It is customary to assort the currency of from one to four groups by

banks each day. Let us follow rapidly one of these groups through the

remainder of the processes. The money of a group accumulated from day to

day in the vault is in the morning transported to the assorting room,

where it is delivered to the second assortment teller. By him the

bundles are opened, the inventory verified, and the packages separated

by denominations, reference being had in this process to the upper note

of each package. The packages of each denomination are then strapped

together by means of cardboards and rubber bands, and the group number,

the denomination, and the amount marked upon each bundle. Next morning

the money is delivered in this shape to the second assorters.

It will be understood that each of these persons thus receives notes of

a single denomination issued by from forty to sixty banks. The second

assorter first counts his money to be sure of the amount, and then

assorts the notes into his till in the manner already described,

putting, however, only the notes of one bank into a box. For his

guidance each assorter is provided with a printed list of the banks

composing his group, the number of the box assigned to each being set

opposite to the title. For convenience of handling about the tills,

these lists are mounted upon thick cardboards. The existence of stolen

notes or counterfeits on a bank is noted upon these lists, and special

directions for assortment are conveyed in the same manner. When a bank

is in liquidation or is withdrawing part of its circulation, an "I,"

denoting "inactive," is set opposite the title. The notes of such banks

are thrown together into box 52, and from this circumstance are known in

the nomenclature of the office as "52's." These are counted together and

put up in packages by means of orange-colored straps, properly marked

for delivery, through a regular channel, to another division of the

Treasurer's office, where the money is assorted and destroyed and the

amount retired from circulation. At present more than half the banks of

some groups are on the inactive list, and notwithstanding the clamor

from the West for more paper currency, that part of the country is in

the lead in the contraction which is rapidly going on. Of the Chicago

banks, the notes of all but three have been ordered to be destroyed and

withdrawn as they are redeemed, and in St. Louis and St. Paul only a few

banks remain on the active list. Of the eastern cities, New York alone

is pursuing the same line of policy to any considerable extent, more

than half the banks there being either liquidating or reducing their

circulation. The motives which induce this step in the case of solvent

and unembarrassed institutions are diverse; but the effect is always the

same. The amount of currency retired in this manner ranges ordinarily

from twenty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars a day.

The labor of assorting finished, the clerk's next duty is to count up

the money of each bank. In doing this he examines each note to be sure

that they all bear the same title. In some groups great care is

required to ensure correctness in this process. For instance, a clerk

will tell you that there are Springfield banks in every State in the

Union. He exaggerates a little, but group 38 is nevertheless the _bête

noir_ of the assorting room. In the second assortment, as in the first,

even hundreds of dollars make a full package. Notes of active banks are

pinned up, the "fit" in blue straps and the "unfit" in green, each

package marked with the group number, the bank number, the amount, the

assorter's signature, and the date. Notes wrongly grouped are thrown

together and put up in white straps, for return next day to the first

assorter. "Odds" are enveloped in yellow or pink straps, accordingly as

they are "unfit" or "fit," and are ultimately put in the vault until

the group is next brought up for assortment. When the contents of a

till have all been counted out, the assorter's cash is in the four

items of full packages of notes of active banks, "52's," "errors" of

first assortment, and "odds." The money of each of these items is

strapped up in a bundle properly marked, and the amounts entered in the

book. Delivery is made to the second assortment teller in a manner

similar to that already described.

Of course, in a room where one or two millions of dollars are handled

daily, rigid discipline is required to prevent loss through carelessness

or peculation. A clerk on leaving his till must lock up his money. No

assorter is allowed to leave the room during business hours except on a

pass, to be taken up by the doorkeeper. This is obtained from the

superintendent of assorters, who, before issuing it, examines the till

of the applicant to see that everything is in shape. Slips of paper,

perforated by a punch, are the sops which placate the Cerberus of the

agency. Each assorter is provided with a card on which are printed two

sets of numbers, from one to thirty-one, and a certificate that the

holder's cash was properly balanced and his till in order at the close

of business on the day of the month last punched. On this card the

teller, after examining the assorter's money, makes one punch, and the

superintendent of assorters another, after a minute inspection of the

till and its surroundings. Thus the assorter receives the only passport

on which he may leave the office for the day. In the afternoon, when all

the money handled has been deposited in the safes, the superintendent of

the agency makes a tour of all the rooms. The safes are then closed, and

finally the Treasurer tries all the locks.

The work of the second assortment is by most clerks pretty easily

learned, and upon this beginners are usually placed. The mechanical

difficulties are, however, the same as those already noticed in

connection with the first assortment; and speed can be acquired only by

long and diligent practice. The agency offers few attractive positions

to a clerk, whatever his grade. Currency long in circulation becomes so

mutilated as to be difficult to handle. It is soiled and dusty, and

often emits the most disgusting smells. One memorable shipment of

several millions from San Francisco still lingers in the recollection of

the unfortunate clerks, who spit and sneezed over the filthy mass. The

notes were begrimed with every soil of the Pacific slope, and made

odorous by association with every species of vice and uncleanliness to

which human flesh is subject. The labor of the assorter and counter,

even at the best, is severe and unpleasant; while from motives of

economy the task is heaped up to the maximum and the pay cut down to the

minimum.

The next process after assortment is to "make up" all the packages of

all denominations into bundles, each containing only notes of a single

bank. For this purpose the currency of active banks is delivered from

the assorters through the teller to a "maker-up" who takes an inventory.

Next day he assorts the packages of a group in a till similar to those

already described, except that it is laid flat upon a low counter. Then

he takes the contents of a box, ascertains, by examining the upper note

of each package, that the money is all the issue of a single bank, and

writes in ink upon a blank label the title of the bank, the amount of

each denomination, and the total of all, signs and dates this, and

straps it upon the bundle. Having emptied all the boxes of his till in

this manner, he prepares a list of the amount of each bank's money made

up, and verifies his work by comparing the footing with the total

charged to him on the previous evening. This list is delivered to the

bookkeepers, and upon it the accounts of the agency are based. From

motives of saving in express charges, when the total of a bank's

currency in the till is less than five hundred dollars, the money is not

made up, but thrown aside as "odds," together with all excess over even

thousands of dollars, when such excess is less than five hundred. These

"odds" are returned, after account, to the vault. The work of making up

employs from two to four persons constantly. Absolute correctness is of

high importance, and great painstaking is required. Even a moment's

relaxation of attention is likely to produce an error which, if not

discovered, would involve the misplacement of hundreds or thousands of

dollars. Fortunately, the system of checks and proofs is so thorough

that all errors are discovered unfailingly, and the consequences

confined to the agency. The different colored straps noticed in use for

packages are but one feature of a general scheme by which currency in

the office is made to indicate, at a glance, its description, proper

place, and future course. The possibility of error or confusion in large

amounts is thus reduced to the last degree. And minute precautions will

hardly be deemed superfluous, when it is considered that all the

processes described in this article are going on simultaneously every

day at the heaped-up tills and counters.

On leaving the hands of the maker-up, the money is taken to the

proving-room. Here the bundles are distributed among a force of women,

who recount all the notes for the purpose of verifying the amount, the

description, and the assortment. If, among the notes of a bank, is found

one of another, the estray is exchanged, through the superintendent of

assorters, for a note of the proper description. The prover, having

ascertained that her money is correct according to the accompanying

label, puts her initials to the latter, as well as upon each package of

notes, wraps and ties the bundle, and carries it to a table, where, in

her presence, the knots are sealed. First, however, the unfit notes are

cancelled by removing a triangular piece from each of the lower corners.

This is done by means of a knife, which is moved by hand with a lever,

which easily cuts through two hundred notes at a time. The sealed

packages are then put in the hands of the delivery clerk. At his counter

the fit parcels are enveloped in a stout outside wrapper and directed to

the various banks whose notes are contained in each. In this shape these

parcels are taken to the office of the Adams Express Company for

shipment. The unfit notes are delivered to the Comptroller of the

Currency, by whose clerks they are again counted. When there is no

longer any possibility of incorrectness either in the amount or the

description, orders are made out for the issue of new currency, and the

redeemed notes are carried to the basement of the Treasury, where they

are put in a machine and reduced to pulp. This product is sold to paper

makers, who, in consideration of its quality, are willing to buy it at a

good price. There is a possibility, therefore, that the banker who

several months ago forwarded his shipment of currency for redemption,

may have the substance of his note return to him in these pages, bearing

this account of the experiences of the journey.

FRANK W. LAUTZ.

UNKNOWN PERSONS.

I was wandering through the Uffizi gallery in Florence one day, with my

guide-book open in my hand, when I met the subjects of this story. They

were by a large window, nine of them, framed in a little gilt frame a

foot or so square. I looked at them, and then, by force of habit, I

looked at the guide-book. "Portraits of nine unknown persons," it said.

I went nearer and looked at them again, and after that I saw the

guide-book no more. They were not portraits or unknown persons, but nine

new friends who told me the story of their lives as I stood by the

window gazing.

There were eight brothers of them, of a noble family, and dwelling in

happy Tuscany. They lived in the country. Their mother was dead--died

when Barnaba first opened his wondering eyes at her. Their father was a

student, and loved his boys, and his books, and nature, and determined

to keep them all together. "If we live in town," he said, "I can't do

this; I am not very rich, so I will remain in my country home, and my

boys and I will have a life of our own." Such a merry, merry life as the

boys had together. Everything was turned to play for them, even their

studies. Their principal delight was acting, and in their little plays,

queer compounds of Grecian dramas and childish dreams, each one had his

regular part. It was Pietro who was always the main figure, made the

grandest speeches, and prayed the longest prayers--for they had

religious dramas sometimes--and strutted around the most. They made

Giuseppe their hero for all that, carried him in on their shoulders from

battle, and crowned him with laurel at the end of the fourth act

regularly. Domenico played the scholar: he had so grave an air, so

learned a mien. Guido was the soldier boy. Let him but throw his cap on

his wavy hair, or toss his coat over his shoulder and strut upon the

mimic stage, and you would have sworn he was armed to the teeth, and

that you could hear the click of his spurs.

