Читать книгу: «The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays», страница 5

Fifty years ago it was quite common to describe Thackeray as a cynic, a charge from which Shirley Brooks defended him in the well-known verses contributed to “Punch” after the great novelist’s death. Strange that such a mistake should ever have been made about one whose kindness is as manifest in his books as in his life: “a big, fierce, weeping man,” as Carlyle grotesquely describes him: a writer in whom we find to-day even an excess of sentiment and a persistent geniality which sometimes irritates. But the source of the misapprehension is not far to seek. His satiric and disenchanting eye saw, with merciless clairvoyance, the disfigurements of human nature, and dwelt upon them perhaps unduly. He saw

 
How very weak the very wise,
How very small the very great are.
 

Moreover, as with many other humorists, with Thomas Hood and Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln (who is one of the foremost American humorists), a deep melancholy underlay his fun. Vanitas vanitatum is the last word of his philosophy. Evil seemed to him stronger than good and death better than life. But he was never bitter: his pen was driven by love, not hate. Swift was the true cynic, the true misanthrope; and Thackeray’s dislike of him has led him into some injustice in his chapter on Swift in “The English Humorists.” And therefore I have never been able to enjoy “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” which has the almost unanimous praises of the critics. The hard, artificial irony of the book – maintained, of course, with superb consistency – seems to me uncharacteristic of its author. It repels and wearies me, as does its model, “Jonathan Wild.” Swift’s irony I enjoy because it is the natural expression of his character. With Thackeray it is a mask.

Lastly I come to a point often urged against Thackeray. The favorite target of his satire was the snob. His lash was always being laid across flunkeyism, tuft hunting, the “mean admiration of mean things,” such as wealth, rank, fashion, title, birth. Now, it is said, his constant obsession with this subject, his acute consciousness of social distinctions, prove that he is himself one of the class that he is ridiculing. “Letters four do form his name,” to use a phrase of Dr. Holmes, who is accused of the same weakness, and, I think, with more reason. Well, Thackeray owned that he was a snob, and said that we are all of us snobs in a greater or less degree. Snobbery is the fat weed of a complex civilization, where grades are unfixed, where some families are going down and others rising in the world, with the consequent jealousies, heartburnings, and social struggles. In India, I take it, where a rigid caste system prevails, there are no snobs. A Brahmin may refuse to eat with a lower caste man, whose touch is contamination, but he does not despise him as the gentleman despises the cad, as the man who eats with a fork despises the man who eats with a knife, or as the educated Englishman despises the Cockney who drops his h’s, or the Boston Brahmin the Yankee provincial who says haöw, the woman who callates, and the gent who wears pants. In feudal ages the lord might treat the serf like a beast of the field. The modern swell does not oppress his social inferior: he only calls him a bounder. In primitive states of society differences in riches, station, power are accepted quite simply: they do not form ground for envy or contempt. I used to be puzzled by the conventional epithet applied by Homer to Eumaeus – “the godlike swineherd” – which is much as though one should say, nowadays, the godlike garbage collector. But when Pope writes he writes a lying platitude. In the eighteenth century, and in the twentieth, honor and fame do rise from condition. Now in the presence of the supreme tragic emotions, of death, of suffering, all men are equal. But this social inequality is the region of the comedy of manners, and that is the region in which Thackeray’s comedy moves – the comédie mondaine, if not the full comédie humaine. It is a world of convention, and he is at home in it, in the world and a citizen of the world. Of course it is not primitively human. Manners are a convention: but so are morals, laws, society, the state, the church. I suppose it is because Thackeray dwelt contentedly in these conventions and rather liked them although he laughed at them, that Shaw calls him an enslaved mind. At any rate, this is what Mr. Howells means when he writes: “When he made a mock of snobbishness, I did not know but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs: we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile to spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic life… This is the toxic property of all Thackeray’s writing… He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different.” In other words, Thackeray was not a socialist, as Mr. Shaw is, and Mr. Howells, and as we are all coming measurably to be. Meanwhile, however, equality is a dream.

 
Honor and fame from no condition rise
 

All his biographers are agreed that Thackeray was honestly fond of mundane advantages. He liked the conversation of clever, well-mannered gentlemen, and the society of agreeable, handsome, well-dressed women. He liked to go to fine houses: liked his club, and was gratified when asked to dine with Sir Robert Peel or the Duke of Devonshire. Speaking of the South and of slavery, he confessed that he found it impossible to think ill of people who gave you such good claret.

