actually existent, of the imperious now and the imperious self; and both impose qualifications, sometimes prohibitions, on instincts and actions stronger, more vital and necessary, than themselves: "Not thus"-"Not so much"— "Not his now at all." The thought of a neighbor is to make some self less miserable; the thought of a future is to reclaim a possible present. And little by little, as the present becomes richer and the ego more complex, there will enter into the present more and more strands of the future, and the ease and discomfort of the self will be shot and veined more and more subtly and indissolubly with the ease and discomfort of the neighbor. The dreams of the dreamers will slowly become reality; the chaste, sometimes sterile, saints will have bequeathed their features to the offspring of the teeming, the forgotten fleshly generations; and that mystery will happen to which Renan has secretly and fearfully alluded: the Divinity will have been born of the prayer of its worshippers.

In that Kingdom of Heaven there will be no saints, in the realized Utopia no Samurai, for saints imply sinners and Samurai imply uninitiate. But meanwhile and I return to my worship of the Present-there has to be a definite worship of the Future. There are Samurai (with recognition in eyes and voice rather than in garb) needed to prevent progress being too perpetually wasted, but not, methinks, to organize it; tender-hearted Samurai physicians to check the birth of the unfit rather than The Fortnightly Review.

to breed supermen on Mr. Shaw's principles; sceptical Samurai moralists less to say "believe" and "obey" than to ask "are you quite sure?" and "try for yourself." And such Samurai, in their serene but sometimes arduous and solitary efforts at (forgive what seems an anti-climax!) humbugging themselves and others as little as possible, will require a religion to keep them alive, a dreamed-of future to console them for the present. They will require a book like your adventures in the TwinPlanet beyond Sirius as an aid to devotion, a latter-day Pilgrim's Progress.

I am aware, as I write these lines, that there is an air of obscurantism in them. I confess to a superstition in favor of the secret and ironical ways of the Universe, and a perhaps meanspirited fear of human pre-arrangement of all things; deeming, as I do, that our intellect, though vast, cannot yet compass the multitudinous unexpected; and that what little intelligence and sympathy and will we possess is barely sufficient for everyday use and everyday's unaccountable surprises.

Thoroughly earnest and strenuous people may stigmatize this attitude as dilettanteish, and I have a notion that they do not really like me. But I feel sure, dear Mr. Wells, that you will protect me against your Samurai and their presumable Index Expurgatorius; nay, that you will pull a few wires, in order that the revised edition of the New-Republican Breviary should contain some little high-minded quotation from this over-garrulous letter of your devoted and grateful Reader.

Vernon Lee.

To speak seriously of musical plays, light and airy things as they are, is to break a butterfly on the wheel. It is only when the performers take themselves seriously, with a deadly solemnity befitting gloomy tragedians, that we are made to wonder if they do not occupy too disproportionate a place in public favor. We are far from entertaining the old puritanical view that on the whole it must be less sinful to weep than to laugh; indeed we cannot afford to be without the many Girls and Belles that have enlivened our existence for so many years. We hope they may long live and prosper: we gladly put up with their emptiness for the sake of their tunefulness; but for all that, and without speaking disrespectfully of the Equator, we cannot consider them seriously as if they were so many Church Congresses or British Associations.

As a general rule it saves a deal of trouble to take things at their surface value. A penny may not contain three farthings' worth of metal, but to save worry we accept it as an equivalent for four. We are not required to read Browning's poetry, but we must praise it if we wish to take our seats among the mighty. In the same way we have agreed to accept the refining and educational value of the stage as a general and inclusive dogma, for we should get involved in a most unpleasant mental puzzle if we tried to differentiate. The man who tries to work out the relative value for educational purposes of Hamlet, Major Barbara, and The Belle of New York, must have plenty of spare time on his hands.