How Barnaba loved Guido! How he would twirl his long hair over his

finger secretly, hoping 'twould wave, and try to strut in on the stage

heroically too. But he was sure to blunder a bit, poor Barnaba. He was

the youngest, you see, and had poor parts given him that he didn't suit.

He was not meant for a page, and sometimes, while Pietro would strut

around and puff and declaim, little Barnaba was clenching his nervous

hands tightly behind him, and longing that he might speak out like a man

too. But no one ever dreamed that the stiff little page, with the long

hair and the wondering eyes, had any wishes other than to make a good

page. For Barnaba had a firm mouth, spite of the tremble at the corners,

and it was always readier to shut than to open.

The other three boys, Luigi, Leonardo, and Leone, were good boys and

happy boys, but they were by nature "the populace." They were always

ready to come in on the stage as "the excited crowd" or "the hooting

rabble." They threw up their hats and cried, "Si, si" splendidly, but

then they would cry, "Nò, nò" just as well if it was their part to do

so. So you can see they made a capital populace. Very near them, in a

beautiful villa, there lived for a while in the summer time, once a

little girl. Henrighetta she was called by her friends, but the boys'

father bade them call her la signorina, "because," said he, "it is well

to respect women." "But Henrighetta is only a little girl," said

Barnaba. "Pshaw, she'll be a woman some day," laughed Guido, and twirled

on his toes, "and I'll be a man." And he pulled away at some very

make-believe moustaches, and raised his eyebrows until even his grave

father laughed. For at this time Guido was only eleven and Barnaba

seven. Pietro, the eldest--he was seventeen--very aged indeed, the lads

thought. So Henrighetta became their playmate.

Shortly before she left the villa they had a great play. It was the best

they had ever had. There was a prologue and an epilogue, written and

spoken by Pietro, and ever so much shouting, and a very bloody scene in

which Guido rescued Henrighetta from the ruffians, who were being led by

a traitor page (Barnaba, of course) to kill her for her jewels. "Luigi,"

said Barnaba, "I hate to be mean, even in a play. I wish you would be

the page and let me be a ruffian." Then Luigi laughed hard, and told his

brothers. And they said, "Fancy Barnaba a ruffian," and laughed until

poor Barnaba looked sadder than ever. "Oh, you'll make a real good page,

and you know you have to kiss Henrighetta's long dress," said Guido, as

he whittled a little gun. "So I will," said Barnaba, and was quite

happy.

Now, really Henrighetta was a good deal like other girls, not very

pretty or very wise, but fresh and happy. But with the eight boys she

was a queen indeed--dared even to speak threateningly to Pietro, though

she was but ten years old, and stamped her foot one day at Guido. Oh,

how vexed he was! Yet she was always kind to Barnaba, and on the night

of the play bade him kiss her hand instead of her dress, if he wished.

It was very inappropriate, but Barnaba thought it angelic, and imprinted

just the most serious and tender kiss on Henrighetta's chubby fingers at

the moment when Guido carried her off from her terrible fate. They had

quite an audience that night. Henrighetta's friends were many, and they

all said how beautifully she looked when she was married to Guido at the

close of the play, as she was, of course, with Pietro for a cardinal and

Barnaba as page, to hold up my lady's train.

Well, the boys grew up, and though they wandered off to see the world

and study, they found their way home often and often. Barnaba alone

stayed there all the while. He grew of use to his father in writing,

became his private secretary, and seemed to be as much a part of the

home as the olive grove near by, or the long, shaded walks he loved so

well. Barnaba's hair was as straight as ever, and his white collar grew

crumpled sooner than it ought, and he looked as if he belonged somewhere

else. Observing people wondered sometimes, but only a little, and

Barnaba's brothers would have told you he was a shy, good boy, and his

father would have said the same, and I dare say Barnaba himself might

have replied a little in like manner, had he replied at all. But Barnaba

did not talk much. He read, and dreamed, and walked in the woods.

Sometimes at evening he would take off his cap, and the wind would blow

his hair, and a light would burn in his eyes, and you would have

thought, "Barnaba will do something surely." But he never did.

It was in the summer time, twelve years later than the play time, that

Henrighetta came again to the villa. It was a little dull for her, for

all the boys were away from home but Giuseppe and Barnaba. Giuseppe was

older and angelic. He went to see the poor, and he had written a

beautiful book about the Cross, and he slept in a little room on a hard

bed, and said his prayers a great deal. His brothers would cross

themselves often in speaking of him. "Giuseppe is a holy man," they

would say. There was a verse in Giuseppe's book that Barnaba loved. He

said it often to himself. It was this: "There is a road, and the name of

it is Patience; the flowers that grow by it are few, but they are very

sweet; and if you pluck them and weave them into a crown, the fragrance

shall last for ever."

Barnaba was in the woods one day, saying these words softly to himself,

when the lady Henrighetta approached. She was dressed all in white, and

Barnaba thought her very beautiful and proud. Yet she spoke so sweetly

to him. "Are you not my old friend Barnaba?" she asked. Had he been

patient, and had he plucked one of the rare sweet flowers? It seemed so,

truly. She spoke so sweetly, and she smiled at him, and she seated

herself by him. "I am going to make a wreath for myself," she said,

"while my father talks to your brother near by, and you shall get me

flowers and tell me about your brothers--where you all are and what you

are doing." Such dainty commands! How Barnaba flew for the flowers! How

oddly he looked with his long hair flowing, and his eager hands

clutching up the sweetest herbs, and grasses, and blossoms, all for her.

"May I make your wreath?" he said, for Barnaba knew well what flowers

loved each other.

What a happy Barnaba! How the sun shone, and the trees whispered that

day, and how she talked to him, told him of all the years, of her

travels, for she had seen much, and he sat and listened, and wove the

flowers together, and watched her white hands and her full, soft throat.

And after the lady Henrighetta talked she sang a little. It was such a

fair day, so dreamy, and shady, and restful. She sang scraps of old

Italian songs. When Barnaba had finished the wreath he handed it to her

to place upon her head. "What shall I give you for this?" she said, and

held out her hand. It was only a moment, yet it was a long enough moment

to have placed a kiss upon it, and Barnaba was a man, and Barnaba longed

to do it, but did he dare? While he wondered Giuseppe and her father

joined them, and they all walked home to Henrighetta's together, talking

of the olden times. Then they bade her good-by. She lingered at the

doorway to watch them go. Barnaba looked back once and saw her standing

there, all in white, with the wreath he had made crowning her dark hair.

"And the fragrance shall last for ever," he whispered so softly that

Giuseppe did not hear.

The next day Guido came home. He was a real soldier now, with spurs and

a jaunty cloak, and such a twinkle in his eye and swing in his walk and

laugh in his voice that you longed to see him enter the room, and wished

for him to speak--not that he said so much, but he said it so well. The

quiet home was always changed when Guido arrived. Merry songs were heard

all over the house, horns, and racings, and laughter. And this time

Guido was more than ever gay. He and the lady Henrighetta grew to be

great friends. They would ride and walk, and although there were always

people with them, they seemed to talk for each other all the time, and

to smile for each other all the time. Every one saw it and smiled

too--every one but Barnaba. He was very busy during this while with his

father, correcting proofs for a new book on archæology.

It was not until twelve long days had gone by that he again saw the lady

Henrighetta. Then he went over one evening to her father's villa, "where

we are to have some plays as we used to do," said Guido. Barnaba's heart

beat hard, and he longed to see the lady Henrighetta again. She was

getting ready for the play. "Barnaba, you are to be page, please," said

Guido, "and hold my lady's train." So Barnaba was page, and the play

began. There were many strange faces and voices in it, and it was a

studied play, each part learned by rote. It did not seem like old times

at all. Barnaba began to feel very far away, when suddenly he was called

to where the lady Henrighetta was, and bidden to follow her as her page.

She greeted him kindly. "All you have to do is to stand by my side," she

said. To stand by her side! And then the curtain rose again, and the

lady Henrighetta, clad in regal robes, sailed forward, and Barnaba, clad

as a page, followed her meekly and stood at her side.

What a little hum there was when she appeared! and when Guido strode

rapidly in toward her and pressed her passionately, how the applause

rang! It was an intense scene, and Guido seemed intensely in earnest.

"How well he plays," thought Barnaba. Then, as Guido looked at

Henrighetta and Henrighetta really blushed a little and dropped her

eyelids, Barnaba's soul rose. It was a strong soul; it was a man's soul;

and it was in a white heat of rage now. If he, the page, had but a sword

to kill him, the lover! Just then he heard a little whisper which the

others did not hear. It was too low. Guido had said, not "Leonora, mia

cara," as the play said, but "Henrighetta, mia cara." There was a sudden

movement on the stage. It was the page who had turned quickly,

frantically. He had nearly reached the door when he turned again and

came back, white but firm, with a strange smile on his lip, and resumed

his place. Guido swore. The pretty tableau was spoiled. I am afraid even

my lady sighed softly, but Barnaba did not know that. She had told him

to stand by her side, and her command must be obeyed.

The scene over, however, Barnaba rushed from the house, out into the

fresh air. He turned and gazed back through the window. There they stood

together, side by side, smiling, happy, Guido and Henrighetta, and here

was poor Barnaba, still in the trappings of livery, with his heart all

torn in his hands. Out in the darkness he dropped his head toward the

earth. Giuseppe saw the face, and came toward him. "What is it,

brother?" asked he softly. "What have you lost?" Barnaba looked up at

him. His brave, firm lips trembled once. "My life," he said; "I have

lost my life." There was a silence. "He that loseth his life shall find

it," said Giuseppe. "These are the words of the Lord." And the two

brothers crossed themselves and walked homeward together in silence.