This explains his love of Horace. Venables reports that he would not study his Latin at school. But he certainly brought away with him from the Charterhouse, or from Trinity, a knowledge of Horace. You recall what delightful, punning use he makes of the lyric Roman at every turn. It is solvuntur rupes when Colonel Newcome’s Indian fortune melts away; and Rosa sera moratur when little Rose is slow to go off in the matrimonial market. Now Horace was eminently a man of the world, a man about town, a club man, a gentle satirist, with a cheerful, mundane philosophy of life, just touched with sadness and regret. He was the poet of an Augustan age, like that English Augustan age which was Thackeray’s favorite; social, gregarious, urban.

I never saw Thackeray. I was a boy of eight when he made his second visit to America, in the winter of 1855–56. But Arthur Hollister, who graduated at Yale in 1858, told me that he once saw Thackeray walking up Chapel Street, a colossal figure, six feet four inches in height, peering through his big glasses with that expression which is familiar to you in his portraits and in his charming caricatures of his own face. This seemed to bring him rather near. But I think the nearest that I ever felt to his bodily presence was once when Mr. Evarts showed me a copy of Horace, with inserted engravings, which Thackeray had given to Sam Ward and Ward had given to Evarts. It was a copy which Thackeray had used and which had his autograph on the flyleaf.

And this mention of his Latin scholarship induces me to close with an anecdote that I find in Melville’s “Life.” He says himself that it is almost too good to be true, but it illustrates so delightfully certain academic attitudes, that I must give it, authentic or not. The novelist was to lecture at Oxford and had to obtain the license of the Vice-Chancellor. He called on him for the necessary permission and this was the dialogue that ensued:

V. C. Pray, sir, what can I do for you?

T. My name is Thackeray.

V. C. So I see by this card.

T. I seek permission to lecture within your precincts.

V. C. Ah! You are a lecturer: what subjects do you undertake, religious or political?

T. Neither. I am a literary man.

V. C. Have you written anything?

T. Yes, I am the author of “Vanity Fair.”

V. C. I presume, a dissenter – has that anything to do with Jno. Bunyan’s book?

T. Not exactly: I have also written “Pendennis.”

V. C. Never heard of these works, but no doubt they are proper books.

T. I have also contributed to “Punch.”

V. C. “Punch.” I have heard of that. Is it not a ribald publication?

RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA⁴

THE English drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years. Mr. Gosse says that in 1700 the English had the most vivacious school of comedy in Europe. And, if their serious drama was greatly inferior, still the best tragedies of Dryden and Otway – and perhaps of Lee, Southerne, and Rowe – made not only a sounding success on the boards, but a fair bid for literary honors. Ten years later the drama was moribund, and in 1747 its epitaph was spoken by Garrick in the sonorous prologue written by Dr. Johnson for the opening of Drury Lane:

 
Then, crushed by rules and weakened as refined,
For years the power of Tragedy declined:
From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
Till declamation roared whilst passion slept.
Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread;
Philosophy remained though nature fled.
But, forced at length her ancient reign to quit,
She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of wit:
Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day,
And pantomime and song confirmed her sway —
 

That is, as has been complained a hundred times before and since, the opera and the spectacular show drove the legitimate drama from the stage.

The theatre, indeed, is not dead: it has continued to live and to flourish, and is furnishing entertainment to the public to-day, as it did two hundred – nay, two thousand – years ago. The theatre, as an institution, has a life of its own, whose history is recorded in innumerable volumes. Playhouses have multiplied in London, in the provinces, in all English-speaking lands. The callings of the actor and the playwright have given occupation to many, and rich rewards to not a few. Scholars, critics, and literary men are apt to look at the drama as if it were simply a department of literature. In reading a play, we should remember that we are taking the author at a disadvantage. It is not meant to be read, but to be acted. It is not mere literature: it is both more and less than literature. The art of the theatre is a composite art, requiring the help of the scene-painter, the costumer, the manager, the stage-carpenter, sometimes of the musician and dancer, nowadays of the electrician; and always and above all demanding the interpretation of the actor. It is not addressed to the understanding exclusively, but likewise to the eye and the ear. It is a show, as well as a piece of writing. The drama can subsist without any dialogue at all, as in the pantomime; or with the dialogue reduced to its lowest terms, as in the Italian commedie a soggetto, where the actors improvised the lines. “The skeleton of every play is a pantomime,” says Professor Brander Matthews, who reminds us that not only buffoonery and acrobatic performances may be carried on silently by stock characters like Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Punchinello; but a story of a more pretentious kind may be enacted entirely by gesture and dumb show, as in the French pantomime play “L’Enfant Prodigue.” A good dramatist includes a good playwright, one who can invent striking situations, telling climaxes, tableaux, ensemble scenes, spectacular and histrionic effects, coups de théâtre. These things may seem to the literary student the merely mechanical or technical parts of the art. Yet, without them, a play will be amateurish, and no really successful dramatist has ever been lacking in this kind of skill.