If it be true that the stage holds the mirror up to human life, we ought sometimes to be surprised, and now and then a little mortified, at the re

flection. Let it be granted that by always looking at our features in the glass we fail in the end to see ourselves as others see us; but what, for a fresh impression, does a Frenchman see in the English mirror, and what do we see in the French? A close study of contemporary French plays reveals the fact that, with very few exceptions, adultery in one form or another still holds the stage victoriously. Over the Channel they never seem to get tired of contemplating that one particularly French vice, which is rather singular for a people who have originated the objection to toujours perdrix. But acting is likewise a peculiarly French art, and their drama, adulterous though it may be, is serious, in part State-aided, bound by traditional canons of art, and kept clearly distinct from pantomime. On the other hand the French, looking in the English mirror, receive the impression that the English are immoderately given to horse-play and to more or less silly songs and dances. For a light-hearted and volatile race it is remarkable with what an astonished contempt they view the antics of a British clown; only the other day a famous French dramatic critic regretted in print the extent to which the spirit, and often the actions, of this classic and insular individual pervade our light comedies and musical plays. As we hope presently to prove, we have a reasonable doubt concerning the truth of the reflection, but in any case it cannot be denied that plays like Charley's Aunt and light operas like The Belle of Mayfair make no serious call on the dramatic critic's faculties, and that, though they form the staple of our amusements, seriously trained actors are not required for them.

Slapping on the back has put life

into many a failing play, but it is not taught as an art, and is beyond criticism. The vigor of the slap is left to the actor's discretion, and as it raises a laugh in proportion to its sound, the tendency is of course to overdo it. Unless we are very much mistaken, a French actor would be taught the complete slapping-manual, with the minuteness of detail that characterized the teacher of the Conservatoire who spoke thus to a pretty young débutante:

No, no, little one, this won't do. When you come on, you are supposed to be thinking, to expect something, and you must show all this without speaking. Now try again: show in your eyes what you expect; open your lips softly so as to show your pearly teeth. . . . Oh, great heavens! Not all of them!

One of the reasons why the modern stage is less educational than could be wished is that it is more spectacular than it used to be; in ever so many ways it now appeals more to the eye than to the ear. The scenery distracts the attention from the moral lesson, and the stage furniture is made not so much for useful purposes as for what the comic actor may do with it. The splendor of modern scenery makes it a question of less importance who may or may not be the Juliet or the Romeo, but the change in the cast of The Belle of Mayfair has recently made almost as great a sensation as would a change of government. We can hardly wonder at this curious development when we remember the weak human nature that is supposed to be reflected, its want of bright recreation which drama or tragedy does not quite afford. Our dancing and singing favorites are of almost as much importance to us as our political stars who clap pennies on to the income-tax, or promise to take them off and forget to do so.

Making this handsome acknowledgment of our indebtedness to the lyric

stage, we cannot be accused of prejudice when we say that probably not one in a hundred of the stage-struck youths and maidens of our day have ever heard of the Educational Value of the Stage, a phrase which, like that other connecting Church and Stage, comforteth many. Not one in a thousand hopes to educate an ignorant public into the way it should go. They,mostly young people in whom there is no guile-happen to have formed a curiously correct estimate of the amount of study, of artistic temperament and arduous training, required to ascend to the giddy heights of a star. They feel that they are just as fairly endowed with a pleasing physique, a decent voice, and some sprightliness of manner as the best star that shines and draws hundreds a week from the treasury; and really, why they do not invariably succeed is not very easy to explain. It is not as if they all aimed at being leading tragedians; they do not have Aut Garrick aut nullus for their motto; it may even be doubted whether the artistic reproduction of a butler or a lodging-house servant is a thing they dream of or run away from home for. Art, in short (why should we try to disguise it?) has nothing to do with the business. A dance, a song, doublets and tights, and say £50 a week is all they aspire to. Success is uncertain, but it is so very easy and so splendid. If your physique is pleasing, you need not study very hard; you have only to show yourself, not quite as Phryne did before her judges, but as near as you dare go to that classic example, and the prize may be within your grasp. Phryne was probably as stupid as a goose, but her income was fabulously large, and Praxiteles carved her statue in marble, and her fellow citizens placed another statue of her wrought of pure gold in one of their temples. This first of professional beauties never went the length as

cribed to her; the slander was contradicted soon afterwards, but this is neither here nor there: we all believe it

now.

