London Pictures and London Plays

I CANNOT pretend this year to answer one of the regular questions of the London social season, and say how I think the exhibitions of 1882 compare with those of the previous twelvemonth ; for the simple reason that I find the exhibitions of 1881 have left no definite impression on my mind. I recall with extreme difficulty last year’s Grosvenor Gallery ; I attempt, quite without success, to evoke a vision of the Academy. Here and there, it is true, a dim, peculiar canvas on the walls of the latter institution glimmers into momentary distinctness. I remember coming back to London from the Continent quite late in the season, and going to the Royal Academy on one of those stale, close, dusty days that precede the closing of its doors. I was accompanied by a foreign friend, and we wandered through the fatigued looking rooms with a certain languor of attention. Here and there we stopped rather short, as before the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield by Mr. Millais, before the portrait of Matthew Arnold by Mr. Watts. These painters are, in the line of portrait, the most distinguished in England, and the model, in each of the cases I have mentioned, was what a Frenchman would call another English illustration. But what was principally illustrated in both works was the ancient axiom that even Homer sometimes nods. Very bad, strangely, grotesquely bad, were the portrait of Matthew Arnold by Mr. Watts, and the portrait of Lord Beaconsfield by Mr. Millais. My foreign friend, a painter by profession, chose to take the humorous view of the Academy altogether, and to treat even the most brilliant pictures suspended there as productions with which the art of painting was but feebly and remotely connected ; and indeed it was not easy to pretend that the state of painting was honorable in a country in which two of its foremost representatives were capable of exhibiting such fearful emanations of the brush as those two misbegotten portraits. I was not greatly concerned to defend it, for I may frankly observe that English painting interests me chiefly, not as painting, but as English. It throws little light, on the whole, on the art of Titian and of Rembrandt; but it throws a light which is to me always fresh, always abundant, always fortunate, on the turn of the English mind. It is far from being the most successful manifestation of that mind ; but it adds a good deal to our knowledge of it. This assertion, doubtless, makes it the more culpable to have so completely forgotten the contents of last year’s exhibitions; I ought to have remembered them for their illuminating virtues ; and I am afraid I must say, in mitigation of my fault, that on that occasion the English mind was less happily manifested even than usual. Moreover, it matters very little, for last year’s exhibitions have scarcely more actuality than last year’s moons. I alluded to them only because one is expected to be able to say, any month of May, with an air of experience, that this is rather a good, or rather a bad, Academy.

I think it is rather a good one; by which I mean that it is somewhat less bad than usual. There are fewer pictures within immediate eye-shot that are no pictures at all than I remember on some former occasions; and the whole exhibition has an air of succeeding tolerably well in what it attempts. It is true that it does n’t attempt anything very tremendous, except in the sense in which it is always tremendous to attempt to paint. But there is painting and painting ; there is light work, and there is heavy work. The Academy is essentially light; it does its best not to “go in,” as the phrase is, more for the severely plastic than a Royal Academy of Arts is absolutely bound to do. The pictures for the most part are illustrations, like the little drawings in the magazines or in books. There are no striking experiments in execution, and, save on the part of the distinguished president, no attacking of the nude. Personal color, personal form, has hardly a votary; but there are multitudinous coats and trousers, and innumerable bonnets and shawls. There are also any number of chairs and tables, of windows and doors, curtains, carpets, sideboards, and chimney-pieces ; and the usual proportion of green fields and cloudy skies, thatched cottages, and old brick walls, browsing donkeys and waddling geese. These are the stock properties of British art; and with their assistance the British artist is rarely at a loss to point a moral. He is not less anecdotical to-day than usual; but his anecdotes are often very neatly related. The British artist is apt to be an arrant Philistine, but he is by no means without his good points. He is wanting in science; he is wanting even in art; but he has a great deal of observation and a great deal of feeling. As M. Taine, the French critic, long ago took occasion to remark, he is very fond of studying and representing motives and states of mind ; he has a turn for psychology ; he is often successful in rendering the facial expression of emotions, though indeed since M. Bastien-Lepage exhibited at the Salon that remarkable figure of Joan of Are, which hangs to-day in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and showed us with what skill a modern Frenchman could infuse into a set of features the condition and attitude of a soul, it must be admitted that these ingenious feats are not reserved for the English.

