prosper in. The actor need not now eat out his heart with chagrin that his patient merit has to suffer whips and scorns on his profession's account. Society not only welcomes him, but holds him much in favor, for in these times the famous player has the advantage that attends preferment after revolution. He occupies a place in which he yet feels new, and of which he speaks mysteriously, and in which he is regarded with some curiosity. Even Mr. Irving could not repress a sort of chuckle from his lecture before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh. Before long all this reserve and strangeness will have disappeared, and the apologist of the theatre will be as rare a bird as the theatrical "reformer," described as one who combines with intellectual superciliousness a timidity as to moral contamination. Mr. Irving finds the stage as it is both elevating and educating, a social benefactor and benefit to the individual, notwithstanding its sins of omission and of commission; and I think no sociologist is prepared to dispute him. Indeed, the old warfare against the stage is about ended, or, if pursued, is so to the disadvantage of those who wage it; of course I mean indiscriminate warfare, battle against the theatre.
Not less important than the first, but more technical and of immediate interest to the limited number, is Mr. Irving's lecture on the Art of Acting. He finds as remarkable improvement in that regard as in the moral and social status of the theatre; and particularly commends the modern adoption of Hamlet's advice to the players as the rule and guide of action. Artifice is more and more dispelled, and the decrees of art become the utterance of nature. We learned sometime ago from his friendly rejoinders to Coquelin that Mr. Irving has no sympathy with the brilliant and specious Diderot's idea that the actor must be insensible to the emotions he simulates. It seems impossible there should be any great acting without profound sensibility, though it is the business of the artist to control his feelings within conscious bounds; careful not to overstep the modesty of nature by letting passion get the better of judgment. Not to follow too far the interesting lead of Mr. Irving's delightful volume and valuable addition to stage literature, this quotation, which presents a summary of the actor's art, will serve also as an epitome of the three especially æsthetic lectures:
"It is necessary to this art that the mind should have, as it were, a double consciousness, in which all the emotions proper to the occasion may have full swing, while the actor is all the time on the alert for every detail of his method. It may be that his playing will be more spirited one night than another. But the actor who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art must have a greater power over his audiences than the passionless actor who gives a most artistic simulation of the emotions he never experiences."
Recent Fiction.[1]
For a good story, that pretends to be nothing more than a story, that impels to no soul-searchings, and that is instructive only in the mildest way, the season has brought us nothing better than "The Refugees." Dr. Doyle's work usually has a way of suggesting some one of the masters of fiction with "Micah Clarke" and "The White Company" the suggestion was of Scott, while with the Sherlock Holmes series it was only of Gaboriau,—and the Franco-American romance now before us tempts to characterization of its writer as a Dumas doublé de Cooper. Taking the revocation of the Edict of Nantes as his central episode, Dr. Doyle seeks (not in vain) to interest us in the fortunes of a Huguenot family group; and his story divides neatly into two parts, one of which, quite as good as "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne," takes us to the court of "le Roi Soleil," while the other, no less thrilling than "The Last of the Mohicans," transports us to the wilds of the New World, and gives us some of the best Indian fighting to be found in books. Adventure is piled upon adventure with startling swiftness of succession; but we soon learn that the author has a way for his hero out of the difficulties he encounters, however desperate, and we can only feign alarm at the critical moments. We must say that the writer's Americans (not Indians) are a little
- ↑ The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents. By A. Conan Doyle. New York: Harper & Brothers. Pietro Ghisleri. By F. Marion Crawford. New York: Macmillan & Co. From Out of the Past. By Emily Howland Hoppin. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. John Paget. By Sarah Barnwell Elliott. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Broadoaks. By M. G. McClelland. St. Paul: The Price-McGill Co. The Love Affairs of an Old Maid. By Lilian Bell. New York: Harper & Brothers. Old Kaskaskia. By Mary Hartwell Catherwood. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Toppleton's Client; or, A Spirit in Exile. By John Kendrick Bangs. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co. Many Inventions. By Rudyard Kipling. New York: D. Appleton & Co. The Story of a Story, and Other Stories. By Brander Matthews. New York: Harper & Brothers. Mr. Tommy Dove, and Other Stories. By Margaret Deland. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Day and Night Stories: Second Series. By T. R. Sullivan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
