formed her ideal in the London Alhambra. It has frequently been asserted that the presentation of comedy has spoiled the English actor for classic or ideal acting. I believe neither this nor that other talk about the unfitness of the AngloSaxon nature for acting. It would be nearer the truth to say that the presentation of farce and burlesque has spoiled the English actor for realistic comedy. One evening I went to the Haymarket Theatre. The first piece was termed a comedy, and was played off in the usual clownish fashion. Then John Gilbert's delightful fairy comedy, The Palace of Truth, was given; a charmingly poetical drama, at the same time brimming with rich humor. To my surprise, the same actors who in the sham comedy had so roused my disgust now entered into the spirit of the real comedy with warm, earnest feeling. There, was no more trace of misplaced accent; the blank verse was recited smoothly and with understanding; the players showed that they had a thorough appreciation for the poetry of their parts; and humor was no longer buffoonery. This went to prove that the real fault of the English stage was that it was weighted with a load of false traditions prescribing that whatever was intended to be realistic must be shown in a convex mirror and distorted into a burlesque image of nature; and that whenever actors are allowed a chance to raise themselves into regions of idealism, where they are no longer hampered by these traditions, they instantly become natural, their own imagination being more loyal to true dramatic principles than the traditions which trammel them. My first impressions caused me to regard English players as a set of soulless blockheads; but I now saw that it was their training which was at fault, and that they themselves had the feeling for sentiment and perception of the ideal in art common to the entire Anglo-Saxon race.

Returning home, I found the American theatre encumbered with similar faults. There was the same stagey tone, unlike anything heard in real life, the same misplacing of accent, and although cock

ney was not prevalent an unpleasant change had come over the English heard behind the foot-lights. It is well known that there are differences in pronunciation in various sections of the United States; that in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and in the West there are marked distinctions in accent. Now the combination system has brought together players from all parts of the country, and it is not uncommon to hear nearly all the different American accents from members of the same company, or troupe, which is perhaps a better name for these wandering organizations. Nowhere is purer English spoken than in Boston, and it is not pleasant when we hear words like half, laugh, and draft spoken flatly like cat and hat, calm pronounced cam, or the h dropped from words like where, which, and what. I noticed that Madame Janauschek, in spite of her perceptible foreign intonation, spoke better and more agreeable English than almost any member of her very poor supporting company. In France and Germany the stage language is the standard in pronunciation, but the foreigner who should visit our theatres in the expectation of learning the correct English pronunciation would have a bewildering variety of styles to choose from. The farcical manner of acting is also characteristic of the American stage. Actors are not so completely the slaves of tradition as in England, but, notwithstanding, very few choose to be true and natural, although the success of these few shows a public appreciation of truth to nature. There is very little idea of the value of delicacy of handling, of nice touches, and of fine portrayal of character. Our actors seem to be inspired with mortal fear lest the audience may not perceive how funny they are, so they exaggerate and give coarse, clumsy caricatures of character; their pictures are broad, crude daubs instead of well-defined, carefully outlined sketches. I recently saw an adaptation of a French play; one of the characters was a habitual newspaper reader, and the actor knew no better way to portray this peculiarity than by lugging around huge armfuls of

crumpled newspapers wherever he went. Again, I saw an adaptation of one of Benedix's German comedies, arranged for two popular comedians. Benedix was a playwright rather than a dramatist, and his works are generally good examples of skillful construction upholstered with very commonplace language. The adaptation was given a "local tone by garnishing it with American slang and vulgarity, and the home-baked, domestic flavor of the original, which was the chief characteristic and great charm of the piece, was spoiled by the introduction of a deal of extravagant and furniture - smashing business.. The two comedians were simply boisterously funny; their impersonations were typical of no human beings ever met with in America or elsewhere, whereas the originals were good pictures of their corresponding German types.

This lack of well-trained actors is a matter that calls for earnest consideration. Study abroad is considered essential for good artists in almost every other profession, and why should not actors do likewise? They should not go to England, but let them spend at least a year in France and another in Germany.