I have embarked too soon, however, upon generalizations about the state of affairs at the Academy ; for it was my intention to speak first of the Grosvenor Gallery, which is on the whole the more interesting show. It is, at any rate, the pleasanter place to go to. There are fewer pictures, and the same may be said of the visitors, —perhaps from this very fact of your shilling’s worth being more slender. People with only a shilling to spend on pictures — and there are many people in London in this sad situation — prefer to spend it at the Academy. It occurs to me that the vagueness of my recollection of the Grosvenor last year is owing to the fact that Mr. Burne Jones had nothing on exhibition. Or was it the year before that this melancholy blank occurred ? Vagueness prevails, whichever way I turn it ; so I foresee that a twelvemonth hence I shall be very glad to have these notes to refer to. A Grosvenor without Mr. Burne Jones is a Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Mr. Whistler, it is true, is always there, but Mr. Whistler is rather less a sign of the establishment. This year Mr. Burne Jones is in force, as I count in the catalogue of the exhibition no less than nine of his productions. Most of these, however, are small pieces, and I must speak only of the two principals. The common verdict, I suppose, is that they are as queer as ever, — which I am quite willing to agree to, if it be added that they are as charming. They are full of beautiful work, beautiful feeling, an expression of many things. There are many people who declare that they contain only two things, — a bad stomach and a perverted mind. Mr. Burne Jones’s figures have a way of looking rather sick ; but if illness is capable of being amiable, — and most of us have had some happy intimation that it is, — Mr. Burne Jones accentuates this side of the case. This, indeed, I suppose, is the very ground of that accusation about the perversity of his mind ; he is accused of delighting in disease, and reveling in woe. The truth is, however, that this kind of talk is very much beside the mark, and I should be inclined to doubt whether the painter’s art is very dear to any one who cannot find much to enjoy in Mr. Burne Jones. With the exception of Mr. Millais, who is not so much a painter as a master of the brush, he seems to me the only Englishman painting to-day who carries into the business a passion of his own. A whole range of feeling about life is expressed in Mr. Burne Jones’s productions, and I scarcely know of which of his competitors the same can be said. His expression is complicated, troubled ; but at least there is an interesting mind in it. And then, in general, it is exceedingly successful and beautiful. He is a deep and powerful colorist; he lives in a world of color. Amid the hard, loud chatter and clash of so many of his colleagues, the painting of Mr. Burne Jones is almost alone in having the gravity and deliberation of truly valuable speech. It needs, however, to be looked at good-humoredly and liberally ; he offers an entertainment which is for us to take or to leave. It pretends to please us, if we care to be pleased, — to touch us in the persuasive, suggestive, allusive, half-satisfying but more mystifying way in which distinguished artists of the imaginative class have always appealed to us. He is not a votary of the actual, and nothing is easier than to pull such an artist to pieces, from the point of view of the actual. But the process is idle ; the actual does not gain and the artist does not suffer. It is beside the mark, as I said just now, to say that his young women are always sick, for they are neither sick nor well. They live in a different world from ours,— a fortunate world, in which young ladies may be slim and pale and “ seedy ” without discredit and (I trust) without discomfort. It is not a question of sickness and health; it is a question of grace, delicacy, tenderness, of the chord of association and memory. Mr. Burne Jones has for that chord an exquisite touch. It is easy to accuse him of turning reality topsy-turvy ; but I think he does it less injury than many of those painters whose relations with it are more primitive. At any rate, for the author of these lines there is something in his talent which makes almost anything pass. There is no very visible reason, for instance, why, in the largest picture the artist exhibits this year, the lovely Phyllis, forsaken by her lover, and turned by the kind gods into an almondtree, should look as if she had secreted a button, or even a quid of tobacco, beneath her upper lip ; there is no reason why Demophoon, the guilty lover, passing that way in penitence, and finding himself suddenly embraced by the arborescent Phyllis, should have hair of a singular greenish tinge. If there was to be any green hair in the