It was six months after, at the time of the wedding, that the portrait

was painted. Giuseppe is in the centre. The brothers all said 'twas his

place. Pietro has his cowl over his head, you see, but he is fat and

hearty for all that. Domenico leans on a book, as ever, and the populace

smile pleasantly and in a well-bred manner. Guido and his wife are side

by side--the daring, jaunty, happy man and his high-born, full-throated,

soft-eyed wife. And where is Barnaba? Just over her. Below her, even in

the picture, he should have been, he thinks, and beside her, never, but

once, in a play. Dear, poor, brave Barnaba! He has changed in the six

months. His collar is as twisted, his hair as long and straight, and his

eyes as full of wonder; but there are two new turns to his lips--smiling

turns. "I've lost," they seem to say, "and I might have won. Life has

treated me poorly, but I owe her no grudge. Guido and his wife have gone

away. Giuseppe is visiting the poor. Pietro is at his priestly

work--what is it? The others are back in their lives." Barnaba walks in

the grove alone, and repeats to himself: "There is a road, and the name

of it is Patience. The flowers that grow by it are few, but they are

very sweet; and if you pluck them and weave them into a crown, the

fragrance shall last forever." And Barnaba smiles.

MARY MURDOCH MASON.

THE DEAD STAR.

Yonder in empty dark

Wanders, somewhere, a wasted sun, whose light,

Erst breathed abroad with life-creating spark,

Made hanging gardens of the circling night.

Through Time's dark emptiness

Some soul, that genius lit, goes, withered, wan,

Its flame to blackness fallen, purposeless--

The dead star wanders with the fire-spent man!

JOHN JAMES PIATT.

THE LONDON THEATRES.

A person taking up his residence in a foreign city is apt, I think, to

become something of a playgoer. In the first place he is usually more

or less isolated, and in the absence of complex social ties the

theatres help him to pass his evenings. But more than this, they offer

him a good deal of interesting evidence upon the manners and customs of

the people among whom he has come to dwell. They testify to the

civilization around him, and throw a great deal of light upon the ways

of thinking, feeling, and behaving of the community. If this exotic

spectator to whom I allude is a person of a really attentive

observation, he may extract such evidence in very large quantities. It

is furnished not by the stage alone, but by the _theatre_ in a larger

sense of the word: by the audience, the attendants, the arrangements,

the very process of getting to the playhouse. The English stage of

to-day, of which I more particularly speak, certainly holds the mirror

as little as possible up to nature--to any nature, at least, usually

recognized in the British islands. Nine-tenths of the plays performed

upon it are French originals, subjected to the mysterious process of

"adaptation"; marred as French pieces and certainly not mended as

English; transplanted from the Gothic soil into a chill and neutral

region where they bloom hardly longer than a handful of cut flowers

stuck into moist sand. They cease to have any representative value as

regards French manners, and they acquire none as regards English; they

belong to an order of things which has not even the merit of being

"conventional," but in which barbarism, chaos, and crudity hold

undisputed sway. The English drama of the last century deserved the

praise, in default of any higher, of being "conventional"; for there

was at least a certain method in its madness; it had its own ideal, its

own foolish logic and consistency. But he would be wise who should be

able to indicate the ideal, artistic and intellectual, of the English

drama of today. It is violently and hopelessly irresponsible. When one

says "English drama" one uses the term for convenience' sake; one means

simply the plays that are acted at the London theatres and transferred

thence to the American. They are neither English nor a drama; they have

not that minimum of ponderable identity at which appreciation finds a

starting-point. As the metaphysicians say, they are simply not

cognizable. And yet in spite of all this, the writer of these lines has

ventured to believe that the London theatres are highly characteristic

of English civilization. The plays testify indirectly if not directly

to the national manners, and the whole system on which play-going is

conducted completes the impression which the pieces make upon the

observer. One can imagine, indeed, nothing more characteristic than

such a fact as that a theatre-going people is hopelessly destitute of a

drama.

I ventured a month ago to record in these pages a few reminiscences of

the Comédie Française; and I have a sort of feeling that my readers may,

in the light of my present undertaking, feel prompted to accuse me of a

certain levity. There is a want of delicacy, they may say, in speaking

of the first theatre in the world one day and of the London stage the

next. You must choose, and if you talk about one, you forfeit the right

to talk about the other. But I think there is something to be done in

the way of talking about both, and at all events there are few things it

is not fair to talk about if one does so with a serious desire to

understand. Removing lately from Paris to the British metropolis, I

received a great many impressions--a sort of unbroken chain, in which

the reflections passing through my fancy as I tried the different

orchestra-stalls were the concluding link. The impressions of which I

speak were impressions of outside things--the things with which in a

great city one comes first into contact. I supposed that I had gathered

them once for all in earlier years; but I found that the edge of one's

observation, unlike that of other trenchant instruments, grows again if

one leaves it alone. Remain a long time in any country, and you come to

accept the manners and customs of that country as the standard of

civilization--the normal type. Other manners and customs, even if they

spring from the same soil from which you yourself have sprung, acquire

by contrast an unreasonable, a violent, but often a picturesque relief.

To what one may call a continentalized vision the aspect of English life

seems strange and entertaining; while an Anglicized perception finds,

beyond the narrow channel, even greater matter for wonderment.

The writer of these lines brought with him, at the outset of a dusky

London winter, a continentalized, and perhaps more particularly a

Parisianized, fancy. It was wonderful how many things that I should have

supposed familiar and commonplace seemed strikingly salient and typical,

and how I found, if not sermons in stones and good in everything, at

least examples in porter-pots and reflections in coal-scuttles. In

writing the other day of the Théatre Français, I spoke of M. Francisque

Sarcey, the esteemed dramatic critic; of the serious and deliberate way

in which he goes to work--of the distance from which he makes his

approaches. During the first weeks I was in London, especially when I

had been to the play the night before, I kept saying to myself that M.

Francisque Sarcey ought to come over and "do" the English theatres.

There are of course excellent reasons why he should not. In the first

place, it is safe to assume that he comprehends not a word of English;

and in the second, it is obligatory to believe that he would, in the

vulgar phrase, not be able to "stand" it. He would probably pronounce

the English stage hopelessly and unmitigably bad and beneath criticism,

and hasten back to Delaunay and Sarah Bernhardt. But if we could suppose

him to fight it out, and give the case a hearing, what a solid

dissertation we should have upon it afterward at the bottom of the

"Temps" newspaper! How he would go into the causes of the badness, and

trace its connections with English civilization! How earnestly he would

expatiate and how minutely he would explain; how fervently he would

point the moral and entreat his fellow countrymen not to be as the

English are lest they should lapse into histrionic barbarism!

I felt, to myself, during these days, in a small way, very much like a

Francisque Sarcey; I don't mean as to the gloominess of my conclusions,

but as to the diffusiveness of my method. A spectator with his senses

attuned to all those easy Parisian harmonies feels himself, in London,

to be in a place in which the drama cannot, in the nature of things,

have a vigorous life. Before he has put his feet into a theatre he is

willing to bet his little all that the stage will turn out to be weak.

If he is challenged for the reasons of this precipitate skepticism, he

will perhaps be at loss to give them; he will only say, "Oh, I don't

know, _cela se seut_. Everything I see is a reason. I don't look out of

the window, I don't ring the bell for some coals, I don't go into an

eating-house to dine, without seeing a reason." And then he will begin

to talk about the duskiness and oppressiveness of London; about the

ugliness of everything that one sees; about beauty and grace being

never attempted, or attempted here and there only to be wofully missed;

about the visible, palpable Protestantism; about the want of expression

in people's faces; about the plainness and dreariness of everything

that is public and the inaccessibility of everything that is private;

about the lower classes being too miserable to know the theatre, and

the upper classes too "respectable" to understand it.

And here, if the audacious person we are conceiving is very far gone,

he will probably begin to talk about English "hypocrisy" and prudery,

and to say that these are the great reason of the feebleness of the

stage. When he approaches the question of English "hypocrisy" you may

know that he is hopelessly Gallicized, or Romanized, or Germanized, or

something of that sort; and indeed his state of mind at this point

strikes me myself with a certain awe. I don't venture to follow him,

and I discreetly give up the attempt. But up to this point I can see

what he may have meant, in the midst of his flippancy, and I remember

how to my own imagination at first everything seemed to hang together,

and theatres to be what they were because somehow the streets, and

shops, and hotels, and eating-houses were what they were. I remember

something I said to myself after once witnessing a little drama of real

life at a restaurant. The restaurant in question is in Piccadilly, and

I am trying to think under which of the categories of our Gallicized

observer it would come. The remarkable façade, covered with gilded

mosaics and lamps, is certainly a concession to the idea of beauty;

though whether it is a successful one is another question. Within it

has, besides various other resources, one of those peculiar refectories

which are known in England as grill-rooms, and which possess the

picturesque feature of a colossal gridiron, astride of a corresponding

fire, on which your chops and steaks are toasted before your eyes. A

grill-room is a bad place to dine, but it is a convenient place to

lunch. It always contains a number of tables, which accommodate not

less than half a dozen persons; small tables of the proper dimensions

for a _tête-â-tête_ being, for inscrutable reasons, wholly absent from

English eating-houses.

The grill-room in question is decorated in that style of which the

animus is to be agreeable to Mr. William Morris, though I suspect that

in the present application of his charming principles he would find a

good deal of base alloy. At any rate, the apartment contains a number

of large medallions in blue pottery, pieced together, representing the

heathen gods and goddesses, whose names are inscribed in crooked

letters in an unexpected part of the picture. This is quite the thing

that one would expect to find in one of those cloisters or pleasances,

or "pleached gardens," in which Mr. Morris's Gothic heroines drag their

embroidered petticoats up and down, as slow-pacedly as their poet

sings. Only, in these pretty, dilettantish cloisters there would

probably be no large tickets suspended alongside of the pictorial

pottery, inscribed with the monstrous words, _Tripe! Suppers!_ This is

one of those queer eruptions of plainness and homeliness which one

encounters at every turn in the midst of the massive luxury and general

expensiveness of England--like the big, staring announcement, _Beds_,

in the coffee-house windows, or _Well-aired Beds_ painted on the side

walls of taverns; or like a list of labels which I noticed the other

day on a series of japanned boxes in a pastry-cook's shop. They seemed

to me so characteristic that I made a note of them.

