"If you are going to take this business in hand, Alphonse, you must set about it in a sensible, reasonable manner. It is said set a thief to catch a thief,' but I never heard that it was advisable to send one maniac to inquire into the condition of another."

"It is enough to make one mad, raving mad, to hear that that sweet girl has gone and buried herself in a convent. Would to Heaven she and my odious wife could change places! That frigid, heartless creature would have suited a nunnery very well, but poor Agatha was made for a lifereplete with the warmest affections, the closest ties-for all that earth can yield of happiness!"

"It was your own inconstancy that thrust her from these pleasant paths," said the baron, dryly.

“I know it, I acknowledge it," replied Alphonse, in a voice choked with emotion; "and God knows I have been punished for my perjury. Oh! you cannot imagine what it is to be tied to a woman you hate, to see the same cold, unfeeling, mindless being ever before you. Madame de Florennes is the embodiment of apathy; no tear of sympathy ever glistens in her eye, no ray of the precious sunshine of the heart ever brings the faintest tinge to her uniformly pale cheek! She is a stone, a block of ice, only alive to one thing, and that is to taking care of her money; you can't think how she doles it out, this money for which I sacrificed myself! I have always been consoling myself with the thought that if she would do one kind act, and die, I might marry poor dear Agatha; but now that I know she has taken the veil, even that crumb of comfort is lost to me."

"It ought to be a crumb of comfort to you to be able to do anything to relieve her from the anxiety which is evidently preying on her mind. But I am sorry I applied to you, Alphonse; it would have been better had I deputed my family physician to go to Ghent and inquire about this poor lunatic, or pretended lunatic, and paid him for his trouble."

Alphonse bit his lips, and an angry reply was upon them, but he checked himself, and merely said:

"I am not quite a fool, Vanderhoven. I have promised to undertake this investigation, and I shall carry it on as quietly and as discreetly as your doctor himself could have done. You need not give yourself any further trouble on the subject, but go in peace to your bride.”

There was a slight inflection in his voice, a quick glance of the eye, which indicated that the thought of this bride was not quite a welcome one; truth to tell, Alphonse, so capricious, so changeable, so inconstant himself, was somewhat astonished, and somewhat displeased, that the husband of his sister-of the beautiful, the charming, the amiable Hortense -could ever dream of putting another in the place which she had occupied.

SHAKSPEARE AND THE STAGE.

A VEXED QUESTION.

BY SIR NATHANIEL.

DOES Shakspeare improve, on the whole, by being acted? clear gain, or a demonstrable loss to him, to be transferred from the closet to the stage? Cela dépend, as the French say that depends.

Among other conditions,-histrionic ability left out of sight,-it depends partly on the intellectual culture, taste, and temperament of any one particular spectator; and partly on the characteristic qualities of any one particular play.

Says Mr. Emerson, the Essayist, after a fling at Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, for wasting their oil, as critics, editors, commentators, and emendators: "The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius: him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express:-the genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world's dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the greenroom. The feeling is a common one, albeit this transcendental mode of expressing it is rather uncommon, and not too intelligible, except in the drift.

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When Boswell complained to Johnson of the Doctor's not having mentioned Garrick in his Preface to Shakspeare, and asked him if he did not admire him, "Yes," answered Johnson, “as a poor player, who frets and struts his hour upon the stage;'-as a shadow." But," persists Boswell, "has he not brought Shakspeare into notice?" At this, the Doctor takes fire, and blazes up. "Sir, to allow that, would be to lampoon the age. Many of Shakspeare's plays are the worse for being acted: Macbeth, for instance." And to Bozzy's "What, sir, is nothing gained by decoration and action ?" he seems to have vouchsafed no direct reply.

Johnson's low estimate, by the way, of stage appliances, as tending to illustrate the greatest of tragic poets, was a sore point with Boswell, whom it distressed as heterodox and unaccountable. One evening during the Doctor's sojourn in Edinburgh, when some friends of Bozzy's had "dropped in," before whom the bear-leader was anxious, no doubt, that Ursa Major should exhibit to advantage, the following pathetic entry in. the Journal indicates the status quo. "I have preserved nothing of what passed, except that Dr. Johnson displayed another of his heterodox opinions, a contempt of tragic action. He said 'the action of all players in tragedy is bad. It should be a man's study to repress those signs of

* Representative Men, by R. W. Emerson: "Shakspeare."