picture, it surely should belong to the hardly yet revivified nymph. In spite of all this, Phyllis’s lip and Demophoön’s hair are extremely pictorial, and I am willing to believe that they are indispensable parts of a beautiful scheme. The picture in question has a strange and touching beauty; though it is of course open to the grave accusation of representing a monstrosity. The artist has asked himself why, if a poet may be a painter, a painter may not be a poet. Phyllis, shut up in the trunk of the tree, has retained her slim and delicate human shape ; she has not merged it in the blossoming boughs, whose wealth of white flowers is splendidly rendered by the painter. This charming curtain of almond blossom hangs over the reunited pair, and mingles with the tender embrace of the nymph, who flings herself from out her riven sheath, and hangs upon the neck of the startled Demophoön. The subject was difficult, and there could be no question of making it “ natural ; ” Mr. Burne Jones has had to content himself with making it lovely. It is a large, elaborate study of the undraped figure, the painter’s treatment of which surely gives sufficient evidence of his knowing how to draw,—an accomplishment that has sometimes been denied him. The drawing of the two figures in The Tree of Forgiveness has knowledge and power, as well as refinement, and we should be at a loss to mention another English artist who would have acquitted himself so honorably of such an attempt. Sir Frederick Leighton deals more or less in the nude, but Sir Frederick Leighton’s drawing is more superficial than Mr. Burne Jones’s. In regard to color, the latter artist’s pictures, it has usually seemed to us, may be divided into the warm and the cool. The Tree of Forgiveness is decidedly cool, — cool with the coolness of a gray day in summer. The mass of almond blossom introduces a great deal of fresh and moist-looking white ; the flesh-tones are wan and bloodless, as befits the complexion of people whom we see through the medium of a certain incredulity. It would never do for Phyllis and Demophoön to present themselves with the impudence of, say, Rubens’s flesh and blood. Mr. Burne Jones’s other large picture, which he has called, simply, we suppose, to give it a label of some kind, At the Mill, is in the opposite key. It represents — But such a beginning is rash, for it would by no means be easy to say what it represents. Suffice it that three very pretty young women, in old Italian dresses, are slowly dancing together in a little green garden, on the edge of a mill-pond, on the further side of which several men, very diminutive figures, are about to enter, or about to quit, the bath. To the right, beneath a quaint loggia, a fourth young woman, the least successful of the group, is making music for her sisters. The color is deep, rich, glowing, exceedingly harmonious, and both in this respect and in its being, in feeling and expression, an echo of early Italianism, the picture has an extraordinary sweetness. It is very true that I have heard it called idiotic ; but there is a sad want of good-humor in that. It is equally true that I have not the least idea who the young women are, nor what period of history, what time and place, the painter has had in his mind. His dancing maidens are exceedingly graceful, innocent, maidenly : they belong to the land of fancy, and to the hour of reverie ! When one considers them, one really feels that there is a want of discretion and of taste in attempting to talk about Mr, Burne Jones’s pictures at all, much more in arguing and wrangling about them. They are there to care for if one will, and to leave to others if one cannot. The great charm of the work I have just mentioned is, perhaps, that to many persons it will seem impregnated with the love of Italy. If you have certain impressions, certain memories, of that inestimable land, you will find it full of entertainment. I speak with no intention of irreverence when I say that I think it delightfully amusing. It amuses me that it should be just as it is, —just as pointless as a twilight reminiscence, as irresponsible as a happy smile. The quaintly-robed maidens, moving together in measure, and yet seeming to stand still on the grass ; the young men taking a bath just near them, and yet the oddity being no oddity at all; the charming composition of the background, the picturesque feeling, the innocence, the art, the color, the mixture of originality and imitation, — all these things lift us out, of the common. Sweet young girls of long ago, — no one paints them like Mr. Burne Jones. The only complaint I have to make of him is that one cannot express one’s appreciation of him without seeming to talk in the air. For this reason I will pass on to Mr. Whistler, though on reflection I hardly know whether the case is bettered.