Still, although stage presentation, the mise en scène, is the touchstone of a play as play, it is of course quite possible to read a play with pleasure. It is even better to read it than to see it badly acted, just as one would rather have no pictures in a novel than such pictures as disturb one’s ideas of the characters. A musical adept can take pleasure in reading the score of an opera, though he would rather hear it performed. This is not to say that a play depends for its effect upon actual performance in anywhere near the same degree as a musical composition; for written speech is a far more definite language than musical notation. I use the latter only as an imperfect illustration.

This professional quality has been much insisted on by practical playwrights, who are properly contemptuous of closet drama. But just what is a closet drama? Let it be defined provisionally as a piece meant to be read and not acted. Yet a play’s chances for representation depend partly on the condition of the theatre and the demands of the public. Mr. Yeats, for example, thinks that a play of any poetic or spiritual depth has no chance to-day in a big London theatre, with an audience living on the surface of life; and he advises that such plays be tried in small suburban or country playhouses before audiences of scholars and simple, unspoiled folk. To the English public, with its desire for strong action and variety, Racine’s tragedies are nothing but closet dramas; and yet they are played constantly and with applause in the French theatre. In the eighteenth century, when the English stage still maintained a literary tradition, – though it had lost all literary vitality, – the rankest sort of closet dramas were frequently put on and listened to respectfully. No manager now would venture to mount such a thing as “Cato” or “Sophonisba” or “The Castle Spectre.” The modern public will scarcely endure sheer poetry, or long descriptive and reflective tirades even in Shakespeare. Such passages have to be cut in the acting versions. The Elizabethan craving for drama was such that everything was tried, though some things, when brought to the test of action, proved failures. Ben Jonson’s heavy tragedies, “Catiline” and “Sejanus,” failed on the stage; and Daniel’s “Cleopatra” never got so far as the stage, a rare example of an Elizabethan closet drama. Very likely, modern literary plays like “Philip Van Artevelde” and Tennyson’s “Queen Mary” might have succeeded in the seventeenth century. For the audiences of those days were omnivorous. They hungered for sensation, but they enjoyed as well fine poetry, noble declamation, philosophy, sweet singing, and the clown with his funny business, all in close neighborhood. They cared more for quantity of life than for delicate art. Their art, indeed, was in some ways quite artless, and the drama had not yet purged itself of lyric, epic, and didactic elements, nor attained a purely dramatic type. Since then, the French, whose ideal is not so much fulness of life as perfection of form, have taught English playwrights many lessons. Brunetière, speaking of the gradual evolution and differentiation of literary kinds (genres), says that Shakespeare’s theatre, as theatre, exhibits the art of drama in its infancy.

Perhaps, then, no hard and fast line can be drawn between an acting drama and a closet play. It is largely a matter of contemporary taste. “Cato,” we know, made a prodigious hit. Coleridge’s “Remorse,” a closet drama if there ever was one, and a very rubbishy affair at that, was put on by Sheridan, though with many misgivings, and lasted twenty nights, a good run for those days. No audience now would stand it an hour. And yet we have seen Sir Henry Irving forcing Tennyson’s dramatic poems into a temporary succès d’estime. “Samson Agonistes” is a closet play, without question; but is “The Cenci”? Shelley wanted it played, and had selected Miss O’Niel for the rôle of Beatrice. But it never got itself played till 1889, when it was given before the Shelley Society at South Kensington. The picked audience applauded it, just as an academic audience will applaud a rehearsal of the “Antigone” in the original Greek; but the dramatic critics sent down by the London newspapers to report the performance were unconvinced.

