiments of the play- 
 wright's trade. Bating a jot here and 
 there for the exaggeration of the humor- 
 ist, we may accept this account of his 
 failings as fairly exact. But though he 
 could not help himself, he could give ex- 
 cellent advice to his neighbor. William 
 Godwin did not lose heart after the un- 
 timely taking off of his " Antonio," most 
 
humorously chronicled by Lamb. He got 
 ready another tragedy, which Kemble de- 
 clined ; and he sketched out a third, 
 which was submitted to Lamb for sug- 
 gestions. In these Lamb was fertile; and 
 though the seed he dropped fell on stony 
 ground, much of it was worthy of a richer 
 soil. There is a letter of his wherein he 
 develops out of his friend's feeble plot a 
 strong situation, almost identical with the 
 second act of the " Lucrece Borgia " of 
 Victor Hugo. And in a preceding letter 
 he had hit upon a situation very like that 
 on which turns the plot of the operatic 
 " La Favorita." These two letters of 
 Lamb's should be studied by all who seek 
 for success on the stage. They are full 
 not only of that criticism of life which is 
 the only true criticism of literature, but 
 of a knowledge of stage-devices, and of 
 the means whereby an audience may be 
 taken captive, very remarkable in one 
 who could not apply his precepts in his 
 own practice and for his own benefit. 
 
 Here, for instance, are a few of Lamb's 
 dramatic dicta: "Some such way seems 
 dramatic, and speaks to the eye. . . . These 
 
ocular scenes are so many great land- 
 marks, rememberable headlands, and 
 light-houses in the voyage. Macbeth's 
 witch has a good advice to a magic writer 
 what to do with his spectator : 
 
 'Show his eyes, and grieve his heart.' 
 
 You must not open any of the truth to 
 Dawley by means of a letter : a letter is 
 a feeble messenger on the stage. Some- 
 body, the son or his friend, must, as a 
 cou f -de-main, be exasperated, and obliged 
 to tell the husband." 
 
 " I am for introducing situations, sorts 
 of counterparts to situations, which have 
 been tried in other plays like, but not 
 the same. On this principle I recom- 
 mended a friend like Horatio in ' The 
 Fair Penitent,' and on this principle I rec- 
 ommend a situation like Othello with re- 
 lation to Desdemona's intercession to 
 Cassio. By-scenes may likewise receive 
 hints. The son may see his mother at a 
 mask or feast as Romeo, Juliet. The 
 festivity of the company contrasts with 
 the strong perturbations of the individ- 
 ual. Dawley may be told his wife's past 
 
unchastity at a mask by some witch- 
 character as Macbeth upon the heath 
 in dark sentences. This may stir his brain 
 and be forgot, but come in aid of stronger 
 proof hereafter. From this what you will 
 perhaps call whimsical way of counter- 
 parting, this honest stealing and original 
 mode of plagiarism, much yet, I think, 
 remains to be sucked. 
 
 " I am certain that you must mix up 
 some strong ingredients of distress to give 
 a savor to your pottage. Your hero 
 must kill a man, or do something!' Ear- 
 lier in the same letter Lamb had said, 
 " A tragic auditory wants blood" and had 
 warned Godwin not to disappoint them 
 of the tragic ending. 
 
 After all, there is nothing so very un- 
 usual in the fact that as a critic he knew 
 what ought to be done, although as a 
 dramatist he could not do it. Charles 
 Lamb was a genius, and William Godwin 
 was not ; but from a seat in the pit " John 
 Woodvil," which was never acted, is lit- 
 tle or no better a play than " Antonio," 
 which was damned. 
 
 " I am the worst hand in the world at 
 
"3 
 
 a plot," writes Lamb to Godwin ; and we 
 can call "John Woodvil " to bear witness 
 to his truth. Strictly speaking, Lamb's 
 tragedy has no plot, although it has a 
 story. It lacks the chain of closely link- 
 ed incidents and situations which we are 
 wont to demand in a play. The merits 
 of " John Woodvil " are poetic merely, 
 and dramatic only by accident or in in- 
 cidentals. 
 
 A word or two here as to Lamb's poe- 
 try may be in place. It may be doubted 
 whether, in any strict use of the word, 
 Lamb was a poet at all ; but as I write 
 this the memory comes back of " Hester," 
 and of "The Old Familiar Faces," and of 
 certain passages in " John Woodvil," and 
 it seems a harsh judgment. De Quincey, 
 a kindly critic, who credited Lamb's 
 prose with the " rarest felicity of finish 
 and expression," called his verse "very 
 pretty, very elegant, very tender, very 
 beautiful," but thought that he was as 
 one to whom the writing of verse " was a 
 secondary and occasional function ; not 
 his original and natural vocation not 
 an epyov, but a iraptpyov." In short, Lamb 
 
had his poetic impulses and his poetic 
 moments, but they were not long-lived. 
 In verse, as in prose, he had always some- 
 thing to say; and he said it aptly, with 
 care. His is not the polished verse that re- 
 flects only the empty image of its writer. 
 Nor is he like that French poet of whom 
 Malibran used to speak, and who was rich 
 in words and poor in ideas ; so the great 
 singer described him as " trying to make 
 a vapor-bath with a single drop of water." 
 Lamb did not try to make a vapor-bath, 
 and he was never reduced to a single 
 drop of water. 
 
 Of "John Woodvil," the minor char- 
 acters reveal themselves in their deeds, 
 and they are grouped skilfully to set off 
 the hero. But the hero himself is not 
 a man of action he is an elegant con- 
 versationalist. How Kemble must have 
 longed for the fine speeches which John 
 Woodvil pours forth ! They were full of 
 a true poetry he could well appreciate, 
 and exactly suited to his cast of thought 
 and histrionic habit. Yet he was right to 
 reject the play, even had he not had 
 " Antonio " as a warning. There is not 
 
much to act in " Woodvil." The man 
 does little or nothing ; he talks and stalks, 
 and talks again ; once he seems about to 
 get drunk, which might enliven the story 
 somewhat, and once he fights a duel ; 
 but as he spares his adversary's life, even 
 this pleasing incident lacks finish. The 
 end of the drama is tame beyond endur- 
 ance on the stage. If, however, we put 
 down our opera-glasses, and read "John 
 Woodvil " quietly by the fireside, there 
 is much to reward us. The character of 
 Margaret is beautifully presented and de- 
 veloped. She is akin to Shakspere's 
 women both in character and in ad- 
 venture. Even the manly disguise she 
 does is a frequent Elizabethan, and in- 
 deed Shaksperian, device. The dialogue 
 throughout is full of the tricks of the 
 older dramatists, especially a constant 
 dropping into rhyme. 
 
 At the time Lamb wrote " John Wood- 
 vil " he was in the fresh flush of his de- 
 light in the plays of Beaumont and Fletch- 
 er, and of Marlowe. In the joy of his 
 discovery of these poets and of their fel- 
 lows, and in the heat of the imitative fever 
 
this gave him consciously or unconscious- 
 ly, he wrote, besides the tragedy, a dra- 
 matic sketch called " The Witch." This 
 fills a scant three pages in the collected 
 edition of his poems, but it is an extraor- 
 dinary production. It might be a frag- 
 ment recovered from a lost play by the 
 author of "The Duchess of Malfy " or 
 "The White Devil." It has the secret, 
 black, and midnight atmosphere. " The 
 Witch " is as Elizabethan as " John Wood- 
 vil " in external language, and even more 
 so in the internal feeling and thought. 
 
 Two other of Lamb's dramatic attempts 
 may be dismissed briefly before taking 
 the one play of his which did undergo 
 the ordeal by fire, and was seen by the 
 light of the lamps. One of these was 
 " The Wife's Trial ; or the Intruding 
 Widow," which the author declared to be 
 a dramatic poem founded on Mr. Crabbe's 
 tale of " The Confident." It is a story in 
 dialogue rather than a play, although cer- 
 tain passages in it might not act ill. The 
 other theatrical effort was " The Pawn- 
 broker's Daughter," a farce in two acts. 
 This was founded on his own essay " On 
 
the Inconvenience of being Hanged." It 
 was written nearly a score of years after 
 "Mr. H.," and from a letter to Southey it 
 seems as though there was once some 
 hope of its being acted at the Haymarket 
 Theatre. " Tis an extravaganza," wrote 
 Lamb, "and like enough to follow 'Mr. 
 H.' " "The Pawnbroker's Daughter" is 
 a very whimsical piece. Like " Mr. H.," 
 it was quite the equal of the average 
 farce of the first quarter of this century. 
 To us its fault is that it is not above this 
 average. Cutlet is an amusing character, 
 and so is Pendulous : in each of these are 
 to be seen strokes of Lamb's genuine hu- 
 mor. At the fall of the curtain comes 
 the dramatic millennium, when every- 
 body forgives and forgets, and is happy. 
 
 The one play of Lamb's known to ev- 
 erybody is the two-act farce called "Mr. 
 H.," acted at Drury Lane Theatre, De- 
 cember 10, 1806, and damned out of hand. 
 " These are our failures," said Mr. Brum- 
 mel's valet; and "Mr. H." is, in England, 
 always accounted one of Lamb's failures, 
 and quite the worst of them. It was acted 
 but one night. The prologue was received 
 
with great favor, and Lamb, who was sit- 
 ting with his sister in the front row of the 
 pit, joined in the applause. The curtain 
 fell silently at the end of the first act. 
 During the second, some of the spectators 
 began to hiss, and Lamb went with the 
 crowd, " and hissed and hooted as loudly 
 as any of his neighbors." Talfourd tells us 
 that Elliston, who played " Mr. H.," would 
 have tried it again, but " Lamb saw at 
 once that the case was hopeless." 
 
 The farce has not been performed since 
 in England, to my knowledge, save twice 
 only. It was given at an amateur per- 
 formance in 1822, by the late Charles 
 James Mathews, when the young archi- 
 tect who was one day to be Elliston's le- 
 gitimate successor as the airiest of light 
 comedians, acted in this play, which had 
 been damned at Drury Lane, and in an- 
 other, which had been damned at Covent 
 Garden both of these misfortunes being 
 duly set forth on the play-bill with char- 
 acteristically impudent humor. And it 
 was given once again some sixty years 
 later at the Gaiety Theatre in London, at 
 a single matinee, by a little band of enthu- 
 
siastic young actors and actresses calling 
 themselves " The Dramatic Students." 
 And these are the only two appearances 
 of " Mr. H."on the London stage. 
 
 The consensus of British criticism is 
 that " Mr. H." was too slight for the the- 
 atre and too wire - drawn in its humor, 
 and that its failure was what might have 
 been expected. From this view an Amer- 
 ican, for reasons to be given hereafter, 
 feels called upon to dissent. No doubt 
 4< Mr. H." is not one of the author's rich- 
 est works ; nor, on the other hand, is it 
 as barren and bare as its critics have de- 
 clared. To my mind, " Mr. H." is not at 
 all a bad farce, as the farces of the time 
 go : in 1806 a popular farce was not re- 
 quired to be as substantial and as in- 
 structive as a tragedy. It has scarcely 
 action enough for two acts ; but it is no 
 slighter in plot and situation than the 
 flimsy five -act comedies of Frederick 
 Reynolds, whose " Dramatist " and " No- 
 toriety " were very well received in their 
 day and are carefully forgotten in ours. 
 It is "well cut," as the French phrase it 
 well planned, well laid out. In the first 
 
act is the wonder, the perplexity, the 
 guessing, the questioning as to the name 
 hidden behind this single aspirate. In 
 the second we have the unexpected dis- 
 closure, the general repulse, and the hap- 
 py deliverance. The dialogue is actable ; 
 it is fairly good stage dialogue, lending 
 itself to the art of the actor ; and while 
 it is not in Lamb's best manner, it is of 
 far higher literary quality than can be 
 found in the faded afterpieces of that 
 time, or in the more highly colored farces 
 of our day. The fault of the piece, the 
 fatal fault, was the keeping of the secret 
 from the spectators. To keep a secret is 
 a misconception of true theatrical effect, 
 an improper method of sustaining dra- 
 matic suspense. An audience is inter- 
 ested not in what the end may be, but in 
 the means whereby that end is to be 
 reached. Before the play was done, Lamb 
 wrote to Manning (then in China) that 
 " the whole depends on the manner in 
 which the name is brought out." If the 
 audience that night had been slyly let into 
 the secret in an early scene, they would 
 have had double enjoyment in watch- 
 
ing the futile endeavors of the dramatis 
 persontz to divine it, and they would not 
 have been disappointed when Mr. Hogs- 
 flesh let slip his full patronymic. Kept 
 in ignorance, the spectators joined the 
 actors in speculation ; and when the word 
 was revealed they were not amused by 
 the disgust of the actors, so annoyed were 
 they that they had been puzzled by a vul- 
 gar name. 
 
 Perhaps, too, there was a certain reac- 
 tion after the undue expectancy raised 
 by the prologue. Lamb wrote to Words- 
 worth that the number of friends they 
 "had in the house . . . was astonishing." 
 Now, nothing is so dangerous on the first 
 night of a new play as a large number of 
 the author's friends in the audience. One 
 is greatly inclined to regret that Lamb 
 did not yield to Elliston, and let the play 
 be acted again. If it had had a second 
 chance, the injudicious friends would have 
 been absent, and the name of the hero 
 would have been noised abroad and once 
 in the possession of this secret, the au- 
 dience might well have laughed long and 
 heartily at the hero's misadventures. 
 
