Some sixteen licensed play-houses still nightly open their doors to the world of London, from courtly St. James's to squalid Shoreditch and remotest Islington. Some ten or twelve hundred hard-working people-actors, singers, dancers, scenepainters, musicians, costumiers, machinists, property-men, sceneshifters, "supers," and all that indescribable tagrag and bobtail which hangs on to the skirts of theatrical enterprise-still gain hard-earned bread by holding the mirror up to nature, or by lackering, framing, cleaning, and repairing the said mirror. The List of Pieces belonging to Members of the Dramatic Authors' Society or their representatives, up to February 1856, now lying before us, shows some twelve hundred tragedies, comedies, dramas, melodramas, farces, interludes, burlettas, extravaganzas, burlesques, spectacles, or pantomimes. There are writers for the stage who still make a livelihood by the craft. Not a Theatrical-Fund dinner but can still secure the indispensable Lord of British charity to fill its chair. The daily newspapers continue to find room in their columns for accounts of the last new piece, and some Sunday prints contrive to fill whole broadsides with the most marvellous minutiæ of even provincial theatrical intelligence-whence the reader may gather with pleasure that "Little Joe Eccles has been doing good business at StokeDamerel," and that "Slogger and his dogs are drawing immensely at Corbridge;" or grow sad to learn that "Thorne's troupe has been but indifferently patronised at Sowerby-Bridge; which is the more to be lamented, as Thorne has invariably provided a good class of legitimate entertainment, and the company comprises many old-established favourites." If we pass from the sovereign people to the sovereign-the Queen has her series of winter performances in the Rubens-room at Windsor; while scarce a week passes but we learn that "her Majesty has honoured with her presence" the Olympic, the Princess's, or the Haymarket. Noble and rich follow the royal example. Who has not heard of the private theatricals of Woburn and Belvoir? And in hundreds of English country-houses-stately or snug, warm old Tudor or bran-new Elizabethan-if you could lift the roof, Asmodeus fashion, and peep in on the amusements of the winter, ten to one but you would find the best room in the house fitted with a proscenium, the ladies'-maids at work on costumes, Cumberland's Acting Drama littering the library tables,-in short, all signs of "a play toward" among the young people.

In truth, the stage is like the king-it never dies. It never can die, while there lives in men the impulse to embody emotion and incident in mimetic forms-the craving to project ourselves out of our daily life and habitual surroundings into new forms,

strange utterances, unfamiliar relations, passions stronger than society tolerates, and mirthfulness less marred by melancholy than real life supplies. All children are actors. Watch them in their little plays. The very word "play" has its significance, common, as it is, to the actor and the child. Childhood is one long drama, full of marvellous incident. It matters little whether its stage be a Spitalfields court or a ducal nursery. The scenery, machinery, and decorations in both are created by the glamour of that glorious imagination as yet undimmed by life and unchastened by experience, which can find Pactolus in a streetgutter, and make of the foulest cellar a very palace of delight.

The complaint that the drama is dead comes chiefly from old gentlemen, who remember the Kembles, and the O. P. riots; and literary men, who are au fait at the Elizabethan repertory, but who never enter the theatre in the next street. But the drama is as alive as ever for those cherry-cheeked boys, and fair-haired little maidens, whose bright faces light up the Christmas box, and whose merry laughter sounds like a ring of silver bel's through the hoarser full-grown mirth of pit and gallery. The drama is as alive as ever for the hard-handed artisan and his neat wife, who, from their bench at Sadler's Wells, follow breathless the jealousy of Othello, or roar at the self-conceit of Bottom. Nor is the drama dead for even that blasé public of Oxford Street which trembles with the tremolo that ushers in the ghost of the Corsican brother, or scarce suppresses its shriek at the discovery of Mrs. Charles Kean hanging on to the door of the murder-vault in Pauline. Nor is the drama dead for the selecter audiences which chuckle over the unctuous humour of Keeley, or the inimitable homely realism of his better-half, or which follow Mr. Wigan through the unforced scenes of Still Waters run deep, or sit, like Garrick, between laughter and terror, to witness the farcical grimace, vehement passion, mad energy, and bewildering contrasts of Robson in the Yellow Dwarf or Prince Richcraft; nor for the coarser crowd which roars with Wright through a "screaming farce" at the Adelphi, or is convulsed by the quaint oddities of Buckstone at the Haymarket.

