drama until 1890, but, except in the early days of his career, he cared nothing for the quality of his support. Acquiescing in the abominable star system, which had been slowly but surely strangling the stock companies, he was content to shine alone amid a body of abject incompetents, and, training nobody, passed away without a successor. It might have been different if he had had rivals to prick the spur of his intent, but E. L. Davenport, a great actor and artist, belonged to a rather earlier period, while Lawrence Barrett, though inspired by a noble ambition, did not possess the precious gift of genius.

The decay of high comedy was much more gradual, for the simple reason that the old traditions were preserved in a succession of such stock companies as those at the old Chambers Street Theatre, which flourished from 1848 to 1856, the first and second Wallack's, and Daly's in New York; the Boston Museum, and the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. They were genuine schools of acting, in which were reared a host of gifted players who perpetuated and disseminated the traditions of the old classic style, with all its easy and authoritative grace of manner, its bold and spirited yet neatly finished execution, its strong characterisation, and its mastery of vocal tone and emphasis. A veritable feast of humour was provided by William E. Burton, who was equally happy in the broad extravagances of Toodles, the unction of Falstaff, the liquorish revelry of Sir Toby Belch, the stolid fantasies of Bottom, or the grotesque savagery of Caliban. William Rufus Blake was scarcely less illustrious, while the names of William Warren, John Gilbert, John Brougham, the Wallacks, Mary Gannon, Mrs. John Drew, George Holland, Charles Fisher, Chippendale, W. J. Florence, Joseph Jefferson, and others of not much smaller note are still fresh in the memory of veteran playgoers. Mr. Jefferson, happily, still lives, the one shining exemplar of the finished comedian of the mid-century,

of the real master of his art. With his death the race will become extinct, because there is no longer any school in which the art of high comedy is practised. So far as the purely American stage is concerned, poetic tragedy and old comedy are dead, or at least comatose.

Will there be any revival? That is a difficult question to answer. It is just possible that a quickening impulse may come from England, where the lack of good modern plays is compelling managers to revert to the standard drama. The splendid example set by Henry Irving is bearing fruit, and the names of old masterpieces are beginning to reappear upon the programmes. A group of ambitious young actors is forming, and there is a bare chance that a new era of theatrical brilliancy may be at hand. In that case, it would not be long before the American stage enjoyed at least a reflection of its glory. The establishment of anything like a native theatre seems to be more remote than ever. There does not exist, at the present moment, a single American dramatist, with the possible exception of Mr. Bronson Howard, of acknowledged repute. Of such writers as Augustus Thomas, James A. Herne, Clyde Fitch, or William Young, it can only be said that there is in their work some promise of valuable future achievement. There is not, indeed, much hope just now for native talent. The speculators who, during the last few years, have acquired control of all our theatres, are disposed to frown upon it. It is seldom, indeed, that they will incur any monetary risk in encouraging it, except in the adaptation of lewd French farces -which have replaced the French emotional drama of twenty years back and popular novels of the moment. Having exterminated the schools of native actors, and crushed the aspirations of native authors by their blind and selfish policy, first in the star system and more recently in the syndicate scheme which has grown out of it, with all the attendant evils of long runs and an in

equitable division of profits, they now have no other resource than to import both plays and players. In the war plays, in Western melodrama, and in occasional pieces such as Barbara Frietchie or Peter Stuyvesant there is distinctive American nationality, but more and more the leading theatres are abandoned to the alien actor and the alien playwright. In all other branches of art — in painting, sculpture, and architecture, in music and literature American genius has challenged admiration by its originality and vigour, by its rapid and constant progress. Only in the American theatre is the foreigner supreme. To him we look for our choicest entertainments,— a year or two after they have been approved in London or Paris, -our wittiest or most moving plays, our most fascinating and capable performers. Only in the luxury, not always in the good taste, of our stage appointments do we equal or excel all rivals. Without tragedians, without comedians, without playwrights, the American theatre, as a separate entity, is a pitiful illustration of the ill effects of the destruction of competition by a greedy monopoly.

M

THE MUSICAL CENTURY

By H. T. FINCK

USIC is the only one of the fine arts of which it can be said that it reached its highest development in the nineteenth century. It is the modern art par excellence, and while everybody has been told that it is the youngest of the arts, few realise how much is implied in that assertion. More than two thousand years ago poetry, architecture, and sculpture had reached heights in Greece which have never been surpassed. The greatest poet of the nineteenth century would have been only too proud to have written the Iliad and the Odyssey exactly as they were recited twenty-seven hundred years ago; nor has the nineteenth century produced architects, sculptors, and painters superior to those of ancient Greece and mediæval Italy. But no nineteenth-century composer would have dreamed of writing music like that which the contemporaries of Phidias or of Titian listened to. The Italian operas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are never sung now, and our concert programmes very seldom contain a composition older than Palestrina, who died in 1594. Music, as relished by us, is therefore only three centuries old, or twenty-four centuries younger than the poetry we enjoy.

Nor is this all. Even the compositions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are fast becoming an acquired taste," enjoyable only by musical scholars and antiquarians. Music, in truth, is an art still in the process of evolution, and it is therefore not surprising to

find that of all its branches only one-the ecclesiasticreached its highest pinnacle before the nineteenth century, which, therefore, must be called the musical century. The oratorios, cantatas, and other choral works of Bach and Handel, written in the first half of the eighteenth century, have never been equalled, although excellent choral compositions, both ecclesiastic and secular, were written by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Rubinstein, and many others. But in the departments of chamber music, orchestral composition, pianoforte pieces, lyric song, and opera, the last century marks a decided-in most cases an astounding-advance over the eighteenth. To prove this assertion is the object of this review.

In the modern sense of the word, chamber music means duos, trios, quartets, etc., for pianoforte, and one, two, three, or more different orchestral instruments; or for a corresponding number of orchestral instruments without pianoforte, the favourites being duos (usually sonatas) for piano and violin or violoncello, and quartets for two violins, viola, and violoncello. In this branch of the art the superiority of the nineteenth century lies less in the matter of form and style than in the abundance of good things. It is true that the style of the Hadyn trio is far from satisfactory, because the violin and the violoncello do little more than double up the melody and the bass, respectively, of the piano part. But in the best of his quartets we find more individualisation of the several instrumental parts, and Mozart still further carried out this tendency of giving each player's part an equal interest and importance. The architecture, or cyclical structure, of chamber music has also undergone little change since their time. But whereas Haydn and Mozart are practically the only chamber-music composers of their age still heard in our concert-halls, the new century provided a number of masters, of whom at least three