The reason that an American hazards 
 this supposition is simply that the experi- 
 ment was tried in these United States, 
 and with success. Three months after 
 " Mr. H." was seen at Drury Lane it was 
 brought out in New York, at the Park 
 Theatre, where it was acted for the first 
 time March 16, 1807. It seems to have 
 made no great hit and no marked failure. 
 Mr. Ireland, whose Records of the New 
 York Stage is the model book of its kind 
 erudite, ample, and exact finds no rec- 
 ord of the repetition of " Mr. H." until 
 1824, when it was performed " by desire." 
 In 1812, however, it had been produced 
 by the very remarkable company then 
 gathered at the Chestnut Street Theatre 
 of Philadelphia.' Mr. William B. Wood, 
 one of the managers of the theatre, acted 
 Mr. H.,and in the highly interesting vol- 
 ume of histrionic autobiography which 
 he published in 1854, under the title of 
 Personal Recollections of the Stage, he re- 
 cords the result in one brief and pregnant 
 paragraph : " Charles Lamb's excellent 
 farce of 'Mr. H.' met with extraordinary 
 success, and was played an unusual num- 
 
( UNIVERSITY 
 ^ 
 
 her of nights." Mr. Ireland has found 
 that Wood continued to act the part for 
 ten or a dozen years. I can hope only 
 doubtfully that some tidings of the bet- 
 ter fate that befell " Mr. H." here beside 
 the Hudson and the Schuylkill was borne 
 across the Atlantic to the attic near the 
 Thames where Lamb received his friends 
 of a Wednesday evening ; but I fear- me 
 greatly this good news did not venture 
 on the wintry voyage, or some record of 
 his pride at this unexpected reversal of 
 the London verdict by the higher court 
 of Philadelphia would linger in one of 
 the many letters to Manning. 
 
 " And so I go creeping on," Lamb wrote 
 to Manning, " since I was lamed by that 
 cursed fall from off the top of Drury Lane 
 Theatre into the pit, something more than 
 a year ago. However, I have been free of 
 the house ever since, and the house was 
 pretty free with me on that occasion." 
 
 It cannot be doubted that this freedom 
 of the theatre was a precious privilege to 
 one like Lamb, who had no great store of 
 wealth. In 1817 he moved to Russell 
 Street, with Drury Lane in sight from the 
 
front window, and Covent Garden from 
 the back ; and here he lived for six years, 
 almost within sound of the orchestras of 
 the two patent houses, almost within hear- 
 ing of the double tinkle of the bell that 
 rolled up the great green curtain. It was 
 perhaps the right of admission purchased 
 by " Mr. H," which gave him the chance 
 to study certain of the old actors about 
 whom Elia was to discourse in days to 
 come with ample humor and exact knowl- 
 edge. To the end Elliston, who had act- 
 ed " Mr. H.," remained a prime favorite. 
 To the end the playhouse was for Lamb 
 a haven of rest ; for there, as he looked 
 across the smoky flare of the footlights 
 into the mystic recesses beyond, he could 
 forget himself, and find surcease of sor- 
 row, relief from haunting dread, and rec- 
 reation after "that dry drudgery at the 
 desk's dead wood." 
 
 The hour came when Lamb was re- 
 leased from doing his daily stent of labor, 
 but that hour took away perhaps as much 
 as it brought. Comrades began to drop 
 by the wayside ; on the stage also the 
 ranks of the old favorites were thinning ; 
 
and even behind the curtain Lamb missed 
 "the old familiar faces." The hour came 
 when Mary Lamb, who had worked with 
 him over the Tales from Shakspere, and 
 who had sat by him in the pit at the hiss- 
 ing of" Mr. H.," was more and more shut 
 out from him in the darkness of a cloud- 
 ed mind. The hour came when Coleridge, 
 the friend to whom he had tied himself 
 in youth, was taken from him. The hour 
 came to Charles Lamb at last, as it must 
 come to all of us, when 
 
 "We speak of friends and their fortunes, 
 
 And of what they did and said, 
 Till the dead alone seem living, 
 And the living alone seem dead. 
 
 "And at last we hardly distinguish 
 
 Between the ghosts and the guests, 
 And a mist and shadow of sadness 
 Steals over our merriest jests." 
 
TWO FRENCH THEATRICAL 
 CRITICS 
 
 I. M. FRANCISQUE SARCEY 
 
 j)O attempt a portrait of a man 
 of letters after the subject 
 has already sat to two limners 
 as accomplished as Mr. Hen- 
 ry James and M. Jules Le- 
 maitre is venturesome and savors of con- 
 ceit ; but nearly fifteen years have passed 
 since Mr. James made his off-hand thumb- 
 nail sketch of M. Sarcey, and M. Lemai- 
 tre's more recent and more elaborate por- 
 traiture in pastels was intended to be 
 seen of Parisians only. Moreover, Mr. 
 James, although he praises M. Sarcey, does 
 so with many reserves, not to say a little 
 grudgingly ; he even echoes the opinion 
 once current in Paris that M. Sarcey is 
 heavy an opinion which M. Lemaitre 
 denounces and disproves. 
 
It is in person that M. Sarcey is heavy 
 in body, not in mind. He is portly 
 and thick-set, but not thick-witted. He 
 is short-sighted physically, but no critic 
 has keener insight. His judgments are 
 as solid and as firm-footed as his tread. 
 Sainte-Beuve has indicated the difference 
 between the "grave, learned, definitive" 
 criticism which penetrates and explains 
 and " the more alert, and more lightly 
 armed" criticism which gives the note to 
 contemporary thought. It is in the for- 
 mer class, among the " grave, learned, de- 
 finitive " critics that M. Sarcey must be 
 placed ; but his serious and elaborate deci- 
 sions are expressed with perhaps as much 
 liveliness and as much point as any one 
 of the " more alert and more lightly 
 armed " may display. M. Sarcey's wit is 
 Voltairean in its quality, in its directness, 
 and in its ease. Though his arm is strong 
 to smite a cutting blow if need be, yet 
 more often than not it is with the tip of 
 the blade that he punctures his adversary, 
 fighting fairly and breaking through the 
 guard by skill of fence. 
 
 And of fighting M. Sarcey has had his 
 
128 
 
 fill since he entered journalism more than 
 thirty years ago. Born in 1828, he was 
 admitted to the Normal School in 1848 
 in the class with Taine and Edmond 
 About. For seven years after his gradu- 
 ation in 1851, he served as a professor in 
 several small towns, constantly involved 
 in difficulties with the officials of the Sec- 
 ond Empire. In 1858 he gave up the 
 desk of the teacher for that of the jour- 
 nalist, and coming up to Paris by the aid 
 and advice of About, he began to write 
 for the Figaro. The next year the Opin- 
 ion Nattonale was started, and M. Sarcey 
 became its dramatic critic. In 1867 he 
 transferred his services to the Temps, 
 which is indisputably the ablest and most 
 dignified of all Parisian newspapers; and 
 to the Temps, in the number which bears 
 the date of Monday and which appears 
 on Sunday afternoon, M. Sarcey has con- 
 tributed for now nearly a quarter of a 
 century a weekly review of the theatres, 
 slowly gaining in authority until for a 
 score of years at least his primacy in Paris 
 as a dramatic critic has been beyond 
 question. 
 
In addition to this hebdomadal essay 
 M. Sarcey has descended daily into the 
 thick of contemporary polemics. He 
 writes an article nearly every day on the 
 topic of the hour. When About started 
 the XIX e Siecle after the Prussian war, 
 M. Sarcey was his chief editorial con- 
 tributor, leading a lively campaign against 
 administrative abuses of all kinds and ex- 
 posing sharply the blunders of the eccle- 
 siastical propaganda. He has little taste 
 for party politics, which seem to him arid 
 and fruitless ; but in the righting of 
 wrongs he is indefatigable, and in the 
 discussion of urban improvements, enter- 
 ing with ardor into all questions of water 
 supplies, sewerage and the like. And to 
 the consideration of all these problems 
 he brings the broad common -sense, the 
 stalwart logic, the robust energy which 
 are his chief characteristics. He has 
 common-sense in a most uncommon de- 
 gree ; and its exercise might be monoto- 
 nous if it were not enlivened by ironic 
 and playful wit. 
 
 Calling on him one day a few summers 
 ago and being hospitably received in the 
 
spacious library which his friend M. 
 Charles Gamier, the architect of the 
 Opera, has arranged for him in the wide- 
 windowed studio of a house purchased 
 by him from the painter who had built 
 it for his own use, M. Sarcey told me that 
 he was a little surprised to discover that 
 such reputation as he might have outside 
 of his own country was chiefly as a dra- 
 matic critic, whereas in France he was 
 known rather as a working journalist. 
 Sitting on the broad, square lounge below 
 the wide window the famous Divan 
 Rouge of which M. Sarcey himself has 
 told the legend in the pages of a French 
 review I suggested that perhaps this 
 was owing to the merely local interest of 
 the subjects the daily journalist was forced 
 to deal with, while the Parisian dramatic 
 critic discussed plays., many of which were 
 likely to be exported far beyond the 
 boundaries of France and beyond the lim- 
 its of the French language. I asked him 
 also how it was that he had never made 
 any collection of his dramatic criticisms, 
 or even a selection from them, as Jules 
 Janin and Theophile Gautier had done 
 
in the past, and as Auguste Vitu of the 
 Figaro and M. Jules Lemaitre of the De- 
 bats had more recently attempted. 
 
 I regret that I cannot recall the exact 
 words of M. Sarcey's answer, although 
 my recollection of the purport of his re- 
 marks is distinct enough. He said that 
 he had not collected his weekly articles 
 or even made a selection from them be- 
 cause they were journalism and not liter- 
 ature : the essential difference between 
 journalism and literature being that the 
 newspaper is meant for the moment only 
 while the book is intended for all time, 
 or as much of it as may be ; he wrote for 
 the Temps his exact opinion at the min- 
 ute of the writing and having in view all 
 the circumstances of the hour. He said 
 that in a book an author might be mod- 
 erate in assertion, but that in a newspaper, 
 which would be thrown away between 
 sunrise and sunset, a writer at times must 
 needs force the note ; and when it was 
 worth while, he must be ready to declare 
 his opinion loudly, with insistence and 
 with undue emphasis. Of this privilege 
 he had availed himself in the Temps, and 
 
this was one reason why he did not wish 
 to see his newspaper articles revived after 
 they had done their work. (Here I feel it 
 proper to note that a careful reading of 
 M. Sarcey's feuilletons every week for now 
 nearly fourteen years has shown me that 
 although his enthusiasm may seem at 
 times a little overstrained, it is never fac- 
 titious and it is never for an unworthy 
 object.) 
 
 A second reason M. Sarcey gave for 
 letting his dramatic criticisms sink into 
 the oblivion of the back number is that 
 he always gave his opinion frankly and 
 fully at the instant when his impres- 
 sions crystallized, and that he sometimes 
 changed these opinions when a play was 
 revived or when a player was seen in a 
 new part. " Now, if I reprinted my feuil- 
 letons, "said he, laughing, " I should lose 
 the right to contradict myself." 
 
 " To look at all sides," Lowell tells us, 
 "and to distrust the verdict of a single 
 mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a critic," 
 but the hasty review of a play penned be- 
 fore sunrise, while the printer's boy waits 
 for copy, is of necessity the verdict of a 
 
single mood; and this is why M. Sarcey 
 feels the need of keeping his mind open 
 to fresh impressions, and of holding him- 
 self in readiness to modify his opinion if 
 good cause is shown for a reversal of the 
 previous decision. And the criticism to 
 which Lowell refers is, in one sense, liter- 
 ature, while the rapid, reviewing of con- 
 temporary art can never be more than 
 journalism, tinctured always with the be- 
 lief that what is essential is news first 
 its collection, and secondarily a comment 
 upon it. 
 
 In this same conversation with M. Sar- 
 cey in his library he told me that he had 
 planned a book on the drama A His- 
 tory of Theatrical Conventions was to 
 be its exact title, I think but that he 
 had done little or nothing towards it. 
 The drama, like every other art, is based 
 upon the passing of an implied agreement 
 between the public and the artist by which 
 the former allows the latter certain privi- 
 leges ; and in no art are these conventions 
 more necessary and more obvious than in 
 the art of the stage. The dramatist has 
 |}ut a few minutes in which to show his 
 
action, and he can take the spectator to 
 but a few places ; therefore he has to se- 
 lect, to condense, to intensify beyond all 
 nature ; and the spectator has to make 
 allowances for the needful absence of the 
 fourth wall of the room in which the scene 
 passes, for the directness of speech, for 
 the omission of the non-essentials which 
 in real life cumber man's every movement. 
 Certain of these conventions are perma- 
 nent, immutable, inevitable, being of the 
 essence of the contract, as we lawyers say, 
 inherent in any conceivable form of dra- 
 matic art. Certain others are accidental, 
 temporary, different in various countries 
 and in various ages. 
 
 A history of theatrical conventions as 
 M. Sarcey might tell it would be the story 
 of dramatic evolution and of the modifi- 
 cation of the art of the stage in accord 
 with the changing environment ; it would 
 be as vital and as pregnant and as stimu- 
 lating a treatise on the drama and its es- 
 sential principles as one could wish. I 
 expressed to M. Sarcey my eagerness to 
 hold such a book in my hand as soon as 
 might be. He laughed again heartily, and 
 
returned that he had made little progress, 
 and that he was in no hurry to set forth 
 his ideas nakedly by themselves and sys- 
 tematically co-ordinated. " If I once for- 
 mulated my theories," he said, " with 
 what could I fill my feuilleton those 
 twelve broad columns of the Temps every 
 week ?" 
 
 What M. Sarcey has not yet done for 
 himself the late Becq de Fouquieres at- 
 tempted in a book on L'Art de la Mise 
 en Scene, the principles laid down in 
 which are derived mainly from M. Sar- 
 cey's essays in the Temps. M. de Fou- 
 quieres, it is to be noted, had not M. Sar- 
 cey 's knowledge, his authority, his vigor, 
 or his style, but his treatise is logical and 
 valuable, and may be recommended heart- 
 ily to all American students of the stage. 
 
