will, keeping up bad blood and rendering welldisposed, humane, but critically placed men their own enemies and the stumbling-blocks to civilisation and to the spread of glad tidings from heaven.

A writer in the Literary World brought against Mrs. Stowe the charge of plagiarism, pointing out and proving that the weakest part of Uncle Tom's Cabin had been borrowed from Mrs. Sherwood, and that little Eva was unquestionably nothing more than an adaptation of the little Henry of the English lady.

The London Christian Observer published a long article in its October, 1852, number, in which, after much moralising, it smugly concludes:

On the whole we venture to hope that Uncle Tom's Cabin is destined to achieve a great work in the world. We are by no means among the number who despair of great and good things among our trans-Atlantic relations. . . . Good English blood runs in the veins of a large proportion of the population; and this will at length force its way to their hearts.

The Prospective Review of London, in an article published in its number for November, 1852, finds the prominent excellence of the book to be its moderation.

From some previous experience in works of a similar tendency, from a knowledge of the exciting nature of the subject, and in some degree, too, if we may venture to say so, from the sex of the authoress, we had prepared ourselves for a dash of impassioned advocacy, for horrors heaped upon horrors, fiends in human shape gibbering on every page, the constant surging of the lash, the frequent hiss of the branding iron, and influenced by a natural dislike to more horrors than must perforce be encountered in daily life, and the consciousness that our personal indignation against slavery

needed no such stirring up, we had resolved to rank ourselves among the few who had not read Uncle Tom's Cabin. We need hardly say how agreeably we were disappointed when at last we were induced to take up the book.

Blackwood's Magazine, in a review printed in October, 1853, appraises Uncle Tom's Cabin as unquestionably a remarkable book.

Upon the whole we are not surprised at its prodigious success even as a mere literary performance, but whether it will have any direct effect upon the dreadful institution at which it is aimed may be regarded as problematical. Of one thing we are persuaded, that its author, as she has displayed in this work undoubted genius, in some respects of a higher order than any American predecessor or contemporary, is also a woman of unaffected and profound piety, and an ardent friend of the unhappy black. Every word in her pages issues glistening and warm from the mint of woman's love and sympathy, refined and purified by Christianity. We never saw in any other work so many and such sudden irresistible appeals to the reader's heart, appeals which, moreover, only a wife and a mother could make. Mrs. Stowe is unquestionably a woman of genius.

. . It is evident that the writings of one English author at least of the present day have made a deep impression on Mrs. Stowe. This is Mr. Dickens, with whom indeed she has much in common, but he must not attribute it to mere gallantry if we express our opinion that there are parts of Uncle Tom's Cabin which he can never surpass, which he never has surpassed. . . . It occurs to us that had Mr. Dickens passed his life among the same scenes as Mrs. Stowe, making allowance for certain special circumstances affecting the latter, he would have produced a work very similar in both its faults and excellencies to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Arthur Bartlett Maurice.

I.

When we stand upon the portal of a new century a glance back may serve to reassure us for a gaze forward; although we must acknowledge that in the nineteenth century, as indeed in the eighteenth also, the drama did not pass through a splendid period of expansion such as made glorious its history in the seventeenth century. We are forced to remark that in the course of the last two hundred years the drama had lost its literary supremacy, partly as a result of its own enfeeblement, and partly in consequence of the overwhelming competition of prosefiction, which was able to perform in the nineteenth century even more than it had promised in the eighteenth.

But we are encouraged to note that a score of years before the century drew to an end the novel was beginning to show signs of slackening energy, while the play was apparently again gathering strength for a sharper rivalry. In German and in English, in Italian and in Spanish, young writers of ardent ambition were mastering the methods of the theatre and were recognising in the drama the form in which they could best express themselves and in which they could body forth most satisfactorily their own vision of life, with its trials, its ironies, and its problems. Even in French, in which language the drama had flourished most abundantly during the middle of the century only to languish a little toward the end, the final years were to be illumined by the triumphs of a young poet, possessed of a delightful fantasy and initiated into every secret of stagecraft. And afar in the Scandinavian land, which seems so remote to most of us, there still towered the stern figure of the powerful playwright whose stimulating influence had been felt in the dramatic literature of every modern language.