For Mr. Whistler, of course, is extremely peculiar; he is supposed to be the buffoon of the Grosvenor, the laughing-stock of the critics. He does the comic business once a year; he turns the somersault in the ring. The author of these hasty pages — exhibitions must be spoken of quickly, if they are to be spoken of at all — finds him, like Mr. Burne Jones, extremely amusing ; only the entertainment he yields is of a much broader quality. He is exceedingly unequal, but for Mr. Whistler this is rather a good year. He has no less than seven productions at the Grosvenor, but I can speak only of the two full-length sketches of female figures which he entitles, respectively, a Harmony in Flesh-Color and Pink, and a Harmony in Black and Red. It is a misfortune for Mr, Whistler that he once gave the measure of his talent, and a very high measure it was. The portrait of his mother, painted some years ago, and exhibited this year in New York, is so noble and admirable a picture, such a masterpiece of tone, of feeling, of the power to render life, that the fruits of his brush offered to the public more lately have seemed in comparison very crude. I know not whether the fine work I speak of was a harmony, a symphony, an arrangement, or a nocturne ; to-day, at any rate, the artist takes the precaution of not calling his little sketches portraits. One of them, the Harmony in Black and Red, may or may not be a likeness of the lady who stood for it; but it bears a remarkable resemblance to another person. I conclude from this that it has the appearance of life, which is a good deal, by the way. It may have been painted in three hours ; whereas I suppose it took Mr. Holman Hunt as many months to bring his garish Miss Flamborough (also at the Grosvenor) to its extraordinary perfection of hideousness. The vague black shadow on Mr. Whistler’s canvas lifts its head and poises itself and says something, and the huge, bloated doll, who, with an orange and a woolly lamb, appeals to one’s interest in the misguided effort of the expre-Raphaelite, is equally inanimate and elaborate. Mr. Whistler is a votary of “ tone ; ” his manner of painting is to breathe upon the canvas. It is not too much to say that he has, to a certain point, the creative afflatus, llis little black and red lady is charming ; she looks like some one, as I have said, and if she is a shadow she is the shadow of a graceful personage. Her companion, in flesh-color and pink, is a trifle less graceful, and her hat does n’t fit; I also contest her flesh-color, which has a light gray tinge, not usually remarked in the human complexion. Still, she does very well on the wall. — which is about all that one is obliged to claim for these light emanations.

If the contributors to the Grosvenor were mentioned in their order of distinction, I suppose that Mr. Millais, Mr. Watts, Mr. Alma Tadema, should be the principal names. These three artists are represented solely by portraits, except, indeed, that Mr. Tadema has a couple of very small subjectpieces. His main contribution, however, is his portrait of the German actor, Ludwig Barnay, who distinguished himself in London last year as the most brilliant member of the admirable company presided over by the Duke of Meiningen, which rendered Julius Cæsar as Julius Cæsar had not been rendered in England for many a year. Barnay is painted in the robes of Marc Antony, and of his handsome pagan-looking head Mr. Alma Tadema, so apt in such achievements, has had no difficulty in making a very actual and effective Roman. The artist’s great hit this year is, however, the portrait he exhibits at the Academy, the admirable, masterly portrait of Mr. Whichcord, R. I. B. A., — whatever those mystic letters may mean. Mr. Whichcord, R. I. B. A., clad in simple black, but decorated with a brilliant but inscrutable badge, has had — whatever his other honors — the honor of inspiring the finest portrait of the year. Such painting as Mr. Tadema’s makes the painting of many of his fellows in England look like school-boy work ; his aim is so definite and so high, his taste so large, his art so much the art of knowledge. The present work, his only contribution to the Academy, has a subdued richness, a shaded glow, which reminds one of those few canvases of John Bellini which, in Venice, shed their quiet radiance from the depths of some sombre sacristy. There is nothing new to say of Mr. Millais, who this year contributes no less than nine pictures, all portraits, to the two exhibitions. He continues to be one of the most accomplished and most disappointing of painters. He has all the arts of success, but only some of the arts of perfection. No one who can do so well condescends at times to do so ill ; and no one who does so ill gives you at times, in his grossest aberrations, an equal impression of ability. His facility is unprecedented, and his fortune corresponds. He has no “ subject ” this year ; he has indeed painted his annual fancy-piece, but it constitutes the gem of a separate exhibition. None of his portraits at the Academy or the Grosvenor are of great importance, but some are much better than others, notably two or three representations of children, whom he often renders with great power. There is a poor lady in light blue at the Grosvenor, planted squarely before the public, with her arms akimbo, and looking as if