Great acting in English is of a rarity so unparalleled that it requires some eourage to proclaim it as a thing here actually in our midst. We have, at the present moment, no great native acting. We have actors and actresses of many useful and picturesque kinds of talent; one actress, an exception to every rule in whom a rare and wandering genius comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. But we have not in our whole island two actors capable of giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of Shakespeare, or indeed of rendering any form of poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who have come to us from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern. The coming of such marvellous guests into our midst is not a matter to be noted hastily, with the puzzled indifference of the journalist, in our daily papers. Its importance has to be affirmed, and not at all for the benefit of the public, which may be allowed to amuse itself after its own lik ing, but in mere honor towards greatness in art, which is the personal concern of those able to recognize it, and which it is their condemnation to overlook.

Let us admit then that the mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have lost on our stage, and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare.

It is in their rendering of Romeo and Juliet and of Hamlet that these two actors have shown themselves at their greatest. And first of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they give to each play as a whole, by their way of setting it in action. I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should give one the same kind of impression as

when one is assisting at "a solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally different from that of Beethoven, and Romeo and Juliet is a suite, Hamlet a symphony. To act either of these plays, with whatever qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music was unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice to the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented for its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for Shakespeare's sake, not for the actor-manager's.

And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance of Romeo and Juliet I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well as the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to be acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the rhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And that is because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so beautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and an ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet. In Hamlet I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer covering of wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not less to be honored than any man on earth. I have seen

romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him living, a gentleman as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life. And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before one's eyes like a religious service.

How is it that we get from the acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves; the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental, everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never controlled. Intention without the power of achieve. ment is almost as lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now here are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point. There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as these two American actors can. It is in this preliminary technique, this power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument, that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can give us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful and subtle passage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it sonorously, as rhetoric; and another eagerly, as passionate speech; but no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts, which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts his loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at Mr. Sothern when he gives the soliloquy, "To be or

not to be," which we are accustomed to hear spoken to the public in one or another of many rhetorical manners. Mr. Sothern's Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitive reflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortable before setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear his thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, and just so casually. To render this on the stage requires, first, an understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producing by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of those words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely mastered those two first requirements of acting? No one, now acting in English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.

So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted; only, in England, we cannot. These once granted, the individual work of the actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal. And I would say that what these two players do is to give us, not the impression of fine imitations, but the impression of real people, who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking merely the ⚫ language of their own hearts. They give us Hamlet or Juliet in the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles, picturesque glimpses, and with what gaps between! gaps not even realized by the actor in his search for effect. The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the ingénue, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious tragic child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to us, outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern's Romeo has an exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover's, and is alive. But

Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet, she is Juliet. I would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germans yet.". Yet what a Hamlet! how, majestical, how simple, how much a poet and a gentleman! To what depth he suffers, how magnificently he interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the universe! We know other Hamlets for their stride, their grandiloquent pathos; but this Hamlet for the intellect which is his destruction.

Miss Marlowe's Ophelia is not perhaps so great a triumph as her Juliet, and merely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of some beautiful bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered among all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple poetry it makes of madness. It is tenderly troubling, never without "favor and prettiness"; it is, again, no decorative madness, but the spoiled brain of this particular woman, who has been so easily swayed from Hamlet to Polonius, willess, but with the desire to be loved and to be kind. She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet toward her a credible thing.

Miss Marlowe has played in London another Shakespearean part, that of Viola in Twelfth Night, which I have not seen. But I have seen her in a play which has succeeded with London audiences better than Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called When Knighthood was in Flower, and here too I seemed to discern a lesson for the English stage. Even through the silly disguises of this inconceivable production, which pleased innocent London as it had pleased indifferent New York, one felt a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool's fabric of the The Monthly Review.

melodrama, which set her far above our steady practitioners in the same art of sinking. And, above all, a sense of parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She was a live thing, defiantly and gaily conscious of every absurdity with which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.

The personal appeal of Mr. Sothern and of Miss Marlowe is very different. In his manner of receiving applause there is something almost resentful, as if, being satisfied to do what he chooses to do, and in his own way, he were indifferent to the opinion of others.

It

is not the actor's attitude, but what a relief from the general subservience of that attitude! In Miss Marlowe there is something so young, warm and engaging, a way of giving herself wholly to the pleasure of pleasing, to which the footlights are scarcely a barrier. She does not startle you with sudden touches of genius, she fills and gladdens you with a sense of the single human being whom she is representing. And there is her strange beauty, in which the mind and the senses have an equal part, and which is full of savor and grace, alive to the finger-tips. With these personal qualities I am here scarcely concerned. What I want to emphasize is the particular kind of lesson which this acting, so essentially English, though it comes to us as if set free by America, should have for all who are at all seriously considering the lamentable condition of our stage in the present day. We have nothing like it in England, nothing on the same level, no such honesty and capacity of art, no such worthy results. Are we capable of realizing the difference? If not, Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern will have come to England in vain.

Arthur Symons.

