came the ground for a new claim to the merit of invention, and the popular writer is credited with the discovery of a distinct shape of piece, called the 'political satire,' in which public characters are introduced and ridiculed. Without contesting this claim, it may be mentioned that there was in the last century a writer of the name of Foote who attained some distinction in this vein, and that within a few years back it has been a favourite device with actors to 'dress at' leading political men. The Wicked World was parodied in The Happy Land (with the sanction of the author,' as stated in the bills), while at another theatre this parody was made to do duty as the basis of a rough French adaptation. By this ingenious device a single piece was spread over a large area, the ball' as it were kept up, and the interference of the Lord Chamberlain made the most of.1 The reference to 'Latour Tomline,' whoever he may be, brings us to another abuse, which is imperceptibly destroying the chances of true comedy in this country-viz. the wholesale importation of foreign 1 pieces. Burlesques, opera-bouffes, farces, 'comedy dramas,' are all brought over wholesale, while the dealers engaged in 'the trade' form a large and prosperous class. A few months ago there was hardly a London theatre that was not dependent for its entertainment on some foreign element. There is no reason, of course, why a French piece should not be introduced to an English audience, and even undergo some sort of shaping to fit it for that introduction, no more than that the romances of Dumas and Hugo should not be translated. But what is to be complained of is the system by which English pieces are manufactured out of French ones, and presented as the work of English writers. Nearly all the stock farces which raise the curtain' or 'play out' the audiences at every theatre in the kingdom are compounded out of lively little French trifles, furnished with English names and characters; the dialogue being ingeniously rewritten, but preserving the same points. On the first night, indeed, some critic states that the piece is founded on the well-known Palais 6 But A graver question, as to the morality of Mr. Gilbert's drama, was lately raised in a court of law. As specimens of the piece which was the subject of the action were printed in the newspapers, so that the public could have an opportunity of judging the matter impartially, an opinion may be hazarded here without danger. Ordinary double entendre speaks for itself, and may be relished or reproved, according to particular tastes. Mr. Gilbert's ingenuity and fancy for grotesque inversion has led him to deal-no doubt innocently-with situations which are certainly risqués' and are at least disagreeable in flavour. There is one particular motif, the one which led him into his recent troubles, and to which he is so partial as to repeat it in various productions. This turns on the first abrupt manifestation of love in an unsophisticated being; and he is fond of using fairy agencies to delay the consciousness of love until the subject is grown up. In the ordinary course of life this passion grows with the growth of young people, and the early expression of the gentle passion is controlled by discipline and modesty. Of course the naïve manifestations of an ingénue are amusing and even interesting. They form a valuable element in stage comedy. Yet it is a topic that must be delicately handled. Such does not belong to the drama, because it lowers instead of elevating. Mr. Gilbert has been far too partial to this theme. In his Princess three young princes find their way into a sort of fairy boarding school for young ladies, who have been jealously secluded from men; the whole point of the lively dialogue turns upon naïve questions of the fair inhabitants of the seminary. In Pygmalion and Galatea, a graceful piece, Galatea puts the same kind of naive questions. In the Creatures of Impulse the modest, retiring maid becomes forward, as we have shown, and is eager to be kissed by soldiers and others. The Wicked World, in spite of high testimonials to the contrary, is unquestionably a piece of a coarse and pagan flavour. Royal farce,' &c. ; but by-and-by it is enrolled in the published Lacy collection as the entire work of the English adapter. There is a piratical flavour about such proceedings which cannot be defended. The characteristic part of the whole is that now it has come to be boldly justified; on the adapter's work is founded a claim of authorship, or at least proprietorship; and we have the spectacle of the adapter called for before the curtain, modestly to receive the applause of friends for his exertions. It is amusing to follow the different stages of the shapes of appropriation-legitimate translation, then 'founding' a piece on a French original, then 'adapting,' all which were a few years ago honestly acknowledged to be so many forms of borrowing. Now this confession of indebtedness is dropped. It cannot be denied that the greater number of our noted and safe English dramatists' of the present day owe a large part of their reputation to pieces 'founded' on French and German ones. There are, for example, some elegant little pieces for two or three performers which are in high favour with refined players like the Kendals, Miss Herbert, and Mr. Farren, written by Mr. Theyre Smith, and which are pointed to as showing what can be done by an English writer. These certainly rival any French piece in neatness of form and execution of dialogue. No wonder, for they are mostly founded on, or suggested by, French pieces. A Happy Pair has a strange likeness to a little French piece, Livre premier, Chapitre onze, or some such