to the one object of making as much money as possible. With us, every theatre is a private business enterprise; and that is the reason, pure and simple, why "nothing of merit pays."

How shall things be bettered? is the question. That they must be bettered is undeniable, unless we are ready to confess a limited capacity for intellectual progress. The drama is one of the higher arts, and if in any community a great department of art be neglected, the entire culture becomes one-sided and faulty, unsymmetrical, like an otherwise fair body with one feature missing. And like the different parts of the body, the fine arts are so closely connected, each having so important a bearing on the other, that no single one can suffer without the others suffering with it.

We have had several attempts to improve our theatre, but on examination these will be found to have been shortsighted and ill-considered, and therefore abortive. We must go to the foundation and rebuild. The drama in America has hardly been in a more sorry state than at present. There is a lack of hearty interest on the part of the public; every actor of even less than mediocre talent seems to regard himself as a brilliant "star," and endless "combinations" wander from ocean to ocean, threatening to degrade the profession deeper than in the days when to be an actor was to be a strolling vagabond.

But how shall affairs be bettered? Some tell us we must look to the state for aid. That would, however, be too much like whistling for the wind. Many years would have to pass by before the men in charge of our state administrations would consent to devote a dime to the welfare of the dramatic art. The proposition that a city should in its corporate capacity establish a dramatic institution of the highest standard is more worthy of consideration. Many of our cities and towns own public halls, which are used for concerts and dramatic entertainments as well as for municipal purposes, -a precedent, surely. Then the attraction of a good theatre helps a city from a commercial point of view.

Strangers like to transact their business where they are well entertained. But then, on the other hand, many of our city councilmen are chosen for quite other qualifications than high character or good taste, and since these individuals have a reputation for insisting on having a finger in every pie which they help to bake, their influence would be apt to be disastrous to art.

Every large city should have one theatre where the highest art standard is maintained, and this would exert a powerful and healthy influence on the others. Let one city take the lead in this matter, then a spirit of rivalry would soon cause the others to follow. The characteristics of such an institution may be briefly sketched:

First of all a standard theatre should be regarded strictly as an art-institute, and be placed on an equal footing with a museum of fine arts. It should be richly endowed, so as to be independent of popular caprice and the whim of the hour, and placed in such hands as to insure judicious management and the steady following of a permanent and systematic policy. The greater number of the seats should be sold by subscription, thus securing a permanent public, which in appreciativeness, discrimination, and interest for theatre and actors would be far more responsive than a floating audience. A personal attachment would thus be formed between players and public the artistic value of which could scarcely be overestimated. That with such inducements there would be little difficulty in establishing the subscription system among us is shown by the ease with which Mr. Arthur Cheney obtained stockholders enough to build the Globe Theatre, and that too without the slightest guarantee as to the character of the performances and the use to be made of the theatre. In consequence of the subscription system must come that of a constantly changing repertory, allowing perhaps the "running" pieces three or four performances a week, as at the Théâtre Français. The lover of the drama would then have an opportunity to visit the theatre as many times in the course

A theatre pension-fund, formed by contribution and the receipts from two or three special performances a year, together with the reputation of such a theatre, would attract a class of actors such as now devote themselves to "starring," and their permanent connection with the theatre would insure an excellent ensemble. And to encourage dramatic production, generous prizes might be offered each year for the best plays, and a liberal royalty should be paid for pieces accepted, thus inducing our best authors to write for the stage. Such a theatre, beginning modestly, would soon

and gifts and bequests would undoubtedly flow in, enabling it gradually to extend its field of work, and also, perhaps, to include the kindred art of music, taking in charge concerts and the opera. Then would

"Music and sweet poesie agree,

As needs they must, the sister and the brother." It is a great work, and many prejudices must be overthrown before it is accomplished, but when the right man comes and puts his shoulder to the wheel a man who, like Laube, combines high scholarly attainments with a great organizing power we shall have a national drama worthy of the name. Sylvester Baxter.

