other two. Indeed, the play might almost be rewritten as a mediæval morality, and called Everywoman: or Dame 'Goodwife, Dame Lechery, and Dame Maidenhood.' Here, again, the thesis, not life, dictates the form of the play, which is not a play but a triangle; and once more you cannot believe a word of it. We leave the French, then, with their turn for logic more in evidence than ever. We have seen how it gave them a formula for modern drama, a vehicle for a true criticism of life. Now we see the formula piercing through the drama, and life subordinated to the criticism. The French stage is suffering from intellectual hypertrophy. Where is the remedy to be found? Assuredly not, as some enthusiasts deceive themselves into believing, in the rhymed fantasies of M. Rostand. Practical conduct, life as we know it, is the staple commodity of French drama. This does not exclude great poetry, for a great poet will always have a 'message' for his day. M. Rostand only offers it a copy of verses. An inspired schoolboy, like our own Landor, he can turn anything into metre-gasconnades, a duel, pâtisserie, a protuberant nose, the Old Guard, a battle-field, Napoleon's cocked hat, what you will. He has with difficulty been dissuaded from addressing the French Academy in verse. Il ne manquait que ça ! ' No, the French drama is not to be saved by prosody. We regard Rostandism as a passing mirage, if, indeed, it be not a mirage already dispelled. If a French Ibsen-but a French Ibsen is a contradiction in terms. And, in any case, it is no business of ours to prescribe.

Were we to offer the French that impertinence, nothing but their traditional politeness could save us from the obvious retort about the mote and the beam. The English stage of to-day is in little danger of intellectual hypertrophy; in mid-nineteenth century-the point at which we left it-it was in no danger at all. It was an absent-minded drama. It whistled as it went, for want of thought. And it went in another sense, it went into the Ewigkeit. Where is that drama now? The French drama of that date still lines our shelves-volume after volume of Augier and Dumas and even of Labiche. These French playwrights still permit themselves to be read and not seldom to be played. But who can read the Théâtre Complet' of Bulwer Lytton or the acting editions' of Boucicault or Tom Taylor or Charles Reade or John Oxenford? It is impossible even to think of the early Victorian theatre without a yawn, so ' unidea'd' was it, so ephemeral, so paltry and jejune. We

shrink from dwelling on this tedious theme. Our concern here is not with the imitators, the adapters, the mere purveyors, but with the elect few who have done something new-no matter whether good or bad, so long as it is new to drama-the Fortschrittsmänner as the Germans call them, the men who give a new lead in art. The first of these men, in the history of the modern English theatre, was T. W. Robertson. In the Robertsonian drama-which includes not merely the author of Caste' and 'Society' and ' School,' but minor and coarser Robertsons like H. J. Byron and James Albery-is to be found the first intelligent employment in England of the picture-stage. A plausible representation of actual life and manners and speech, with all rhetoric and rhetorical conventions abolished, with no aim but the aim of illusion, was for the first time presented to an English playhouse audience. The world of the sixties is now so remote from us-are not the humours of its remoteness the very point of Mr. Pinero's 'Trelawny of the 'Wells'?—that it is odd to think of Robertson as a realist; nevertheless, a realist he was in his day. We are not referring to the real door-handles' of 'Society' or the 'real 'snow' of 'Ours,' or the other novelties of accurate mise-enscène of which the history is written in the annals of the old Prince of Wales's Theatre under the régime of the Bancrofts. These mechanical details were bound in time to be invented for the new requirements of the picture-stage, though that consideration does not detract from the credit of the actual inventors. Still less are we referring to the structure of the Robertsonian drama, the motivation' of its plot. It is here, of course, that realism can best justify itself-in the action and the springs of action-so that the impression produced on the spectator's mind may be the exact opposite of Judge Brack's, the impression that these are the very things people do.' Robertson was no realist in this sense. His plots are always feeble, often merely silly, and the motives of his character have little in common with those of live people. Nevertheless Robertson was a true realist in aim, and more often than not he did succeed in transferring to the stage certain types of character, the current ideals and ambient atmosphere of so much of the outside world as he had the opportunity of studying. That was a limited opportunity, no doubt; Robertson's was a cockney and a middle-class world; but then so much of England in the sixties was cockney and middle-class. This was the new, the forward,' element in Robertson's plays

that ranks him among our Fortschrittsmänner; he did, however imperfectly, bring the stage into some sort of relation to life. As with all new developements, the method was a method of exaggeration. Hawtrey and Eccles and Polly and Sam Gerridge are caricatures, but the basis of observed fact underlies them all. Hawtrey is a caricature which might have been signed 'John Leech,' as Eccles or Sam Gerridge might have been signed Charles Keene.' Robertson, then, accomplished something. The Robertsonian drama counts. It gave a lead, and a fairly good one, for the picture-stage. But, English in its many good qualities, it was English also in its chief defect; it was unidea'd.' Happily no quotation in proof of this statement is called for-happily, because Robertsonian prose is absolutely unreadable. School' and 'Ours' have been revived in quite recent years, and Caste' has been played during the season just expired, so that the present generation of playgoers has had ample opportunity of acquaintance with some typical Robertsonian plays. They show that, while Robertson observed his time and responded to its pressure, he had no critical ideas about it. By ideas we do not, of course, mean the puerile commonplaces of the copybook.