Let it be granted, then, that the question in the case of any given play is a question of more or less. Still, the difference between our modern literary drama, as a whole, and the Elizabethan drama, – which was also literary, – as a whole, I take to be this: that in our time literature has lost touch with the stage. In the seventeenth century, the poets wrote for the theatre. They knew that their plays would be played. In the nineteenth century, English poets who adopted the dramatic framework did not write for the theatre. They did not expect their pieces to be played, and they addressed themselves consciously to the reader. When one of them had the luck to get upon the boards, it was an exception, and the manager generally lost money by it. Thus, in the late thirties and early forties, in one of those efforts to “elevate the stage,” which recur with comic persistence in our dramatic annals, Macready rallied the literati to his aid and presented, among other things, Taylor’s “Philip Van Artevelde,” Talfourd’s “Ion,” Bulwer’s “Richelieu” and “The Lady of Lyons,” and Browning’s “Stafford” and “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” The only titles on this list that secured a permanent foothold on the repertoire of the playhouses were Bulwer’s two pieces, which were precisely the most flimsy of the whole lot, from the literary point of view. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon” has been tried again. As I saw it a number of years ago, with Lawrence Barrett cast for Lord Tresham and Marie Wainwright as Mildred, it seemed to me – in spite of its somewhat absurd motivirung– decidedly impressive as an acting play. On the other hand, “In a Balcony,” though very intelligently and sympathetically presented by Mrs. Lemoyne and Otis Skinner, was too subtle for a popular audience, and was manifestly unfitted for the stage.

The closet drama is a quite legitimate product of literary art. The playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form. Indeed, as the closet dramatist is not bound to consider the practical exigencies of the theatre, to consult the prejudices of the manager or the spectators, fill the pockets of the company, or provide a rôle for a star performer, he has, in many ways, a freer hand than the professional playwright. He need not sacrifice truth of character and probability of plot to the need of highly accentuated situations. He does not have to consider whether a speech is too long, too ornate in diction, too deeply thoughtful for recitation by an actor. If the action lags at certain points, let it lag. In short, as the aim of the closet dramatist is other than the playwright’s, so his methods may be independent.

In the rather bitter preface to the printed version of “Saints and Sinners” (1891), Mr. Henry Arthur Jones complains of “the English practice of writing plays to order for a star performer,” together with other “binding and perplexing.. conventions and limitations of playwriting,” as “quite sufficient to account for the literary degradation of the modern drama.” The English closet drama of the nineteenth century is an important body of literature, of higher intellectual value than all the stage plays produced in England during the same period. It is not necessary to enumerate its triumphs: I will merely remind the reader, in passing, that work like Byron’s “Manfred,” Landor’s “Gebir,” George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy,” Beddoes’s “Death’s Jest-Book,” Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna,” Tennyson’s “Becket,” Browning’s “Pippa Passes” and Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon,” is justified in its assumption of the dramatic form, though its appeal is only to the closet reader. I do not forget that one or two of these have been tried upon the stage, but they do not belong there, and, as theatre pieces, were flat failures.

It is hard to say exactly what qualities ensure stage success. As reading plays, Lillo’s “George Barnwell” is intolerably stilted, Knowles’s “Virginius” insipid, “The Lady of Lyons” tawdry; yet all of them took notoriously, and the last two – as any one can testify who has seen them performed – retain a certain effectiveness even now. Perhaps the secret lies in simplicity and directness of construction, unrelaxing tension, quick movement, and an instinctive seizure of the essentially dramatic crises in the action. In a word, the thing has “go”; lacking which, no cleverness of dialogue, no epigrammatic sharpness of wit or delicate play of humor can save a comedy; and no beauty of style, no depth or reach of thought, a tragedy. Hence it is pertinent to remark how many popular playwrights have been actors or in close practical relations with the theatre. In the seventeenth century this was a matter of course. Shakespeare was an actor, and Molière and Jonson and Marlowe and Greene and Otway, and countless others. Cibber was an actor and stage-manager. Sheridan and both Colmans were managers. Garrick and Foote wrote plays as well as acted them. Knowles, Boucicault, Robertson, Pinero and Stephen Phillips have all been actors.