she were a good deal frightened at her position, which has very much the style and weight of a chalk figure on a blackboard. On the other hand, there are at least two brilliant renderings of blooming little heroines of the nursery, painted in the large, free, solid, confident way of which, at his best, Mr. Millais is an unsurpassed master. Of how nobly he can paint when he is in the humor of it, a certain big silver bowl with a gilt interior, which figures in one of these pictures, may remain as an example. Mr. Millais paints the celebrities, his principal celebrity this year being (at the Academy) that very holy man and very superior model, Cardinal Newman. This was a great chance, but the chance is sadly missed ; the artist having made shipwreck, as it seems to me, on the vast scarlet cape of his Eminence. This exalted garment, of a very furious red, is painted with a crudity which causes it to obliterate the face, without justifying itself. It is violent, monotonous, superficial, uninteresting ; it is nothing but a cape, and yet it is not even a cape. I cannot speak of the face ; the face is not there, — a grievous pity, for it is a very fine one. The cardinals have had poor luck this year, Cardinal Manning having been sacrificed simultaneously to Mr. Watts, whose effort is less violent than that of Mr. Millais, but not more successful. The best that can be said of his portrait of Cardinal Manning is that it is not so bad as his portrait, at the Grosvenor, of the Prince of Wales. A grateful recollection of some of the former fruits of his once interesting talent — Mr. Watts has sometimes risen very high ; he has had the great thing, he has had “ style ” — leads us to draw the curtain of silence over this ill-starred performance, which, we should imagine, would expose its author to the penalties attached to that misdemeanor known to English law as “ threatening the Royal Family. " A painter of portraits who, on the other hand, every year reveals a more vigorous faculty is Mr. Frank Holl, one of whose present contributions to the Academy ranks in merit with Mr. Tadetma’s portrait of the ex-president of the R. I. B. A., from which in manner it widely differs. I refer to his singularly lifelike representation of the late Captain Alexander Mitchell Sim, “ painted for the board room of the Surrey Commercial Dock Company.” This is an ancient mariner in the evening of his days, and it is a really noble picture of tough and tranquil old age. I am not acquainted with the Surrey Commercial Dock board room, but I should say it was just the picture for the place. Mr. Frank Holl is rather wanting in style, and, I should suppose, in imagination; but he has qualities which, if a man of genius does not turn up, may make him the English portrait-painter of the future : a strong, comprehensive simplicity, a great appreciation of characters, a manly, resolute, general way of painting, — an excellent power of summing-up, as it were. The portrait of Captain Sim marks his highest point this year ; but be has several other excellent things, — noticeably, at the Grosvenor, a certain Mr. J. Jones Jenkins, M. P., a solid representation of a solid personage. It would be difficult to put before us more vividly the commercial, practical, political, successful Englishman, —the “ City man ” made perfect; difficult too, on the whole, to represent him more agreeably. This is the way he would paint himself if he knew how to paint; the picture is a good deal in the manner of a good speech in the House of Commons.

I cannot leave the Grosvenor without saying a word about Mr. W. B. Richmond’s extraordinary portrait of Mr. Gladstone, in a crimson gown and in his most uplifted mood. He communes with the skies ; he expounds the Scriptures, which appear to repose upon his knee. There has lately been more than one portrait of Mr. Gladstone from the theological point of view, but it was reserved for Mr. Richmond to depict him as of African blood, of distracted intellect, and of the Methodist persuasion. I know not what may have been the success of Mr. Richmond’s picture with the public, but it has a very interesting side. It is the last word of Philistinism, — a character in which it must he confessed that it has many formidable competitors. Neither should I leave the Grosvenor gallery without speaking of several American talents which are honorably exemplified there, — Mr. Houghton, for instance (if Mr. Roughton is still an American), Mr. Julian Story, Mr. Sargent. Mr. Houghton is familiar to most of us ; this year he has been to Holland, and contributes to the two exhibitions (mainly to the Academy) a series of Dutch subjects of combined landscape and figure, into which he has succeeded in infusing much of the low, cool tone of that delectable country. Mr. Julian Story, the younger son of the distinguished sculptor who has lived and worked so long in Rome, is the author of the largest picture (but one) at the Grosvenor, — an Entombment, of which the brilliant cleverness, the ready resource, the discreet, agreeable color, the youthful energy, have, in the absence of some of the subtler qualities of feeling, attracted much attention. Mr. Julian Story is an executant, — he has made a great hit. Mr. Sargent, whose only defect is a certain papery texture, contributes a charming little gray Venetian interior, with figures.