 That M. Sarcey should ever feel any 
 difficulty in filling his allotted space is in- 
 conceivable to those who wonder weekly 
 at his abundance, his variety, and his over- 
 flowing information. The post of dramat- 
 ic critic has been held in Paris by many 
 distinguished men, who for the most part 
 regarded it with distaste and merely as a 
 
disagreeable livelihood. Theophile Gau- 
 tier was frequent in his denunciation of 
 his theatrical servitude, speaking of him- 
 self as one toiling in the galley of jour- 
 nalism and chained to the oar of the 
 feuilleton. In like manner Theodore de 
 Banville and M. Frangois Coppee cried 
 aloud at their slavery, and sought every 
 occasion for an excursus from the pre- 
 scribed theatrical theme. Even M.Jules 
 Lemaitre now and again strays from the 
 path to discuss in the Debats a novel or 
 a poem not strictly within the jurisdiction 
 of the dramatic critic. M. Sarcey is never 
 faint in his allegiance to the stage, and he 
 is never short of material for examination. 
 If there are no novelties at the theatres, 
 there may be new books about the stage. 
 Or if these fait there are questions of 
 theatrical administration. Or, in default 
 of everything else, the Comedie-Frangaise 
 is always open, and in the dull days of the 
 summer it acts the older plays, the come- 
 dies and tragedies of the classical reper- 
 tory, and in these M. Sarcey finds many a 
 peg on which to hang a disquisition on 
 dramatic esthetics. I will not say that 
 
I have not found the same truth presented 
 more than once in the seven hundred of 
 M. Sarcey's weekly essays that I have 
 read and preserved, or the same moral en- 
 forced more than once ; but that is a pret- 
 ty poor truth which will not bear more 
 than one repetition. 
 
 Perhaps the first remark a regular read- 
 er of M. Sarcey's weekly review finds him- 
 self making is that the critic has a pro- 
 found knowledge of the art of the stage. 
 Of a certainty the second is to the effect 
 that the critic very evidently delights in 
 his work, is obviously glad to go to the 
 theatre and pleased to express his opinion 
 on the play and the performance. No 
 dramatic critic was ever more conscien- 
 tious than M. Sarcey, none was ever as in- 
 defatigable. Often he returns to see a 
 piece a second time before recording his 
 opinion in print, ready to modify his first 
 impression and quick to note the effect 
 produced on the real public, the broad 
 body of average play-goers but sparsely 
 represented on first nights. 
 
 Next to his enjoyment of his work and 
 his conscience in the discharge of his 
 
138 
 
 duty, the chief characteristic of M. Sarcey 
 is his extraordinary knowledge, his wide 
 acquaintance with the history of the thea- 
 tre in Greece, in Rome, and in France, his 
 close hold on the thread of dramatic de- 
 velopment, and his firm grasp of the vital 
 principles of theatric art. He understands 
 as no one else the theory of the drama, 
 the why and the wherefore of every cog- 
 wheel of dramatic mechanism. He seizes 
 the beauty of technical details, and he is 
 fond of making this plain to the ordinary 
 play-goer, who is conscious solely of the 
 result and careless of the means. He 
 has a marvellous faculty of seizing the 
 central situation of a play and of setting 
 this forth boldly, dwelling on the subsid- 
 iary developments of the plot only in so 
 far as they are needful for the proper ex- 
 position of the more important point. 
 By directing all the light on this domi- 
 nating and culminating situation, the one 
 essential and pregnant part of the piece, 
 M. Sarcey manages to convey to the 
 reader some notion of the effect of the 
 acted play upon the audience a task far 
 above the calibre of the ordinary theatri- 
 
cal critics, who content themselves gen- 
 erally with a hap-hazard and hasty sum- 
 mary of the plot, bald and barren. From 
 M. Sarcey's criticism of a play in Paris it 
 is possible for an intelligent reader in 
 New York to appreciate the effect of the 
 performance and to understand the causes 
 of its success or its failure. 
 
 His criticism even when one is most 
 in disagreement with his opinions is al- 
 ways informed with an exact appreciation 
 of the possibilities and the limitations of 
 the acted drama. Here is M. Sarcey's 
 real originality as a theatrical critic that 
 he criticises the acted drama as something 
 to be acted. With the possible exception 
 of Lessing whom he once praised to 
 me most cordially, declaring that he was 
 delighted whenever he took down the 
 Dramaturgic and chanced upon some 
 dictum of the great German critic con- 
 firmatory of one of his own theories with 
 the exception of Lessing and of G. H. 
 Lewes, M. Sarcey is the first dramatic 
 critic of literary equipment who did not 
 consider a tragedy or a comedy merely as 
 literature and apart from its effect when 
 
acted. La Harpe and Geoffrey might 
 have contented themselves with reading 
 at home the plays they criticised for all 
 the effect of the performance to be de- 
 tected in their comment. Janin and Gau- 
 tier were little better: to them a drama 
 was a specimen of literature, to be judged 
 by the rules and methods applicable to 
 other specimens of literature. 
 
 Now no view could be more unjust to 
 the dramatist. A play is written not to 
 be read, primarily, but to be acted ; and 
 if it is a good play it is seen to fullest 
 advantage only when it is acted. M. 
 Coquelin has recently pointed out that 
 if Shakspere and Moliere, the greatest 
 two dramatists that ever lived, were both 
 careless as to the printing of their plays, 
 it was perhaps because both knew that 
 these plays were written for the theatre, 
 and that only in the theatre could they be 
 judged properly. Seen by the light of 
 the lamps a play has quite another com- 
 plexion from that it bears in the library. 
 Passages pale and dull, it may be, when 
 read coldly by the eye, are lighted by the 
 inner fire of passion when presented in 
 
the theatre ; and the solid structure of 
 action, without which a drama is naught, 
 may stand forth in bolder relief on the 
 stage. A play in the hand of the reader 
 and a play before the eye of the spec- 
 tator are two very different things ; and 
 the difference between them bids fair to 
 grow apace with the increasing attention 
 paid nowadays to the purely pictorial 
 side of dramatic art, to the costumes and 
 the scenery, to the illustrative business 
 and the ingenious management of the 
 lights. No one knows better than M. 
 Sarcey how sharp the difference is be- 
 tween the play on the stage and the play 
 in the closet, and no one has indicated 
 the distinction with more acumen. He 
 judges the play before him as it impresses 
 him and the surrounding play-goers at its 
 performance in the theatre, and not as it 
 might strike him on perusal alone in his 
 study. 
 
 And this is one reason whyif it were 
 necessary to declare the order of the 
 critical hierarchy I should rank M. Sar- 
 cey as a critic of the acted drama more 
 highly than any British critic even of 
 
the great days of British dramatic criti- 
 cism, when Lamb and Hazlitt and Leigh 
 Hunt were practitioners of the art. The 
 task of Hazlitt and of Leigh Hunt was 
 far different from M. Sarcey's. The Eng- 
 lish.drama of their day was so feeble that 
 few except professed students of theatri- 
 cal history can now recall the names of 
 any play or of any playwright of that 
 time ; and therefore the critics devoted 
 themselves almost altogether to an analy- 
 sis of the beauties of Shakspere and of 
 the art of acting as revealed by John 
 Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and Ed- 
 mund Kean. Lamb's subtle and para- 
 doxical essays are retrospective, the best 
 of them, and commemorate performers 
 and performances held in affectionate re- 
 membrance. He wrote little about the 
 actual present, and thus he avoided the 
 double difficulty of dramatic criticism 
 as M. Sarcey has to meet it to-day in 
 France. 
 
 This double difficulty is, that when the 
 dramatic critic has to review a new play 
 he is called upon to do two things at 
 once, each incompatible with the other : 
 
he has to judge the play, which he knows 
 only through the medium of the acting, 
 and he has to judge the acting, which he 
 knows only as it is shown in the play; 
 and thus there is a double liability to 
 error. Neither the dramatist nor the 
 comedian stands before the critic simply 
 and directly each can be seen only as 
 the other is able and willing to declare 
 him. It may be said that the dramatic 
 critic does not see a new play he sees 
 only a performance, and this perform- 
 ance may be good or bad, may betray 
 the author or reinforce him, may be fair- 
 ly representative of his work and his 
 wishes or may not. It is not the play 
 itself that the critic sees it is only the 
 performance. If the play is in print, the 
 critic may correct the impression of the 
 single representation, or he may do so if 
 the play be revived. Lamb and Hazlitt 
 and Leigh Hunt, dealing almost wholly 
 with the comedies and tragedies of the 
 past, all of which were in print and in 
 their possession for quiet perusal, had a 
 far easier task than M. Sarcey's they 
 had to do little more than comment upon 
 
the acting or express their pre-existing 
 opinion of the play itself. M. Sarcey has 
 to judge both piece and the acting at the 
 same time, and he has to judge the piece 
 solely through the medium of the acting, 
 and the acting solely through the medium 
 of the piece ; and it may happen that 
 either medium refracts irregularly. Ev- 
 ery actor, every dramatic author, every 
 theatrical manager knows that there are 
 " ungrateful parts " and " parts that play 
 themselves." Out of the former the best 
 actor can make but little, and in the lat- 
 ter the defects of even the poorest actor 
 are disguised. 
 
 No dramatic critic is better aware of 
 this double difficulty than M. Sarcey, and 
 no one is more adroit in solving it. As 
 far as natural gifts and an unprecedented 
 experience can avail, he avoids the dan- 
 ger. He is open-minded, slow to formu- 
 late his opinion and always ready to give 
 a play or a player a rehearing. He is never 
 mean, never morose, never malignant. He 
 is not one of the critics who attack a liv- 
 ing author with the callous carelessness 
 with which an anatomist goes to work on 
 
a nameless cadaver. He is no more easy 
 to please than any other expert whose 
 taste is fine, though his sympathies are 
 broad ; but when he is pleased he is em- 
 phatic in praise. It was in the Idle Man, 
 in his wonderful panegyric of Kean's 
 acting, that Dana said, " I hold it to be 
 a low and wicked thing to keep back 
 from merit of any kind its due ;" and M. 
 Sarcey is of Dana's opinion. He is, capa- 
 ble of dithyrambic rhapsodies of eulogy 
 when he is trying to warm up the Parisian 
 public to a proper appreciation of M. 
 Meilhac's "Gotte" or " Decore," for ex- 
 ample; and although nobody can love 
 New York more than I do, sometimes one 
 of the Temps reviews of a new play at the 
 Vaudeville, of a revival at the Odeon, 
 or of a first appearance at the Frangais 
 is enough to make me homesick for 
 Paris. 
 
 As a critic even of the drama, M. Sar- 
 cey has his limitations. He is now and 
 then insular Paris (like New York) had 
 its origin on an island. At times he is 
 dogmatic to the verge of despotism. He 
 has the defects of his qualities ; and the 
 
first of his qualities is a robust common- 
 sense, which is sometimes a little com- 
 monplace and sometimes again a little 
 overwhelming, a little intolerant. Com- 
 mon-sense is an old failing of the French. 
 " We have almost all of us," says M. Jules 
 Lemaitre, " more or less Malherbe, Boi- 
 leau, Voltaire, and M. Thiers in our mar- 
 row." A characteristic of all these typi- 
 cal Frenchmen was pugnacity, and this is 
 one of M. Sarcey's most valuable qualities. 
 He fights fair, but he fights hard. His 
 long campaign against M. Duquesnel as 
 the manager of the Odeon and his re- 
 peated attacks on the theories of the late 
 M. Perrin, until the death of the admin- 
 istrator of the Comedie-Frangaise, are 
 memorable instances of M. Sarcey's te- 
 nacity. They are instances also of his 
 sagacity, for time has proved the truth of 
 his contentions. Again, when M. Zola 
 made a bitter and personal retort to a 
 plain-spoken criticism, M. Sarcey returned 
 an answer as good-tempered as any one 
 could wish, but as convincing and as cut- 
 ting as any of M. Zola's many opponents 
 could desire. When M. Sarcey picks up 
 
the gauntlet, he handles his adversary 
 without gloves. 
 
 In the reply to M. Zola, as elsewhere, 
 M. Sarcey confessed his abiding weakness 
 the incurable habit of heterophemy 
 which makes him miscall names in al- 
 most every article he writes, setting down 
 " Edmond " when it should be " Edward," 
 and the like. But blunders of this sort 
 are but trifles which any alert proof- 
 reader might check, and which every 
 careful reader can correct for himself. 
 They are all of a piece with M. Sarcey 's 
 writing, which abounds in familiarities, 
 in slang, in the technical terms of the 
 stage, in happy-go-lucky allusions often 
 exceedingly felicitous, and in frequent 
 anecdotes from his wide reading or from 
 his own experience. The result is a style 
 of transparent ease and of indisputable 
 sincerity. Nobody was ever in doubt as 
 to his meaning at any time, or in doubt 
 as to the reason why he meant what he 
 said. To this sincerity M. Sarcey referred 
 in his reply to M. Zola, and to it he owes, 
 as he there declared, much of his author- 
 ity as a dramatic critic. With the public, 
 
i 4 8 
 
 intelligence and knowledge count for 
 much, and skill tells also, and so does 
 wit ; but nothing is as important to a 
 critic as a reputation for integrity, for 
 frankness, for absolute honesty in the 
 expression of his opinions. 
 
 To keep this reputation free from sus- 
 picion M. Sarcey declined to solicit the 
 succession of Emile Augier in the French 
 Academy. In a dignified and pathetic 
 letter to the public, he declared that al- 
 though he believed that most of the 
 dramatists who belonged to the Forty 
 Immortals would vote for him, and al- 
 though he believed that both before his 
 candidacy and after his election he could 
 criticise the plays of these dramatists as 
 freely as he did now, yet he did not be- 
 lieve that the public would credit him 
 with this fortitude. " The authority of 
 the critic lies in the confidence of the pub- 
 lic," he wrote ; and if the public doubted 
 whether he would speak the truth and 
 the whole truth as frankly after he had 
 been a candidate or after he had become 
 an Academician, his opinion would lose 
 half its weight. To guard his freedom 
 
he told me once he had refused all hon- 
 ors, even the cross of the Legion of Honor. 
 He declared in this letter that he hesi- 
 tated long, and that he knew the sacrifice 
 he was making. If journalism had been 
 without a representative in the Academy, 
 perhaps he might have felt it his duty to 
 be a candidate, but John Lemoinne was 
 one of the Forty, and there were already 
 two or three other journalists drawing 
 nigh to the Academy, " who will fill most 
 brilliantly the place I give up to them." 
 He concluded by declaring that his am- 
 bition was to have on his tombstone the 
 two words which would sum up his ca- 
 reer " Professor and Journalist." 
 
 He began as a professor, as a teacher 
 in the schools, and now for thirty years 
 he has been a journalist, a teacher in the 
 newspapers, loving his work, and doing it 
 with a conscience and a fidelity which 
 make it an honor to the modern news- 
 paper. 
 
 1890. 
 