+ Boswell's Life of Johnson, sub anno 1769.

emotion and passion, as they are called.' He was of a directly contrary opinion to that of Fielding, in his Tom Jones,' who makes Partridge say of Garrick, 'Why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did.' For, when I asked him, ' Would not you, sir, start as Mr. Garrick does, if you saw a ghost?' he answered, 'I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost." "*

Goldsmith's similar disposition to vilipend Garrick and his class, elicits some semi-apologetic remarks from Mr. Forster, who says that uneasy relations, existing only between author and actor, have had a manifest tendency at all times unfairly to disparage the actor's intellectual claims, and to set any of the inferior arts above them. "Nevertheless, the odds might be made more even. The deepest and rarest beauties of poetry are those which the actor cannot grasp; but in the actor's startling triumphs, whether of movement, gesture, look, or tone, the author has no great share. Thus, were accounts fairly struck with the literary class, a Garrick might be honestly left between the gentle and grand superiority of a Shakspeare on the one hand, who, from the heights of his immeasurable genius, smiles down help and fellowship upon him; and the eternal petulance and pretensions of an Arthur Murphy, on the other, who, from the round of a ladder to which of himself he never could have mounted, looks down with ludicrous contempt on what Mr. Ralph would call the implements' of his elevation." Campbell was much of the same mind when he said, or sang, of Kemble, that

His was the spell o'er hearts
Which only Acting lends,-
The youngest of the sister Arts,
Where all their beauty blends :
For ill can Poetry express

Full many a tone of thought sublime,
And Painting, mute and motionless,
Steals but a glance of time.

But, by the mighty actor brought,

Illusion's perfect triumphs come,

Verse ceases to be airy thought,
And Sculpture to be dumb.‡

Colley Cibber writes with only natural esprit de corps, magnifying his office, and upholding his order, when he thus nicely adjusts the balance between Shakspeare and Mr. Betterton. "Betterton was an actor, as

Shakspeare was an author,-both without competitors, formed for the mutual assistance and illustration of each other's genius! How Shakspeare wrote, all men who have a taste for nature may read and know,but with what higher rapture would he still be read, could they conceive how Betterton played him! Then might they know, the one was born alone to speak what the other only knew to write! Pity it is, that the momentary beauties flowing from an harmonious elocution, cannot, like those of poetry, be their own record; that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that pre

* Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (August 15, 1773).
Forster's Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, book iii. ch. ii.
Poems of Thos. Campbell, Valedictory Stanzas to J. P. Kemble.

sents them; or at best can but faintly glimmer through the memory, or imperfect attestation, of a few surviving spectators. Could how Betterton spoke be as easily known as what he spoke, then might you see the muse of Shakspeare in her triumph, with all her beauties in their best array, rising into real life, and charming her beholders."* The inference is, that a generation that knows not Betterton, knows not Shakspeare; so that the poet without the player cannot be made perfect-cannot, indeed, be properly conceived at all.

There is an amusing entry, which bears on this vexed question, in Thomas Moore's journal, during one of his residences in Paris: "Went with Bessy to market, and afterwards called upon Wordsworth. A young Frenchman called in, and it was amusing to hear him and Wordsworth at cross purposes upon the subject of 'Athalie;' Wordsworth saying that he did not wish to see it acted, as it would never come up to the high imagination he had formed in reading it, of the prophetic inspiration of the priests, &c., &c.; and the Frenchman insisting that in acting alone could it be properly enjoyed,-that is to say, in the manner it was acted now; for he acknowledged that till the Corps de Ballet came to its aid, it was very dull, even on the stage,-une action morte." Wordsworth was not the man to think Hamlet and the Ghost sublimed by stage-management, or the storm scenes in Lear intensified in effect by a mouthing actor, and an unlimited allowance of property thunder and lightning; while the Frenchman, as a Frenchman, was not the man to understand a possible preference of the book, at home, to its attractions at the spectacle. Not that all Frenchmen are inevitably of this way of thinking. At any rate some of them recognise the closet claims of our, and the German, dramatic literature, whatever they may think of the stage supremacy of their own. M. Philarète Chasles, for instance, says, that the two great northern nations of modern times, Germany and England, have created dramas (it is of chefs-d'œuvres he speaks) far more adapted to the philosopher than to the spectator, and composed rather to be meditated upon than to be represented. "The noble poetry of Goethe's 'Faust' evanishes on the boards. Never was the Midsummer Night's Dream' intelligible on the stage; while the 'Festin de Pierre,' or rather the 'Convive-statue' of Tirso de Molina (Juan Tellez), has been triumphant in every theatre throughout Europe. The 'Orestes' of the ancients is an infinitely better acting-piece than the Hamlet' of Shakspeare. The North looks for thought, not for action; in the thought, it descries the cause of the thought, and studies the nuances of this cause. Not that it despises passion, but it is ever ready to chill it by cold analysis. When suffering and bleeding, it ponders itself, and scrutinises its own suffering. This it is which makes the dramas of Shakspeare (dramas which are not dramas, and wherein the action is a mere pretext) so eternally fruitful for meditative intellects and contemplative souls.