The reason of my being in the pastry-cook's shop was my having

contracted in Paris the harmless habit of resorting to one of these

establishments at the luncheon hour, for the purpose of consuming a

little _gateau_. Resuming this innocent practice on English soil, I

found it attended with serious difficulties--the chief of which was

that there were no _gateaux_ to consume. An appreciative memory of

those brightly mirrored little shops on the Paris boulevards, in which

tender little tarts, in bewildering variety, are dispensed to you by a

neat-waisted _patissière_, cast a dusky shadow over the big buns and

"digestive biscuits" which adorn the counter of an English bakery. But

it takes a good while to eat a bun, and while you stand there solemnly

disintegrating your own, you may look about you in search of the

characteristic. In Paris the pastry-cooks' shops are, as the French

say, coquettish--as coquettish as the elegant simplicity of plate

glass, discreet gilding, polished brass, and a demonstrative _dame de

comptoir_ can make them. In London they are not coquettish--witness

the grim nomenclature alluded to above; it was distributed over a

series of green tin cases, ranged behind the counters: Tops and

bottoms--royal digestives--arrow-root--oat-cake--rice biscuit--ratafias.

I took my seat in the grill-room at a table at which three gentlemen

were sitting: two of them sleek British merchants, of a familiar and

highly respectable type, the other a merchant too, presumably, but

neither sleek nor British. He was evidently an American. He was a

good-looking fellow and a man of business, but I inferred from the

tentative, experimental, and even mistrustful manner with which he

addressed himself to the operation of lunching, and observed the

idiosyncrasies of the grill-room, that he found himself for the first

time in England. His experiment, however, if experiment it was, was

highly successful; he made a copious lunch and departed. He had not had

time to reach the door when I perceived one of the British merchants of

whom I just now spoke beginning to knock the table violently with his

knife-handle, and to clamor, "Waiter, waiter! Manager, manager!" The

manager and the waiter hastened to respond, while I endeavored to guess

the motive of his agitation, without connecting it with our late

companion. As I then saw him pointing eagerly to the latter, however,

who was just getting out of the door, I was seized with a mortifying

apprehension that my innocent compatriot was a dissembler and a

pickpocket, and that the English gentleman, next whom he had been

sitting, had missed his watch or his purse. "He has taken one of

these--one of these!" said the British merchant. "I saw him put it into

his pocket." And he held up a bill of fare of the establishment, a

printed card, bearing on its back a colored lithograph of the

emblazoned façade that I have mentioned. I was reassured; the poor

American had pocketed this light document with the innocent design of

illustrating his day's adventures to a sympathetic wife awaiting his

return in some musty London lodging. But the manager and the waiter

seemed to think the case grave, and their informant continued to

impress upon them that he had caught the retiring visitor in the very

act. They were at a loss to decide upon a course of action; they

thought the case was bad, but they questioned whether it was bad enough

to warrant them in pursuing the criminal. While this weighty point was

being discussed the criminal escaped, little suspecting, I imagine, the

perturbation he had caused. But the British merchant continued to

argue, speaking in the name of outraged morality. "You know he oughtn't

to have done that--it was very wrong in him to do it. That mustn't be

done, you know, and you know I ought to tell you--it was my duty to

tell you--I couldn't _but_ tell you. He oughtn't to have done it, you

know. I thought I _must_ tell you." It is not easy to point out

definitely the connection between this little episode, for the

triviality of which I apologize, and the present condition of the

English stage; but--it may have been whimsical--I thought I perceived a

connection. These people are too highly moral to be histrionic, I said;

they have too stern a sense of duty.

The first step in the rather arduous enterprise of going to the theatre

in London is, I think, another reminder that the arts of the stage are

not really in the temperament and the manners of the people. This first

step is to go to an agency in an expensive street out of Piccadilly,

and there purchase a stall for the sum of eleven shillings. You receive

your ticket from the hands of a smooth, sleek, bottle-nosed clerk, who

seems for all the world as if he had stepped straight out of a volume

of Dickens or of Thackeray. There is almost always an old lady taking

seats for the play, with a heavy carriage in waiting at the door; the

number of old ladies whom one has to squeeze past in the stalls is in

fact very striking. "Is it good?" asks the old lady of the gentleman I

have described, with a very sweet voice and a perfectly expressionless

face. (She means the play, not the seat.) "It is thought very good, my

lady," says the clerk, as if he were uttering a "response" at church;

and my lady being served, I approach with my humbler petition. The

dearness of places at the London theatres is a sufficient indication

that play-going is not a popular amusement; three dollars is a high

price to pay for the privilege of witnessing any London performance

that I have seen. (One goes into the stalls of the Théâtre Français for

eight francs.) In the house itself everything seems to contribute to

the impression which I have tried to indicate--the impression that the

theatre in England is a social luxury and not an artistic necessity.

The white-cravatted young man who inducts you into your stall, and

having put you into possession of a programme, extracts from you,

masterly but effectually, the sixpence which, as a stranger, you have

wondered whether you might venture to give him, and which has seemed a

mockery of his grandeur--this excellent young man is somehow the

keynote of the whole affair. An English audience is as different as

possible from a French, though the difference is altogether by no means

to its disadvantage. It is much more "genteel"; it is less Bohemian,

less _blasé_, more _naïf_, and more respectful--to say nothing of being

made up of handsomer people. It is well dressed, tranquil, motionless;

it suggests domestic virtue and comfortable homes; it looks as if it

had come to the play in its own carriage, after a dinner of beef and

pudding. The ladies are mild, fresh colored English mothers; they all

wear caps; they are wrapped in knitted shawls. There are many rosy

young girls, with dull eyes and quiet cheeks--an element wholly absent

from Parisian audiences. The men are handsome and honorable looking;

they are in evening dress; they come with the ladies--usually with

several ladies--and remain with them; they sit still in their places,

and don't go herding out between the acts with their hats askew.

Altogether they are much more the sort of people to spend a quiet

evening with than the clever, cynical, democratic multitude that surges

nightly out of the brilliant Boulevards into those temples of the drama

in which MM. Dumas, _fils_, and Sardou are the high priests. But you

might spend your evening with them better almost anywhere than at the

theatre.

As I said just now, they are much more _naïf_ than Parisian

spectators--at least as regards being amused. They cry with much less

facility, but they laugh more freely and heartily. I remember nothing

in Paris that corresponds with the laugh of the English gallery and

pit--with its continuity and simplicity, its deep-lunged jollity and

its individual guffaws. But you feel that an English audience is

intellectually much less appreciative. A Paris audience, as regards

many of its factors, is cynical, skeptical, indifferent; it is so

intimately used to the theatre that it doesn't stand on ceremony; it

yawns, and looks away and turns its back; it has seen too much, and it

knows too much. But it has the critical and the artistic sense, when

the occasion appeals to them; it can judge and discriminate. It has the

sense of form and of manner; it heeds and cares how things are done,

even when it cares little for the things themselves. Bohemians,

artists, critics, connoisseurs--all Frenchmen come more or less under

these heads, which give the tone to a body of Parisian spectators.

These do not strike one as "nice people" in the same degree as a

collection of English patrons of the drama--though doubtless they have

their own virtues and attractions; but they form a natural, sympathetic

public, while the English audience forms only a conventional,

accidental one. It may be that the drama and other works of art are

best appreciated by people who are not "nice"; it may be that a lively

interest in such matters tends to undermine niceness; it may be that,

as the world grows nicer, various forms of art will grow feebler. All

this _may_ be; I don't pretend to say it is; the idea strikes me _en

passant_.

In speaking of what is actually going on at the London theatres I

suppose the place of honor, beyond comparison, belongs to Mr. Henry

Irving. This gentleman enjoys an esteem and consideration which, I

believe, has been the lot of no English actor since Macready left the

stage, and he may at the present moment claim the dignity of being a

bone of contention in London society second only in magnitude to the

rights of the Turks and the wrongs of the Bulgarians. I am told that

London is divided, on the subject of his merits, into two fiercely

hostile camps; that he has sown dissension in families, and made old

friends cease to "speak." His appearance in a new part is a great event;

and if one has the courage of one's opinion, at dinner tables and

elsewhere, a conversational godsend. Mr. Irving has "created," as the

French say, but four Shakespearian parts; his Richard III. has just been

given to the world. Before attempting Hamlet, which up to this moment

has been his great success, he had attracted much attention as a

picturesque actor of melodrama, which he rendered with a refinement of

effect not common upon the English stage. Mr. Irving's critics may, I

suppose, be divided into three categories: those who justify him in

whatever he attempts, and consider him an artist of unprecedented

brilliancy; those who hold that he did very well in melodrama, but that

he flies too high when he attempts Shakespeare; and those who, in vulgar

parlance, can see nothing in him at all.

I shrink from ranging myself in either of these divisions, and indeed I

am not qualified to speak of Mr. Irving's acting in general. I have

seen none of his melodramatic parts; I do not know him as a comedian--a

capacity in which some people think him at his best; and in his

Shakespearian repertory I have seen only his Macbeth and his Richard.

But judging him on the evidence of these two parts, I fall hopelessly

among the skeptics. Mr. Henry Irving is a very convenient illustration.

To a stranger desiring to know how the London stage stands, I should

say, "Go and see this gentleman; then tell me what you think of him."

And I should expect the stranger to come back and say, "I see what you

mean. The London stage has reached that pitch of mediocrity at which

Mr. Henry Irving overtops his fellows--Mr. Henry Irving figuring as a

great man--_c'est tout dire_." I hold that there is an essential truth

in the proverb that there is no smoke without fire. No reputations are

altogether hollow, and no valuable prizes have been easily won. Of

course Mr. Irving has a good deal of intelligence and cleverness; of

course he has mastered a good many of the mysteries of his art. But I

must nevertheless declare that for myself I have not mastered the

mystery of his success. His defects seem to me in excess of his

qualities and the lessons he has not learned more striking than the

lessons he has learned.