In harping upon this question of ideas, their presence or their absence, we do not forget that we are presenting only one aspect-important as that aspect may be of a manysided matter. The future historian of the English stageunhappily the epithet 'future,' which has long since become stale in this connexion, is still obligatory-the future historian of the English stage will have to describe many phases of it which are here left out of account. Our less ambitious task is to contrast the modern French and English theatres, and that contrast turns upon the inequality in their stock of ideas: abundance, even to excess, on the one hand, on the other a lamentable penury. To such an inquiry the theatrical record for many years after Robertson's death is scarcely relevant. Those years witnessed the rise of Henry Irving, the return of London society, at his call, to a theatre from which it had long held aloof, the gradual perfection of the art of mise-en-scène, and many other important things. But none of these important things had aught to do with the theatre of ideas. That suited neither Sir Henry Irving's interesting qualities as a romantic actor nor his still more conspicuous ability as a manager, a generalissimo of stage forces. Sir Henry, to be sure, added Tennyson to our list of acted poets, but only, we fancy, with the result of bringing the world in general to the mind of

Tennyson's candid friend 'Old Fitz,' who wished A. T. had 'not tried the stage.' And, of course, there were those gorgeous Shakespearian revivals which it is a duty to remember, as well as those pseudo-poetic plays of W. G. Wills which it is a pleasure to forget. Of the Shakespearian revivals there is one thing to be said germane to our present purpose. They represented an effort to pour old wine into new bottles: to accommodate the platform-drama to the picture-stage. Charles Kean had made a similar attempt in the fifties, which failed, because the new conditions were imperfectly understood and because public opinion had not yet escaped from the bondage of the old rhetorical ideal. In the eighties this ideal had vanished, and though a few veterans grumbled, the Lyceum experiment did achieve a certain success. It was Walter Bagehot, if memory serves, who said that, though Eton boys might not learn much Latin or Greek, they left school with the firm impression that there were such languages. So the Lyceum public, all agape at the 'solid sets' and the rich costumes, carried away a conviction that there had indeed been a Shakespeare. As to the difference between the old and the new styles we cannot do better than give the unconscious evidence of FitzGerald and his cronies, who had seen both. They found the scenery of the Lyceum Much Ado''too 'good,' while Irving was without any humour, Miss Terry 'with simply animal spirits.' On the other hand, of Macready's Macbeth FitzGerald remembered the actor's 'Amen stu-u-u-u-ck in his throat.' In other words, overelaboration of scenery was the besetting sin of the picturestage, as that of the platform-stage had been over-emphasis of delivery or ranting.' The truth is, Sir Henry Irving stands apart. By sheer force of individuality he has impressed himself on the time; he has rendered signal service to the playhouse by making it once more a social institution, and to the actor's calling by making it, perhaps for the first time, an entirely respectable profession; but in the developement of modern drama, as we are considering it, he has taken no share.

This complete, if 'splendid,' isolation of the Lyceum in the later eighties reminds us of those enthusiastic Parisian anglers who, so the story runs, continued to fish for gudgeon under the Pont-Neuf while the Revolution was raging

* More Letters of Edward FitzGerald, p. 273.

† Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble, P. 255.
+ Ibid.

P. 45.

that ranks him among our Fortschrittsmänner; he did, however imperfectly, bring the stage into some sort of relation to life. As with all new developements, the method was a method of exaggeration. Hawtrey and Eccles and Polly and Sam Gerridge are caricatures, but the basis of observed fact underlies them all. Hawtrey is a caricature which might have been signed John Leech,' as Eccles or Sam Gerridge might have been signed Charles Keene.' Robertson, then, accomplished something. The Robertsonian drama counts. It gave a lead, and a fairly good one, for the picture-stage. But, English in its many good qualities, it was English also in its chief defect; it was unidea'd.' Happily no quotation in proof of this statement is called for-happily, because Robertsonian prose is absolutely unreadable. School' and 'Ours' have been revived in quite recent years, and 'Caste' has been played during the season just expired, so that the present generation of playgoers has had ample opportunity of acquaintance with some typical Robertsonian plays. They show that, while Robertson observed his time and responded to its pressure, he had no critical ideas about it. By ideas we do not, of course, mean the puerile commonplaces of the copybook.

In harping upon this question of ideas, their presence or their absence, we do not forget that we are presenting only one aspect-important as that aspect may be—of a manysided matter. The future historian of the English stageunhappily the epithet 'future,' which has long since become stale in this connexion, is still obligatory-the future historian of the English stage will have to describe many phases of it which are here left out of account. Our less ambitious task is to contrast the modern French and English theatres, and that contrast turns upon the inequality in their stock of ideas: abundance, even to excess, on the one hand, on the other a lamentable penury. To such an inquiry the theatrical record for many years after Robertson's death is scarcely relevant. Those years witnessed the rise of Henry Irving, the return of London society, at his call, to a theatre from which it had long held aloof, the gradual perfection of the art of mise-en-scène, and many other important things. But none of these important things had aught to do with the theatre of ideas. That suited neither Sir Henry Irving's interesting qualities as a romantic actor nor his still more conspicuous ability as a manager, a generalissimo of stage forces. Sir Henry, to be sure, added Tennyson to our list of acted poets, but only, we fancy, with the result of bringing the world in general to the mind of