- Dosia is said to have had a great success in Paris, and I bought it, as I always buy a French novel, for a midsummer journey; but I consider myself egregiously cheated. Dosia, in my opinion, amounts to nothing at all. It certainly is not brilliant; neither is it lofty. It is not dramatic; neither is it a cloverscented idyl. It is a Russian story, but so little localized that the scene might have been laid anywhere else without injury to the tale. And this want of background and flavor of the soil is not made up, as in some great writers who believe in "people, not things," by vividly painted strong characters, men and women whom you remember. Dosia herself is a very harmless little tomboy; the princess is one of your eminently meritorious women, who calmly entraps Pierre, talks to him about "les machines de son exploitation agricole," lends him instructive books, and sends him home with "un gros bouquin sous le bras. C'est

l'usage de la maison." And Platon, her brother, insufferably priggish, like Miss Warner's heroes, is so plainly advanced on the very first page as the man and jailer for poor Dosia that you cannot even pretend not to see it. There are no delineations of character, then, and no background; unless indeed we take for that purpose a sort of Russian seesaw, or rather more like what in the Southern States is called a joggingboard, I suppose. In the last chapter all the characters are seated upon this plank in a row, en famille, and, like “un vol d'hirondelles perchées sur un fil télégra phique," they disappear, hop! hop! As to plot, there is only what strikes an American as an absurdity. Dosia while still a school-girl, having become furiously unhappy one day because her horse has been taken from her, beseeches her cousin to carry. her with him when he goes; her cousin being Pierre, who is but little older than she is. Pierre is not especially in love with Dosia, although she is "jolie comme un cœur," but consents because she is so unhappy. They start together in his tarantass, driven by a postboy, while it is still daylight, and drive only a short distance through the early evening; by that time they have irretrievably quarreled, the postboy is tartly ordered to return, Dosia's mother supposes that her madcap daughter had taken a fancy to go a little way with her cousin, and that is the end of the escapade. The end of the escapade? By no means. For if there is any plot in this sketchy book, it is that very escapade. It continually looms up as something terrible, a blot in the past of poor Dosia, dark as Erebus to the solemn Platon, her lover. His sister, the princess, who is somewhat "emancipated," and has liberal views, hazards the remark that it was but "un enfantillage." But Platon, who knows the whole story and precisely what happened to the very number of breaths, gloomily replies: "Cependant, pour celui qui l'épousera, cet enfantillage n'est pas sans conséquence." Even the princess gives in before this view of the case. Farther on, he thinks of her freak as a "sou

venir qu'elle voudrait plus tard pouvoir effacer de sa vie au prix de tous les sacrifices." He goes out into the garden where she first spoke to her cousin, and gives himself up to "l'affaissement complet du désespoir." And, finally, the end is attained only by Dosia's tearsand-ashes confession that last year she was guilty of a fault" which would cost her "the happiness of her life," namely, a two hours' ride with her cous. in in the tarantass, in the presence of the postboy. Après cela, monsieur, je ne suis plus digne de votre estime." And then, not without a good deal of the air of a man who forgives much, Platon decides to take her.

66

We

Some people say they enjoy "light stories;" but, light or heavy, I think stories should have some taste. have a good many novels like rice pudding; others are Roman punch; others, liqueurs. Dosia is like white of egg, with the sugar left out.

In whatever degree the poets of the present day may be found to differ from those of fifty years ago, there is certainly a very slight similarity between the respective verse scribblers of either epoch. The ancient poetaster was a very pronounced character in his way. Of course, he had one quality which is common to so many of his race, and that was a most profound and irreversible conviction regarding the general emptiness of human affairs. Personally, he leaned with considerable fondness toward the possession of such attributes as glossy dark curls, a pale complexion, and a Byronic collar He was usually a most incorrigible wanderer. It was his peculiarity that he never traveled; he was perpetually "wandering." Ruins, graveyards, and places somewhat unpopular with the multitude being his principal stopping - points, it was doubtless for this reason that scrip and staff were preferred to the usual modes of conveyance. But it was astonishing and indeed melancholy to observe how slight an amount of mental benefit ever seemed to result from his visits to foreign countries. He appeared to glide amid Venice in a gondola, or ruminate amid the Pisan Campo Santo, or explore NO. 253.

VOL. XLII.