Conceded that this professional point of view has been rightly emphasized, yet before the acted drama can rank as literature, or even hope to hold possession of the stage itself for more than a season, it must stand a further test. It must read well, too. If it is no more than an after-dinner amusement, without intellectual meaning or vital relation to life: if it has neither strength nor truth nor beauty as a criticism of life, or an imaginative representation of life, what interest can it have for serious people? Let us stay at home and read our Thackeray. Eugène Scribe was perhaps the cunningest master of stagecraft who ever wrote. Schlegel ranked him above Molière. He left the largest fortune ever accumulated by a French man of letters. His plays were more popular in all the theatres of Europe than anything since Kotzebue’s melodramas; and all European purveyors for the stage strove to imitate the adroitness and ingenuity with which his plots were put together. But if one to-day tries to read any one of his three hundred and fifty pieces – say, “Adrienne Lecouvreur” or “La Bataille des Dames” – one will find little in them beyond the mechanical perfection of the construction, and will feel how powerless mere technical cleverness is to keep alive false and superficial conceptions.

When it is asserted, then, that the British drama has been dead for nearly two hundred years, what is really meant is that its literary vitality went out of it some two centuries ago, and has not yet come back. It is hard to say what causes the breath of life suddenly to enter some particular literary form, inspire it fully for a few years, and then desert it for another; leaving it all flaccid and inanimate. Literary forms have their periods. No one now sits down to compose an epic poem or a minstrel ballad or a five-act blank verse tragedy without an uneasy sense of anachronism. The dramatic form had run along in England for generations, from the mediaeval miracles down to the rude chronicle histories, Senecan tragedies, and clownish interludes of the sixteenth century. Suddenly, in the last years of that century, the spark of genius touched and kindled it into the great drama of Elizabeth. About the middle of the eighteenth century life abandoned it again, and took possession of the novel. Fielding is the point of contact between the dying drama and new-born fiction. The whole process of the change may be followed in him. “Tom Jones” and “Amelia” still rank as masterpieces, but who reads “The Modern Husband,” or “Miss Lucy in Town,” or “Love in Several Masques,” or any other of Fielding’s plays? How many even know that he wrote any plays? Mr. Shaw attributes Fielding’s change of base to the government censorship. He writes:

In 1737 Henry Fielding, the greatest practising dramatist, with the single exception of Shakspere, produced by England between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, devoted his genius to the task of exposing and destroying parliamentary corruption… Walpole.. promptly gagged the stage by a censorship which is in full force at the present moment [1898]. Fielding, driven out of the trade of Molière and Aristophanes, took to that of Cervantes; and since then, the English novel has been one of the glories of literature, whilst the English drama has been its disgrace.

But Mr. Shaw’s explanation fails to explain, and his estimate of Fielding’s talent for drama is too high. With the exception of “Tom Thumb,” his plays are very dull, and it is doubtful whether, given the freest hand, he would ever have become a great dramatist. It was not Walpole but the Zeitgeist that was responsible for his failure in one literary form and his triumph in another. The clock had run down, and though Goldsmith and Sheridan wound it up once more towards the end of the century, it only went for an hour or so. It is usual to refer to their comedy group as the last flare of the literary drama in England before its final extinction.

In the appendix to Clement Scott’s “The Drama of Yesterday and To-day” there is given, by way of supplement to Genest, a list of the new plays put on at London theatres between 1830 and 1900. They number about twenty-four hundred; and – until we reach the last decade of the century – it would be hard to pick out a dozen of them which have become a part of English literature: which any one would think of reading for pleasure or profit, as one reads, say, the plays of Marlowe or Fletcher or Congreve. Of course, many of the pieces on the list are of non-literary kinds – burlesques, vaudevilles, operas, and the like. Then there is a large body of translations and adaptations from the foreign drama, more especially from the French of Scribe, Sardou, Dumas, père et fils, d’Hennery, Labiche, Goudinet, Meilhac and Halévy, Ohnet, and many others. Next to the French theatre, the most abundant feeder of our modern stage has been contemporary fiction. Nowadays, every successful novel is immediately dramatized. This has been the case, more or less, for three-quarters of a century. The Waverley Novels were dramatized in their time, and Dickens’s stories in theirs, and there are a plenty of dramatized novels on Scott’s catalogue. But the practice has greatly increased of recent years. Now, for some reason, a dramatized novel seldom means a good play; that is to say, permanently good, though it may act fairly well for a season. One does not care to read the stage version of “Vanity Fair,” known as “Becky Sharp,” any more than one would care to read “The School for Scandal” diluted into a novel. The dramatist conceives and moulds his theme otherwise than the novelist. “Playwriting,” says Walter Scott, “is the art of forming situations.” To be sure, Shakespeare took plots from Italian “novels,” so called; that is, short romantic tales like Boccaccio’s or Bandello’s. But he took only the bare outline, and altered freely. The modern novel is a far more elaborate thing. In it, not only incident and character, but a great part of the dialogue is already done to hand.