Thus we catch a glimpse of one of the most striking characteristics of the modern theatre-its extraordinary cosmopolitanism which made possible the performance of Cyrano de Bergerac and of the Doll's House in every quarter of the globe. Not only can we find French and German plays acted frequently in New

York, but we are glad to record that the English-speaking stage was again exporting its products, and that Mr. Bronson Howard's Saratoga was performed in Berlin, Mr. Gillette's Secret Service in Paris, and Mr. Pinero's Second Mrs. Tanqueray in Rome. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the playgoers of New York had been permitted to see an English play, Hamlet, acted by a French company, a German play, Magda, acted by an Italian company, and a Russian play, the Power of Darkness, acted by a German company.

An educated man to-day is more than a native of his own country: he is also a citizen of the world, just as the educated man was in the Middle Ages when all Europe was governed by the Church of Rome and by the Holy Roman Empire, and when all men of learning wrote in Latin and studied the same Roman law. The spread of instruction, the ability to understand other languages than the native tongue, and the intelligent curiosity of the more cultivated public, have brought about a unity in modern literature like that which was visible in medieval literature before the Renascence came and before the population of Europe was segregated into separate peoples, hostile and intolerant. We have not let go the idea of nationality, and indeed we cherish it unceasingly; but we are not now afraid to see the idea of cosmopolitanism grafted on it.

In the Middle Ages the drama was almost the same everywhere; and a French mystery was always very like an English mystery, just as an Italian sacred representation was very similar to a Spanish sacramental act. So at the beginning of the twentieth century the forms of the arama are almost identical throughout the civilised world. In structure there is little difference nowadays between an English play and a Spanish-far less than there was when John Webster and Lope de Vega were almost simultaneously putting upon the stage the pitiful story of the sad Duchess of Malfi. There is a flavour of the soil about the Doll's House, about Magda, and about the Second Mrs. Tanqueray; the first is unmistakably Scandinavian, the second is indubitably Teutonic, and the third is frankly Brit

ish; but in form there is little to distinguish them from one another—just as there is nothing in the structure of any one of them to differentiate it from Le Gendre de M. Poirier, or from the Froufrou, written in French during the same half century.

II.

The cosmopolitanism of our civilisation at the beginning of the twentieth century, the eagerness of artists of every nationality to profit by what they can learn from their fellow-craftsmen in other capitals, the widespread international borrowing-these are not the sole causes of the similarity of structure observable in the pieces of the chief living playwrights of to-day. There is another reason to be detected by extending our glance into the past history of the drama and piercing beyond the Middle Ages into antiquity. If we do this we cannot fail to see that this likeness of the English play and the German play to the French play is due in part to the fact that in all the modern languages the drama has reached an advanced period of its evolution, when it has definitely specialised itself and when it has been able to disentangle itself from the other and nondramatic elements with which it was perforce commingled in the more primitive periods.

The history of the drama is the long record of the effort of the dramatist to get hold of the essentially dramatic and to cast out everything else. The essence of the drama is a representation of a human will exerting itself against an opposing force; and the playwright has ever been seeking the means of presenting his conflict without admixture of anything else. The tragedy of the Greeks, elaborated out of rustic song and dance, retained to the end the evidences of its origin, not only in the lyrics of the chorus but in their vocal music and in their sculpturesque attitudes. The drama of the Elizabethans, descended directly from the mysteries and moralities of the Middle Ages, was often prosily didactic, one character being permitted to discourse at undue length, in much the same fashion as the mediæval expositor, and another being allowed to deliver a bravura passage, lyric or rhetorical, not unlike the tenor solo of Italian opera, fre

quently delightful in itself but always undramatic.

The stage of the Elizabethan theatre was sometimes in the course of a single play made to serve as a pulpit for a sermon, a platform for a lecture, and a singing-gallery for a ballad; and it would be easy enough to single out scores of passages, even in Shakespeare, which exist for their own sake and which are not integral to the play wherein they are embedded. But Shakespeare could when he chose anticipate the more modern swiftness and singleness of purpose; and sometimes when he was inspired by his theme, as in Macbeth and Othello, he put all his strength in the depicting of the central struggle which was at the heart of his play. He excluded all accidental and adventitious superfluities, of which the most of his fellow-playwrights never thought of depriving themselves. There is also to be remarked in the Elizabethan plays generally a narrative freedom which is epic rather than dramatic. So in the plays written under Louis XIV. there is to be observed, more especially in Corneille's tragedies, an oratorical tendency, a proneness to formal argument, which is equally aside from the truly dramatic.