title. Uncle's Will is a repetition of Dumas' Un Mariage sous Louis XV. Cut off with a Shilling is a free version of L'Eté de la St. Martin; and Which is Which is also taken from a French piece, whose name we cannot recall, but could recover with a little trouble. Yet these are no doubt accepted as 'original.' As well might an English tailor who lets out a French coat at the waist and contracts the fulness at the chest claim to be the maker, instead of the 'adapter,' of the coat. Or as well might Mr. Harrison Ainsworth take Dumas' Three Musketeers, and, by putting English names and scattering' Gramercys' and 'By my Halidames' plentifully, shape that story into an exciting tale of his Windsor Castle pattern. At this moment we have Mr. Farnie's Nemesis running its hundred nights at the Strand, and Mr. F. Latour Tomline's Realms of Joy and Wedding March at the Royalty and Strand theatres, all French property, of which the last-named deserves particular notice. It is received, we are told, with 'shouts of laughter,' yet never was the heavy hand of the adapter more cruelly laid upon the victim. The embarrassments into which the chapeau de paille led the expectant husband on his wedding-day are well known, and the spirit in which the original French piece is written and acted requires the whole to be touched with a light gaiety, half earnest and half serious-in fact, precisely as a person in real life would feel under such a succession of petty trials. He would be now vexed, now inclined to smile, now inclined to carry it off in laughter. There would also be a graduated advance in his feelings; the accumulation of annoyances would gradually make him serious. In its English shape it is brought down to the level of vulgar real life, and at the same time set out with the artificial conventionalities of the farce actor. One of the criticisms extolled the 'satire' of some introduced allusions to the police, and it will hardly be credited that the subject of this praise is a speech, 'What, you again?' addressed to a lady whom he was about to 'run in,' and whom he had never seen before. This brilliant point is duly emphasised in the daily advertisements: Policeman Wilkins will run 'em in every night,' or some such phrase. This sort of satire ' -Heaven save the mark!-is what we have come to. The conclusion, then, is thisthe crowd of adapters, translators, 'original' writers, and the rest, are really ignorant of what is the true dramatic element. Having obtained some success in the mechanical process of manipulating foreign pieces, and being in possession of the stage, they are one cause of the decay of dramatic taste in the audience and actors. The professional adapter is no dramatist save in the manager's and actor's sense of the term, who know that he is familiar with the old stage tricks, such as putting in 'fat.' But the true dramatist is a student, one that has made human nature and human character his study. It is to be noticed that praise of French acting is now resented, and critics affect to protest that English actors can be found quite as good. But it must be repeated that a French play performed by French actors of average ability is a thing belonging to another sphere altogether. It is nature, or rather the essence of nature, while the English style is artificial and false and concrete. The contrast is really extraordinary. Individual English actors have no doubt improved in their style, but there seems to be no chance of general improvement so long as the present class of pieces is put into their hands. They are not to blame. When plays are without intellectual 'characters,' and exhibit dialogue that is all repartee or else colourless, the actor is perforce obliged to supply extra elements of his own to fill out the part and make it 'go. This is the foundation of the present unnatural style of English acting, which even in the best hands is forced and overdone at every 'point' and ges ture, as though the actor wished to attract special attention to each exertion. Take the gentlemen of genteel comedy. Their heavy dragoon walk becomes a swagger; the laugh, an unnatural burst; a gentleman offering his arm to a lady to walk in the garden '-which by the way, invariable on the stage, is not usual in genteel life-appears to be taking part in a Court procession. In short, every motion, point, &c., are details of a wretched stage business,' and are each, duly emphasised, driven as a fresh nail into the audience. On the other hand, on the French stage all this is secondary; the actor conveys his character by his general demeanour, by an even level of performance. Each is penetrated by the intellectual nature of his part, which is his safe guide, independent of outside peculiarities. And this, in conclusion, brings us to answer what may be a natural question after so much fault-finding: What is the true mode of presenting character on the stage? The characters and story should be inseparable, the story arising out of the characters, and vice versa. This is what gives the breath of life to all the old comedies. Suppose a story founded on rank and poverty descending to ally itself with wealth and low birth, with the consequence of pride and patronage on the one side, and contempt and a certain sense of inferiority on the other. Now it can be imagined that, in the natural order, a state of things might arise by which this relation could be reversed by intellectual means, the low-born becoming superior, and the noble being brought down. Here are strong dramatic elements, which have been used in a French piece, Le Gendre de M. Poirier. A duke marries the daughter of a bourgeois tradesman, and indemnifies himself by scarcely concealed