I wonder whether it is possible to write dispassionately on any Irish question? For an Irishman of course it is impossible; passionate conviction is his birthright, and there is no more prejudiced man on the face of the globe. It is perhaps a virtue in a time of political and religious flabbiness. The Irishman on these questions is at least not flabby. And when I say "these questions," I really mean all questions, for there is nothing that I know of in Ireland that is not connected with religion or politics in some mysterious manner, with the result that it cannot be discussed without generating heat. The Language Question is a case in point. Listening to Unionists, you would imagine that there was not a possible base motive or underhand trick to which the leaders of the Gaelic League would refuse to stoop. The most casual interest in the Irish tongue is the manifest Mark of the Beast, and an Irish name on a farm-cart is proof irrefragable of political conspiracy. The Nationalists, I must admit, are less preposterously illogical; but they believe that they are winning, and so they can afford to moderate their language, sometimes. Yet they too detect the meanest motives and the most sinister designs in the Unionists who deride the new Irish labels at the corners of the streets. Everything in Ireland is a "job" if you happen to belong to the unsuccessful side. If you are the one to succeed, then naturally it is not a "job." Detachment is not a characteristic of the Irish judgment. There are many reasons to account for this fact but that it is a fact is indisputable. Is it possible even for an Englishman who has lived long in Ireland to form a detached and unprejudiced judgment on such a question as the revival of the

Irish language? I am not prepared to say that it is. I will not quote the old hackneyed phrase, but there is no doubt that we English do become Hibernicised, often much to our benefit. Living in a land where battle is the breath of life and every question is debated red-hot, our chilly blood runs faster and warmer (I need scarcely say this is not a physiological treatise), and we begin to feel like fighting various opinions which in England we should discuss in a purely academic spirit. Still, an Englishman has this in his favor, that his own countrymen are less likely to suspect him of Irish or Nationalist prejudices, and may believe that he can look at these matters with some degree of coolness. It is disagreeable to write one's own credentials, but if my view of the present Battle of the Books in Ireland is to have any value at all, it is essential that my readers should understand clearly where I stand. As an Englishman, a Unionist, and an irreclaimable Tory, I may surely be acquitted of any undue leaning to political nationalism in the Home Ruler's sense. Having been in the society both of extreme Unionistsand there is no Tory to be compared in intensity with the Irish Tory-and of Nationalists of various shades of opinion, I may pretend to some acquaintance with the views of both sides. And as a student of Irish, and one not ignorant of other languages, I may perhaps be able to form a fair judgment of the literary and linguistic aspects of the question. The last thing a man discovers is his personal equation of prejudice and error, and I claim no immunity from the universal defect; but I have tried to get rid of prejudice, and I think my diverse associations in Ireland have assisted me in the endeavor.

I doubt whether it is realized in Eng. land how seriously this question of the Irish language is taken in Ireland. You read in the parliamentary reports question after question about the use of the language, its place in the schools, and so on; but the impression you are apt to get is that a great deal of fuss is being made because the magistrates fined a farmer for putting his name in Gaelic on his cart. The concrete trifling detail always commands the attention of the newspaper-reader at the expense of the general principle. The average man will say, quite accurately, that English is the statutory language of Ireland, and the farmer was legally bound to use it on his cart. Further, he will observe that few people in Ireland speak, still less read, Gaelic-though, as a matter of fact, the character is quite as easy to decipher as the illuminated texts in English churches-and will ask what is the use of learning, teaching, or using a language which has apparently almost died out of its own accord. This might have been approximately true twenty or even ten years ago, but no one who has lived in Ireland of late is under any illusion about the vitality of Gaelic. Whatever it was ten years ago, it is very much alive now. One might fill pages with statistics, but they are needless. Any one who knows Ireland is fully aware that at this moment there is no question which is exciting the intelligence of the people more than this question of the language. You see Gaelic inscriptions over the shops, Gaelic on the street labels, Gaelic in advertisements, a Gaelic column in newspapers-even a marriage announcement in Gaelic type in the Unionist Irish Times, to the amazed horror of its constant readers. Gaelic is taught in thousands of elementary schools, and will be taught in all, for the Roman Catholic clergy have taken it under their wing. The Gaelic League is everywhere, and on "Language Day" in Dublin, when

the disciples of the Irish tongue march in their thousands with Gaelic banners and strange devices, the main streets at some points are almost impassable. Gaelic is being made a test for local appointments, and very soon the man who does not know Irish will have a poor chance of any office in the gift of local councils and boards of guardians in many if not most parts of Ireland.

He

The Irish Unionist does not minimize these facts, which meet him on every side. He views them with dismay and detestation; and quite naturally, for, since he is determined not to learn Irish, he sees various outlets for his talents absolutely closed to him. does not blink the danger, and he fights it à outrance. His opposition is founded on the primitive instinct of self-preservation, and no one must blame him for it. One can only blame him for not disarming the attack by joining it. There is not the slightest reason why Unionists and Protestants should not join the Gaelic League, or why they should not become Irish scholars as good as Nationalists and Catholics. The weapon which they believe is pointed at them they can grasp by the hilt. Why will they reject their own salvation? Because-and I believe this to be nearly the universal opinion of Irish Unionists-they believe the Gaelic League and the language movement to be merely insidious agents in the struggle for Home Rule. That is undoubtedly at the bottom of the Unionist opposition to everything that smacks of Gaelic. It is believed to be another nail in the coffin of the Union.

Now this is an argument that cannot be lightly brushed aside by any one who believes that the Union is necessary to Great Britain and, on the whole, beneficial to Ireland. If it were true that the Gaelic League is essentially a political agency, and the revival of the Irish language merely a side-wind to blow away all connection with Eng