But this confusion is not peculiar to the drama and it is to be studied in all the other arts also. As M. Émile Faguet has put it clearly, "literatures always begin with works in which the various species are either fused or confused, depending on the genius of the authors; they always continue with works in which the distinction of species is observed; and they always end with works which embrace only the half or the quarter or the tenth of a single species." In other words, there is always increasing differentiation; there is an advance from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous; and M. Faguet gives as a typical example the simplification of Greek comedy. He asserts that the lyrical-burlesque of Aristophanes was more or less a medley of every possible species-"true comedy, farce, pantomime, opéra-bouffe, ballet, fairy spectacle, political satire, literary satire;" and yet, in the course of less than a century, little by little, whatever did not belong strictly to pure comedy was eliminated. The chorus was cast aside, taking with it the opera, the ballet, the fairy

spectacle: and with the departure of the parabasis personal satire went also, taking eloquence with it. So the lyrical burlesque of Aristophanes was slowly simplified into the comic drama of Menander, which is but "the witty and delicate depicting of average manners." Latin comedy followed Greek comedy slavishly; but French comedy, although it inherited the classic traditions, still further differentiated itself into subspecies, Molière, for example, showing how pure comedy could sustain itself without the aid of farce.

The simplification of the primitive play, which was carelessly comprehensive in its scope, has been the result of a steadily increasing artistic sense. It is due chiefly to the growth of a critical temper which is no longer content to enjoy unthinkingly and which is educating itself to find pleasure in the purity of type. This more delicate appreciation of æsthetic propriety is likely to be gratified only in the higher efforts of the dramatist, in those plays which plainly aspire to be judged also as literature. We need not look for anything of the sort in the more boisterous popular pieces which make no pretence to literary merit. In sensational melodrama, for example, we are none of us shocked by the commingling of farce and tragedy; and in operetta we are not even surprised by the admixture of lyric sentimentality and horse-play fun-making. But the more literary a play may be, the more elevated its quality, the more carefully we expect it to avoid incongruity and to conform to the type of its species.

It seems now as though the unliterary plays, like melodramas and operettas, would always owe some portion of their popularity to sheer spectacle, to extraneeous allurements devised to tickle the ears or to glut the eyes of the unthinking populace. But it is evident also that the critical spirit of the more cultivated playgoers is now inclined to resent the inclusion in the literary drama of anything foreign to the main theme, whether this extraneous matter is didactic or lyric, rhe torical or oratorical. They prefer that the stage should not be a platform or a pulpit. In Athens under Pericles, and in London under Elizabeth, the poets who wrote plays were addressing audiences which had not read the newspapers and which

might welcome instruction nowadays needless. needless. The impatient playgoers of our own time can see no reason why they also should not profit by the invention of printing; and they are quick to resent any digression from the straight path of the plot. They are frankly annoyed when the author ventures to halt the action that he may deliver a sermon, an oration, or a lecture, that he may declaim a descriptive report or an editorial article. They have not come to the theatre to be instructed, but to be delighted by the specific pleasure that only the theatre can give.

III.

This elimination from our latter-day stage-plays of all the non-dramatic elements which are so abundant in the earlier periods of the drama has been accompanied, and indeed greatly aided, by certain striking changes in the physical conditions of performance, and, more especially, in the shape and size and circumstances of the theatre itself. The modern playhouse is as unlike as possible, not only to the spacious Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, with its many thousand spectators seated along the curving hillside, but also to the Globe Theatre and its contemporary rivals in London and in Madrid, which which were only unroofed courtyards.

The plays of Sophocles were performed outdoors, where the wind from the Ægean Sea might flutter the robes of the actors; and the plays of Shakespeare and of Calderon were performed in buildings open to the sky, so that a sudden rain-storm might interfere sadly with the telling of the tale. The English and the Spanish playwrights were like the Greek in that they all had to depend on the daylight. The pieces of Molière were performed by candle-light in a weather-tight hall and on a stage decked with the actual scenery, which had been lacking in London and Madrid, as well as in Athens: and this is one reason why Molière was able to perfect the outward form of the modern play. The comedies of Sheridan and of Beaumarchais were produced originally in theatres externally similar to ours of to-day, but huge in size, villainously ill-lighted with oil lamps, and having a stage the curve of which projected far beyond the proscenium arch. It was