I have, after all, mixed up, if I may he allowed the phrase, the Grosvenor and the Academy, for which my excuse must be that most of the prominent artists represented in the one exhibition are represented in the other. The portraits, decidedly, are the best things of the year, and one of the best of these is Mr. Herkomer’s remarkable picture of Mr. Archibald Forbes, the famous war correspondent of the Daily News, to-day well known in America. Two or three things are more delicate than this, but none are more living, more complete. The valiant journalist stands there almost at full length, in his professional blouse, face to face with his public, with a strong, good-humored smile upon his energetic features. Mr. Herkomer has been much the fashion since he took the medal of honor for the English school at the last Paris exhibition ; yet I have often found him, in spite of a great talent, rather heavy and coarse. With his portrait of Mr. Forbes, however, there is no fault to be found ; there is no criticism to make of it. It is one of those fine pictures which, beside representing an individual, represent a type, — raise the individual to the significance of a type. This is the roving Englishman, the man of energy and adventure, who has left his solid footprint in every corner of the globe, and has brought back from his furthest peregrinations a fund of good spirits and good stories. There is something equally masculine in the physiognomy of Mr. Herkomer’s model and in the way the artist has rendered it. There is usually a so-called “ picture of the year ” at the Academy, and I have been asking myself on what work of art, on this occasion, such a title may be bestowed. Is Sir Frederick Leighton’s tall, long-legged, duncolored Phryne at Eleusis the picture of the year ? This is a study of the nude on a large scale: the beautiful Athenian, competing for the prize awarded to perfection of form, undrapes her loveliness before the admiring multitude. Her loveliness is considerable, for Sir Frederick Leighton has a great deal of elegance, a great sense of beauty ; but neither in modeling nor in color does her elongated person appear to justify this lavish exposure. The head is charming and charmingly placed, and the picture more freely painted than a number of other polished creations by the same artist, scattered through the neighboring rooms. But the body strikes one as too monotonously yellow, too flat, too remodeled. The lady stands there in the atmosphere of Greece, and her beauty must have flashed more vividly, shone more splendidly, upon the eyes of Greeks. It is true that it is not with the eyes of Greeks that we look at her. This perhaps is what is needed to see deeper into the present manner of the accomplished president of the Academy. More than any English painter he devotes himself to the plastic, but his efforts remain strongly and brilliantly superficial. His texture is too often that of the glaze on the lid of a prunebox ; his drawing too often that of the figures that smile at us from the covers of these receptacles. And yet, as I say, he has a great sense of beauty. I am reduced to believing that to-day there is no picture of the year ; for neither Mr. Millais, nor Mr. Pettie, nor Mr. Orchardson, nor Mr. Marcus Stone, nor Mr. Long, nor Mr. Boughton, nor any other of the popular purveyors of pictorial anecdote has succeeded in providing it. Mr. Pettie has several clever things, but I know no painter possessing so many parts of the temperament of a painter in whom the total is less felicitous. He is a Scotchman by nativity, and his coloring has a Caledonian harshness, a kind of “sandy” quality, which is fatal to the plastic idea. There could not be a better example of what I have called the Philistinism of English art than his exceedingly ugly picture of the young Duke of Monmouth kneeling in suppliance, with his hands tied, to the cowardly James II. The violation of taste here is quite bottomless. An artist whose success in England is, from the foreign point of view, absolutely inexplicable is Mr. Edwin Long, who paints large sentimental Eastern subjects, and who, the other day, sold one of these productions for six thousand pounds. Mr. Long, if I am not mistaken, would be regarded in France, in Germany, even in Italy, as dangerously weak. The Academy, which every year purchases out of a certain Chantrey fund a picture to call its own, has this year selected a very charming work by Mr. Marcus Stone : a love-scene in an oldfashioned garden, with a couple of figures and a great many very delicately treated accessories. The picture, which is not very solid, is yet the result of a great deal of talent, and though it is extremely English it is also extremely skillful. The increase and diffusion — signified on each wall of the exhibition — of the particular sort of skill which it reveals is perhaps the best thing to be noticed in English art to-day.