It is nearly certain that there were old-fashioned citizens who objected to this deification, just as some people are now short-sighted enough to wonder at the public glorification of the performers in our frivolous and utterly inconsequential plays; but it is one thing to call attention to this singular evolution and another to condemn it. We may regret the time when only the highest human passions were torn to tatters by ragged actors in barns: moralists may deplore that we ever departed from the virtuous theatrical custom prevailing before the Restoration, when no women were allowed to add their adventitious attractions to the play; but we know very well that the manager who takes himself seriously and magnifies his office by aiming at instruction would very soon have to put the shutters up. Fortunately no manager aims so fatally high. The sacred lamp of burlesque is extinguished for the present, but the flame of the musical and non-educational play burns brightly, to the benefit of all concerned.

Well considered, this does not deserve the name of effete degeneration. We must bear in mind that all past ages have been very much the same. The great mistake of all cantankerous judges of existing morals and customs is to consider the present without reference to the past. The saying that "the more we change the more we remain the same thing is too often forgotten. We may not all be fatalistic enough to believe that what is must be best, because it could not be otherwise, but we can all more readily believe that human nature is an unchangeable factor in the development of the stage. In the second century of our era Athenæus had read, as he tells us, eight

hundred indifferent comedies, while the tragedies could probably have been counted on the fingers. And lest we should think that the inane ditties of our musical plays are peculiar to our time, the same writer has preserved for us in his Deipnosophists a popular ditty of his day which, for pure inanity, could hardly be matched at the Gaiety. This is what the stalls applauded in the golden days of Greek art:

Where are my roses, and where are my violets?

Where is my beautiful parsley? Are these then my roses, are these then my violets?

And is this my beautiful parsley?

it? It is somewhat difficult to judge of the relative social position of different classes of society in antiquity, but the enthusiasm for anything approaching a public character was then pretty much what it is now. Phryne was not an actress in our sense; we have not the exact counterpart of the modest courtesan of antiquity. The word is now a term of reproach, but it was not so originally. The modestly behaved and frequently literary women who pleased the public by their beauty and fascination, if not by their art, were rewarded for the pleasure their society afforded to the rich and idle, and were frequently taken in marriage by the highest and wisest in high society. Ptolemy, the first king of Egypt, married a courtesan, and Themistocles was the son of another. They themselves did not usually perform, but they kept flute-playing women in their train, of whom the least said the better. Socrates, for whom we now entertain such a profound respect, spent much of his time in loose houses with the fluteplaying women of Aspasia. It is a sorrowful reflection, but if Socrates had lived in our days he would have been a regular frequenter of the stage-door. This is not the generally accepted view of his character, but great is truth and gossip will prevail even after twenty centuries. Of course a philosopher must study human nature, and it is equally true that we are apt to invest the immortal dead with god-like qualities which they did not possess. example, there is not, connected with the drama, a more impressive figure than that of Eschylus; to our mind it recalls all that was majestic and severe in the life and history of old Greece, and his marble busts still frown down, after long centuries, on the frivolities of to-day. Yet Eschylus, so the gossips said, wrote many of his best plays when fuddled with drink, which gave Sophocles (who was possi

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bly a trifle jealous) the chance of girding at him: "If you do write well," said he, "you do so only by accident." This little fact, not taught in preparatory schools, is no disparagement to the immortal precursor of Milton. One hears so much now of the British drama, and so many are the reasons alleged for its decay, so many the remedies proposed for its betterment, that it is surprising nobody has suggested to our dramatists to try the Eschylean method; they could not possibly write worse than they write now when sober.

All lovers of the drama, and of the Thespian art as distinguished from Terpsichorean performances, must regret the terminological inaccuracy which classes every conceivable performance as art and every such performer as an actor. It is too late in the day to complain of the corruption of the language in that sense. The man on the tight rope has so long been called an artist, the hair-cutter a professor, that we must make the best of it. But if Socrates and the man who cut his corns were both professors, if Praxiteles and the parsley-singer were brother artists, we confess to feeling the imperative need of a word that shall distinguish such men as Garrick and Kean, such women as Siddons and Rachel, from their less distinguished brethren and sisters in art.

It is true that attempts at Academies of Art, to whom we might look for an authoritative definition, have in this country been mostly failures. We hear little of the Literary Academy founded a few years ago which might have devised some term which would mark the author of Esmond from the author of The Bondman, the impersonator of Lady Macbeth from the lady who turns a summersault. Alexander Dumas once made a subtle use of the distinction conferred by the well-understood meaning of such a name when