II. M. JULES LEMAITRE 
 
 IN the evolution of literature three 
 kinds of critics have been developed. 
 First in point of time came the critic 
 who spoke as one having authority, who 
 appealed to absolute standards of taste, 
 who had no doubt as to the force of 
 his criterions, who judged according to 
 the strict letter of the law, and who 
 willingly advised a poet to put his Peg- 
 asus out to grass or ordered a writer of 
 prose to send his stalking-horse to the 
 knacker. This critic believed in definite 
 legislation for literature, and sometimes 
 when his name was Aristotle or Horace, 
 Boileau or Pope he codified the scat- 
 tered laws, that all might obey them un- 
 derstandingly. Macaulay was the last 
 English critic of this class, and even now 
 many of his minor imitators hand down 
 their hebdomadal judgments in the broad 
 columns of British weeklies. In France 
 there is to-day a man of force, acuteness, 
 and individuality, M. Ferdinand Brune- 
 
tiere, who accepts this outworn creed of 
 criticism, and who acts up to it conscien- 
 tiously in the Revue des Deitx Mondes. 
 
 The papal infallibility of the Essay on 
 Criticism began to be doubted towards the 
 end of the last century. Lessing, for one, 
 had impulses of revolt against the rigid- 
 ity of the rules by which literature was 
 limited; but the German protest of the 
 Schlegels, for instance, was rather against 
 the restrictions of French criticism than 
 against a narrow method of appreciating 
 poetry. Like the Irish clergyman who 
 declared himself willing to " renounce the 
 errors of the Church of Rome and to 
 adopt those of the Church of England," 
 most of the writers who refused to be 
 judged by the precepts of Classicism were 
 ready to apply with equal rigor the rules 
 of Romanticism. But in time, out of the 
 welter and struggle of faction came a per- 
 ception of a new truth that it is the task 
 of the critic not to judge, but to examine, 
 to inquire, to investigate, to see the ob- 
 ject as it really is and to consider it 
 with disinterested curiosity. This Sainte- 
 Beuve attempted, though even he did not 
 
always attain to the lofty ideal he pro- 
 claimed ; and to the same chilly height 
 Matthew Arnold tried to reach, saying 
 that he wished to decide nothing as of 
 his " own authority ; the great art of crit- 
 icism is to get one's self out of the way 
 and to let humanity decide." 
 
 The phrase which Dr. Waldstein quoted 
 from Spinoza not long ago as characteristic 
 of the scientific mind Neque flere, neque 
 rzdere, neque admirare, neque contemnere, 
 sed intelligere (Neither to weep nor to 
 laugh, neither to admire nor to despise, 
 but to understand) this may serve to 
 indicate the aim of scientific criticism 
 which judges not, which expresses no 
 opinions, which does not take sides, which 
 merely sets down, with the arid precision 
 of an affidavit, the facts as these are re- 
 vealed by a qualitative analysis. Unfort- 
 unately, criticism as impersonal as this 
 is impossible ; no man can make a mere 
 machine of himself to register in vacua. 
 " If there were any recognized standard 
 in criticism, as in apothecaries' measure, 
 so that, by adding a grain of praise to 
 this scale or taking away a scruple of 
 
blame from that, we could make the bal- 
 ance manifestly even in the eyes of all men, 
 it might be worth while to weigh Han- 
 nibal," Mr. Lowell tells us ; " but when 
 each of us stamps his own weights and 
 warrants the impartiality of his own 
 scales, perhaps the experiment may be 
 wisely foregone." 
 
 The natural reaction from an impossibly 
 callous scientific criticism which sought 
 to suppress the personality of the critic 
 was a criticism which was frankly indi- 
 vidual. This is the third kind of criti- 
 cism ; it abdicates all inherited authority 
 and it does not pretend to scientific ex- 
 actitude. It recognizes that no standard 
 is final, and that there is no disputing 
 about tastes. It is aware that in the 
 higher criticism as in the higher educa- 
 tion there has been an abolition of the 
 marking system, and that the critic is no 
 longer a pedant or a pedagogue sending 
 one author up to the head of his class 
 and setting another in the corner with a 
 fool's cap on his brow. It declares the 
 honest impression of the individual at 
 the moment of writing, not concealing 
 
the fact that even this may be different 
 at another time. In reality Poe was a 
 critic of this type, though he lacked 
 frankness, and with characteristic char- 
 latanry was prompt to appeal to the 
 immutable standards to verify his own 
 vagaries. 
 
 The three types of criticism have been 
 evolved inevitably one out of the other ; 
 and the development of the third kind 
 has not driven out the practitioners of 
 the first and second. Critics of all three 
 classes exist at present side by side in 
 France, England, and America, disputing 
 together daily in the schools. Yet the 
 man is of more importance than the 
 method ; and a born critic can bend any 
 theory of his art to suit his purpose. 
 Boileau and Sainte-Beuve were both good 
 critics, and Matthew Arnold was a good 
 critic ; and so was Lowell, who seemed 
 rather an eclectic, not firm in following 
 any one creed. To which theory a man 
 gives in allegiance nowadays is mainly a 
 question of temperament. In France, as 
 it happens, the most brilliant critic of 
 the younger generation, M.Jules Lernaitre, 
 
belongs to the third class. M. Lemaitre 
 is a triumphant exemplar of individual 
 criticism, giving his opinions for what 
 they are worth, and presenting them so 
 forcibly, so picturesquely, so pleasantly, 
 that at least they are always worth listen- 
 ing to. There is no pose in his frankness, 
 and his apparent inconsequence is open 
 and honest. 
 
 In some respects M. Jules Lemaitre is 
 a typical Frenchman of letters. He has 
 the ease, the grace, the wit, the lightness 
 of touch, and the certainty of execution 
 characteristic of the best French authors. 
 Behind these charms he has the love of 
 clearness, of order, of symmetry in a 
 word, of art which is among the most 
 marked of French qualities. He dislikes 
 extravagance of any kind ; he hates harsh- 
 ness, violence, brutality. He inherits the 
 Latin tradition, and he has fed fat on the 
 poetry of Greece and Rome. He has 
 none of the liking of his contemporary, 
 M. Paul Bourget, for foreign countries, and 
 none of M. Bourget's curiosity as to for- 
 eign literature. M. Lemaitre is content 
 to have M. Pierre Loti do his travelling 
 
for him, or to let Guy de Maupassant go 
 abroad as his proxy. 
 
 M.Jules Lemaitre has not yet "come 
 to forty years." He is still a young man. 
 He was born in 1853, in the little village 
 of Vennecy, on the edge of the forest of 
 Orleans. He attended school at Orleans 
 and then in Paris, and when he was nine- 
 teen he entered the Normal School, which 
 of late years has given many a brilliant 
 man to French literature. In 1875, at 
 the age of twenty -two, he was gradu- 
 ated from the Normal School with high 
 honors, and he was at once sent to the 
 Lycee of Havre as professor of rhetoric. 
 Here he stayed five years teaching, and 
 yet finding time to write that first volume 
 of verse with which most authors begin 
 their literary career. 
 
 In 1880 he published these poems, and 
 in the same year he was promoted and 
 sent to Algiers. In 1883 he brought out 
 a second book of rhymes, and he pre- 
 sented his double theses to the Sorbonne, 
 whereupon he was made a doctor of let- 
 ters. The thesis in French, a study of 
 the plays of Dancourt and of the course 
 
of French comedy after the death of Mo- 
 liere, was quite unconventional in its in- 
 dividuality, as any one may see now that 
 it has been published. He was again pro- 
 moted, but he already thought of giving 
 up his professorship to venture into liter- 
 ature. In 1884 he asked for leave of ab- 
 sence and went to Paris, where he began 
 to contribute regularly to the Revue 
 Bleue, the most literary and the most in- 
 dependent of French weekly journals 
 as far as may be the Parisian equiva- 
 lent of the Nation. In a very few weeks 
 he made his name known to all the Pa- 
 risians who care for literature. His acute 
 analysis of Renan was the first of his es- 
 says to attract general attention ; and 
 when he followed this up with equally 
 incisive studies of M. Zola and of M. 
 Georges Ohnet, he was at once accepted 
 as one of the most acute of contempo- 
 rary French critics. As one of his biog- 
 raphers declares, " He was unknown in 
 October, 1884, and in December he was 
 famous." A few months later, when J. J. 
 Weiss resigned, M. Lemaitre was appoint- 
 ed dramatic critic of the Journal des 
 
Debats, the position long held by Jules 
 Janin. 
 
 His contributions to the Revue Bleue 
 M. Lemaitre has four times gathered 
 into volumes sent forth under the same 
 title, Les Contemporains. Selections from 
 his weekly articles in the Debats have 
 also been collected in successive volumes 
 called Impressions de Theatre. The titles 
 he has given to these two series of his 
 criticisms reveal the aim of M. Lemai- 
 tre and his range. Those whom he crit- 
 icises are chiefly his contemporaries, or 
 at furthest those who have deeply and 
 immediately influenced the men of to- 
 day ; and the criticisms themselves are 
 chiefly his impressions. M. Lemaitre is a 
 man of the nineteenth century, first of all, 
 and he tells his fellow-men how the books 
 and the plays of the nineteenth century, 
 the authors and the actors, affect him, 
 how they move him in short, how they 
 impress him at the moment regardless of 
 any change of opinion which may come 
 to him in the future. 
 
 Sainte - Beuve protests against those 
 who borrow ready-made opinions, and it 
 
159 
 
 must be admitted that more often than 
 not a ready-made opinion is a misfit. 
 M. Jules Lemaitre has his opinions made 
 to measure, and as soon as he outgrows 
 them they are cast aside. While he wears 
 them they are his own, and neither in 
 cut, cloth, nor style are they common- 
 place. He has the double qualification 
 of the true critic insight and equipment. 
 He has humor and good-humor, and he 
 enjoys the play of his own wit. He is a 
 scholar who is often as lively and as law- 
 less as a schoolboy. He is at once a man 
 of letters and a man of the world. He 
 hates the smell of the lamp, and his 
 best work has the flavor of the good talk 
 that may go up the chimney when there 
 is a wood fire on the hearth. As he 
 gained experience and authority he has 
 become less emphatic, and he hesitates 
 more before coming to definite conclu- 
 sions. The certainty of conviction which 
 he brought with him from the provinces 
 has given way to a more Parisian scepti- 
 cism. His earlier criticisms were all solid- 
 ly constructed and stood four-square. 
 Renan, M. Georges Ohnet, and M. Zola 
 
were never in any doubt as to his final 
 opinion. 
 
 The later criticisms are more individ- 
 ual, more "personal" as the French say 
 more impressionist, than the earlier. M. 
 Lemaitre is quite aware that the shield is 
 silver on one side and gold on the other, 
 and he is no longer willing to break a 
 lance for either metal, whichever may be 
 nearer to him. He is open-minded, he 
 sees both sides at once, and he sets down 
 both the pro and the con, sometimes de- 
 clining to express his own ultimate opin- 
 ion, sometimes even refusing to form any 
 opinion at all. He is fond of setting up a 
 man of straw to act as the devil's advo- 
 cate ; but though this insures a full hear- 
 ing of the witnesses for the defence as 
 well as for the prosecution, it rarely pre- 
 vents M. Lemaitre from getting his saint, 
 after all, when he is resolute for the beat- 
 ification. Now and again he seems in- 
 different, and he remains "on the fence," 
 as we Yankees say, or rather on both sides 
 of it at once. His attitude then is that 
 of a lazy judge leaving the whole burden 
 of decision on the jury. Yet he is prompt 
 
enough, as the essays on M. Daudet's " Im- 
 mortel," M. Zola's " Reve," Victor Hugo's 
 " Toute la Lyre," in the fourth series, show 
 plainly, when his opinion is clear and sim- 
 ple. This is evidence, were any needed, 
 that behind the hesitation and the appar- 
 ent indifference there is a live interest in 
 literature, a real love for what is true, gen- 
 uine, hearty, and a sharp hatred for shams. 
 His hatred of shams is shown in his 
 swift condemnation of M. Georges Oh- 
 net's romances, perhaps unduly ferocious 
 in manner, although indisputably de- 
 served. M. Georges Ohnet is the most 
 popular of French novelists ; his stories 
 sell by the hundred thousand, and he oc- 
 cupies the place in France which the late 
 E. P. Roe held in America, and which Mr. 
 Rider Haggard holds now in England. 
 There had been a general silence in the 
 French press about M. Ohnet's novels; 
 no one praised them highly, but they 
 pleased the public or, at least, the half- 
 educated and really illiterate mass of nov- 
 el readers. M. Lemaitre felt the revolt 
 of a scholar of refined tastes and delicate 
 instincts against the overpowering popu- 
 
larity of M. Ohnet's empty triviality, and 
 in a memorable article he "belled the 
 cat" and he " rang the bell." Never was 
 such an execution since Macaulay slew 
 Montgomery. M. Lemaitre began by say- 
 ing that he was in the habit of discussing 
 literary subjects, but he hoped that he 
 would be pardoned if he spoke now of 
 the novels of M. Georges Ohnet ; and then 
 he went on to hold up to scorn the feeble 
 style of M. Ohnet, the merely mechanical 
 structure of his stories, the conventional- 
 ity of his characters and their falsity to 
 humanity, the barren absurdity of his phi- 
 losophy of life and the baseness of his ap- 
 peal to the prejudices of the middle class, 
 wherein he sought for readers. In gen- 
 eral, M. Lemaitre is keen of fence, and his 
 weapon is the small sword of the duelling 
 field ; but to M. Ohnet he took a single- 
 stick or a quarter-staff, and with this he 
 beat his victim black and blue, breaking 
 more than one bone. 
 
 Longfellow tells us that " a young critic 
 is like a boy with a gun ; he fires at every 
 living thing he sees ; he thinks only of his 
 own skill, not of the pain he is giving." 
 