That an actor so handicapped, as they say in London, by nature and

culture should have enjoyed such prosperity, is a striking proof of the

absence of a standard, of the chaotic condition of taste. Mr. Irving's

Macbeth, which I saw more than a year ago and view under the

mitigations of time, was not pronounced one of his great successes; but

it was acted, nevertheless, for many months, and it does not appear to

have injured his reputation. Passing through London, and curious to

make the acquaintance of the great English actor of the day, I went

with alacrity to see it; but my alacrity was more than equalled by the

vivacity of my disappointment. I sat through the performance in a sort

of melancholy amazement. There are barren failures and there are

interesting failures, and this performance seemed to me to deserve the

less complimentary of these classifications. It inspired me, however,

with no ill will toward the artist, for it must be said of Mr. Irving

that his aberrations are not of a vulgar quality, and that one likes

him, somehow, in spite of them. But one's liking takes the form of

making one wish that really he had selected some other profession than

the histrionic. Nature has done very little to make an actor of him.

His face is not dramatic; it is the face of a sedentary man, a

clergyman, a lawyer, an author, an amiable gentleman--of anything other

than a possible Hamlet or Othello. His figure is of the same cast, and

his voice completes the want of illusion. His voice is apparently

wholly unavailable for purposes of declamation. To say that he speaks

badly is to go too far; to my sense he simply does not speak at all--in

any way that, in an actor, can be called speaking. He does not pretend

to declaim or dream of declaiming. Shakespeare's finest lines pass from

his lips without his paying the scantiest tribute to their quality. Of

what the French call _diction_--of the art of delivery--he has

apparently not a suspicion. This forms three-fourths of an actor's

obligations, and in Mr. Irving's acting these three-fourths are simply

cancelled. What is left to him with the remaining fourth is to be

"picturesque"; and this even his partisans admit he has made his

specialty. This concession darkens Mr. Irving's prospects as a

Shakespearian actor. You can play hop-scotch on one foot, but you

cannot cut with one blade of a pair of scissors, and you cannot play

Shakespeare by being simply picturesque. Above all, before all, for

this purpose you must have the art of utterance; you must be able to

give value to the divine Shakespearian line--to make it charm our ears

as it charms our mind. It is of course by his picturesqueness that Mr.

Irving has made his place; by small ingenuities of "business" and

subtleties of action; by doing as a painter does who "goes in" for

color when he cannot depend upon his drawing. Mr. Irving's color is

sometimes pretty enough; his ingenuities and subtleties are often

felicitous; but his picturesqueness, on the whole, strikes me as dry

and awkward, and, at the best, where certain essentials are so

strikingly absent, these secondary devices lose much of their power.

Mr. Fechter in Hamlet was preponderantly a "picturesque" actor; but he

had a certain sacred spark, a heat, a lightness and suppleness, which

Mr. Irving lacks; and though, with his incurable foreign accent, he

could hardly be said to _declaim_ Shakespeare in any worthy sense, yet

on the whole he spoke his part with much more of the positively

agreeable than can possibly belong to the utterance of Mr. Irving. His

speech, with all its fantastic Gallicisms of sound, was less foreign

and more comprehensible than that strange tissue of arbitrary

pronunciations which floats in the thankless medium of Mr. Irving's

harsh, monotonous voice. Richard III. is of all Shakespeare's parts the

one that can perhaps best dispense with declamation, and in which the

clever inventions of manner and movement in which Mr. Irving is

proficient will carry the actor furthest. Accordingly, I doubt not, Mr.

Irving is seen to peculiar advantage in this play; it is certainly a

much better fit for him than Macbeth. He has had the good taste to

discard the vulgar adaptation of Cibber, by which the stage has so long

been haunted, and which, I believe, is played in America to the

complete exclusion of the original drama. I believe that some of the

tenderest Shakespearians refuse to admit the authenticity of "Richard

III."; they declare that the play has, with all its energy, a sort of

intellectual grossness, of which the author of "Hamlet" and "Othello"

was incapable. This same intellectual grossness is certainly very

striking; the scene of Richard's wooing of Lady Ann is a capital

specimen of it. But here and there occur passages which, when one hears

the play acted, have all the vast Shakespearian sense of effect.

----To hear the piteous moans that Edward made

When black-faced Clifford shook his sword at him.

It is hard to believe that Shakespeare did not write that. And when

Richard, after putting an end to Clarence, comes into Edward IV.'s

presence, with the courtiers ranged about, and announces hypocritically

that Providence has seen fit to remove him, the situation is marked by

one or two speeches which are dramatic as Shakespeare alone is dramatic.

The immediate exclamation of the Queen--

All-seeing heaven, what a world is this!

--followed by that of one of the gentlemen--

Look _I_ so pale, Lord Dorset, as the rest?

--such touches as these, with their inspired vividness, seem to belong

to the brushwork of the master. Mr. Irving gives the note of his

performance in his first speech--the famous soliloquy upon "the winter

of our discontent." His delivery of these lines possesses little but

hopeless staginess and mannerism. It seems indeed like staginess gone

mad. The spectator rubs his eyes and asks himself whether he has not

mistaken his theatre, and stumbled by accident upon some prosperous

burlesque. It is fair to add that Mr. Irving is here at his worst, the

scene offering him his most sustained and exacting piece of

declamation. But the way he renders it is the way he renders the whole

part--slowly, draggingly, diffusively, with innumerable pauses and

lapses, and without a hint of the rapidity, the intensity and _entrain_

which are needful for carrying off the improbabilities of so explicit

and confidential a villain and so melodramatic a hero.

Just now, when a stranger in London asks where the best acting is to be

seen, he receives one of two answers. He is told either at the Prince

of Wales's theatre or at the Court. Some people think that the last

perfection is to be found at the former of these establishments, others

at the latter. I went first to the Prince of Wales's, of which I had a

very pleasant memory from former years, and I was not disappointed. The

acting is very pretty indeed, and this little theatre doubtless

deserves the praise which is claimed for it, of being the best

conducted English stage in the world. It is, of course, not the Comédie

Française; but, equally of course, it is absurd talking or thinking of

the Comédie Française in London. The company at the Prince of Wales's

play with a finish, a sense of detail, what the French call an

_ensemble_, and a general good grace, which deserve explicit

recognition. The theatre is extremely small, elegant, and expensive,

the company is very carefully composed, and the scenery and stage

furniture lavishly complete. It is a point of honor with the Prince of

Wales's to have nothing that is not "real." In the piece now running at

this establishment there is a representation of a boudoir very

delicately appointed, the ceiling of which is formed by festoons of old

lace suspended tent fashion or pavilion fashion. This lace, I am told,

has been ascertained, whether by strong opera glasses or other modes of

inquiry I know not, to be genuine, ancient, and costly. This is the

very pedantry of perfection, and makes the scenery somewhat better than

the actors. If the tendency is logically followed out, we shall soon be

having Romeo drink real poison and Medea murder a fresh pair of babes

every night.

The Prince of Wales's theatre, when it has once carefully mounted a

play, "calculates," I believe, to keep it on the stage a year. The play

of the present year is an adaptation of one of Victorien Sardou's

cleverest comedies--"Nos Intimes"--upon which the title of "Peril" has

been conferred. Of the piece itself there is nothing to be said; it is

the usual hybrid drama of the contemporary English stage--a firm, neat

French skeleton, around which the drapery of English conversation has

been adjusted in awkward and inharmonious folds. The usual feat has been

attempted--to extirpate "impropriety" and at the same time to save

interest. In the extraordinary manipulation and readjustment of French

immoralities which goes on in the interest of Anglo-Saxon virtue, I have

never known this feat to succeed. Propriety may have been saved, in an

awkward, floundering, in-spite-of-herself fashion, which seems to do to

something in the mind a violence much greater than the violence it has

been sought to avert; but interest has certainly been lost. The only

immorality I know on the stage is the production of an ill-made play;

and a play is certainly ill made when the pointedness of the framework

strikes the spectator as a perpetual mockery upon the flatness of the

"developments." M. Sardou's perfectly improper but thoroughly

homogeneous comedy has been flattened and vulgarized in the usual way;

the pivot of naughtiness on which the piece turns has been "whittled"

down to the requisite tenuity; the wicked little Jack-in-the-Box has

popped up his head only just in time to pull it back again. The

interest, from being intense, has become light, and the play, from being

a serious comedy, with a flavor of the tragic, has become an elaborate

farce, salted with a few coarse grains of gravity. It is probable,

however, that if "Peril" were more serious, it would be much less

adequately played.

The Prince of Wales's company contains in the person of Miss Madge

Robertson (or Mrs. Kendal, as I believe she is nowadays called) the most

agreeable actress on the London stage. This lady is always pleasing, and

often charming; but she is more effective in gentle gayety than in

melancholy or in passion. Another actor at the Prince of Wales's--Mr.

Arthur Cecil--strikes me as an altogether superior comedian. He plays in

"Peril" (though I believe he is a young man) the part of a selfish,

cantankerous, querulous, jaundiced old East Indian officer, who has come

down to a country house to stay, under protest, accompanied by his only

son, a stripling in roundabouts, whom he is bringing up in ignorance of

the world's wickedness, and who, finding himself in a mansion well

supplied with those books which no gentleman's library should be

without, loses no time in taking down Bocaccio's "Decameron." Mr. Arthur

Cecil represents this character to the life, with a completeness, an

extreme comicality, and at the same time a sobriety and absence of

violence which recalls the best French acting. Especially inimitable is

the tone with which he tells his host, on his arrival, how he made up

his mind to accept his invitation: "So at last I said to Percy, 'Well,

Percy, my child, we'll go down and have done with it!'"

At the Court theatre, where they are playing, also apparently by the

year, a "revived" drama of Mr. Tom Taylor--"New Men and Old Acres"--the

acting, though very good indeed, struck me as less finished and, as a

whole, less artistic. The company contains, however, two exceptionally

good actors. One of them is Mr. Hare, who leads it, and who, although

nature has endowed him with an almost fatally meagre stage presence, has

a considerable claim to be called an artist. Mr. Hare's special line is

the quiet natural, in high life, and I imagine he prides himself upon

the propriety and good taste with which he acquits himself of those

ordinary phrases and light modulations which the usual English actor

finds it impossible to utter with any degree of verisimilitude. Mr.

