illusion-stage. M. Antoine, when he played La Mort du 'Duc d'Enghien' in London a few years ago, turned his back upon the audience throughout a long scene. Perhaps the best indirect evidence that a play was naturally assumed to be a piece of rhetoric, and that acting was identical with spouting, is supplied by Miss Austen. When the private theatricals at Mansfield Park were afoot, Tom Bertram asserted of his father that

'for anything of the acting, spouting, reciting kind, I think he has always a decided taste. I am sure he encouraged it in us as boys. How many a time have we mourned over the dead body of Julius Cæsar, and to be'd, and not to be'd, in this very room, for his amusement! And I am sure, my name was Norval, every evening of my life through our Christmas holidays.'

All that Mr. Yates, another of the amateurs, demanded from a part, we are told, was 'good ranting ground,' and his great objection to one character was that there was not a tolerable speech in the whole.' This remark, curiously enough, gets repeated almost word for word by the oldfashioned tragedian in Mr. Pinero's 'Trelawny of the Wells,' who objects to a new piece that there isn't a speech-not 'what you could call a real speech-in it.'

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Gradually the platform drama sank into the inanimate or semi-animate condition of a survival.' The sham Elizabethanisms which passed for tragedy were beginning to pall. Thomas Lovell Beddoes called the drama of his time ' haunted ruin,' and advocated the policy of 'a clean slate.' 'Say what you will,' he wrote, I am convinced the man 'who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling 'fellow--no reviver even, however good. These re-anima'tions are vampire cold. With the greatest reverence ' for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think we had 'better beget than revive.' The works of Talfourd and Sheridan Knowles-nay, even 'Money' and 'The Lady of 'Lyons' were rhetorical plays, and are now, indeed, vampire cold.' One of the latest efforts to keep the old art alive was 'The Patrician's Daughter' of Westland Marston (1842), which aimed at establishing the principle ' of characters talking poetically in plain dress'-a principle which resulted in the description of a marriage settlement by a family solicitor as

'the accustomed deed

Determining the rights and property
Of such as stand affianced.'

When some years later one of the last of the rhetorical actors quitted the stage, Tennyson addressed a sonnet to Macready, moral, grave, sublime,' and in the last epithet hit off the ideal of platform tragedy. Rhetorical comedy had its sublimities 6 too. In Dion Boucicault's 'London 'Assurance' (1841) Grace Harkaway talks as no young lady ever talked in 1841, or, we may be sure, in any other year, but as players were expected to talk in the platform period of drama :

'I love to watch the first tear that glistens in the opening eye of morning, the silent song that flowers breathe, the thrilling choir of the woodland minstrels, to which the modest brook trickles applause; these, swelling out the sweetest chord of sweet creation's matins, seem to pour some soft and merry tale into the daylight's ear, as if the waking world had dreamed a happy thing, and now smiled o er the telling of it.'

Then there is Lady Gay Spanker's description of the hunt and its emotions:

'Time then appears as young as love, and plumes as swift a wing. Then I love the world, myself, and every living thing-a jocund soul cries out for very glee, as it would wish that creation had but one mouth that I might kiss it.'

These, and such as these, were the 'real speeches' to which Mr. Pinero's broken-down actor referred.

Surely here is ample evidence that down to the very middle of the last century the modern English drama, the drama as we know it to-day, had not come into being. From the reign of Queen Elizabeth right into the reign of Queen Victoria there had been a continuous tradition of a stagetechnique which is not ours. It was a technique, as has been seen, conditioned by the material arrangements of the playhouse, and chiefly by the situation of the stage with respect to the audience. The history of the gradual modification of that technique is the history of the gradual withdrawal of the stage from the pit to the curtain line. Here, then, is another of the many cases in which art has been shaped less by its own inherent needs than by external causes, economic and social. For it was the pressure of population that step by step forced the stage back into its present place-changed it from a platform into the lower plane of a framed picture. While the number of London theatres was strictly limited by privilege, the number of people desiring to frequent them steadily increased. Rich, as we have seen, in Cibber's time, tried to meet the

increasing demand by contracting Drury Lane stage in order to expand the pit. But this measure was insufficient, and every time Drury Lane was burnt down it rose from its ashes more vast than before, until the younger Colman declared that a semaphore was needed to signal the actions of the players to the occupants of the topmost gallery. The result was twofold: the shrinking of the stage made it as absurd to retain the old rhetorical methods of the platform drama as the enlargement of the house itself made it impossible to abandon them. In such conditions no new drama could be born. That was not possible until the privilege of the 'patent houses' was abolished, and theatres could be built of reasonable size and in sufficient numbers to satisfy the popular demand. The necessary change was effected by the Theatres Regulation Act of 1843, which established free trade in drama. In addition to freedom, the change meant specialisation. A patent house had been justly called by Charles Mathews a huge theatrical omnibus.' When Macready took over Covent Garden in 1837, he had to provide a company for tragedy, another for comedy, a third for opera, to say nothing of a staff of pantomimists. Now every manager was free to form a repertory suited to his house and the talents of his players. The stage was in the picture-frame, rhetoric an anachronism, and the natural action and talk of actual life a possibility. From this moment the birth of the modern drama in England was only a question of time.