If all art is supposed to be one, and if its different manifestations, to the truly penetrating eye, are supposed to minister a mutual light, there should be no great violence of transition in passing from the exhibitions to the theatres. The British stage has indeed a considerable analogy to British painting, and the reflections which present themselves at the Lyceum and the Haymarket are not very different from those which illuminate the devious path of the visitor to Burlington House and the eccentric temple in Bond Street. Both at the play-house and at the exhibition he encounters a good deal of Philistinism. On the other hand, both the art of the painter and that of the actor are said to be improving, and if the training-school for young actors, for which an appeal has just been made to the English public by a group of more or less distinguished dilettanti, becomes a working institution, the dramatic profession may spread its wings indeed. It is proposed to establish a dramatic conservatory, modeled upon that of the Conservatoire in Paris, at which the young ladies and gentlemen who aspire to brave the footlights may acquire what may be roughly termed a little ease of manner. The more ease the better; for English acting is for the most part distinguished by a consummate want of study. There is good material, — though not so good, I think, as we sometimes hear affirmed; but it remains undeveloped and ineffective, — it does n’t see its way. It will take more, however, than even the hottest histrionic forcing-house to make an English school of actors which shall rival the French; it will take a transformation of English life, of the English temperament, of the English tongue. That a place of serious study for young persons proposing to adopt this very difficult profession is much to be desired, I shall, however, not pretend to deny. Such an institution would perhaps be even less valuable for what it might produce than for what it might prevent. There is an immense deal to prevent on the English stage. Would a trainingschool have, for instance, prevented Mr. Henry Irving, who has for some time past been offering us such a Romeo as we never dreamed of? A trainingschool, assiduously frequented by Mr. Irving in his youth, would not, perhaps, have suppressed him altogether, but it would have suppressed some of his extraordinary peculiarities. That these peculiarities should have blossomed and flowered at such a prodigious rate — a most rank and bristling vegetation—is the best possible proof of the absence of taste, of criticism, of knowledge, of a standard, on the part of the public. More extraordinary even than Mr. Irving’s eccentricities is the fact that they have not interfered with his success. The part, of all the parts he has played, in which it might have been thought they would be most destructive is this exquisite part of the graceful and passionate Romeo ; but, as it happens, the play has thriven mightily, and though people are sadly bewildered by what they see and hear in it, they appear to recommend the performance to their friends. It has the advantage of that splendid scenic presentation which Mr. Irving understands so well, and which converts the play from a splendid and delicate poem into a gorgeous and overweighted spectacle. Mr. Irving does these things very handsomely; he is a most liberal and intelligent manager. It may, indeed, not be thought a proof of his intelligence that he himself should play the hero, or that he should entrust the girlish Juliet to the large, the long, the mature Miss Terry. Miss Terry has great charm ; she is what the French call, in artistic parlance, a “ nature ; ” she is almost always interesting, and she is often a delightful presence : but she is not Juliet; on the contrary ! She is too voluminous, too deliberate, too prosaic, too English, too unversed in the utterance of poetry. How little Mr. Irving is Romeo it is not worth while even to attempt to declare; he must know it, of course, better than any one else, and there is something really touching in so extreme a sacrifice of one’s ideal. It remains to be ascertained why he should have wished to bring out the play. Mr. Irving is not a Romeo ; Miss Terry is not a Juliet; and no one else, save Mrs. Stirling, is anything in particular. Was it for Mrs. Stirling, then, that this elaborate undertaking was set on foot? She plays the Nurse, and plays it very well, — too well, almost, since it is pushed forward, out of its relations to the total. Mrs. Stirling, to-day a very old woman, is a rich and accomplished actress ; she belongs to a more sincere generation ; she knows her art, and it is from her rendering of the garrulous, humorous, immoral attendant of the gentle Juliet that the spectator receives his one impression of the appropriate and the adequate. It was probably for the spectacle that Mr. Irving took the play in hand, and the spectacle has richly rewarded him. It is the last word of stage-carpentering, and is full of beautiful effects of color and costume. The stage is crowded with figures ; there are at moments too many ; the play moves slowly through a succession of glowing and deceptive pictures. The fault of all this splendor of detail is that, in the homely phrase, it puts the cart before the horse. The play is not acted, it is costumed ; the immortal lovers of Verona become subordinate and ineffectual figures. I had never thought