42

the Roman Colosseum, for the sole purpose of stating these facts in his verse with a nonchalant contempt, as matters of no earthly consequence whatever. After his third stanza the reader frequently had a sense of this unhappy writer having been pretty nearly everywhere on the inhabited globe, and having carried away with him from each place the most saturnine if not dyspeptic impressions. His immedicable pain was even proof against a trip to the ruins of Babylon, not to say Ecbatana or Persepolis. He produced in you, although after a somewhat more scholarly fashion, the impression of Charles Reade's lunatic who so untiringly shrieks forth that "everything is nothing, and nothing is everything." He had an extraordinary passion for writing his proper nouns with capital letters. Sometimes he would tell his mysterious Lady that when Flattery's whisper 'mid the dazzling throng should pour its hollow tale in Beauty's ear, O then, perchance, et cetera, with the proper rhymes for "throng " and "ear." Sometimes it would be an announcement to the effect that he sped to meet the heartless Foe, whose shafts, however fierce they rang, could deal no anguish by their blow more bitter than Affection's pang! The pathetic distress of this ill-starred being was in every annual and "keepsake " throughout the land. He would be wildly rushing to battle in the "Maiden's Garland" this week, and roaming 'mid climes of the olive and fig in "Fancy's Nosegay" the next. Sometimes his Farewell or his Stanzas to

would be set to music, and young girls in dresses that barely touched the ground, and with a single camellia in their hair, would play the songs before spinnets and feel immensely thrilled as they did so. They would think how desperately attractive a creature such and such a poet must be, provided it were really his picture on the title-page of the song, representing a cloaked personage, very tall of stature, and with bowed head and folded arms, perfectly unoccupied in the neighborhood of a sunset and a partly shattered column.

The verse scribbler of to-day is quite

66

often represented by a wholly opposite sort of individual. He is one about whose dress nothing more peculiar manifests itself than an occasional marked seediness. He, too, is broken-hearted, - but from a widely different cause. No special circumstance of feminine scorn or infidelity concerns him. It is with him, as with his predecessor, a case of everything being nothing, and nothing every thing; no particular heart - blight is to be blamed for this agreeable impression. Nothing so mild as affection's pang" is talked about by our modern poetaster; it is rather "the wild, keen passion of parting," with this gentleman, or "the close-clinging kiss that consumes," or something equally high-spiced and alliterative. He is always extremely alliterative; and always a little more so, it is observable, when he has nothing at all to say. This latter event being one of considerable frequency, his verses sometimes remind us of those famous lines which begin,

"An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,

Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade," and so on, until they reach the letter Z. And with all due respect intended toward the ladies of this gentleman's acquaintance, it would nevertheless often appear as if most of them were, to phrase the matter with mildness, a trifle reckless in their deportment. But then it should be remembered that after all they are constantly depraved in a classic way. Very often, too, they are mediævally immoral, which of course makes a difference. Their delineator is always either classical or mediæval. He would not, under any circumstances, deal with any subject that has not clinging about it the glamorous mist of at least three hundred years. He is so resolutely Greek, so inflexibly archaic, that one sometimes wonders how he manages ever to do anything so outrageously modern as to jump into a street car or to read a morning paper. He is fond of saying "I wis" and "I wot," and "therewithal," and "gat" for "got," and "straight" for "straightway." He thinks it a most desirable thing to have said of you by your critics that you are hopeless, be

lieve in nothing, have been utterly disappointed with the general plan of things, hate the present, and were too evidently not born for it, but that your genius, notwithstanding its bitterness and morbidity, is an unquestionable fact. All these comments our modern poetaster has read regarding certain men who have written remarkable verses in the present day, and he aspires to have the same said of himself at some future time. Hence those pitiless, red-lipped sirens, whose kisses are a deadly delight; hence those diatribes against the iron implacability of fate; hence those tendencies toward renaissance, and those æsthetic refusals to notice any era later than the sixteenth century.

