To-morrow at dawn I with 180 men attack 7,000 men behind walls. If this letter reaches you without signature or addition it will be because I have been killed or seriously wounded. In such a case I commend to you Claire" (his wife, by birth an Englishwoman)" and my daughter."

The attack succeeded, and Garnier was able calmly to announce in a scientific letter to Colonel Yule that he was the master of Hanoi and the neighbouring provinces, and about to declare the Tong-King open to European commerce. "Here I am with a province of two million souls on my back," he wrote to a naval friend at Saigon. "Do not say to me like Sganarelle Put it down,' but come and help me. I am entreating the admiral to send you.-Tell Philastre that I have done nothing wrong, and that I was as patient with the Annamites as possible. Either they should not have sent me or I could have done nothing else but what I have done."

upon

The days flew on, and on the 21st of December, when French hopes were at their highest, a body of Chinese pirates, the Black Flags who infest the coasts of Annam, bore down Hanoi, summoned no doubt by the despairing Annamites, and attacked the citadel in which Garnier was posted. Their attack was repulsed, and Garnier made a sortie in pursuit. He was drawn into an ambuscade, his foot slipped on the uneven ground, and he fell pierced by many lances. His companions regained the citadel with difficulty, and the French force maintained itself on the defensive, while in all the districts round the tide was turning in favour of Annam, and while at home the evacuation of the place and practical abandonment of the French pretensions was being hurriedly decided upon.

It is a strange story, and the repetition of some of its incidents in the

recent disaster, which has cost the French the life of Commandant Rivière, gives it a double interest. As far as Garnier is concerned, one's feeling cannot but be one of pure loss and regret. He sacrificed, in a doubtful cause, a life which was rich in every promise of fruitful and honourable service to his country. As a politician he was often rash and fanciful; as a man of science he would probably have achieved one of the greatest reputations of the century. Two of his latest utterances strike one with a sense of pathos which leaves a sting in the memory.

"For the moment," he writes to Colonel Yule from the citadel which was to be his grave, "they ask of me to be a man of action. I am not allowed to be a student, though for some years past my tastes have been carrying me more and more towards things purely scientific."

The second is dated from Shanghai, just before he started for Saigon in obedience to Admiral Dupré's sum

mons.

"The Government of India has just let me know that I have only to express the wish and they will put at my command all the resources of which they can dispose. The success of my Tibetan enterprise interests them to the highest degree. What a pity I am not English! Then I should be an honoured and powerful man.— I feel that if I am supported IndoChina is French; but in France, alas! I am nothing but an adventurer."

Does not this last passage read like sinister motto for this French colonial movement of which we are hearing so much? Such a career as that of Francis Garnier tends to show that there is something forced and out of joint about it. The nation is not behind it, and gifts like Garnier's seem to make no way, and to lose themselves in a more or less aimless struggle.

M. A. W.

66

be

OUR actors have been very eloquent of late upon the subject of their art, both with voice and pen. Perhaps naturally, they have for the most part preferred to deal with it rather from what one may call the romantic point of view than the practical, though, remembering Mr. Boucicault's amusing lecture at the Lyceum last year, one cannot say that the latter has been altogether ignored. And either point, practical or romantic, presents such easy access to the hearer's grace" as the hearer either by temperament or by fancy is disposed! As much benefit, says Gibbon, may derived from opposition as from agreement in ideas. Certainly, there has been no lack of opposition in the various ideas that have been put about within the last year or two on this attractive subject, and the benefit we have all derived has no doubt been correspondingly great. The representatives of both schools have had a fair hearing, the representatives of the old school and the new; the one grounding its faith on the theory of heaven-born inspiration, the incommunicable spark of genius native and untrammelled; the other holding that, without a sufficient mixture of earthly training, the heavenly flight is not unlikely to end in the fate of Icarus, the fate

"Of the soil'd glory and the trailing wing."

Though it is always interesting to hear what a man has to say of a profession to which he has devoted the best years of his life, it is perhaps a question whether actors are always the best critics of their own art. Very amusing ones they often are, but not as a rule, I think, the surest or the most impartial. And after all, it is only natural that this should be so. In the first place, acting, alone of all the arts, has

no clearly defined and recognised rules; in the second, it is less the art than the artist that we admire and applaud. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician-it is their work that attracts and charms us; but of themselves-the workmen, often we know little or nothing, save their names as title-page or catalogue may have preserved them. But with the actor, the man himself, the individual is all in all;

"He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all."