"I do not allege that Shakspeare is deficient either in action or passion; what I affirm is, that they are to him the means only, not the end; this great man has frequently neglected theatrical effect, and sacrificed it to meditation, to observation, to graduated tints, to analysis, to the infinite

* Cibber's Apology, ch. iv.

† Memoirs, Journals, &c., of Thomas Moore.

study of character and of human events. in his completeness by a public concourse. the theatre; but he is above it.”*

Never will he be understood
He is not, indeed, outside of

M. Chasles may leave much to be desired, and may advance something that is objectionable; but at least his stand-point is not amid the thick clouds and darkness, fogs and vapour mists and muddlement, which seem the natural envelope of so many who discourse of the divine Williams.

The worst objection that one of Mr. Landor's imaginary interlocutors can find against the theatre, is, that he loses in it his original idea of such men as Cæsar and Coriolanus, and, where the loss affects him more deeply, of Juliet and Desdemona. "Alexander was a fool to wish for a second world to conquer: but no man is a fool who wishes for the enjoyment of two, the real and ideal: nor is it anything short of a misfortune, I had almost said of a calamity, to confound them. This is done by the stage: it is likewise done by engravings in books, which have a great effect in weakening the imagination, and are serviceable only to those who have none, and who read negligently and idly." Hence the speaker would be sorry if the most ingenious print in the world were to cover the first impression left on his mind of such characters as Don Quixote and Sancho: yet probably a very indifferent one, he apprehends, might do it; for we cannot master our fancies, nor give them at will a greater or less tenacity, a greater or less promptitude in coming and recurring.

Charles Lamb writes identically to the same effect, when he says in a letter to Samuel Rogers-apropos of a gift-copy, from the author, of the "Pleasures of Memory," illustrated: "But I am jealous of the combination of the sister arts. Let them sparkle apart. What injury (short of the theatre) did not Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery do me with Shakspeare? to have Opie's Shakspeare, Northcote's Shakspeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakspeare, heavy-headed Romney's Shakspeare, wooden-headed West's Shakspeare (though he did the best in Lear), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakspeare, instead of my, and everybody's Shakspeare; to be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! to have Imogen's portrait! to confine the illimitable!"

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Haydon, the historical painter, harps on the same string. "I will not go again to see any of Shakspeare's plays," he resolves, in his Journal: you always associate the actors with the characters." This was after going with Wilkie to see Macbeth," in 1808. It is observable that Sir George Beaumont had, in 1807, expressed to Haydon his doubt as to the prudence of painting subjects taken from the poets, where you have to contend with the preconceived ideas of the spectators. Especially was Sir George urgent with this warning, in painting from Shakspeare, when, said he, "you not only have the powerful production of his mind's pencil to contend with, but also the perverted representations of the theatres, which have made such impressions on most people in early life, that I, for my part, feel it more difficult to form a picture in my mind from any

* Etudes sur le Drame Espagnol, par M. Philarète Chasles, § xvii.

† Landor's Imaginary Conversations: William Penn and Lord Peterborough. Final Memorials of Charles Lamb: Letter to Rogers, Dec. 1833.