IF cleverness were the one thing needful in a book, The New Republic 1 of Mr. Mallock would leave little to be desired. Only a man of wit, and of much confidence in his wit, would have dared plan such a work; but though the author's interest in his own performance flags a little after his brilliant outset, his epigrams are not exhausted before the close, and we do not feel that he has miscalculated his powers in detail, whether or no in the present case he has wielded them effectively. The sub-title of the book indicates its plan. A young man of fortune and distinction assembles at his sea-side villa a party comprising all the chief leaders of English thought at the present day, some typical representative of each of the contending schools. The disguises are so thin that even the American reader is in no danger of mistaking the characters. Matthew Arnold comes under the name of Mr. Luke, Ruskin as Mr. Herbert, Professor Jowett as Dr. Jenkinson, Huxley and Tyndall as Mr. Starks and Professor Stockton, and a certain Mrs. Singleton, well known in London society, who has published rather naughty and enormously silly poems under the nom de plume of Violet Fane, figures very conspicuously as Mrs. Sinclair. Then there are Mr. Rose, a pre-Raphaelite poet and critic, presumably Mr. Pater; Mr. Saunders, a particularly tough and unscrupulous young materialist, identified by some with Professor Clifford; Lord Allen, a modest and boyish peer, of immense estates and benevolent purposes; a rather hazy and sentimental Scotchman who has seceded from the kirk to join the ranks of free thought, and suggests George Macdonald; a charming Miss Merton, who is a devout Romanist; Lady Ambrose, a thorough woman of the great world, with manners so delightful that they impart a certain fascination to a positively de

1 The New Republic; or, Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country-House By W

fective intelligence; Mr. Leslie, the intimate friend of the host, who gives us some of the keenest mots with which the book is adorned, but who is heart-sick over the death of the woman whom he had loved in secret, and so cannot openly mourn; and finally the host himself, Otto Laurence, who also fancies himself in a state of deep disenchantment with "life, love," literature, and "all things," yet who is swayed by romantic and reactionary impulses toward Mr. Herbert and Miss Merton. The fact that the author of the volume appears to divide his own languid and fluctuating opinions about equally between these two friends tends rather to confuse the personalities of Leslie and Laurence, but a little care will keep them distinct in the reader's mind, and the portrait of Laurence the host in the first chapter is one of the most caustic bits in the whole book:

"He had considerable natural powers, and was in many ways a remarkable man; but, unhappily, one of those who are remarkable because they do not become famous, not because they do. He was one of those of whom it is said till they are thirty that they will do something; till they are thirty-five that they might do something if they chose: and after that, that they might have done anything if they had chosen. Laurence was as yet only three years gone in the second stage, but such of his friends as were ambitious for him feared that three years more would find him landed in the third. He too was beginning to share this fear, and not being humble enough to despair of himself was, by this time, taking to despair of the century. He was thus hardly a happy man, but like many unhappy men he was capable of keen enjoyments."

This reminds one strongly of that very polished satirist, the author of Cecil, and H. MALLOCK. London: Spottiswoode & Co. New York: Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong. 1878

so do many other passages in the book, but there is a difference of tone which is not in Mr. Mallock's favor.

Laurence and Leslie have a little têteà-tête before the other guests assemble; and resolve that certain subjects shall be discussed among them, in a certain order, which they proceed, whimsically, to indicate on the back of the menu cards of the first elaborate dinner. These subjects are, first, the Aim of Life; then, Town and Country, with reference to the surroundings amid which the aim of life may be best attained; after these, Society, Art and Literature, Love and Money, Riches and Civilization, the Present, and the Future. It would be too gross a violation of probability to represent any such plan as strictly adhered to; the talk was desultory and fragmentary, as the talk of many men with many minds always must be, but it recurred repeatedly to the subjects named, while it dwelt, as was also perfectly natural, longer than upon any one of them on the conflict, so called, between faith and skepticism. The party remained together over a Sunday, in the course of which Dr. Jenkinson preached to them a broad - church sermon, transcribed in italics at a somewhat merciless length, and Mr. Herbert denounced them for a lot of lost spirits in an eloquent and imprecatory harangue, while Laurence read them some extracts from the private journals of his cynical old uncle. Lady Ambrose favored them with the opening chapter of a novel, just sent her in manuscript by a young lady friend, and the various poets present were prevailed upon with no great difficulty each to sing or recite some bit of original verse. We can imagine it. We "do so with our enchantments " even here in the New World.

The literary peculiarities of those personages whom we know best as authors are hit off with very different degrees of success. Mr. Ruskin's, whom the host is represented as regarding with a sort of shuddering and inconsistent respect, are most cleverly caught. Here is one instance out of scores: "When God said, Let there be light,

and light was, and God saw that it was good, was he thinking, as he saw this, of the exact velocity it traveled at, and of the exact laws it traveled by, which you wise men are at such infinite pains to discover; or was he thinking of something else which you are at no pains to discover at all, of how it clothed the wings of the morning with silver, and the feathers of the evening with gold? Is water, think you, a nobler thing to the modern chemist, who can tell you exactly what gases it is made of, and nothing more, or to Turner, who could not tell you at all what it was made of, but who did know and who could tell you what it is made, — what it is made by the sunshine and the cloud - shadow and the storm - wind; who knew how it paused in the taintless mountain trout-pool, a living crystal over stones of flickering amber, and how it broke itself turbid with its choirs of turbulent thunder where the rocks card it into foam, and where the tempest sifts it into spray. When Pindar called water the best of things, was he thinking of it as the union of oxygen and hydrogen?