"Such," says Lamb, "is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds, in a perverse manner, the actor with the character he represents. It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. Kemble. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. Siddons." While, then, that disturbing element of personality enters so largely into his art, and forms, with his admirers at any rate, so large a part of his attraction, it must be a little difficult for the actor to keep his head quite cool when he comes forward himself to play the critic. Again, no less an authority than Garrick has told us that "the greatest strokes of genius have been unknown to the actor himself, till circumstances, the warmth of the scene, has sprung the mine, as it were, as much to his surprise as to that of his audience." If this be so, clearly the actor would have a hard task who should attempt critically to

examine or explain an art which depended "for its greatest strokes of genius" on the inspiration of the moment. It might be added, too, that the actor who essays to play the critic's part while riding on the full tide of theatrical success, must necessarily concern himself mainly, if not wholly, with that particular and individual aspect of his art on which his own eyes are fixed. Now there are, I think, very few of us, whatever may be our line of business, who can claim to be quite sure and impartial critics of our own work.

No doubt some actors have left behind them important as well as amusing contributions to the study of their art. Colley Cibber, we all know, whatever his failings may have been, was an excellent critic of acting. So, too, according to Sir Walter Scott, was John Kemble; and Macready's

diaries and letters are full of sensible and thoughtful remarks on the profession which he did so much to strengthen and adorn. As a rule, however, it will, I think, be generally found that all such criticisms were the after-math of study and experience, reaped when the glow and stir of active work was over, and when the evening of life gave leisure to separate fact from fancy, to contrast the promise of morning with the actual performance of noon. It is for this reason that Mrs. Frances Kemble's criticism seems to me to have so much value, the criticism, I mean, contained in the prefatory chapter to her recently published Notes upon some of Shakespeare's Plays. With the notes themselves we need not be at present concerned; but that chapter in which she treats of the spirit, the right understanding of his true relation to the poet with which the actor should approach the interpretation of Shakespeare's work-and particularly, perhaps, now when such extravagant theories are abroad, her remarks on the actor's proper place and importance in the intellectual community, seem to me worthy of our most earnest regard.

Others, I know, apparently annoyed by her view of the present condition of our stage, which, let it be allowed, is not that of an enthusiast, have objected that Mrs. Kemble is no longer actively concerned with the art she criticises. As I have already said, this seems to me the particular condition which makes so strongly for her criticism.

"He who has watched, not shared the fight, Knows how the day has gone."

Among, but not of, us she stands, a solitary and interesting figure, leaning, from the silence of the past, an equal ear to the "exulting thunder" of the present. Its triumphs and its failures are alike impersonal to her. Amid charge and counter-charge of rival the noise of contending factions, the

theorists, she can still keep a steadfast head, and a judgment, touched a little, it may be, with memories unknown to us, but yet unswayed by individual interest, undimmed by individual caprice. The comparisons we so vainly strive to draw between ourselves and our fathers are possible to her; and though it would be expecting too much of poor human nature to ask her to find in them all the inferiority of the latter that we are so pleased to discover, it is less in actual performance than in conception and method, that, if I read her words aright, she finds inadequacy in the former.

Mrs. Kemble has been reproached with disparaging the actor's art. "That a Kemble," complains the writer of a recent article in the Quarterly Review "that a Kemble should disparage the actor's art is

1 An attempt has also been made to disparage the value of Mrs. Kemble's criticism by reminding us that they are in effect no more than a reprint of a paper contributed to the Cornhill Magazine some twenty years ago. Be it so; for my part I see no objection. They are as applicable now as then; in some respects, even more so; for if our theatre then was less serious in its designs and less fortunate than now, it also took far less upon itself than, in some quarters at any rate, it now does.

indeed strange." And yet this is what she finds to say of it :

"It requires in its professors the imagina

tion of the poet, the ear of the musician, the eye of the painter and sculptor, and over and above these, a faculty peculiar to itself, inasmuch as the actor personally fulfils and embodies his conception; his own voice is his cunningly modulated instrument; his own face the canvas whereon he portrays the various expressions of his passion; his own frame the mould in which he casts the images of beauty and majesty that fill his brain; and whereas the painter and sculptor may select, of all possible attitudes, occupations, and expressions, the most favourable to the beautiful effect they desire to produce and fix, and bid it so remain fixed for ever, the actor must live and move through a temporary existence of poetry and passion, and preserve throughout its duration, that ideal grace and dignity, of which the canvas and the marble give but a silent and motionless image."

True, she finds this also:—

"And yet it is an art that requires no study worthy of the name: it creates nothing-it perpetuates nothing; to its professors, whose personal qualifications form half their merit, is justly given the meed of personal admiration, and the reward of contemporaneous popularity is well bestowed on those whose labour consists in exciting momentary emotion. Their most persevering and successful efforts can only benefit, by a passionate pleasure of at most a few years' duration, the play-going public of their own immediate day.'