M. Lemaitre was a young critic when he 
 wrote this crushing assault on M. Ohnet. 
 Since then he has never attempted to re- 
 peat the experience ; it is true that there 
 is in France to-day no other subject as 
 good as M. Ohnet for a severe critic to try 
 his hand on. Of late when M. Lemaitre 
 has had to express a hostile opinion he 
 has been more indirect ; and now he draws 
 blood by a dexterous insinuation adroitly 
 thrust under his adversary's sword arm. 
 Ill-disguised was his contempt for Albert 
 Wolff, a Parisian from Cologne, a writer of 
 chroniques for the Figaro most perish- 
 able of all articles de Paris one who is to 
 journalism what M. Georges Ohnet is to 
 literature. Ill-disguised is his condemna- 
 tion of the part M. Henri Rochefort has 
 played in the French politics of the past 
 quarter of a century, and bitterly incisive 
 corrosive almost is the outline he 
 etches of the character of the man with 
 the immitigable grin, the man whose Lan- 
 terne helped to light the fall of the sec- 
 ond empire, the man who has since egged 
 on every revolt, however bloody, however 
 hopeless, however foolish. 
 
164 
 
 Of these adverse criticisms there are 
 very few indeed a scant half-dozen, per- 
 haps in the threescore essays contained 
 in volumes of Les Contemporains. This 
 is as it should be, for he is a very narrow 
 critic indeed who deals more in blame 
 than in praise. For criticism to be profit- 
 able and pregnant, the critic must needs 
 dwell on the works he admires. Merely 
 negative criticism is sterile. The late 
 Edmond Scherer said that "the ideal of 
 criticism was to be able to praise cordially 
 and with enthusiasm, if need be, without 
 losing one's head or getting blind to de- 
 fects." 
 
 Nothing is more needful for a critic 
 than sympathy with his subject. The 
 faculty of appreciation, of hearty admi- 
 ration, of contagious enthusiasm even, is 
 among the best gifts of a true critic ; and 
 this M. Lemaitre has in abundance. He 
 likes the best and the best only, but this 
 he likes superlatively. And he can see 
 the good points even of authors who do 
 not altogether please him ; and these he is 
 always ready to laud in hearty fashion. 
 
 " Readers like to find themselves more 
 
i6 5 
 
 severe than the critic ; and I let them have 
 this pleasure," said Sainte- Beuve. M. 
 Lemaitre goes far beyond his great pred- 
 ecessor ; he delights in broad eulogy of 
 those who appeal to his delicate sense of 
 the exquisite in literary art. His enjoy- 
 ment of " Pierre Loti," for example, of 
 M. Daudet's Nabab, of Renan, is so in- 
 tense that he is swept off his feet by the 
 strong current of admiration. But though 
 he lose his feet he keeps his head, and in 
 his highest raptures he is never uncritical. 
 What M. Lemaitre likes best, if not always 
 the books best worth liking, are always 
 at least books well worth liking ; and he 
 likes them for what is best in them, and 
 never for their affectations, their super- 
 fluities, their contortions ; and it is for 
 these often that many a critic pretends to 
 worship a master. M. Lemaitre's taste is 
 keen and fine and sure ; and his judgment 
 is solid. 
 
 Although M. Lemaitre knows his clas- 
 sics Greek, Latin, and French as be- 
 comes a Normalien, he likes French litera- 
 ture better than Greek or Latin ; and he 
 likes the French literature of the nine- 
 
teenth century better than that of the 
 eighteenth, or even of the seventeenth. It 
 is his contemporaries who most interest 
 him. In his clear and subtle and respectful 
 analysis of the characteristics of his fellow- 
 critic M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, M. Le- 
 maitre confesses that while he reads Bos- 
 suet and acknowledges the power of that 
 most eloquent of orators, yet the reading 
 gives him little pleasure, " whereas often 
 on opening by chance a book of to-day or 
 of yesterday " he thrills with delight ; and 
 he calls on M. Brunetiere to set off one 
 century against the other. " If, perhaps, 
 Corneille, Racine, Bossuet have no equiv- 
 alents to-day, the great century had the 
 equivalent of Lamartine, of Victor Hugo, 
 of Musset, of Michelet, of George Sand, of 
 Sainte-Beuve, of Flaubert, of M. Renan ? 
 And is it my fault if I would rather read 
 a chapter of M. Renan than a sermon of 
 Bossuet, the Nabab than the Princess of 
 Cleves, and a certain comedy of Meilhac 
 and Halevy even than a comedy of Mo- 
 liere?" 
 
 It is this, I think, which gives to M. Le- 
 maitre's criticism much of its value his 
 
i6 7 
 
 intense liking for the French literature of 
 to-day, and his perfect understanding of 
 its moods and of its methods. He has an 
 extraordinary dexterity in plucking out 
 the heart of technical mysteries. In con- 
 sidering a little book of sayings he took 
 occasion to declare the theory of maxim 
 making, whereby every man may be his 
 own La Rochefoucauld, and he supplied 
 an abundance of bright examples manu- 
 factured according to his new formulas. 
 In like manner he discovered the trick of 
 the rhythms and rhymes of Theodore de 
 Banville, the reviver of the rondeau and 
 of the ballade, and a past-master of verbal 
 jugglery and of acrobatic verse. 
 
 In peering into the methods of more 
 important literary workmen he is equally 
 acute. Take, for example, his study of M. 
 Zola perhaps the most acute and the 
 most respectful analysis of M. Zola's very 
 remarkable powers to be found anywhere ; 
 more elaborate than the excellent essay 
 written by Mr. Henry James when Nana 
 was published. M. Zola is a novelist with 
 a theory of his art violently promulgated 
 and turbulently reiterated until most peo- 
 
i68 
 
 pie were ready to accept his own word 
 for his work, and to regard his romances 
 as examples of the Naturalism he pro- 
 claimed. Now and then an adverse critic 
 dwelt on the inconsistencies between M. 
 Zola's theory and his practice, and M. Zola 
 himself bemoaned the occasional survivals 
 of the Romanticist spirit he detected in 
 himself. M. Lemaitre began by thrusting 
 this aside, and by painting M. Zola in his 
 true colors with a bold sweep of the brush. 
 " M. Zola," he declared, " is not a critic, 
 and he is not a Naturalistic novelist in the 
 meaning he himself gives to the term. 
 But M. Zola is an epic poet and a pessi- 
 mistic poet. . . . By poet I mean a writer 
 who in virtue of an idea . . . notably 
 transforms reality, and having so trans- 
 formed it gives it life." M. Lemaitre 
 then shows us the simple but powerful 
 mechanism of M. Zola's art how he takes 
 a theme and sets it before the reader with 
 broad strokes and with typical characters 
 boldly differentiated and reduced almost 
 to their elements, but none the less alive. 
 Space fails here to show how M. Lemaitre 
 works out most convincingly the substan- 
 
i6 9 
 
 tial identity of M. Zola's massive method 
 with that of the epic poet, and how he 
 discovers in every one of M. Zola's later 
 fictions a Beast, a huge symbol of the 
 theme which that story sets forth, and a 
 Chorus which comments upon the events 
 and brings them nearer to the reader. 
 
 The essay may be recommended to all 
 who have a taste for criticism ; I know 
 nothing at once more acute, more orig- 
 inal, or truer. It may be recommended 
 especially to those who would like to 
 know what manner of writer M. Zola is, 
 and who yet shrink from the reading of 
 his novels, often drawn out and weari- 
 some, and nearly always foul and repul- 
 sive. It is M. Zola's misfortune and it 
 is indubitably his own fault that he is 
 judged by hearsay often, and that his books 
 are taken as the types of filthy fiction. 
 Perhaps he is more frequently condemned 
 than read although sometimes the Brit- 
 ish abuse of his books has struck me as 
 the reaction of guilty enjoyment. Occa- 
 sion serves to say in parentheses here 
 that while M. Zola's forcible and effec- 
 tive novels are painful often, while they 
 
are dirty frequently and indefensibly, 
 they are not immoral. It is rather in 
 Octave Feuillet's rose-colored novels or 
 in M. Georges Ohnet's gilt-edged fictions 
 that we may seek insidious immorality. 
 
 M. Lemaitre indicates the misplaced 
 dirt in M. Zola's novels, and obviously 
 enough is himself a man of clean mind ; 
 but perhaps he lacks the inherent stern- 
 ness of morality which in a man of Anglo- 
 Saxon stock would go with an upright 
 character like his. He has a respectful 
 regard for the Don Juan of Moliere and 
 of Mozart, of Byron and of Musset ; and 
 he has a kindly tolerance for the dis- 
 ciples of Don Juan who infest French 
 literature. 
 
 M. Lemaitre's dramatic criticisms, his 
 Impressions de Theatre, are quite as orig- 
 inal as his more solid literary portraits, 
 quite as fresh, quite as individual, quite 
 as amusing. He lacks the profound 
 knowledge of the conditions of dramatic 
 art, the extraordinary insight into the 
 necessary conventions upon which it is 
 based, the thorough acquaintance with 
 the history of the theatre in France, 
 
which have given to the foremost theatri- 
 cal critic of our time, M. Francisque Sar- 
 cey, his unexampled authority. But he 
 looks at the stage always through his 
 own eyes, never through the opera-glass 
 of his neighbor or the spectacles of tra- 
 dition. He is fond of the theatre, and 
 yet he readily goes outside of its walls 
 and considers not merely the technic of 
 the dramatist but also the ethics. Like 
 most well-equipped and keen-witted crit- 
 ics, his criticism willingly broadens its 
 vision to consider life as well as litera- 
 ture. Of the conventionalities and the 
 concessions to chance which the writer 
 of comedy avails himself freely, M. Le- 
 maitre is tolerant, and wisely ; but he is 
 intolerant and implacable towards the 
 false psychology and the defective ethics 
 of the mere playwright who twists char- 
 acters and misrepresents humanity to 
 gain an effect. 
 
 The critic of the Debats is not content 
 with describing the dramas of the leading 
 theatres of Paris ; he has a Thackerayan 
 fondness for spectacles of all kinds, for 
 the ballet, for the circus and the panto- 
 
mime, for side-shows, for freaks of every 
 degree. In all these he finds unfailing 
 amusement and an unflagging variety of 
 impressions. He is always alert, lively, 
 gay ; and though he travels far afield, he 
 is never at his wits' end. In his dramat- 
 ic criticisms M. Lemaitre appears to me 
 as a serious student of literature and of 
 life, playing the part of a Parisian and 
 it is a most excellent impersonation. 
 
 Of M. Lemaitre's poems, there is no 
 need to say anything ; they are the verses 
 of a very clever man, no doubt, but not 
 those of a born poet. They shine with 
 the reflected light of his work in prose. 
 Gray thought " even a bad verse as good 
 a thing or better than the best observa- 
 tion that ever was made upon it " ; but 
 even fairly good verse is not as good a 
 thing as the best observation that ever 
 was made on the best verse. It is the 
 prose and not the verse of Lessing and of 
 Sainte-Beuve that we turn to, again and 
 again. 
 
 Of M. Lemaitre's stories there is no 
 need to say much : they are the tales of 
 a very clever man, of course, but not those 
 
173 
 
 of a born teller of tales. They lack a 
 something vague and indefinable a fla- 
 vor, a perfume, an aroma of vitality ; it 
 is as though they were a manufacture, 
 rather, and not a growth. They are not 
 inevitable enough. They are naif with- 
 out being quite convincing. They have 
 simplicity of motive, harmony of con- 
 struction, sharpness of outline, touches 
 of melancholy and pathos, unfailing in- 
 genuity and wit and yet and yet Of 
 the stories contained in the beautifully 
 illustrated volume called Dtx Contes only 
 three or four are modern, and even 
 these seem to have a hint of allegory as 
 though there were perhaps a concealed 
 moral somewhere. The rest are tales of 
 once-upon-a-time, in Arabia, in Greece, 
 in Rome, as dissimilar as possible from 
 the contes of M. Daudet or of Maupas- 
 sant, of M. Coppee or of M. Halevy, and 
 with a certain likeness to the Contes 
 Philosophies of Voltaire. To say this 
 is to suggest that they are rather fables, 
 apologues, allegories, than short stories. 
 
 Of M. Lemaitre's play, " Revoltee," 
 there is no need to say more ; it is the 
 
comedy of a very clever man indeed, but 
 not that of a born playwright. When 
 acted at the Odeon in 1889 it did not fail, 
 but it did not prove a powerful attraction. 
 When published and to the delight of 
 all who are fond of the drama French 
 plays are still published as English com- 
 edies were once it impressed the expert 
 as likely to read better than it acted. 
 There was abundance of wit, for example, 
 but it was rather the wit of M. Jules Le- 
 maitre than of his characters, and it was 
 rather the wit of the study than of the 
 stage. Yet " Revoltee " is an honorable 
 attempt, and highly interesting to all who 
 are interested in M. Lemaitre. 
 
 To sum up my opinion of these tenta- 
 tive endeavors in other departments of 
 literature, M. Lemaitre is a very clever 
 man, whose cleverness does not lead him 
 naturally and irresistibly to poetry or to 
 story-telling or to playwriting. What it 
 does lead him to is criticism criticism 
 of literature primarily, because he loves 
 letters, but criticism also of life at large, 
 of man and his manners, his motives, his 
 relation to the world and to the universe. 
 
He has not only the faculty of straight 
 thinking, but also that of plain speaking. 
 He is bold and direct in his discussion of 
 social problems, applying to their solu- 
 tion an unusual common-sense, and de- 
 veloping also an unusual understanding 
 of the causes of apparent anomalies. I 
 do not know anywhere a more acute 
 statement of the relative duty of faithful- 
 ness on the part of husband and wife 
 than is to be found in his criticism of 
 the " Francillon " of M. Dumas fits. And 
 that this statement should be found in a 
 theatrical criticism is characteristic of 
 M. Lemaitre's attitude ; as his vision 
 broadens and his interest in life deepens, 
 a play or a novel is to him chiefly valua- 
 ble as the theme and text of a social 
 inquiry. Literature alone no longer satis- 
 fies. 
 
