travellers have told us, have more respect for a lord. Those who value social distinctions at neither more nor less than what they are worth, are not given to make themselves unhappy about them one way or another. Every one remembers the story of the little marquess at Eton, who being seized by a big commoner, with the usual interrogatory put to new boys as to their name and parentage, answered that his father was " a duke;" and received forthwith from that independent Briton four kicks; one for himself, and "three for the duke." It is commonly told with great gusto as an instance of the levelling discipline of our public schools. So far as this that to be kicked early in life was very wholesome for the little marquess-I concur in the moral; but I am by no means so sure as to the young gentleman who is usually regarded as the hero in the transaction. According to my lights in the science of flunkeyism, to kick a duke (even by deputy) must be, to the genuine flunkey mind, even more delightful than to toady him.

For this reason we need not be surprised to find, in these very Snob Papers, a lament which might otherwise have appeared rather out of place. Literary claims, it appears, are not recognised in the present code of precedence. Successful authors and editors are not admitted, by virtue of their intellectual peerage, into such intimate communication with dukes as might be desired. Especially, there is no recognised place for them at Court. We are told, with a bitter irony, that "two of them have actually been invited to Court during the present reign," and that probably" towards the end of the season one or two will be asked to dinner" by the Premier of the day. In short, in this literary century we have "a Court system which sends men of genius to the second table." Now, when we come upon such passages as these in pages which profess to anathematise all the tinsel of VOL. XC.-NO. DLIV.

Court etiquette, and the influences of aristocratic dinner-parties, as degrading to the very soul of man, what is a bewildered ordinary reader to think It may be an uncharitable query, but it is an exceedingly natural one, which forces itself upon his mind-Hinc illæ lachrymæ? Is this where the shoe pinches? Does all this magnificent protest against the "exclusiveness" of social barriers, this noble scorn of the yoke of fashion, this proclamation of the common dignity of human nature, resolve itself into this-that we, the said scorners and protesters, have had no "command" to Buckingham Palace, and no cards for my Lord Tinsel's fashionable parties? Has Diogenes taken to his tub merely because he was not asked to Alexander's feast?

I must say that if I were a preacher of this doctrine of the total depravity of human nature in the matter of Flunkeyism, and were in search of illustrations for my sermon, I should assuredly mark this down for future improvement. All the little jealousies which are supposed to agitate half-bred society, all the moral indignation expressed by Mrs A. because Mrs B. allows her daughters to visit such a woman as Lady C. (who has struck the A.'s off her list) - all these fungoid growths of society which form the study of some approved modern novelists, surely present no idea so ridiculous as Genius snivelling because it is not asked to dinner.

I almost think that, if I were Genius, I would be above that. It seems very natural, and very allowable, for us dull mediocrities to have our little social ambitions, and to value such recognition on the part of society; but there is something better, too. Titular rank may be desired and accepted by ordinary commoners; but one can well understand that "Coke of Norfolk did not care to be made a lord. The painter who allowed the monarch to pick up his maul-stick would not have cried about a seat at table.

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Such a complaint does dishonour to the true claims of intellect. "There is a divinity that doth hedge a king ;" and it is right for us all to acknowledge it. But Genius is untrue to itself, if it vails its own divine right before any king that reigns. The poet or the philosopher has an empire wider than Cæsar's. He has his court, his audience - chamber, his subjects whom he sways with a word. He is himself a king of men; his "rank and precedence" is not within the cognisance of stars and ribbons. Consign Genius to the "second table!" Its seat is amongst the gods-"beside their nectar-careless of mankind."

But when men of letters condescend from their heroic status to mix in the battle of life with mortals, they are not the foremost men in the fray, in any State or in any generation. They have often been said to be so, in all sorts of languages; but then it was themselves who said it: and they have never been able to persuade the world of it, though they have had its ear so long. A shrewd observer, himself a half-brother of the craft -Lord Shaftesbury-has placed them, justly enough, "in the second rank of men." A commonwealth officered entirely by an aristocracy of genius would probably take no very high place among nations. In spite of the brilliant example of some modern English politicians, it may be safely said that it is not in so far as they are clever writers, but in so far as they are practical men, that they have been useful in the State. The public would rather have the reduction of a penny in the income-tax from the hands of its Chancellor of the Exchequer, than a new Paradise Lost. The aristocracy of letters complains that it has no recognised place in the Court Circular; would it be better satisfied, if authors were privileged to bear the titles of their works as designations of honour, and had assigned them heraldic bearings derived from their literary

achievements, as Mr D'Israeli (the elder) once fancifully suggested? Be it remembered that certain clever men have complained before now of being received in society merely as clever men-to figure as the lion of the evening, and "make sport," as it were, for the Philistines. No doubt, to any but a very vain man, such a position must often be disagreeable. Yet they have been reminded that the complaint against society was hardly just; that Mr Jones and Mr Smith, if they walked into the drawing-room minus their authorship, might often have no claim to be there at all.