Hare's companion is Miss Ellen Terry, who is usually spoken of by the

"refined" portion of the public as the most interesting actress in

London. Miss Terry is picturesque; she looks like a pre-Raphaelitish

drawing in a magazine--the portrait of the crop-haired heroine in the

illustration to the serial novel. She is intelligent and vivacious, and

she is indeed, in a certain measure, interesting. With great frankness

and spontaneity, she is at the same time singularly delicate and

lady-like, and it seems almost impertinent to criticise her harshly. But

the favor which Miss Terry enjoys strikes me, like that under which Mr.

Henry Irving has expanded, as a sort of measure of the English critical

sense in things theatrical. Miss Terry has all the pleasing qualities I

have enumerated, but she has, with them, the defect that she is simply

_not_ an actress. One sees it sufficiently in her face--the face of

a clever young Englishwoman, with a hundred merits, but not of a

dramatic artist. These things are indefinable; I can only give my

impression.

Broadly comic acting, in England, is businesslike, and high tragedy is

businesslike; each of these extremes appears to constitute a trade--a

_métier_, as the French say--which may be properly and adequately

learned. But the acting which covers the middle ground, the acting of

serious or sentimental comedy and of scenes that may take place in

modern drawing-rooms--the acting that corresponds to the contemporary

novel of manners--seems by an inexorable necessity given over to

amateurishness. Most of the actors at the Prince of Wales's--the young

lovers, the walking and talking gentlemen, the housekeeper and young

ladies--struck me as essentially amateurish, and this is the impression

produced by Miss Ellen Terry, as well as (in an even higher degree) by

her pretty and sweet-voiced sister, who plays at the Haymarket. The art

of these young ladies is awkward and experimental; their very speech

lacks smoothness and firmness.

I am not sorry to be relieved, by having reached the limits of my space,

from the necessity of expatiating upon one of the more recent theatrical

events in London--the presentation, at the St. James's theatre, of an

English version of "Les Danicheff." This extremely picturesque and

effective play was the great Parisian success of last winter, and during

the London season the company of the Odéon crossed the channel and

presented it with an added brilliancy. But what the piece has been

reduced to in its present form is a theme for the philosopher. Horribly

translated and badly played, it retains hardly a ray of its original

effectiveness. There can hardly have been a better example of the

possible infelicities of "adaptation." Nor have I the opportunity of

alluding to what is going on at the other London theatres, though to all

of them I have made a conscientious pilgrimage. But I conclude my very

desultory remarks without an oppressive sense of the injustice of

omission. In thinking over the plays I have listened to, my memory

arrests itself with more kindness, perhaps, than elsewhere, at the

great, gorgeous pantomime given at Drury Lane, which I went religiously

to see in Christmas week. They manage this matter of the pantomime very

well in England, and I have always thought Harlequin and Columbine the

prettiest invention in the world. (This is an "adaptation" of an Italian

original, but it is a case in which the process has been completely

successful.) But the best of the entertainment at Drury Lane was seeing

the lines of rosy child faces in the boxes, all turned toward the stage

in one round-eyed fascination. English children, however, and their

round-eyed rosiness, would demand a chapter apart.

H. JAMES, JR.

SOUNDING BRASS.

BEING A RIGHTE TRUTHFULL HISTORIE OF YE ANCIENT TIME.

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not

charity"--which is love--"I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling

cymbal."

It was Sergeant Wright who repeated the words thoughtfully to himself,

nearly two hundred years ago, while his gaze was riveted upon the

glowing rim and cavernous hollow of a ponderous brazen object. It was

not a bell, though there was metal enough in it to have formed a very

respectable one for the village church.

At that early day bells were not common in New England; in the seaport

towns, that formed the colony of Plymouth, the faithful were summoned

to church by the blowing of a conch shell; at other towns there are

records of a "_peece_" being fired, or of a drummer being paid to beat

a reveille for sleepy souls. In Deerfield, where the events we are

about to chronicle took place, the practice seems to have been to

simply hoist a flag at the time appointed for public service. Any of

these means, except the drum, appears on some accounts preferable to

the modern church bell. To any one who has resided in a Catholic

country, where the ringing of bells, from matins to vespers, is

incessant, to one with recent memories of college days, of being rung

up in the morning before having his sleep out, rung to prayers before

he had finished his breakfast, rung to recitation before he had

mastered his lesson, and rung to bed before reaching the "Yours

_truly_" of his love letter, the Sabbath bell is not likely to suggest

ideas of a devotional character. After all, is it not essentially a

relic of barbarism, a pagan institution like the beating of gongs in

the Chinese ceremony of chinchinning the moon? The blowing of the conch

shell is not open to the objection of degrading association; it must

have called to mind the trumpets and rams' horns in the awe-inspiring

Hebrew ceremonial. Fancy instead of the ding-dong of sounding brass in

most village churches, that can sometimes hardly be distinguished from

the locomotive bell, the clear liquid notes of a silver bugle, similar

in character to one of the musical infantry calls, flung by the echoes

from hill to hill, and dying faintly away over the meadows and along

the river. Even the custom of firing a cannon, one great noise, heard

at the furthest boundaries of the parish, and then done with, would be

better than the continual repetition of the strokes of a bell, now

violent and quick, as though calling out all the hose and hook and

ladder companies of the fire department, now slowly dying away,

tantalizing the listener with the expectation that now at last they are

really going to cease, only to bitterly disappoint him by breaking out

again with renewed clamor. Most beautiful of all must have been the

silent lifting of the flag, a symbol which evangelist Bliss has taken

from the signal service in "Hold the Fort":

Wave the answer back to heaven,

By Thy grace we will.

And how popular such a summons would be with the ungodly--leaving them

in peace to enjoy their Sunday morning nap!

But we are wandering from our subject. Suffice it to say that the object

of sounding brass into which Sergeant Wright was looking was not a bell.

Neither was it a cannon, for a howitzer of that calibre, or a few

smaller pieces of sounding brass, would have prevented the sad tragedy

of the Indian captivity, and in that case the events herein chronicled

would never have transpired. Sergeant Judah Wright was looking at Mr.

Hoyt's brass kettle. He was billetted upon the family, and had so won

the hearts of all but the mother, by his ready helpfulness and

kindliness of manner, that they had come to consider him as one of their

own number, and had almost forgotten the arbitrary way in which their

acquaintance had begun. His frequent presence in the kitchen, and

assistance in the labors of the family, was not, however, altogether of

a disinterested nature, being prompted by the same feeling that caused

Jacob's fourteen years of servitude for Rachel to seem but a day--"the

love he bore her."

If Jean Ingelow had lived and written at that time, the Sergeant might

have borrowed a verse or two to explain his love for Goodman Hoyt's

kitchen:

For there his oldest daughter stands,

With downcast eyes and skilful hands,

Before her ironing board.

She comforts all her mother's days,

And with her sweet, obedient ways

She makes her labor light:

So sweet to hear, so fair to see!

Oh, she is much too good for me,

That lovely Mary Hoyt.

She has my heart, sweet Mary Hoyt:

I'll e'en go sit again to-night

Beside her ironing board!

Ah, that flat-iron! It was while beneath her deft fingers it passed

swiftly over the smoking linen, that "the iron entered his soul"; iron,

we mean, of the nature from which Cupid forges his arrow-heads.

Matters came to a crisis in the spring of 1703. The family had "gone

a-sugaring" in Mr. Hoyt's "plantation" of maples, and the Sergeant and

Mary had been left to watch the great kettle of sap as it seethed and

boiled over the coals. The text which heads our story was one from which

the Rev. John Williams had preached on the preceding Sunday, and the

sermon had been the subject of conversation that day.

"I fear me much that thou art but as that kettle, Judah," was the remark

of Goodwife Hoyt as she moved away after another bucket of sap--"mere

sounding brass and a tinkling cowbell!"

Roguish Sally Hoyt, the younger sister of modest Mary, could not forbear

a saucy fling at the lovers.

"Yea, Judah, art thou like the kettle," she said, striking it a rap with

the paddle with which she was stirring its contents. But the kettle,

full to the brim of syrup, failed to respond with its usual resonant

ring. "Hearest thou, Sergeant? It is no more 'sounding brass,' the

reason thereof being that it is so filled with fire and sweetness that

it can hold no more. The same being a token, brethren, as our godly

pastor would say, that the heart of our beloved brother Sergeant Wright

is so filled with that charity which is love, that he hath lost his

proper and natural brazen-facedness, and can no more convey the

knowledge of his condition to the lady of his choice than can this

kettle utter the clamor which is natural unto it."

"Go thy ways for a saucy hussy," exclaimed Mary, with sudden

consciousness, and with a mocking laugh the merry girl was gone. But the

fat was in the fire, and when Goodwife Hoyt returned with more sap, she

found the syrup there too, and the Sergeant kissing the unresisting Mary

behind a neighboring maple. For which wanton proceeding the good woman,

since she could not banish him from her family, sent away her daughter

to dwell with a distant relative, saying ere she went:

"I do prophesy that this silly affection will presently fail; so long as

I have a tongue in my mouth I will speak against it, for the knowledge

that I have of Sergeant Wright tendeth not to edifying."

The Sergeant did not reply verbally; but when Mary in her exile opened

her Bible to the chapter containing the text which had led to a

declaration, she was attracted by another which bore marginal notes in a

well known hand and which seemed to answer for him:

"Charity," which is love, "_never_ faileth; but whether there be

_prophecies_, they shall fail; whether there be _tongues_, they shall

cease; whether there be _knowledge_, it shall vanish away."

Time passed on, and one winter's night the French and Indians burst upon

the little town of Deerfield, and carried it away captive. The last

sight that the Sergeant caught through the open kitchen door was of the

great brass kettle which he and Mr. Hoyt had the night before filled

with wort or new beer, standing by the side of Mary's ironing-board;

then the blazing timbers fell over both with a deafening crash, and he

was marched away with pinioned arms.