In what way and to what extent the drama is a 'function' of the stage on which it is played should now be clear. The transformation of the old drama of rhetoric into the modern drama of illusion is the artistic outcome of a mechanical transformation-the transformation of the platform-stage into the picture-stage. This process of evolution is, of course, not peculiar to England. Throughout Western Europe it has been the same story-the platform superseded by the picture, theatrical monopoly superseded by free trade, rhetoric superseded by illusion. The only foreign theatre, however, with which we need concern ourselves is the French, for that is the only foreign theatre which has exercised a continuous and vital influence upon our own. It is a noteworthy fact that, whatever other differences there may have been between the French and English stages, there has been next to no difference in the particulars which we have been considering. It is sufficient to say that down to 1759 spectators lined both sides of the Parisian stage,

being actually seated upon it, and that, placed in boxes, they continued to line it until the eighteenth century had come to a close. A well-known drawing by Moreau le Jeune, illustrating the crowning of Voltaire's bust at the Théâtre Français in 1778, shows these side-boxes and shows, too, how far the stage projected as a platform into the auditorium. When, then, did the picture-stage make its appearance in France? A casual entry in the 'Journal des Goncourt,' curiously enough, supplies the answer :

'Dimanche, 31 Mars, 1861.-Déjeuner chez Flaubert avec Sari et Laugier, et conversation toute spéciale sur le théâtre. . . . Ce n'est que depuis ce siècle que les acteurs cherchent en leurs silhouettes l'effet tableau: ainsi Paulin Ménier montrera au public des effets de dos pris aux dessins de Gavarni; ainsi Rouvière apportera à la scène les poses tordues et les épilepsies de mains, des lithographies du Faust de Delacroix.'

It is piquant to find a French actor deliberately essaying those very 'effets de dos' for which, as we saw, the amateur in Miss Ferrier's Patronage' was ridiculed. With the 'effet tableau' the modern French drama has arrived.

It arrived a little in advance of our own, and it is not, we think, very difficult to see why. For one reason, theatrical 'privilege'-we have already shown the relation between that and the rhetorical drama-was established earlier on the other side of the Channel than on this. Article I of a decree of the National Assembly, dated November 19, 1791, runs as follows:-Tout citoyen pourra élever un théâtre 'public, et y faire représenter des pièces de tous les genres.' It is true that monopoly was restored by an imperial decree of 1807, and that France had to wait for the definitive establishment of free trade in drama until 1864. But the point is that, decrees or no decrees, for full fifty years before theatres began to multiply in London they were numerous in Paris, and their number steadily increased.* A much more important reason, however, for French priority in modern drama is, we believe, to be found not in the history of French institutions, but in the mental constitution of the French race. It is a race with a peculiar turn for logic; and even when the drama of both countries was acted upon a platform-stage this peculiarity of the French gave a symmetry of structure and a progressiveness of develope

Eleven in 1791, eighteen in 1829, twenty-one in 1833. See, on the whole question, Pougin, 'Dictionnaire du Théâtre,' 1885, art. 'Liberté des Théâtres.'

ment to their drama which were not to be detected in ours. In ours we have seen the platform-stage producing two effects-discursive rhetoric and a certain discontinuity of action. It was this second effect which struck the attention of our French visitor Sorbière, in that an English play seemed to him a pot-pourri. Our playgoers, as they admitted to him, considered only each facet of the play as it came into view, without regard to the play as a whole. But the French, with their logical instinct, did care for the play as a whole, and were concerned not merely for each scene as it passed, but for its relation to the other scenes, for the growth, that is to say, of the action. Here was the difference between the French platform-drama and ours. Theirs was quite as rhetorical; indeed, it was far more rhetorical. From Racine to Voltaire, from Voltaire to Campistron, there was a maximum of tirades, confidences,' monologues, forensic' dialogues all the artifices of rhetoric to a minimum of action. Another racial characteristic, no doubt, contributed to this excess of rhetoric: we mean the French turn for didactic moralising. French tragedy might or might not be a poem; it was always a sermon. Thus Sterne, while professing to think French tragedies absolutely fine,' significantly added, and whenever I have a more brilliant affair upon my hands than common, as they suit a preacher quite as well as a hero, I generally make my sermon out of 'em; and for the text, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, is as good as any one any one in the Bible.' This persistent

didacticism of French drama found its reductio ad absurdum in both the theory and the practice of Diderot. It is always,' said he, virtue and virtuous people that a man ought to 'have in view when he writes. Oh, what good would men gain if all the arts of imitation proposed one common object, and were one day to unite with the laws in making 6 us love virtue and hate vice!' In Diderot's 'Père de 'Famille' a father addresses his child in this strain: 'Marriage, my daughter, is a vocation imposed by Heaven.... 'If marriage exposes us to cruel pain, it is also the source ' of the sweetest pleasures. . . . O sacred bond, if I think ' of thee, my whole soul is warmed and elevated.' Mr. John Morley's comment on this passage is much to the point. If the drama is to be a great moral teacher, it will not be by 'imitating the methods of that colossal type of histrionic 'failure, the church pulpit.' It may be added that the

*

* Diderot, vol. i. p. 327 (1886).