sneers and raillery at his low father-inlaw, at the same time spending his money and giving entertainments to fine friends at which the bourgeois is not allowed to appear. This is borne for a long time; but at last the latter turns, shows the duke that he is steeped in debt, that he is a mere dependant on him, and by his generosity and dignity really becomes the man of rank, while the other feels that he has morally sunk to the level of a plebeian. Each character is marked, strong, and full of entertainment, from contrast with the other; but the reader will see that the story is almost inseparable from the characters, and is, in fact, a development of them. Apply this test to the Robertsonian drama, with its tea-making and croquet, and cha racters whose 'note' is external, such as a drawl or a catch word, and the difference will be apparent. The same blemish is found in the acting, where we find doctors and officers, muffin and pie men, Scotch and Irish men, represented with a realistic minuteness, so that the copy is scarcely distinguishable from the original. Now there is no dramatic entertainment in such reproduction; no intellectual person could be entertained by seeing these ordinary characters. The originals and their ways do not entertain: why should the copies? If one could be acquainted with the modes of thought of such a class-if there were any special form of character in such humble walks of life, as Sue showed there was among the chiffonniers of Paris, the pie or potato can, the peculiar dress and mode of speech, might be accepted as harmonious accidents. So with the Irishman. There is a conventional bundle of precedents, some faithful, others unfaithful, which go to make up the stage Hibernian. As vulgarly introduced, there is no interest about him, simply because it is invariably a repetition. The public is amused, as it is at any buffoonery, no matter how stale. Mr. Boucicault, however, had instinct to pierce below the vulgar surface, and is able to present to us a humorous Irishman with charm, grace, and sentiment. The more realistic actors become, the more painstaking in mere imitating, the farther-paradoxical as it may seem-they travel away from true dramatic effect. Much more could be said on this interesting subject. But space fails us. F. IDLE DAYS IN THE HIGH ALPS. Is there any peace THE The Lotos-Eaters. HE saying is attributed to the Duke of Duke of Wellington that the saddest thing next to a great defeat was a great victory. So, next to work in the High Alps, the most perfect enjoyment is idleness in the same. Nay, as years pass on, attended by a cotemporaneous increase of width and wisdom, it is borne in upon our inner consciousness, with ever stronger conviction, that idleness is the better thing of the two. We ourselves have known, in almost pre-historic times indeed, all the pleasurable excitement of leaving a comfortable bed at midnight in order to stumble through forests that seem all roots, or up slopes of slippery shale, by the light of a single lantern, of leaping sometimes over, and sometimes into, crevasses fringed by ponderous icicles, of crossing perpendicular couloirs swept by clattering showers of stones, of cutting step after step in the iron-bound ice for hours, of crawling along all but impracticable arêtes, and finally of passing a shivering half-hour on the summit of peak or pass enveloped in cloud and mist, while we discussed food of not too attractive a character. With all these and more of the pleasures of mountaineering we are well acquainted; but now in mature years, and with ripened judgment, we give them all up for the delights of perfect idleness. But then this idleness must be really perfect. There must be no off days of hard work to mar that holy tranquillity, which is the reward of complete indolence. Not that we would be more severe than Thomson's wizard But if a little exercise you choose, VOL. IX.-NO. L. NEW SERIES. lovely, and the air fresh and bracing, you may stroll at your leisure over the Aletsch Glacier or the Mer de Glace, especially if accompanied by a party of laughter-loving girls, with whom you may linger over all the marvels and the beauties new to them, but which you discuss with the fluency of a past-master of the Alpine Club. Then as the day wears on, you come to some great glacier, table, or to some grassy bank strewn thick with wild flowers, whither, with judicious foresight, you have already sent forward, not such food as you knew when you worked, but a luxurious pie, a salade russe, an aspic of lobster-all, in short, that the chef does best, with whom you as an idle man have naturally formed a close friendship. Or again, you may act as cicerone in the ascent of some gentle slope like that of the Gorner Grat, provided you do not hurry the time. You should stop frequently to point out the various peaks and domes as they come into view; and while you dwell upon their respective merits, you will have the double advantage of recalling the work you have done, and of revelling in your conscious determination to do no more. And when you have reached this summit, you will probably have the privilege of listening to the very newest glacier theories from the crowd there assembled. As when one lady, contemplating the sweeping curves of the moraines, expresses her surprise that so many carriages have passed along the glacier lately, 'she had really heard it was not possible to drive over them;' while another condescendingly explains that these are not the tracks of wheels, but are ashes carefully spread over the ice to save the unwary traveller from slipping. Fancy the intensely indolent feeling of listening to this sort of thing and not speaking. S |