But Genius has always been complaining of neglect. It is the crying child of the human family. It was rather ill-used by cross nurses some years ago, and has been ailing and fretful ever since. And it has the advantage which the loudest crying child in a family always has-the public ear. The groans of the practical workers of this world are seldom heard-the martyrs of unrequited labour die mute. But Genius, even if it starves, seldom starves in silence. It is a lamentable fact, but it has seldom been too respectable to beg, in some form or other. It is quite true that it cannot live upon praise; but in these days it commonly gets its pudding too-probably quite as much as is good for it. In fact, it is rather the pet of the family just at present, and for that reason seems to cry louder than ever on the slightest provocation.

It is not to be denied that Flunkeyism does exist, and that the term may have a wider application than our particular school assigns to it. There are mean and grovelling natures to be found under all governments and all states of society. If they cannot toady rank, they will toady wealth and political power. They will do even worse; they will toady a popular opinion, and prostitute a "Free Press" to the most mischievous public mania of the day. And it is far better for national character, a far less wrong to

the cause of universal truth and honesty, that a man should fall down and worship even a coroneted mushroom than a false and base principle. Any form of Mumbo-Jumbo were better than that.

For my own part, I believe Dukedom to be as useful and wholesome an institution, in its way, as authorcraft. I am willing to give it such "worship" as has been assigned it from the national fountain of honour. I honestly respect a good duke, as I do a good writer. Taking the class as members of society, I believe them to be quite as desirable acquaintances, their characters quite as good, their domestic relations quite as respectable, and if their dinners are better (as I daresay they are), that need not be a fatal objection. If there are some indifferent specimens, I am not responsible for their manufacture. The reasons for some men being born in that station of life are to me as inscrutable as the reasons for some men being popular authors. But, for all that I can see, I am so far content with hereditary Right Honourables that I have

no desire to have them replaced by extempore coronets, conferred by the voice of the people upon those whom they consider the great men of the day. Popular suffrage of this kind does not always proceed upon the same safe and intelligible principle as that which the soldiers of a certain Crimean regiment adopted, when they unanimously elected for the Victoria Cross the sergeant who served out the grog. There is a kind of "great-man worship" (to borrow one of these new terms) against which even my flunkey spirit rebels. I cannot accept Mr Tupper for a philosopher, or either Mr Bellew, Dr Cumming, or Mr Spurgeon (let me be unsectarian in my selection), for a prophet. Every superstition has its limit; and these happen to be the particular form of Mumbo-Jumbo before which I cannot fall down. I will be content with the hereditary teraphim to which I have been accustomed. Surely it was an unfair reproach against idols that they were "dumb;" the most ghastly of all impositions are the idols which talk.

IN the present deplorable state of the drama and the stage, every lover of the art must rejoice at the surprising success achieved by the remarkable Frenchman who has undertaken to give a new aspect to Shakespearian tragedy, and who has drawn all London to witness two of the greatest dramatic works ever written. No man ever before played Hamlet for seventy consecutive nights; no man, since the great Kean, ever excited so much discussion. That much of this success is owing to the curiosity of seeing a Frenchman play Shakespeare in English, no one will doubt. But whatever the cause, the success is a fact which must have its influence; and now that a second part has been added to Fechter's Shakespearian repertory, the discussion becomes more animated, and the questions involved become more capable of solution.

To express my own opinion in a sentence-I think his Hamlet one of the very best, and his Othello one of the very worst I have ever seen; and I have seen all the good actors, and many of the bad actors, from Kean downwards. On leaving the theatre after Hamlet, I felt once more what a great play it was, with all its faults, and they are gross and numerous. On leaving the theatre after Othello, I felt as if my old admiration for this supreme masterpiece of the art had been an exaggeration; all the faults of the play stood out so glaringly, all its beauties were so dimmed and distorted by the acting of every one concerned. It was necessary to recur to Shakespeare's pages to recover the old feeling.