ASIDES 
 
 I.-SHAKSPERE, MOLIERE, AND MODERN 
 ENGLISH COMEDY 
 
 assert that modern English 
 comedy owes more to Mo- 
 liere than it does to Shak- 
 spere is to declare a fact, and 
 not to propound a paradox. 
 The influence of Shakspere on modern 
 English comedy, on the comic plays acted 
 in England during the past two centuries, 
 is indisputable, of course, but it is less in 
 quantity and less in quality than the in- 
 fluence of Moliere. It would be easy to 
 go through the list of the successful Eng- 
 lish comedies acted since the death of 
 Shakspere, and to pick out the plays, like 
 Tobin's " Honeymoon " and Knowles's 
 " Hunchback," written consciously in the 
 imitation however remote of the Shak- 
 sperian manner. It would not be easy to 
 
name half of the English comedies whose 
 form and substance had been uncon- 
 sciously moulded by the example of Mo- 
 liere. The explanation of the seeming 
 paradox that the comic dramatists of 
 England have been more beholden to the 
 greatest dramatist of France than to the 
 greatest dramatist of England is not far 
 to seek. Indeed, it lies in a nutshell. 
 Modern English comedy is not made on 
 the model of Elizabethan comic drama, 
 and it is made immorality apart on the 
 model of the Restoration comic drama. 
 Now the comic dramatists of the Resto- 
 ration immorality apart were the chil- 
 dren of Moliere. Between the Eliza- 
 bethan dramatists and the dramatists of 
 the Restoration was a great gulf ; they 
 did not think alike ; they did not feel 
 alike ; and the larger manner of the earlier 
 writers was hopelessly impossible to the 
 younger. (Dryden is an exception ; and 
 Dryden is in essentials a belated Eliza- 
 bethan ; *at times he ventured to draw 
 from the nude, and some of the naked 
 wildness of mankind got into his work ; 
 but he stood alone and lonely among his 
 
i 7 8 
 
 contemporaries, who had no feeling for 
 the nakedness of things, and whose men 
 and women were all clothed and in their 
 right mind.) The vigorous outline and 
 the bold stroke of the Elizabethans were 
 not only impossible but even repugnant 
 to the Restoration writers, corrupted as 
 they had been by the Classicism of the 
 French theatre. They were no longer 
 large-minded enough to take in the great- 
 er beauty of mighty Elizabethans. Yet 
 they were men of understanding and 
 taste, and they could appreciate to the 
 full the delicacy and restraint and con- 
 centration of the new French comedy, 
 which Moliere had marked with his image 
 and superscription. Unfortunately for 
 themselves, when they borrowed the point 
 of view of the great Frenchman they for- 
 got to borrow his sobriety and his self- 
 respect. They were wholly lacking in the 
 skill which enabled him to treat with del- 
 icacy and without offence a risky subject 
 and there are few subjects more risky 
 than that of the " Amphitryon," for ex- 
 ample. Where Moliere glided gently and 
 with skilful step, his imitators trod clum- 
 
sily and crushingly ; and it is small won- 
 der that they soon found themselves in 
 the mire. They had a keen wit and a 
 lively humor and a fertile invention, aid- 
 ed when it flagged by reminiscences of 
 France ; but they had no moral taste, no 
 decency ; and their plays have decayed 
 rapidly for want of what would keep them 
 sweet. But as manners and morals im- 
 proved, these plays of the Restoration 
 writers began to be thrust from the stage 
 into the closets of librarians, until there 
 is scarcely a single comic drama of that 
 period holding the stage to-day. The 
 play - goer of the fourth quarter of the 
 nineteenth century has scant chance to 
 see acted any comedy of Etherege, Dry- 
 den, Shadwell, Congreve, Farquhar, Wych- 
 erley, or Vanbrugh. 
 
 It is true, also, that no play of the Eliza- 
 bethan period save Shakspere's and a 
 single piece by a single one of his con- 
 temporaries keeps the stage. It may 
 be that we should be as much shocked 
 by the brutal violence of the minor Eliza- 
 bethans as by the brutal indecency of the 
 minor Restoration writers. The fact re- 
 
mains that the play -goer of to-day can 
 never hope to see acted any play of Mar- 
 lowe, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Web- 
 ster, Heywood, Ben Jonson, Chapman, or 
 Shirley, although he may possibly by great 
 good -luck get a chance now and again 
 to see Massinger's " New Way to Pay Old 
 Debts." Yet the plays of some of these 
 authors have died hard. There is still 
 alive an American actress who likes to 
 act the " Duchess of Malfy," a tissue of 
 freezing horrors. There were three or 
 four other of the plays originally acted 
 under " Eliza and our James," which Mac- 
 ready tried vainly to warm over when 
 he was at the head of one of the two 
 great theatres of London. There were 
 barely a dozen of them which survived to 
 the end of the last century, and which 
 have therefore got themselves embalmed 
 in Mrs. Inchbald's " British Theatre " and 
 in the kindred collections. Among the 
 plays still acted at the beginning of this 
 century are Ben Jonson's " Alchymist " 
 and " Every Man in his Humor," Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher's " Rule a Wife and 
 have a Wife " and the " Chances," Shir- 
 
ley's " Edward the Black Prince," and 
 Massinger's " City Madam," in an altera- 
 tion of which, under the title of " Riches," 
 Kean used to act. To - day Massinger's 
 " New Way to Pay Old Debts," and per- 
 haps six out of Shakspere's twelve come- 
 dies, are all we have to represent the 
 comic drama of Shakspere and his con- 
 temporaries. It is true that now and 
 then a venturesome manager may risk a 
 little money in mounting one of the other 
 comedies of Shakspere, but the experi- 
 ment never meets with popular approval, 
 and the revived play never lives with its 
 own life ; it has been only galvanized 
 into existence ; and as soon as the unnat- 
 ural stimulus is withdrawn it falls back 
 into its coffin. 
 
 Thus it appears that the Elizabethan 
 dramatists with the imposing exception 
 of Shakspere and the dramatists of the 
 Restoration have alike disappeared from 
 the contemporary stage. But while the 
 earlier drama has passed and left no sign, 
 the later has imposed its form on all the 
 dramatic writing which has followed it. 
 Neither the serious nor the comic work 
 
1 82 
 
 of Shakspere and his contemporaries is a 
 potent influence on the drama of to-day. 
 More's the pity, one may say ; but the 
 fact is a fact, none the less. Some of the 
 tragic writers of the last century Otway, 
 Southerne, and Rowe, for instance reveal 
 plainly enough their obligation to their 
 great predecessors ; but popular as were 
 " Venice Preserved " and " Isabella " and 
 " Jane Shore " in their own day and for 
 many a long day afterwards, they are pop- 
 ular now no longer. The sole surviving 
 relics of Elizabethan imitation are Sheil's 
 " Evadne " and one or two of the dramas 
 of Sheridan Knowles ; and even in these 
 the imitation is little more than skin-deep. 
 In comedy the case is fyuite as plain as 
 in tragedy. After we have noted Sheri- 
 dan Knowles's " Love Chase " and Tobin's 
 " Honeymoon " which is imitated rather 
 from Garrick's " Katharine and Petru- 
 chio " than from Shakspere's own " Tam- 
 ing of the Shrew" mention has been 
 made of all the comedies now acted which 
 recall even faintly the method and man- 
 ner of the master. It is, indeed, a very 
 strange thing that the delightful comedy 
 
of Shakspere, the wonderful woodland 
 wit of "As You Like It," and the rich 
 and rollicking humor of " Twelfth Night " 
 a wit and a humor ever charged with 
 poetry, and as free and as fresh in this 
 nineteenth century as in the sixteenth 
 has had little or no imitation from any 
 of the long line of comic dramatists who 
 hold their own briskly and brilliantly in 
 the records of English literature. But 
 so it is. The comedy of Shakspere has 
 been almost without influence on the rest 
 of English comedy. To find its true suc- 
 cessor we must needs cross the Chan- 
 nel to France and consider carefully the 
 very curious likeness of certain of Mus- 
 set's comedies "On ne badine pas avec 
 1'amour" for example, or the "Chande- 
 lier," or the " Caprices de Marianne." It 
 is the comparison of a little thing with a 
 great, no doubt; yet is not Mr. James 
 right when he detects in the quality of 
 Musset's fancy something that reminds 
 him of Shakspere ? Surely if any one is 
 curious to know how things have gone 
 on in that Bohemia which is a desert 
 country by the sea, he can do worse than 
 
i8 4 
 
 devote himself to the dramas of Musset, 
 and he will find in them at least a trace 
 of the lyric sweetness which makes all of 
 us long to blaze our way through the for- 
 est of Arden. 
 
 The comedy of Ben Jonson, of which 
 " Every Man in His Humor" is the con- 
 summate type, has had almost as little 
 influence on its present successors as the 
 more ethereal and poetic comedy of Shak- 
 spere. The comedy of " humors," of the 
 powerful presentation of comic character 
 and the pushing of characteristics to the 
 very verge of caricature, made a better 
 fight for the right to exist than any other 
 dramatic form of the time. Even after 
 Etherege with his " Comical Revenge ; 
 or, Love in a Tub " had set the example 
 of a simpler and more effective devel- 
 opment of character in emulation of the 
 comedy of Moliere even after Etherege 
 had been followed by Dryden and by Con- 
 greve, Vanbrugh, Wycherley, and Far- 
 quhar, not only did the comedies of Jon- 
 % son continue to be acted, but later writers 
 like Shadwell still imitated his exhi- 
 bition of " humors." Although the school 
 
85 
 
 died hard, die it did at last but for a 
 time only. Obviously there was in it 
 some element consonant with the nation- 
 al characteristics. It was not seen again 
 in English literature until Smollett began 
 to write novels suggested by the French 
 " Gil Bias " (itself greatly indebted to the 
 Spanish). Smollett's humor was both 
 broad and elaborate, and it had a cer- 
 tain rough resemblance to Ben Jonson's. 
 Smollett exerted a baleful influence on 
 George Colman the Younger, whose very 
 comic and very careless plays are filled 
 with characters so sharply outlined as to 
 be almost silhouette caricatures. Smol- 
 lett's greater rival, Fielding, brought up 
 on Moliere, has been followed by Sheri- 
 dan. In our century, again, the comic 
 formulas of Ben Jonson and Smollett have 
 been expanded by Dickens, whose influ- 
 ence was felt at once on the contemporary 
 stage. Thackeray, on the other hand, 
 traces his descent through Fielding from 
 Moliere. The two schools are irrecon- 
 cilable, and between them is an irrepressi- 
 ble conflict. The comedy of the present 
 day is in some measure a compromise 
 
1 86 
 
 between the opposing schools. The form 
 of the better class of comedy is Molierean, 
 and all of the higher and important char- 
 acters are cast in the Molierean mould, 
 while the lower characters, the comic 
 servants and scolding women, are likely 
 to have some survival of the "humors" 
 of Ben Jonson and of the kindred carica- 
 tural methods of his followers, Smollett 
 and Dickens. 
 
 The reason why the influence of Moliere 
 is more potent on the form of English 
 comedy than the influence of Shakspere 
 is not far to seek. It is that Moliere rep- 
 resents a later stage of the development 
 of play-making. In outward structure the 
 plays of the great French dramatists who 
 wrote under Louis XIV. are more sym- 
 metrical and better built than the plays 
 of the great English dramatists who wrote 
 under Elizabeth and James I. Not only 
 is the external form simpler and clearer, 
 but the internal unity is in general more 
 marked. It is hard to say just what is 
 the subject of many Elizabethan dramas ; 
 there is never any difficulty in declaring 
 
i8 7 
 
 at once the subject of any drama, comic 
 or tragic, by Corneille, Moliere, or Racine. 
 The English play is often rough and 
 rugged even when it is not formless and 
 shapeless. The French play is always 
 smooth and sharply outlined and logical- 
 ly complete. The English poet gives us 
 only too often an inchoate and incon- 
 gruous mass of poetic matter, a rude lump 
 of ore,- from which we must disengage 
 the precious metal as best we may. The 
 French poet is not as rich and he is not 
 as free-handed ; he fuses his ore and re- 
 fines his gold and beats it thin and pol- 
 ishes it and fashions it curiously. In 
 looking at the English drama of the 
 Shaksperian epoch, the prevailing impres- 
 sion one gets is an impression of main 
 strength, of rude vigor, of native wildness 
 and profusion. In looking at the French 
 drama of the Molierean epoch, the pre- 
 vailing impression is an impression of 
 firm and delicate art. To write in the 
 Elizabethan manner is tolerable only in 
 those who have the lofty stature and 
 giant grasp of the Elizabethans. In mere 
 mass of native ability the authors around 
 
Shakspere were greater than the authors 
 around Moliere ; and yet nowadays writers 
 for the stage will do better if they rather 
 avail themselves of the more orderly 
 methods of the contemporaries of Mo- 
 liere. But even in France comedy was 
 far more vigorous than tragedy; while 
 there is a long stride from Corneille and 
 Racine to Victor Hugo, Moliere was fol- 
 lowed by Regnard, Marivaux, Lesage, and 
 Beaumarchais. In England the imitation 
 of French tragic models was short-lived, 
 while the use of the French formula of 
 comedy, expanded to suit English tastes, 
 continues to this day. 
 
 The cause of the abiding influence of 
 Moliere and of the fading influence of 
 Shakspere is to be sought, I think, in the 
 changes in the physical conditions of the 
 stage. Moliere began to write half a 
 century after Shakspere ceased to write ; 
 and in that half-century many and marked 
 changes had taken place in the arrange- 
 ment and constitution of the theatre. 
 Shakspere acted in a theatre bearing a 
 very close resemblance to the court of an 
 inn from which, indeed, it was an evolu- 
 
i8 9 
 
 tion ; his plays were performed on a pro- 
 jecting platform before a turbulent throng 
 standing and brawling in the pit, scarcely 
 sheltered from the sun and rain. Mo- 
 Here acted in a theatre, well roofed, water- 
 tight, made over from a tennis-court ; and 
 his plays were performed before and be- 
 tween rows of seated courtiers, often in 
 the presence of the courteous king. The 
 stage appliances of Shakspere's time were 
 so few and scanty as to be alm'ost wholly 
 absent. The stage-machinery which Mo- 
 liere could command and of which he 
 made use in the "Festin de Pierre" was 
 elaborate and differed but little from that 
 now available. In fact, the difference be- 
 tween the theatre as organized in the time 
 of Shakspere and the theatre as organized 
 in the time of Moliere is enormous and 
 radical ; whereas the difference between 
 the theatre as it was organized in the 
 time of Moliere and as it is organized to- 
 day is unessential and insignificant. The 
 physical conditions of the stage under 
 Shakspere are altogether other than those 
 of our time, while the physical conditions 
 of the stage under Moliere are substan- 
 
tially identical with those of our time. 
 Therefore is it, in great measure, that the 
 only English comedies which have sur- 
 vived fitly are those influenced by the art 
 of Moliere and made according to his 
 formula and in accord with the environ- 
 ment of to-day. 
 