6

"Ah, master of modern science,' he went on, you can tell us what pure water is made of, but thanks to your drains and your mills you cannot tell us where to find it,' etc.

The sketch of Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, is perpetually blurred and injured by the author's own too evident acrimony. Only the mannerisms of speech and occasional dogmatism of the apostle of culture are suggested by the conceited apothegms of Mr. Luke; his wit and pathos and intellectual refinement, never. His poetry is better satirized than his prose, however, and the following passage, which Mr. Luke is represented as mournfully and reluctantly reciting on the lawn by moonlight,

"So for ages hath man

Gazed on the ocean of time

From the shores of his birth, and turning
His eyes from the quays, the thronged
Marts, the noise and the din

To the far horizon, hath dreamed
Of the timeless country beyond.
Vainly, for how should he pass,
Being on foot, o'er the wet
Ways of the unplumbed waves?
How, without ship, should he pass
Over the shipless sea,

To the timeless country beyond?" The soft, voluptuous prattle of Mr. Rose becomes tiresome at times, but is frequently deliciously funny, as where in the midst of a melodious moan over the ugliness of London he says that among all the sights and sounds of the great city only one thing ever catches his eye that breaks his mood and warns him that he need not despair.

"And what is that?' asked Allen, with some curiosity.

"The shops,' Mr. Rose answered, ' of certain of our upholsterers and dealers in works of art. Their windows, as I look into them, act like a sudden charm on me, like a splash of cold water dashed on my forehead when I am fainting. For I seem there to have got a glimpse of the real heart of things; and as my eyes rest on the perfect pattern (many of which are quite delicious; indeed, when I go to ugly houses I often take a scrap of artistic cretonne with me in my pocket, as a kind of æsthetic smelling-salts), I say when I look in at their windows, and my eyes rest on the perfect pattern of some new fabric for a chair or a window-curtain, or some new design for a wall-paper, or on some old china vase, I become at once sharply conscious, Mr. Herbert, that, despite the ungenial mental climate of the present age, strange yearnings for and knowledge of true beauty are beginning to show themselves like flowers above the weedy soil.''

These dilettanti folk play for a while at constructing an ideal state. The "new republic is supposed to have been suggested by Plato's and to offer the latest modern improvement on that most grotesque and uncomfortable of

commonwealths. But when Mr. Storks has eliminated religion, and Professor Stockton poetry and romance, and Mr. Saunders has restricted the sphere of woman to the function of motherhood, and Lord Allen has removed the lower and Mr. Luke abolished the middle classes, and Mr. Rose has devastated all the homes which are not furnished according to Eastlake, and Dr. Jenkinson has blandly assured the disputants that they all think alike, and added under his breath that none of them think anything worth mentioning, then Mr. Herbert descends upon them in a thunder-gust of sanguinary scorn, and shows them that their scheme is both impudent and impracticable, since their visionary state would consist of upper classes only, and very vain and sinful upper classes, too. Whereupon they all gracefully accept his annihilating amendment, and indulge in a little light and well-bred laughter over the explosion of their too ambitious palace of cards. It is the rigid exclusion of earnestness which, despite the wit of The New Republic, spoils it as a satire. The successful satirist must either firmly believe something, or firmly disbelieve; it does not much matter which. Mr. Mallock would have us think that he does neither.

ter.

"I have no duties," said Laurence. "Did not Mr. Herbert very truly tell us so last night? . . . Herbert and I, you see, are two fools. We both of us want to pray, and we neither of us can." And then Miss Merton modestly offers to pray for him, and is politely assured that that will do quite as well, and even betMr. Mallock is invariably deferential to his Romanist, but if he is really, as later publications of his would seem to indicate," going to Rome," he is going as a panic-struck fugitive, by the tolerably well - worn route of negation and despair. He certainly avails him-. self of no orthodox point d'appui for his present attack, and is therefore fain presently to give it over, and to content himself with manoeuvring the flying ar tillery of his wit, in a manner sufficiently bewildering to his reader, but not very dangerous to his foe.