After laughing heartily over an incident in Mr. Mallock's New Republic, where a young man of gentle birth and refined culture was frightened away from asking the hand of a fascinating young country girl by hearing her say that she was "partial to boiled chicken," I was not a little surprised to find the following phrase in Hallam's Middle Ages: "A solicitude to avoid continual transitions, and to give free scope to the natural association of connected facts, has dictated this arrangement, to which I confess myself partial." (The italics are my own.) There can be no two opinions about the inelegance and incorrectness of the expression, yet it seems a little odd that even the superrefined society of the New Republic should consider it so utterly damning as to be a crucial test of a person's gentility, while so guardedly precise a writer as Hallam apparently saw nothing in it that was beneath the dignity of his style.

-In the Contributors' Club, July Atlantic, 1878, in the article on the Kearsarge Mountain, it is stated that Captain Winslow who commanded the Kearsarge gunboat (famous for its sea fight with the Alabama) was a native of New Hampshire.

Captain John A. Winslow who commanded the Kearsarge was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and educated as a citizen of Boston, Massachusetts.

MR. WESTCOTT, the author of The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia,1 has already been favorably known as an antiquary, his Official Guide-Book to Philadelphia, issued at the time of the Exhibition, being the best guide-book to the city and a thorough piece of work. In the present volume he has gone leisurely over the ground which was there sketched, and has furnished thirty-five monographs of famous buildings and sites connected with the history of Philadelphia and of Philadelphia families. As this city was the most conspicuous city in the country during the most historic period, there can be no question that it furnishes the richest material, especially of a social kind, for a volume of antiquities. Watson in his Annals had already gathered a great variety of facts and reminiscences; he was a veritable magpie, collecting glass and diamonds with equal avidity, and his time was a very uncritical one. He preserved a great deal that might otherwise have been lost, and undoubtedly did much to excite a local pride, but since his time investigations have been made and results published which afford a much fuller and more accurate fund of information than Watson possessed. Mr. Westcott has drawn freely from many sources, and we wish that he had furnished his book with more precise references to his authorities. While the work is readable to the mere pleasure-seeker, it is too full to be regarded simply as a book of gossip. It appeals to the student, and for this reason ought to have been fortified abundantly with references. Indeed, there is sometimes, with all the array of names and dates, a perplexing absence of definiteness with regard to the exact condition of the several buildings noted at the present date. Why, to take a flagrant instance, did the author omit to state the present condition of Independence Hall, and the efforts so successfully made to restore it to its proper condition? And in other instances we are obliged to look sharply and draw inferences, in order to deter

1 The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia. With some Notice of their Owners and Occupants. By THOMPSON WESTCOTT, author of The Official Guide-Book to Philadelphia, A History of Philadelphia, etc. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 822 Chestnut Street.

mine whether a building has or has not been wholly destroyed. We are not all Philadelphians, unfortunately, and we do not get at these matters by instinct. It would puzzle a reader, after following Mr. Westcott's minute investigation of the question in what house it was that the Declaration of Independence was written, to determine whether the house he fixes upon is now standing and recognizable or not.

Mr. Westcott is no worse than most antiquaries in this respect; he is better than most. Yet we never read such booksand this is one of the liveliest - without wishing that the same material might be presented freed from the excessive detail of unimportant names and dates, so that the story of each house or family should be given in picturesque, memorable form. We do not ask for a Hawthorne, he is not to be had for the asking, but surely some of our young writers might well take this rich local material and throw it into simple, animated narrative. It would be good practice for them,much better than spinning webs from their own inexperienced lives and imaginations.

- Mr. De Mille's 2 and Mr. Hill's 3 books start from very different theories of the best methods of instruction, and consequently, while treating the same subject, they repeat one another wonderfully little. Mr. De Mille, for his part, in discussing the Figures of Relativity, strings together the Synoceosis or Enantiosis, the Exergasia, the Paradiastole, etc., etc., defining them and giving examples which few would suspect of bearing such long names. "Every sweet has its sour, every evil its good," is a case of Enantiosis.

"Where ignorance is bliss,

T is folly to be wise," illustrates Antimetabole. The objection to this treatment of every sentence is obvious; the memory is burdened with a long list of really useless terms which are of absolutely no service to the student, and only disgust him with an important part of his educa

2 The Elements of Rhetoric. By JAMES DE MILLE, M. A. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1878. 3 The Principles of Rhetoric and their Application. By ADAMS S. HILL, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in Harvard College. With an Appendix, comprising General Rules for Punctuation. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1878.