The horrors of that captivity are too well known to need repetition.

Through them all Sergeant Wright, by his manly heroism and patient

endurance, his care for Sally, and filial devotion to Mrs. Hoyt, at last

so won her unwilling heart that she was constrained to admit that the

old prejudicial knowledge which she had of him had vanished away.

The efforts put forth by the French to induce the captives to remain in

Canada are notorious. A young French officer having fallen in love with

Sally Hoyt, a Jesuit priest endeavored to persuade her to the marriage.

After a sermon from the texts Deuteronomy xxi., 10-13: "When thou goest

forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered

them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and seest among

the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire that thou wouldest

have her to thy wife, then she ... shall remain in thine house, and thou

shalt be her husband and she shall be thy wife," and 1 Timothy v., 14:

"I will, therefore, that the younger women marry," etc., he addressed

her personally before the congregation. Sally, remembering how her

random shaft had in time past stirred up Sergeant Wright to an

expression of his feelings, and having in mind a bashful lover, a

certain shock-headed Ebenezer Nims, more generally known as "the Nims

boy," for whom she had an inexplicable good will and who had been

"captivated with her," as the ancient chronicle stated with more truth

than it knew, answered adroitly that she had no ill will toward marriage

as a state, but that she preferred to wed with one of her own people,

and requested that "inquisition should be made" whether there were not

one willing to become her husband among the captives. A cold shudder ran

down Sergeant Wright's spinal column. Who could the child mean but him?

Had she misinterpreted his brotherly care and affection? And yet she

knew of his love for her sister. It was with a great sigh of relief that

he saw "the Nims boy" suddenly start from his seat, a timid, shrinking

boy no longer, but transformed on the instant by the girl's challenge to

as brave a knight as ever tilted in tourney for lady's love, and running

the gauntlet of the eyes of friend and foe, place himself at her side.

The wily Jesuit was caught in his own toils; he acknowledged it by

marrying them upon the spot, and adding by way of benediction to the

usual Latin formula--"Mulier hominis confusio est."

When the younger sister marries before the elder it is the custom, in

some parts of the country, to bring in the brass kettle and make the

slighted one dance in it. Neither sister nor kettle were present on this

occasion, but the time was not far distant when both would be found

again. The captives were to be returned. Sergeant Wright had believed

all along, in spite of the mountains of difficulty in the way, that this

would be; and yet he said to himself on that homeward march, "Though I

have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity,"

which is love, "it profiteth me nothing." And in the joy of their first

meeting, the only words that Mary Hoyt could utter were: "Charity

suffereth long--beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all

things, endureth all things; charity _never_ faileth."

On their wedding day they visited the site of the old homestead. There,

in the hollow that had been the cellar, lay the old brass kettle, and in

it a flat-iron that had fallen off Mary's ironing-board. The wort with

which the kettle had been filled had prevented it from entirely melting,

and since she could not dance in it at her sister's wedding, she was

lifted in it now by her husband and danced in it at her own.

The kettle has been preserved as a relic by the Wright family. It hangs

in the upper part of the old mansion, and is so arranged that by pulling

a cord below, the flat iron strikes against it, and so awakens the

servants. And this story, which began with a tirade against bells, ends

in finding its beloved kettle transformed into one; yet to the whole

line and genealogy of the Wrights, by whom it has been cherished, it has

brought its blessing of faith and hope, and though but a bit of sounding

brass, yet in all its history to these presents it lacketh not that

charity which is love.

LIZZIE W. CHAMPNEY.

A ROMAN PICTURE.

Close to the window I wheel my chair,

In the afternoon, when my work is done,

To get my breath of the scented air,

To take my share of the Roman sun:

The air that, over yon mossy wall,

Brings me the sweetness of orange bloom,

The sun whose going carries us all

Out of a glory into a gloom.

Calm in the light of the waning day,

And peaceful, the convent garden lies;

There, on the hillside cold and gray,

The frowning walls and the old towers rise.

To and fro in the wind's soft breath

The bending ivy sways and swings;

To and fro on the slope beneath

The Roman pine its shadow flings.

To and fro the white clouds drift

Over the old roof gray with moss,

Over the sculptured saints that lift

Each to the sky his marble cross,

Over the stern old belfry tower,

Where, from its prison house of stone,

A pale-faced clock marks hour by hour

The changes that the years have shown.

Free glad birds this prison share,

White doves in this old tower dwell.

Not for them the call to prayer,

Not for them the warning bell.

As they flit about the eaves,

How their white wings catch the sun!

While below through orange leaves

Gleams the white cap of the nun.

Spotless kerchief, gown of gray,

Forehead wrapped in band of white:

These must labor, watch, and pray,

These must keep the cross in sight;

These are they who walk apart,

Who, with purpose undefiled,

Seek to fill a woman's heart

Without home or love or child.

Is it true that many hands

Find that rosary a chain?

True that 'neath these snowy bands

Throbs, full oft, a restless brain?

True that simple robe of gray

Covers oft a troubled breast?

True that pain and passion's sway

Enters even to this rest?

True, that at their holiest shrine,

In their hours of greatest good,

Comes to them a voice divine,

Of a sweeter womanhood?

It may be--how can _I_ tell

Who, outside the garden wall,

Only hear the convent bell.

Only see the shadows fall?

MARY LOWE DICKINSON.

ENGLISH WOMEN.

The consideration of the interesting subject which I now take up is not

new to me. Long ago I found myself thinking about it when occasion to do

so presented itself; and in this I was helped by the views of English

society presented in the literature of the day, some of the most

interesting studies of which are furnished in the novels written by

Englishwomen. Indeed, the whole subject of English life and character

has long been of the profoundest interest to me; and a recent visit to

England is rather the occasion than the cause of much of what I shall

write upon it. To say this is due to myself if not to my readers.[1]

[1] My article in the April number of "The Galaxy" happened to be

sent in without a title; and in hastily adding that with which it

appeared both the editor and myself forgot for the moment that it

was the title of Mr. Emerson's well-known book. My silent adoption

of it was an unintentional violation of courtesy which I regret.

One day a lady whom I had had the pleasure of taking in to dinner in a

country house near London, and whom I had soon found to be one of those

simple-minded, good-natured, truth-telling women who are notably common

in England, spoke to me about some ladies who on a previous day had

attracted her attention, adding, "I knew they were Americans." "How?" I

asked. "Oh, we always know American women!" "But how, pray?" She thought

a moment, and answered: "By their beauty--they are almost always pretty,

if not more--by their fine complexions, and by their exquisite dress." I

did not tell her that I thought that she was right; but that she was so

I had by that time become convinced. And yet I should say that the most

beautiful women I had ever seen were Englishwomen, were it not for the

memory of a Frenchwoman, a German, and a Czech. But the latter three

were rare exceptions. Beauty is very much commoner among women of the

English race than among those of any other with which I am acquainted;

and among that race it is commoner in "America" than in England. I saw

more beauty of face and figure at the first two receptions which I

attended after my return than I had found among the hundreds of

thousands of women whom I had seen in England.

The types are the same in both countries; but they seem to come near to

perfection much oftener here than there. Beauty of feature is, however,

sometimes more clearly defined in England than here. The mouth in

particular when it is beautiful is more statuesque. The curves are more

decided, and at the junction of the red of the lips with the white there

is a delicately raised outline which marks the form of the feature in a

very noble way. This may also be said of the nostril. It gives a

chiselled effect to those features which is not so often found in

"America"; but the nose itself, the brow, and the set and carriage of

the head are generally finer among "Americans." In both countries,

however, the head is apt to be too large for perfect proportion. This is

a characteristic defect of the English type of beauty. Its effect is

seen in Stothard's figures, in Etty's, and in those of other English

painters. Another defect is in the heaviness of the articulations.

Really fine arms are rare; but fine wrists are still rarer. Such wrists

as the Viennoise women have--of which I saw a wonderful example in the

Viennoise wife of a Sussex gentleman--are almost unknown among women of

English race in either country. It is often said, even in England, that

"American" women have more beautiful feet than Englishwomen have. This I

am inclined to doubt. The feet may be smaller here; and they generally

look smaller because Englishwomen wear larger and heavier shoes. They

are obliged to do so because they walk more, and because of their

moister climate. But mere smallness is not a beauty in a foot more than

in any other part of the body. Beauty is the result of shape,

proportion, and color; and feet are often cramped out of shape and out

of proportion in other countries than China. A foot to be beautiful

should seem fit for the body which it supports to stand upon and walk

with. It is said by some persons, who by saying it profess to know, that

nature, prodigal of charms to Englishwomen in bust, shoulders, and arms,

is chary of them elsewhere, and that their beauty of figure is apt to

stop at the waist. Upon this point I do not venture to give an opinion;

but I am inclined to doubt the judgment in question upon general

physiological principles. The human figure is the development of a germ;

and it is not natural that, whatever may be the case with individuals,

the type of a whole race in one country should present this

inconsistency. Possibly those who started this notion were unfortunate

in their occasions of observation and comparison.

There is more beauty in the south of England than in the north. When I

left Birmingham on my way southward, although in addition to my

observation northward I had there the opportunity of seeing the great

throngs chiefly of women called together by the triennial musical

festival, my eyes had begun to long for the sight of beauty. The women

were hard-featured, coarse in complexion, without any remarkable bloom,

but rather the contrary, and ungainly in figure. I found a great

improvement in this respect in the lower counties; and in London of

course more than elsewhere. For it is remarkable that according to some

law, which has never yet been formulated, or from some cause quite

undiscovered, perhaps undiscoverable, beautiful women are always found

in the greatest numbers where there are the most men and the most money.

Much has been said about the complexion of the women of England, which

has been greatly praised. I have not found it exceptionally beautiful.