No doubt, such words as these are not quite so satisfying to some minds as would be Campbell's glorification of Mrs. Kemble's famous uncle, for ex ample, to which, indeed, when taken without their qualification, they bear no slight resemblance 1; or as it would be

1 Campbell has, perhaps, rather faded from the memories of the present generation, and it may not be amiss to quote his lines; they were written for a public meeting, held in June, 1817, on the occasion of Kemble's retirement from the stage :

"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."

to hear that "it is acting chiefly that can open to others the means of illuminating the world"; or as to be told that the great demand for acting editions of his plays is a proof how much the stage has done with the present generation to keep alive the study of Shakespeare. Yet, if this be disparagement, what, in the name of common sense, must be praise!

The desire for praise is itself a laudable desire, but the praise desired should be "in due measure and discreet." When it takes such a form

as

Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine,

And earth irradiate with a beam divine,"

One

it is only natural that some one should retaliate with Goethe's well-known saying that Shakespeare is not truly a theatre-poet at all. "he never thought of the stage; it was far too narrow for his great mind." must not, of course, take this saying quite literally. Indeed, Goethe has himself qualified it by adding that the poet's age and the existing conditions of the theatre did not make the same demands upon

him that have hampered subsequent writers. Had he been writing for the court of Madrid, like Calderon, or for the theatre of Lewis XIV., like Molière, "he would probably have adapted himself to a severer theatrical form." Then he concludes: "This is by no means to be regretted, for what Shakespeare has lost as a theatrical poet, he has gained as a poet in general."

2

But, we are told, Goethe cannot on any intelligible law of evidence be set up as a supreme judge of the dramatic exposition of a poet whose greatest interpreters he never saw "___ a disqualification which is at least shared by those of the present generation who think differently from Goethe. Coleridge, we are reminded, "was in a much better position than Goethe to

2 "Shakespeare on the Stage and in the Study," by Henry Irving. Good Words, January, 1833.

speak judicially, and he said that seeing Edmund Kean act was 'like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.' True, he did say so; but he said something else as well; he said, "his rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial" (the rapid rise and fall, that is, that gave the idea of the lightning flash), "though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable." When Coleridge's wellknown words are thus read with their context, which they never, or hardly ever, are, their true significance is plain enough; especially when we add to them the next sentence, "I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello." Coleridge did not, that is to say, find in Kean that distinction which a famous critic of our own day has found in Mr. Irving; though, of course, the distinction of a Benedict is a very different thing from the distinction of an Othello, as the distinction of a D'Orsay would be from the distinction of a Byron, the distinction of a Chesterfield from the distinction of a Swift.

However, as we are to deal only with the eye-witnesses of these great interpreters, we will not stop at Coleridge. Let us take another; let us take Charles Lamb, surely the last of men to disparage the actor's work. "It may seem a paradox," he says, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguishing excellence is a reason why they should be so.

"The

There is so much in them which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye and tone and gesture have nothing to do." Again, let us take Hazlitt, another eyewitness, and a very acute and appreciative critic of theatrical work. representing," he says, "the very finest of them [Shakespeare's plays] on the stage, is, we apprehend, an abuse of the genius of the poet; and even in those of a second-rate class, the quantity of sentiment and imagery

We

greatly outweighs the immediate impression of the situation and the story. It is only the pantomime part of tragedy, the exhibition of immediate and physical distress, that which gives the greatest opportunity for inexpressible dumb show and noise,' which is sure to tell, and tell completely on the stage. All the rest, all that appeals to our profounder feelings, to reflection and imagination -all that affects us most deeply in our closets, and, in fact, constitutes the glory of Shakespeare is little else than an interruption and a drag on the business of the stage. do not mean to say that there is less knowledge or display of mere stage effect in Shakespeare than in other writers, but that there is much greater knowledge and display of other things, which divide the attention with it, and to which it is not possible to give an equal force in the representation. Perhaps it would have been as well for the advocates of the theatrical Shakespeare to have remained content with the judgment of Goethe, to have been less solicitous for more "judicial" evidence. "What hast thou done unto me? I took thee to curse mine enemies, and behold thou has blessed them altogether!"

To put the poet above the actor, to maintain that a Shakespeare is "still better than our very best" Garrick, in no way, as some seem to think, entails any depreciation of the latter. We have seen that the great critics who lived and wrote in the days of the "greatest interpreters" of the Shakesperian drama would have none of the twinship claimed for the actor by Garrick's panegyrist, while at the same time delighting to give the latter in full measure all the praise that was rightly his. And Goethe, how fond he was of the theatre and all its works, surely every one must know, though 'tis true he never let his fondness run away with his judgment, as indeed was not his wont in any matter. Yet, as he seems in certain quarters to be looked upon