Glancing over Clement Scott’s list, old playgoers will find their memories somewhat pathetically stirred by forgotten fashions and schools. There are Planché’s extravaganzas, and later Dion Boucicault’s versatilities – “classical” comedies like “London Assurance,” sentimental Irish melodramas – “The Shaughraun,” “The Colleen Bawn” – and popular favorites, such as “Rip Van Winkle”; the equally versatile Tom Taylor, with his “Our American Cousin,” “The Ticket-of-Leave Man,” etc.; Burnand’s multifarious facetiae; the cockney vulgarities of that very prolific Mr. H. J. Byron; and, in the late sixties, Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer” comedies – “Ours,” “Caste,” “Society,” “School.” Three thousand representations of these fashionable comedies were given inside of twenty years. How gay, how brilliant, even, the dialogue seemed to us in those good old days! But take up the text of one of Tom Robertson’s plays now and try to read it. What has become of the sparkle? Does any one recall the famous “Ours” galop that we used to dance to consule Planco? Eheu fugaces!

The playwriters whom I have named, and others whom I might have named, their contemporaries, were the Clyde Fitches, Augustus Thomases, and George Ades of their generation. They provided a fair article of entertainment for the public of their time, but they added nothing to literature. The poverty of the English stage, during these late centuries, in work of real substance and value, is the more striking because there has been no dearth of genius in other departments. There have been great English poets, novelists, humorists, essayists, critics, historians. Moreover, the literary drama has flourished in other countries. France has never lacked accomplished artists in this kind: from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, from Hugo to Rostand, talent always, and genius not unfrequently, have been at the service of the French theatres. In Germany – with some breaks – the case has been the same. From Lessing and Goethe and Schiller down to our own contemporaries, to Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Halbe, Germany has seldom been without worthy dramatists. Both the Germans and the French have taken the theatre seriously. Their actors have been carefully trained, their audiences intelligently critical, their playhouses in part maintained by government subventions, as institutions importantly related to the national life.

It is not that English men of letters have been unwilling to contribute to the stage. On the contrary, they have shown an eager, although mostly ineffectual, ambition for dramatic honors. In the eighteenth century it was well-nigh the rule that a successful writer should try his hand at a play. Addison did so, and Steele, Pope, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Smollett, Thomson, Mason, Mallet, Chatterton, and many others who had no natural turn for it, and would not think of such a thing now. In the nineteenth century the tradition had lost much of its force: still, we find Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, all using the dramatic form, and some of them attempting the stage. Charles Lamb, one of the most ardent of playgoers and best of dramatic critics, was greatly chagrined by the failure of his farce, “Mr. H – .” Dickens was a good actor in private theatricals, and was intensely concerned with the theatre and the theatrical fortunes of his own dramatized novels. So was Charles Reade, who collaborated with Tom Taylor in a number of plays, and whose theatre piece “Masks and Faces,” was the original of his novelette, “Peg Woffington” —vice versa the usual case. More recently we have seen Stevenson and Henley collaborating in three plays, “Deacon Brodie” and “Beau Austin,” performed at London and Montreal in 1884–87, and “Admiral Guinea,” shown at the Haymarket in 1890; the first and third, low-life melodrama and broad comedy, of some vigor but no great importance; the second, an unusually good eighteenth century society play. Most certainly these experiments do not rank with Stevenson’s romances or Henley’s poems. Another curious illustration of the attraction of the dramatic form for the literary mind is Thomas Hardy’s “The Dynasts” (1904), a drama of the Napoleonic wars, projected in nineteen acts, with choruses of spirits and personified abstractions; a sort of reversion to the class of morality and chronicle play exemplified in Bale’s “King John.” Mr. Hardy is perhaps the foremost living English novelist, but “The Dynasts” is a dramatic monster, and, happily, a torso. The preface confesses that the abortion is a “panoramic show” and intended for “mental performance” only, and suggests an apology for closet drama by inquiring whether “mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life.”