 1883. 
 
 II. THE "OLD COMEDIES" 
 
 EVERY year or so some manager in New 
 York or Boston announces a series of re- 
 vivals of the " Old Comedies." Every now 
 and again the theatrical critics of these 
 cities are moved to contrast to its dis- 
 advantage some contemporary comic 
 drama with these same " Old Comedies." 
 There may be, therefore, interest in an 
 inquiry as to these " Old Comedies," their 
 titles, their authors, their real value, and 
 their traditional reputation. 
 
 First of all, what are the "Old Come- 
 dies," as the term is used by the theatrical 
 critic of the last quarter of the nineteenth 
 century ? The answer to this question is 
 
simple. They are a score or so of more or 
 less comic plays written by various English 
 dramatists at intervals during the hun- 
 dred and fifty years intervening between 
 1700 and 1850, and distinguished from 
 among the thousands of other comic 
 dramas written during that century and 
 a half by the fact that they have had vi- 
 tality enough to keep the stage. In all 
 departments of literature there is a strug- 
 gle for existence, and the acknowledged 
 classics are the results of the survival of 
 the fittest. It is by the same process of 
 natural selection that twenty or thirty 
 " Old Comedies " have been picked out 
 of the thousand or two which were acted 
 contemporaneously with them. It is with 
 these picked and proved troops that the 
 new English or American comedy is 
 measured ; and it is from a hasty com- 
 parison of the best of the past with the 
 average of the present that the decline 
 of the drama is declared. The unfairness 
 of the proceeding needs no comment. 
 When beneficent Time has thrashed out 
 the dramatic literature of our day it will 
 be possible to winnow comic plays written 
 
I 9 2 
 
 by men now living, which in due season 
 will take their place among the "Old 
 Comedies,'' and which will then hold 
 their own against all but the very best of 
 their companions. And as the best of the 
 comedies of our day are not unequal to 
 the best of the comedies of the past cen- 
 tury and a half, so the worst of the plays 
 of our day are not worse than the worst 
 of the plays of the past. The ordinary 
 play-goer speaks of the plays of the past 
 with respect because he is ignorant about 
 them and takes the unknown for the mag- 
 nificent. The ordinary reader lacks cour- 
 age to attack the immense mass of the 
 plays of the past. There was in the 
 library of the Reverend Mr. Arthur 
 Dimmesdale a ponderous tome which the 
 historian of the erring clergyman's strug- 
 gles deems to have been "a work of vast 
 ability in the somniferous school of liter- 
 ature." There is in the library of every 
 dramatic collector a series of collections 
 of little volumes containing some few 
 chosen samples of the plays of the past; 
 and the contents of these little volumes 
 are of a certainty closely akin to the con- 
 
tents of the ponderous tome, in that they 
 all have a powerful soporific virtue. And 
 these little volumes contain less than one 
 in twenty of the plays actually acted : they 
 contain only the more readable specimens. 
 In 1873 or thereabouts Mr. W. S. Gilbert 
 made an examination of the voluminous 
 Account of the English Stage from 1660 
 to 1830, written by the Reverend Mr. 
 Geneste and contained in ten solid vol- 
 umes. He found that between 1700 and 
 1830 nearly four thousand dramatic works 
 of one kind or another were produced in 
 England ; and he declared that of these 
 four thousand plays of all kinds produced 
 in the course of one hundred and thirty 
 years, "three thousand nine hundred and 
 fifty are absolutely unknown, except by 
 name, to any but professed students of 
 English dramatic literature. Of the re- 
 maining fifty, only thirty-five are ever 
 presented on the English boards at the 
 present day; of these thirty- five, only 
 seventeen are works of acknowledged 
 literary merit ; and of these seventeen, 
 only eleven can claim to rank as standard 
 works." That is to say, that during the 
 
hundred and thirty years when the dra- 
 ma in England, if not at its best, was at 
 least the centre of literary interest and 
 more important and more profitable than 
 any other department of literature, only 
 once in about ten years, on an average, 
 was a play produced which by some union 
 of popular attributes with literary quality 
 has managed to survive to the present 
 day. Only one play in ten years ! Since 
 1830 have we not seen produced on the 
 stage more often than once in ten years 
 plays worthy to survive the century and 
 likely to accomplish that difficult task? 
 
 We give ear to the picked plays of the 
 past, and we give no thought to their in- 
 numerable companions ''all silent and all 
 damned." We see the comedies care- 
 fully culled by time, and we do not see 
 their unlovely companions all faded and 
 gone. We look abroad on the theatre of 
 our own time, and the weeds have sprung 
 up with the flowers, and they are far more 
 numerous than the flowers, and they hide 
 the flowers from us ; and many are wont 
 to deny that there are any flowers at all. 
 But the managers of the theatres in the 
 
'95 
 
 year 1983 will probably find little diffi- 
 culty in picking out of the ten thousand 
 plays produced in England and America 
 between 1800 and 1900 at least ten equal 
 in quality to the average of those which 
 now survive from among the plays writ- 
 ten between 1700 and 1800. 
 
 It is not a hard task to make out a list 
 of the so-called " Old Comedies," and the 
 examination is not without interest. Mr. 
 Gilbert did not go further back than 1 700 ; 
 and, as it happens, there is only one play 
 older than 1700 which still holds the stage 
 except certain of Shakspere's. This one 
 play is the " New Way to Pay Old Debts " 
 of Massinger, acted at the Phoenix in 
 Drury Lane and published in 1633. For 
 seventy years after 1633 no English com- 
 edy was acted which keeps the boards 
 nowadays. After 1703 they come a little 
 more closely together ; and it is perhaps 
 best to draw up a chronological list of 
 them, giving the name of the author and 
 the title of the comedy. 
 
 1703 Colley Gibber's " She Would and She 
 Would Not." 
 
i 9 6 
 
 1709 Mrs. Centlivre's " Busybody." 
 
 1717 Mrs. Centlivre's " Wonder ! a Woman 
 Keeps a Secret." 
 
 J 759 [Garrick's ?] "High Life Below 
 Stairs." 
 
 1761 Colman's " Jealous Wife." 
 
 1762 Foote's "Liar." 
 
 1766 Garrick and Colman's " Clandestine 
 Marriage." 
 
 1 773 Goldsmith's ' ' She Stoops to Conquer. " 
 
 1775 Sheridan's "Rivals." 
 
 1777 Sheridan's "School for Scandal." 
 
 1779 Sheridan's "Critic; or, a Tragedy 
 Rehearsed. " 
 
 1780 Mrs. Cowley's "Belle's Stratagem." 
 
 1792 Holcroft's " Road to Ruin." 
 
 1794 O'Keefe's " Wild Oats." 
 
 1797 Colman the Younger's "Heir-at- 
 Law." 
 
 1801 Colman the Younger's "Poor Gentle- 
 man." 
 
 1805 Colman the Younger's "John Bull." 
 
 1805 Tobin's "Honeymoon." 
 
 From 1805 to 1830 no comedy was pro- 
 duced of sufficient vitality to have come 
 down to us. But between 1830 and 1860 
 several plays were produced which have 
 
been included among the " Old Com- 
 edies." These are : 
 
 1832 Knowles's "Hunchback." 
 
 !$37 Knowles's "Love Chase." 
 
 1840 Bulwer's " Money." 
 
 1841 Boucicault's " London Assurance." 
 
 1844 Boucicault's " Old Heads and Young 
 
 Hearts." 
 1852 Reade and Taylor's " Masks and 
 
 Faces." 
 1855 Taylor's " Still Waters Run Deep." 
 
 Here, then, we have twenty-five plays 
 written and acted between 1705 and 
 1855, a space of a century and a half. 
 These are the " Old Comedies," and they 
 are the survivors out of at least five thou- 
 sand dramatic pieces of one kind or an- 
 other. Of course this list of " Old Com- 
 edies" is not absolutely identical with 
 that which would be drawn up by any 
 other student of the stage. As a matter 
 of fact, probably no two persons would 
 agree on exactly the same twenty-five 
 " Old Comedies ;" nor would another 
 writer inevitably limit the number to 
 precisely the quarter of a hundred. Due 
 allowance must be made for the personal 
 
equation. As yet the canon of the " Old 
 Comedies " has not been closed and declar- 
 ed by any council. The present list, how- 
 ever, is my doxy, and I do not believe 
 that your doxy would differ greatly from 
 it. Any list would probably contain at 
 least twenty of these twenty-five. And 
 as no list can be promulgated by author- 
 ity, the one given above may serve as 
 well as another. 
 
 One of the first remarks one feels called 
 on to make, after considering this list of 
 " Old Comedies," is that there has been 
 no decline and falling off in the comic 
 drama as here represented, and that 
 excepting always the plays of Goldsmith 
 and Sheridan, two exceptional drama- 
 tists the comedies written in this cen- 
 tury are quite equal in literary value and 
 theatrical effect to the comedies written 
 in the last century. Without going again 
 into this quarrel of the ancients and mod- 
 erns, it may be said safely that the five 
 latest plays on this list are not inferior 
 to the five earliest. Lord Lytton's " Mon- 
 ey," Boucicault's " London Assurance " 
 and " Old Heads and Young Hearts," 
 
Reade and Taylor's " Masks and Faces," 
 and Taylor's " Still Waters Run Deep," 
 taken together are quite as interesting a 
 quintet as Colley Gibber's " She Would 
 and She Would Not," Mrs. Cowley's 
 " Busybody " and " Wonder " (Townley's 
 or Garrick's) " High Life Below Stairs," 
 and Colman's "Jealous Wife." Artificial 
 as are " London Assurance " and " Old 
 Heads and Young Hearts," they are not 
 more artificial than " She Would and She 
 Would Not " or the " Busybody," and they 
 are quite as lively and as bustling and as 
 full of the rattle and snap of epigram and 
 equivoke. In Gibber, indeed, the charac- 
 ters are wholly external, and the superfi- 
 cial movement does not completely mask 
 the essential emptiness ; while in Jesse 
 Rural Boucicault has drawn with many 
 caressing and tender touches a type of 
 simple and gentle goodness not unworthy 
 of Goldsmith, by whom, no doubt, it was 
 suggested. It cannot be denied that 
 there has been of late years a falling off 
 in the drama of poetic ideals and resolute 
 elevation, from which the popular taste 
 seems in some way to have turned ; but 
 
it may be denied most emphatically that 
 there has been any falling off in comedy 
 itself. 
 
 Another remark called forth by a con- 
 sideration of this list of " Old Comedies " 
 is that although English comedy is very 
 lively far livelier than French, for ex- 
 ample fuller of bustle and gayety and far 
 nearer to farce, it is not lacking in a sub- 
 stantial morality. Probably no one of 
 these twenty -five "Old Comedies" was 
 written with conscious moral purpose and 
 to declare the viciousness of vice and the 
 virtuousness of virtue ; and no one of 
 them obtrudes any other moral than the 
 ever-admirable moral of a healthy life and 
 of the duty of gayety and innocent mirth. 
 Assuredly none of these comedies is fit to 
 serve as a subject of Sunday meditation. 
 It was Goethe in his old age who said, 
 " It is strange that with all I have done, 
 there is not one of my poems that would 
 suit the Lutheran hymn-book." With 
 the exception of Boucicault's two plays, 
 which were the work of an old heart 
 and a young head, and which are hard 
 in tone and therefore not altogether 
 
wholesome, there is no one of these plays 
 which any girl might fear taking her 
 mother to see. There is no one of them 
 which leaves a bad taste in the mouth. 
 There is no one of them which will give 
 you a troubled conscience at night or a 
 troubled head in the morning. There is 
 no one of them which will not give a 
 hearty laugh and an hour of pleasant 
 amusement. 
 
 To ask more than this is to ask too 
 much. Veluti in speculo and Castigat 
 ridendo mores are good enough mottoes 
 for a drop-curtain, but they are not to be 
 taken seriously as part of the code of crit- 
 icism. We look in the mirror, and we see 
 our neighbor's failings and our neigh- 
 bor's faults. The comic writer laughing- 
 ly castigates manners, and we laughingly 
 see the lash fall on our neighbor's back. 
 " There are now quite as many Celimenes, 
 Alcestes, Arnolphes, and Tartuffes as there 
 were in Moliere's time," says the younger 
 Dumas, one of the masters of modern 
 comedy ; " we each of us recognize them, 
 but they do not recognize themselves." 
 In other words, comedy corrects no one ; 
 
and, of a truth, correction is not the true 
 mission of comedy. Conceding that Shak- 
 spere's " Taming of the Shrew " never 
 cured a virago or Moliere's "Miser" a 
 miser, so much the worse for the virago 
 and the miser ; it is enough for comedy 
 that it confirms the healthy in their 
 health. So Lessing, the foremost of Ger- 
 man moralists, tells us ; and he adds that 
 Moliere's " Miser " is instructive to the ex- 
 travagant man, and Regnard's " Game- 
 ster " to the man who never gambles : " the 
 follies they themselves have not, others 
 may have with whom they have to live." 
 Perhaps no better words can be found 
 with which to close this paper than those 
 of Lessing on this very subject : " Comedy 
 is to do us' good through laughter, but not 
 through derision ; not just to counteract 
 those faults at which it laughs, nor simply 
 and solely in those persons who possess 
 these laughable faults. Its true general 
 use consists in laughter itself; in the prac- 
 tice of our powers to discern the ridicu- 
 lous, to discern it easily and quickly under 
 all cloaks of passion and fashion ; in all 
 admixture of good and bad qualities, even 
 
in the wrinkles of solemn earnestness. . . . 
 A preservative is a valuable medicine, 
 and all morality has none more powerful 
 and effective than the ridiculous." 
 