of Romeo and Juliet as a dull drama ; but Mr. Irving has succeeded in making it so. It is obstructed, interrupted ; its passionate rapidity is chopped up into little tableaus. In a word, it is slow, — mortally slow ; for much of the dialogue is incomprehensibly spoken, and the rest ineffectively. To make this enchanting poem tame, — it was reserved for the present management of the Lyceum to accomplish that miracle. The danger, however, is common. — the danger of smothering a piece in its accessories ; and the accident occurs at most of the London theatres. The reason is doubtless that the art of putting a piece on the stage, as it is called (as if the only way to put a piece on the stage were not to act it), has lately made an advance in England which is out of proportion to any improvement that has taken place in the dramatic art proper. Scenery and decorations have been brought to their highest perfection, while elocution and action, the interpretation of meanings, the representation of human feelings, have not been made the objects of serious study. There is plenty of talent in the London theatres, but it wants cultivation and direction. Of course, when Shakespeare is sacrificed to the machinist and the gas-man, the case is at the worst; the sacrifice of M. Sardou is a less tragic event. He is, however, mildly immolated every evening at the Haymarket, with Mrs. Bancroft and Madame Modjeska as high-priestesses of the altar. His ingenious comedy of Odette (which is by no means the triumph of his ingenuity) is represented at that theatre with every refinement of mise en scène. In its way it is as fine as the Romeo and Juliet of the Lyceum, — though of course it matters less that it should be so superfluously pictorial. It consists of a series of interiors, each one of which is more elegant, as the play-bill would say, than the others. The acting is another affair, but the acting is very good. Madame Modjeska plays the erring but repentant wife (as the play-bill again would say) ; and if there were nothing else that was satisfactory in her performance it would be a satisfaction to see a “ star ” reduced to the level of an ordinary luminary, taking a regular place in a good stock company, and content to forego the use of staring capitals in the play-bill. But Madame Modjeska plays with a great deal of art: with grace, with force, with intelligence, with a certain personal distinction. The piece has been arranged for English life, but the heroine continues to be a Frenchwoman ; a fact which eases off, for the actress charged with the part, the question of pronunciations. Madame Modjeska, moreover, has made progress with her English. There are few actresses more delightful than Mrs. Bancroft, when she appears in a part that exactly suits her, and such a part has been arranged for her in this somewhat heterogeneous Odette, — a brief, incidental part, of which, however, she has seized all the opportunities, opportunities for rich yet natural comedy. The comic power of Mrs. Bancroft is remarkable ; it flows with abundance and freedom ; you never hear the creaking of the pump. The whole piece is acted with an amount of care and finish which it would be ungracious not to acknowledge, and which certainly indicates a rise of the level of theatrical criticism. It is not the finish of the best French acting, but it is very well for a theatre operating in English conditions. If I were asked to specify the best piece of comedy in the play, I should say it was the manner in which a young actor, of high promise and of a peculiar and original talent, Mr. Charles Brookfield, representing the major-domo of a private gaming-house at Nice, acquits himself of the single scene of which his part consists. The man is a scoundrel, a charlatan, a Frenchman, a jackanapes, and various other things besides, and the art with which these elements are interfused and expressed is so remarkable as to convert Mr. Brookfield’s purely episodic opportunity into a brilliant triumph. His acting is more than clever, it is imaginative ; more than humorous, it is creative. The best thing in it — and the rarest thing — is the vividness with which he has perceived the figure which he wished to represent. In short, it is a real portrait, and Mr. Brookfield, who has made a great hit, will be watched with interest in future. What I have said of Romeo and Juliet and of Odette is less true of The Squire, at the St. James’s, by the distance that divides Mr. Pinero, the author of this successful but not original dramatic effort, not only from Shakespeare, but from Sardou. Odette is by no means the best Sardou; if the author of the most successful pieces of our time had produced nothing but this drama he would not be known to fame. But the play hangs neatly together, thanks simply to French scenic traditions, — to the French habit of making things stick. The Squire does n’t stand very straight, but it is beautifully mounted and very carefully played. The author appears to have borrowed it from Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novel of Far from the Madding Crowd, — though its origin was, I believe, very sharply contested when the piece was produced, and is at present involved in impenetrable mystery. The pictures are charming, Mrs. Kendal’s acting is interesting, and the rest as good as there is occasion for. On the whole, like the exhibitions, the London theatres are improving.