Reflecting on the contrast offered by these two performances, it seemed to me that a good lesson on the philosophy of acting was to be read there. Two cardinal points were illustrated by it. First, the very general confusion which exists

in men's minds respecting naturalism and idealism in art; secondly, the essential limitation of an actor's sphere, as determined by his personality. Both in Hamlet and Othello, Fechter attempts to be natural, and keeps as far away as possible from the conventional declamatory style, which is by many mistaken for idealism only because it is unlike reality. His physique enabled him to represent Hamlet, and his naturalism was artistic. His physique wholly incapacitated him from representing Othello; and his naturalism, being mainly determined by his personality, became utter feebleness. I do not mean that the whole cause of his failure rests with his physical incapacity, for, as will presently be shown, his intellectual conception of the part is as false as his execution is feeble; but he might have had a wrong conception of the part, and yet have been ten times more effective, had nature endowed him with a physique of more weight and intensity. Twenty Othellos I have seen, with far less intelligence, but with more effective representative qualities, whose performances have stirred the very depths of the soul; whereas I cannot imagine any amount of intelligence enabling Fechter's personality to make the performance satisfactory.

His Hamlet was "natural;" but this was not owing, as many seem to think, to the simple fact of its being more conversational and less stilted than usual. If Shakespeare's grandest language seemed to issue naturally from Fechter's lips, and did not strike you as out of place, which it so often does when mouthed on the stage, the reason was that he formed a tolerably true conception of Hamlet's nature, and could represent that conception. It was his personality which enabled him to represent this conception. Many of the spectators had a conception as

true, or truer, but they could not have represented it. This is selfevident. But what is the meaning of the natural in art? On this point great confusion prevails. By naturalism and realism, men commonly, and falsely, suppose that an imitation of ordinary life is meant: a reproduction of such details as may be recognised among our daily experiences.

Whereas naturalism truly means the reproduction of those details which characterise the nature of the thing represented. Realism means truth, not vulgarity. Truth of the higher as of the lower forms truth of passion, and truth of manners. The nature of a Macbeth is not the nature of an Othello; the speech of Achilles is not the speech of Thersites. The truth of the "Madonna di San Sisto" is not the truth of Murillo's "Beggar Girl." But artists and critics often overlook this obvious fact. Actors are especially prone to overlook it, and, in trying to be natural, sink into the familiar; though that is as unnatural as if they were to attempt to heighten the reality of the Apollo by flinging a paletot over his naked shoulders. It is this error into which Fechter falls in Othello; he vulgarises the part in the attempt to make it natural. Instead of the heroic, grave, impassioned Moor, he represents an excitable creole of our own day.

Intellectually and physically his Hamlet so satisfies the audience, that they exclaim, "How natural!" Hamlet is fat, according to his mother's testimony; but he is also -at least in Ophelia's eyes-very handsome

"The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observed of all observers."

Fechter is lymphatic, delicate, handsome, and with his long flaxen

curls, quivering sensitive nostrils, fine eye, and sympathetic voice, perfectly represents the graceful prince. His aspect and bearing are such that the eye rests on him with delight. Our sympathies are completely secured. And as he endeavours to act, not to declaim the part, we feel that we have Hamlet the Dane before us. All those scenes which demand the qualities of an accomplished comedian, he plays to perfection. Never before have the scenes with the players, with Polonius, with Horatio, with Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, or the quieter monologues, been better played; they are touched with so cunning a grace, and a manner so natural, that our delight is extreme. We not only feel in the presence of an individual, a character, but feel that the individual is strictly consonant with our previous conception of Hamlet, and with the part assigned him in the play. The passages of emotion also are rendered with real sensibility. His delightful and sympathetic voice, and the unforced fervour of his expression, triumph over the foreigner's accent and the foreigner's mistakes in emphasis. This is really a considerable triumph; for although Fechter pronounces English very well for a Frenchman, it is certain that his accent greatly interferes with the due effect of the speeches. But the foreign accent is as nothing compared with the perpetual error of emphasis; and this surely he might overcome by diligent study, if he would consent to submit to the rigorous criticism of some English friend, who would correct him every time he errs. The sense is constantly perturbed, and sometimes violated, by this fault. Yet so great is the power of true emotion, that even this is forgotten directly he touches the feelings of the audience; and in his

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