 III. A PLEA FOR FARCE 
 
 IN one of the best edited and best writ- 
 ten, most careful and most conscientious 
 newspapers in New York I read, not long 
 ago, a criticism of a new comedy, which 
 was praised as " possessing a serious as 
 well as a comic interest, and rarely de- 
 scending to the level of absolute farce." 
 Apparently the critic here asserts by in- 
 sinuation that " absolute farce " can be 
 found only in the lowest levels of the 
 dramatic mine. A similar assumption is 
 frequent in current theatrical criticism, 
 and the theatrical critic is not seldom 
 moved to bemoan the decadence of the 
 drama as indicated by the decline of 
 comedy and the acceptance of farce in 
 its stead. The theatrical critic, it may 
 
be remarked incidentally, generally insists 
 on illuminating the present by the light 
 of other days, and he is prone to cry O 
 temporal O mores! which, after all, is 
 but the Latin for the latter-day and more 
 logical autre temps, autres moeurs ! 
 
 " Life," as one of Margaret Fuller's girl 
 pupils once said, " is to laugh or cry, ac- 
 cording to our constitution." To many, 
 if not to most, it is nobler to cry than to 
 laugh. The tear is more dignified than 
 the smile. Thus tragedy claims a supe- 
 riority over comedy and still more over 
 farce. " Lret a man of cheerful disposi- 
 tion," writes Mr. Lecky, in his History 
 of European Morals (3d ed., vol. i., p. 85), 
 seeking to prove the power of our in- 
 tuitions "let a man of cheerful disposi- 
 tion, and of cultivated but not very fas- 
 tidious taste, observe his own emotions 
 and the countenances of those around 
 him during the representation of a clever 
 tragedy and of a clever farce, and it is 
 probable that he will come to the conclu- 
 sion that his enjoyment in the latter case 
 has been both more unmingled and more 
 intense than in the former. He has felt 
 
no lassitude, he has not endured the 
 amount of pain that necessarily accom- 
 panies the pleasure of pathos ; he has 
 experienced a vivid, absorbing pleasure, 
 and he has traced similar emotions in the 
 violent demonstrations of his neighbors. 
 Yet he will readily admit that the pleas- 
 ure derived from the tragedy is of a 
 higher order than that derived from the 
 farce. Sometimes he will find himself 
 hesitating which of the two he will choose. 
 The love of mere enjoyment leads him to 
 the one. A sense of its nobler character 
 inclines him to the other." 
 
 It would take too long to consider here 
 at length why it is that tragedy is in- 
 tuitively acknowledged to be nobler than 
 farce ; but the fact admits of no dispute. 
 Tragedy is held to be higher than com- 
 edy, and comedy is held to be higher 
 than farce. Perhaps a consciousness that 
 tragedy and comedy are nobler forms of 
 the drama is the cause that the estima- 
 tion of farce is unduly low. Perhaps 
 even the greater and more boisterous 
 entertainment afforded by farce is the 
 cause of the contempt in which many 
 
206 
 
 affect to hold it, for there is a strange 
 tendency in mankind to despise those 
 who amuse it, especially if the laughter 
 excited is at all hearty and robust. A 
 shrewd and ambitious politician never 
 dares to be as funny as he can ; he knows 
 that it is better to make the people take 
 him seriously; he curbs his humor as 
 best he may ; and rather than be hailed 
 as a wit he is willing, by force of dul- 
 ness, to attain a reputation for profundity. 
 Now I, for one, at least, fail to see any 
 reason why farce should be stamped with 
 the stigma of illegitimacy. There are 
 degrees in the drama, no doubt, and the 
 highest places are reserved for tragedy 
 and for comedy; but melodrama and 
 burlesque and farce are all legitimate 
 dramatic forms, and they have each an 
 honorable pedigree. Modern melodra- 
 ma may recognize itself in some of the 
 plays of Euripides and Sophocles ; and M. 
 d'Ennery, for example, would not disavow 
 CEdipus Rex. Burlesque may claim as 
 its founder that great poet Aristophanes, 
 and as one of its friends the author of 
 " A Midsummer-Night's Dream." Farce 
 
could trace its descent from Menander 
 and from Plautus, if it needed to go fur- 
 ther back than the authors of the " Merry 
 Wives of Windsor" and the " Precieuses 
 Ridicules." 
 
 One of the phenomena of theatrical 
 history is the scarcity of comedy and the 
 prevalence of farce. There has been no 
 time recorded in the annals of the Eng- 
 lish stage when the critics were not com- 
 plaining of the dearth of real comedy, and 
 denouncing the plethora of farce. As we 
 look along the list of old comedies which 
 keep the stage to this day, we find a very 
 large proportion of farces. What are 
 "She Would and She Would Not," "The 
 Country Girl " and " The Busybody " but 
 farces? Goldsmith's enemies denounced 
 " She Stoops to Conquer " as farce, and 
 declared that some of its incidents were 
 too low even for that. Sheridan's friends 
 cannot deny that a good half at least of 
 " The Rivals " is frank farce and, in fact, 
 it is the better half. And as for the 
 " Heir-at-Law " with which Mr. Jeffer- 
 son and Mr. Florence have been delight- 
 ing us of late, and which many theatrical 
 
critics have been as prompt to praise as 
 they would be swift to condemn were any 
 living author to bring forth such a het- 
 erogeny of absurdities Colman's farrago 
 of oddity and commonplace is farce, if it 
 is anything at all. In fact, it is difficult 
 to deny the frequent exactness of the 
 epigram declaring that "a comedy is a 
 farce by an author who is dead." 
 
 The only play of contemporary English 
 life which Shakspere wrote, the " Merry 
 Wives of Windsor," is a farce, and not a 
 very good farce either. The one play 
 which he borrowed from a Latin drama- 
 tist, the " Comedy of Errors," is a farce, 
 and not a very good farce. The best of 
 Shakspere's farces is the " Taming of 
 the Shrew," which has a contagion of 
 humor and a swing of movement lacking 
 in the others, despite their rapidity and 
 their bustle. Of all the last -century 
 stage -versions of Shakspere the most 
 tolerable is Garrick's " Katherine and Pe- 
 truchio." The only other farces of that 
 century which rival it are the delightful 
 " High Life Below Stairs " (which Garrick 
 probably wrote) and the " Critic " (which 
 
was written by Sheridan, Garrick's suc- 
 cessor in the management of Drury Lane 
 Theatre, and which drove from the stage 
 the earlier farce on which it was founded, 
 the " Rehearsal," of the Duke of Buck- 
 ingham). 
 
 In the last half of the present century 
 not a few of the best of our plays are 
 farces, and though we may think lightly of 
 those who make us laugh, surely we ought 
 to be grateful to Mr. Bronson Howard 
 for "Saratoga," to Mr. Gilbert for "En- 
 gaged," to Mr. Grundy for the " Snow- 
 ball, " and to Mr. Pinero for the " Magis- 
 trate." Two of the greatest successes of 
 the British stage in the past score of 
 years have been " Pink Dominos," an 
 adaptation of a French farce, and the 
 " Private Secretary," an adaptation of a 
 German farce. Three of the greatest suc- 
 cesses of the American stage in the same 
 period have been Mr. Daly's " Big Bo- 
 nanza," "7-20-8," and "A Night Off," all 
 three of them adapted from German 
 farces. 
 
 In the French theatre farce has been 
 as prolific and as popular as in ours. A 
 14 
 
very large proportion of Moliere's best 
 /work took the form of farce. " Les Pre- 
 cieuses Ridicules," the " Medecin Mal- 
 gre Lui," the " Malade Imaginaire," the 
 " Etourdi," " Monsieur de Pourceaugnac " 
 what are all these but farces ? and the 
 ''Bourgeois Gentilhom me " is perilously 
 close to it. The comic plays of Regnard 
 are called comedies, and as such apparently 
 they are accepted by the French ; but most 
 of them and the best of them are farce- 
 exuberant, robustious, and inordinately 
 funny farce. Could any one ever be in 
 doubt whether the " Legataire Universel " 
 was comedy or farce ? And in the two 
 great comedies of Beaumarchais, the 
 " Barbier de Seville " and the " Mariagede 
 Figaro," there is more than a mere in- 
 fusion of farce ; certain acts are super- 
 saturated with it. In this century, Scribe 
 and M. Sardou have written farces as they 
 have written plays of every other sort; 
 and in its day " Oscar ; ou, Le Mari qui 
 trompe sa Femme" was as risky and as 
 broadly humorous as was " Divorgons " a 
 generation later. And lives there a man 
 with soul so dead and so impervious to 
 
humor as not to dissolve into laughter at 
 the sight of the " Panache" of Gondinet, 
 of the " Boule " and the " Tricoche et 
 Cacolet " of MM. Meilhac and Halevy, and 
 of the " Chapeau de paille d'ltalie," the 
 " Cagnotte " and the "Trente Millions de 
 Gladiator" of Labiche? 
 
 Surely a form of art which can show as-, 
 long a roll of masterpieces as farce is not 
 despicable. Surely it deserves to be 
 treated with the respect paid to the other 
 forms of the drama. It is not as difficult, 
 perhaps, as comedy, which depends on 
 the clash of character and the sparkle of 
 epigram ; but it is not easy. It is an art 
 with laws of its own. It is not burlesque, 
 for one thing, although it is akin to 
 burlesque ; and a marriage between the 
 two is within the forbidden degrees. 
 
 Like true burlesque, as distinguished 
 from mere extravaganza, farce demands 
 the utmost seriousness in its conception 
 and in its performance. Garrick declared 
 that comedy was a serious thing he 
 would not have denied that farce is even 
 more serious. Farce is negative towards 
 burlesque and positive towards comedy; 
 
it repels the one and attracts the other. 
 While farce and burlesque are abhorrent 
 and cannot be joined to advantage, farce 
 and comedy combine readily and melt 
 
 / one into the other in vague and imper- 
 ceptible fluctuations. The farcical-com- 
 edy is not only a legitimate form of art, 
 but it is almost inevitable, as we learn by 
 looking down the long vista of the drama 
 and seeing how very often it has blos- 
 somed luxuriantly. The bastard hybrid 
 called " farce-comedy," prevalent of late in 
 our theatres a queer medley of various 
 kinds of entertainment, musical, saltato- 
 rial, pantomimic, and even acrobatic- 
 may be often clever, but it is rarely either 
 farce or comedy. 
 
 In the history of literature, as in nat- 
 ural history, advancing science has shown 
 us that there are no hard and fast lines 
 between species and genera, but insen- 
 sible gradations from one to the other, 
 with scarcely a missing link anywhere. 
 Farce bears much the same relation to 
 
 ' comedy that melodrama does to tragedy. 
 In farce and in melodrama there is a 
 more summary psychology than in com- 
 
edy and in tragedy. Evemts are of more 
 importance than the persons to whom 
 they happen. The author seeks to in- 
 terest the spectator rather in things than 
 in men and women ; he relies more on 
 the force of situation than on the develop- 
 ment of character. 
 
 Mr. William Archer (the one critic of 
 the acted drama in England who is 
 worthy to be named with M. Francisque 
 Sarcey, the chief critic of the acted drama 
 in France) says that "melodrama may 
 be defined as illogical tragedy, in which 
 causes and effects are systematically dis- 
 proportionate, and the hero is the play- 
 thing of special providences." So farce 
 may be defined as an ultra-logical com- 
 edy, in which everything is pushed to ex- 
 tremes, and the hero is the plaything of 
 special providences. In farce, for in- 
 stance, we see a fibster involving himself 
 in unending snarls, and yet in the end 
 getting off scot-free. And the moral of 
 the play is not in the happy ending 
 brought about arbitrarily and as the dram- 
 atist please ; it resides rather in the hearty 
 laughter which has cleared the air, and 
 
which is a boon in itself and a gift to be 
 thankful for. Laughter is the great an- 
 tiseptic; and it is quick to kill the germs 
 of unwholesome sentimentality by which 
 comedy is often attacked. 
 
 But laughter is a gift for which man- 
 kind is rarely as grateful as it ought to 
 be. We are eager to find distraction 
 rom worry and surcease of sorrow if only 
 for a moment, and we are ready to pay 
 the humorist the wages he asks. Yet 
 oddly enough, we are often ashamed of 
 our own laughter, and we are prone to 
 visit this qualm of conscience upon the 
 author of our amusement. Farce is a 
 natural and useful form of the drama ; it 
 reckons many a masterpiece ; and to 
 make it bear the bar sinister is unkind 
 and unfair. 
 
 THE END 
 
 
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 HOWELLS. With Portrait. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. 
 ^W^ The above works are for sale by all booksellers, 
 or will be sent by the publishers, postage prepaid, to any 
 part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt 
 of the price. 
 
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS. 
 
 STUDIES OF THE STAGE. With Portrait. i6mo, 
 Cloth, Ornamental. 
 
 THE STORY OF A STORY, and Other Stories. Il- 
 lustrated. i6mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $i 25. 
 These stories have a light felicitous touch that is well- 
 nigh the perfection of polished story-telling. They are 
 stamped with an exquisite refinement of the art, and ev- 
 ery telling point is delicately emphasized. Boston Tran- 
 script. 
 
 AMERICANISMS AND BRITICISMS, with Other 
 Essays on Other Isms. With Portrait. i6mo, Cloth, 
 Ornamental, $i oo. 
 
 A racy, delightful little book. . . . It is a long time 
 since we have met with such a combination of keen yet 
 fair criticism, genuine wit and literary grace. The skill 
 with which certain limitations of English literary people, 
 past or present, are indicated is as impressive as it is 
 artistic. Congregationalist, Boston. 
 
 THE DECISION OF THE COURT. A Comedy. 
 
 Illustrated. 32010, Cloth, Ornamental, 50 cents. 
 
 It is thoroughly amusing, without a superfluous word. 
 Boston Herald. 
 
 IN THE VESTIBULE LIMITED. A Story. Illus- 
 trated. 321110, Cloth, Ornamental, 50 cents. 
 For compressed, swift, clear narrative this bit of genre 
 work in fiction is unsurpassed. As a character study 
 it shows keen psychological insight. There is no at- 
 tempt at being funny, yet the reader is continually just 
 on the point of breaking out into laughter. Interior, 
 Chicago. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. 
 ^W For sale by all booksellers, or ivill be sent by mail, 
 postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, Can- 
 ada, or Mexico, on receipt of tJie price. 
 
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