No; be assured the drama is quite alive. We who write about it have not to anatomise a "dead subject," but to examine the gait, features, movements, speech, and behaviour of a living body; a more difficult task, indeed, but a pleasanter one, than the dissector's. But, though it does not die, the drama is subject to metempsychosis. It takes as many forms as that hero of transmigration, Endor, so dear to our nurserydays: an uncouth and clumsy bantling, swaddled in a monk's frock, before the reign of Elizabeth;-at the beginning of that

reign a pedantic doctor, talking Latin, or latinised and scholastic English, in a master-of-arts' gown ;-by the end of that reign a young giant, sounding all mysteries of humanity, pouring forth with irrepressible fertility the most various and life-like creations; sounding the strings of the human heart, from its sharpest tones of pathos to its gladdest note of merriment; pressing into its service the most productive imaginations, the keenest wits, the sweetest voices of the time;-under James and Charles I. dwindling from the colossal dimensions of its prime, but still large of mould, and stately or sweet of utterance; during the Commonwealth a tattered cavalier, skulking from the puritan constables;-between the Restoration and the Revolution a debauched court-gallant, with a brave French suit on its back, cards and claret-flask in hand, chucking orange-girls under the chin, and exchanging smutty and reckless repartee with loose ladies in masks, in the Mall, or from the side-boxes;-under Anne and the earlier Georges alternately a periwigged fop, or a dull prosy university-doctor, declaiming in toga, breeches, and full-bottomed wig;-through the Regency a rattling, sharping, sparkling "blood," with some wit and more slang, or else a mouther of clap-trap, a maudlin Wertherised retailer of German sentiment;-and in our time a motley masquerader, assuming in turn, and more or less weakly, all the shapes of its earlier transmigrations, but incapable, as yet, of moulding for itself a

distinct and characteristic form.

It is not the purpose of this article to examine in detail the features of our national drama in each of these its leading phases. Our sketch is meant merely to support the observation, that the art of the stage is eminently an art of conditions, shaped by the pressure of the time. Because it has ceased to manifest its life in the form we like best, we must not conclude it is dead. Even the iron hand of Cromwell could do no more than suppress it. The moment his gripe was taken off, it sprang up more buoyant, if less beautiful, than before.

The most discouraging point about the stage of our own day is, that it seems as yet to have found no form of its own. We say "seems," for it may be that we are unable to measure aright the peculiarities of contemporary art. Critics of the next generation, judging ours in retrospect, and with all its relations under their eye, may discover, even in the stage-life of our degenerate day, something which distinguishes it from all the earlier forms of dramatic activity. They may prove its irregular and seemingly aimless strugglings to have been the pangs of birth, and not the twitchings of the dead-throe. At any rate, our stage, even for us, is worthy of more study than it has yet received. There has been abundant lamentation over it,-enough, and

more than enough, of depreciatory comparison between it and the stage of other times-Elizabethan, Carolan, or Georgian. But none, or very few, have thought it deserving of positive appreciation.