It is often fresh, oftener ruddy, but still oftener coarse. A delicate,

finely-graduated bloom is not common. The rosy cheeks when looked at

closely are often streaked with fine lines and mottled with minute spots

of red; and the white is still oftener not like that of a lily, or,

better, of a white rose, but of some much coarser object in nature. It

is true that in making these odious comparisons I cannot forget certain

women, too common in "America," who seem to be composed in equal parts

of mind and leather, the elements of body and soul being left out so far

as is consistent with existence in human form. But such women are also

to be found in England, although perhaps in fewer numbers than here.

As to dress, that, as a man, I must regard as a purely adventitious and

an essentially unimportant matter. If a woman be beautiful, or charming

without actual beauty, a man cares very little in what she is dressed,

so long as she seems at ease in her clothes, and their color is becoming

to her and harmonious. There is no greater mistake than the assumption

that being dressed in good taste is indicative of good breeding, of

education, or of social advantage of any kind. Nor is it even a sign of

good taste in any other particular. You shall see a woman who has come

out of the slums, and whose life is worthy of her origin and her

breeding, although it may have become gilded and garish, and she shall

dress herself daily, morning, noon, and night, with such an exquisite

sense of fitness in all things, with such an instinctive appreciation of

harmony of outline and color, that your eye will be soothed with the

sight of her apparel; and she shall nevertheless be vulgar in mind and

manners, sordid in soul, in her life equally gross and frivolous. And

the converse is no less true. Women most happy in the circumstances of

their birth and breeding, intelligent, cultivated, charming, of whose

sympathy in regard to anything good or beautiful you may be sure, will

dress themselves in such an incongruous, heterogeneous fashion that the

beauty which they often possess triumphs with difficulty over their

effort to adorn it.

I feel, therefore, that I am saying very little against Englishwomen

when I say that in general they are the worst dressed human creatures

that I ever saw, except perhaps the female half of a certain class of

Germans. The reputation that they have in this respect among

Frenchwomen and "Americans" is richly deserved. Good taste is simply

absent. The notion of fitness, congruity, and "concatenation

accordingly" does not exist. In form the Englishwoman's dress is dowdy,

in color frightful. If not color-blind, she seems generally to be blind

to the effect of color, either singly or in combination. At the

Birmingham festival I saw a lady in a rich red-purple (plum color)

silk--high around the neck of course, as it was morning--and over this

swept a necklace of enormous coral beads. It made one's eyes ache to

look at her. This was not an uncommon, but a characteristic instance.

Such combinations may be justly regarded as the rule in Englishwomen's

dress. For purple they have strong liking. They not only wear it in

gowns, but they use it for trimming, in bands and flounces, in ribbons,

in feathers. They combine it with all other colors. An Englishwoman

seems to think herself "made" if she can deck herself in some way with

purple silk or velvet, or ribbons or feathers. Of course I am excepting

from these remarks a few who have intuitive good taste, and other few

who employ French _modistes_, and who submit implicitly to their

authority. The latter condition is essential; for even when the main

body of an Englishwoman's dress is in good taste she is very apt to

destroy its effect by some incongruous addition from her stores of

heterogeneous jewels, or by some other ornament--a collar, a cape, a

_fichu_, or a ribbon. They have a sad way of putting forlorn things

about their necks and on their heads which is very depressing, unless

it is astonishing, which happens sometimes. An Englishwoman will be

tolerably well dressed, and then will make a bundle of herself by tying

up her neck and shoulders in a huge piece of lace; or she will wear

specimens of two or three sets of jewels; or she will put a colored

feather in her hair, or a bonnet on her head, that would tempt a tyrant

to bring it to the block. I remember seeing a marchioness whose family

was noble in the middle ages riding with an "American" lady who had not

as much to spend in a year as the other had in a week; but the

marchioness was so obtrusively ill dressed and the American with such

good taste and simplicity that both being unusually intelligent, both

perfectly well bred and self-possessed, and both fine healthy women, a

person ignorant of their rank would have been likely to mistake the

latter for the noblewoman.

It has been said that Englishwomen dress better in full evening dress

than in what is known as _demi-toilette_. I cannot think so. It is not

the English dress that then looks better, but the Englishwoman; that

is, if she has fine shoulders, breasts, and arms. It is the beauty that

is revealed, the woman pure and simple, that pleases the eye, just as

is the case elsewhere. For the things that an Englishwoman will put on,

or put half-off herself, in the evening, are amazing to behold. An

Englishwoman in full dress who has not a fine figure is even more dowdy

than she is in the morning. For then she is likely to be at least neat

and tidy, and she may wear a gown that is comparatively unobtrusive in

form and color. Indeed, the best dress that the average Englishwoman

wears is her simple street dress, which is apt to be of some sober

color--black, gray, light or dark, or a dark soft blue, and to be

entirely without ornament--not a flounce or a bow, or even a button

except for use, with a bonnet, or oftener a hat, equally sober in tint

and in form. And this is best for her; in this she is safe. If she

would not risk offence, let her enfold herself thus. Let her by no

means wander forth into the wilderness of mingled colors: "that way

madness lies." This outward show is in no way the consequence of

carelessness. No one in England seems to be careless about anything,

least of all a woman about her dress. It is helpless, hopeless,

elaborated dowdyism. And yet as I write there rise up against me, with

sweet, reproachful faces, figures draped worthily of their beauty; and

more could not be said even for the work of Worth himself. One of many

I particularly remember with whom I took five o'clock tea at the house

of one of the Queen's chaplains, and who bore a name that may be found

in the "Peveril of the Peak." Her bright intelligence and her rich

beauty (her oval cheek was olive) would have made me indifferent to her

dress had it been a homespun bedgown. But shall I ever forget the

beautiful curves and tint of that soft-gray broad-leafed felt hat and

feather, the elegance of the dark carriage dress that harmonized so

well with it, or the perfect glove upon the hand that was held out so

frankly to bid me good-by? No, fair British friends, it is not you that

I mean; it is those other women whom I saw, but did not know.

It is because of the average Englishwoman's sad failure in dressing

herself that the notion has got abroad that Englishmen are finer looking

than Englishwomen. For the dress of the men is notably in good taste. It

is simple, manly, neat; and although sober in tint and snug in cut, it

is likely to have its general sobriety lightened up with a little touch

of bright, warm color. On the other hand, the dress of "American" men is

generally far, very, very far, inferior to that of the women in the

corresponding conditions of life. This helps to produce the

corresponding mistaken notion that the women in "America" are handsomer

than the men; upon the incorrectness and essential absurdity of which I

have already commented.

As to another attributed superiority of the Yankee woman I must express

my surprised dissent. I have not only read, but heard their intelligence

and social qualities rated much higher than that of their sisters in

England. Fair countrywomen, heed not this flattery. It is not true. The

typical Englishwoman of the upper and upper middle class has in strength

of mind and in information no type counterpart in "America." She may not

know Latin, and she may, and get little good by it; she may not be

brilliant, or quick, or self-adaptive, and she generally is not; but she

is well informed both as to the past and the present; she shows the

effect rather of true education than of school cramming, of culture

inherited and slowly acquired, and of intercourse with able, highly

educated, and cultivated men. She generally has some accomplishment

which she has acquired in no mere showy boarding-school fashion, but

with a respectable thoroughness. England is full of ladies who paint

well in water colors, or who are musicians, not mere piano players, or

who are botanists, or who write well, and who add one or more of such

acquirements to a solid general education, a considerable knowledge of

affairs, and the ability to manage a large household.

The conversation of the society in which such women are found is far

more interesting, far worthier of respect than that which is heard in

fashionable society (and these women are fashionable) in "America." And

this without any reproach to the latter. For how could it be otherwise

than that women who are the daughters, sisters, and wives of men who

are themselves highly educated, and who have the affairs of a great

empire, if not in their hands, at least upon their minds, should in all

that can be acquired by intercourse with such men be superior to others

most of whom bear the same relations to men who are necessarily

inferior in all these respects, who are absorbed in business, and know

little beyond their business except what can be learned from the

hurried reading of newspapers? In England there is not only accumulated

wealth, but accumulated culture; and of this the result appears not

only in the men, but in the women. It could not be otherwise.

Englishwomen are companions, and friends, and helps to their fathers,

their husbands, to all the men of their household. They are not

absorbed in the mere external affairs of society; and society is not

entirely in their hands. Men, men of mature years, form the substance

of English society; they give it its tone; women its grace and its

ornamentation. Even in the Englishwoman's drawing-room the Englishman

is looked up to and treated with deference. The talk and the tone must

be such as pleases him. She finds her pleasure as well as her duty in

making it such as pleases him. She is even there his companion, his

friend, his help. No matter how clever or brilliant she may be, she

does not seek _tenir salon_ like the French female _bel esprit_. No

matter how beautiful or how fashionable she may be, she does not leave

him out of her society arrangements; unless, indeed, in either case,

she chooses to set propriety at naught and brave an accusation of "bad

form." And indeed, should she attempt this she would probably soon be

checked by a very decided interposition of marital authority. The

result of all this is a soberer tone in mixed society than we are

accustomed to, and the discussion of graver topics in general

conversation.

And yet in the household the Englishwoman is quite supreme--much more

so, I think, than she is in "America." She really manages all household

affairs, troubling her husband with no details, but being careful to

manage in such a way as to please him. For, as I have said before, the

wish of the master of an English household is the law of that household.

Notwithstanding all this, I have been led to the firm belief that

hen-pecking is far more common in England than it is with us, and that

curtain lectures are much oftener delivered there than here. "Mrs.

Caudle's Curtain Lectures" would hardly have suggested themselves to an

American humorist, although the thing itself--if not in its perfection,

in its germ--is sufficiently known here to make the humor and the satire

of that series perfectly appreciated. And, strange to say, the average

English husband seems to be a less independent creature than the

"American." English wives more generally insist upon their prerogative

of sitting solemnly up for their husbands at night; and latch-keys are

regarded as a personal grievance. What American wife would think of

making a fuss about a man's having a latch-key? Not a few of them,

indeed, have one themselves. And yet I have seen an Englishwoman of the

lower middle class flush and choke and whimper when the subject of the

inalienable right of a man to a latch-key to his own house was broached,

and begin to talk about the worm turning when it is trampled upon.