Our object in this article is to attempt such an appreciation. Dramatic art, we have said, is eminently an art of conditions. Its development demands a combination of minds such as no other art requires. Author, manager, actor, and public, must all work together to make a play. It is hard to say which of these four has the more important function in the matter. For some sixteen theatres confining ourselves to the capital-this work of writing, managing, acting, and seeing plays is going on. Some of these theatres trust chiefly to the great plays of the past. Shakespeare defrays the bulk of the entertainment at the Princess's and Sadler's Wells. The transpontine Surrey and Victoria, and the east-end theatres and saloons, live mainly on melodrama. Farce and burlesque, dear to the English heart, find room in all the theatres alike. Comedy is the staple ware of the Olympic and the Haymarket. The Adelphi has its melodrama-more artistic and elaborate than suits the audiences of the Surrey or Victoria; and its farce-more "screaming" than the Haymarket or the Olympic. But none of these theatres can strictly be said to have a class of entertainments peculiar to itself. Each of them, upon occasion, ventures on the others' domain. None of our theatrical stars are fixed. They move in wide and eccentric orbits. Shoreditch has its fits of legitimate tragedy; the Britannia Saloon, the City, and Standard, low as their prices of admission are, can find means to pay Mr. Anderson, or Mr. G. V. Brooke, his fifty pounds a week; the Surrey has its opera-seasons; Mr. Charles Mathews is not too nice to divide the honours of Drury Lane with Madame La Barrère and her wild-beasts.

One result of this variety of entertainment is, that such actors as we have are scattered through many theatres, and that no one house possesses a complete and well-trained troupe for any one particular class of plays, and a combination of all the resources required for the perfect representation of any such class.

But one remark applies to all these theatres ;- they live mainly on translations from the French. For comedy, farce, and melodrama alike, our playwrights lay Paris under contribution. There is but a pennyworth of English invention to an intolerable quantity of Gallic importation. The cheap and rapid intercommunication between London and Paris, the very general ability to read French with more or less aid from the dictionary, and the obvious advantages of borrowing or stealing over inventing, have led to an extension of this practice, which, however,

is of much earlier date than most persons are aware.

From the

Augustan days of Anne downwards, our play-writers have drawn largely on France; and a great proportion of what elderly playgoers fondly call "good old English farces" are translations from the French.

And yet our time can boast its original writers. To say nothing of smaller men, whose place is as yet hardly fixed, the generation which has seen produced plays of Miss Baillie, Byron, Sheil, Barry Cornwall, Milman, Miss Mitford, Knowles, Bulwer, Jerrold, White, Marston, and Browning, has something to show. It is enough for the present to say of these writers, that they have produced works which, whether regarded as plays or as poems, are superior to any thing presented on the stage, of the serious kind, since the Restoration-Otway's Venice Preserved alone excepted. In comedy we cannot say as much. Jerrold may have as much wit of words as Congreve, or Vanbrugh, or Sheridan; but he lacks their dramatic movement, buoyant spirits, and knowledge of the world as their world was.

But in spite of these and other less conspicuous exceptions, it must be admitted that our stage is of the French, Frenchy. There is a sad lack of nationality about it. Its pictures of life, such as they are, are thinly-disguised scenes, which may have likelihood in Paris, but are ludicrously unlike any thing in England. The morals are as un-English as the manners. The mainspring of French stage-intrigue, serious or comic, is infidelity to the marriage-vow. Our decencies of life forbid resort to this source of interest. But the interest our playwrights must have; and it is very amusing to see the shifts to which the translators and adapters of our theatres are put to preserve the effect, and yet varnish over the corrupt cause into something less repugnant to British propriety. But the scent of corruption still clings to the scene; and no healthiness of moral tone is possible in our theatre while the prurient poison of the modern French stage is transfused through all its veins.

But, with these evils, we have derived from the French theatre many good lessons. The modern French dramatists are, beyond question, the first who have reduced to system the secret of stageeffect. If, instead of adapting their plays, our writers had contented themselves with studying in them the art of developing a plot in and through action, the secret of conducting a story so as to keep alive the interest of an audience, and to raise it higher and higher to a culminating point, we should have owed nothing but gratitude to France. Even in translations and adaptations, however, this constructive art of the French is manifested for the education of original dramatists to come; and all who even now write original pieces show in their works the influence of French

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