It is (writes Tieck) a Moorish story, in which a noble maiden, who is deeply in love, is compelled to marry a villain (Pascara) in order to save her lover's life. Her lover arrives to free her from the shameful union, but it is too late. All used-up incidents, and stale tragic exaggerations! The performance of the actress, however, so completely ennobled the poverty of the text that the enjoyment of this evening will take its place among my most pleasurable recollections. The scene in which, being already married, she hears the trumpets of her approaching lover, the cry of exultation, the wild laugh in the extremity of her anguish, and her subsequent collapse, were of the very highest tragic power. People no doubt say that this adventurous stroke of the actor's art, which lies upon the very verge of what is pos. sible and beautiful, is too often introduced; that this hysterical laughter in despair, and these convulsive movements and spasmodic jerkings, recur too often and too capriciously, frequently in passages where they rend the spectator's heart, and when they had better be omitted, so as not to degrade this appalling effect to a vulgar stage trick. If this be really the case, then it is to be regretted that a lady whose excellence is so exceptional should not do more justice to herself than to present anything but what is altogether worthy of a true artist. ced A certain physical facility in presenting the external signs of grief, it is well known, frequently gave to Miss O'Neill's performances a semblance of profound pathos which did not spring from depth of emotion. It naturally tempted her to abuse, in the direction indicated by Tieck, a power which stirred, with so little trouble to herself, the sacred source of sympathetic tears." Edmund Kean fell into the same vice, till by repetition the trick made itself felt, and people became callous even to the hysterical sob, which used to make Byron * Such runs as we are familiar with, fatal to actors, and to public taste, were happily then unknown. Milman's Fazio, produced in February, 1818, was acted only fifteen times; Shiel's Evadne (February, 1819), thirty times; while Pocock's Rob Roy (March, 1818) was acted no fewer than thirty-four times that season-a run quite unusual. One weep, and sensitive women faint. night, as the Rev. Julian Young records, on the authority of the elder Mathews, when Kean had been trying something of the kind upon the audience, and got hissed, he whispered, as he left the stage, to a brother actor (Wewitzer), "By Jove, old fellow, they've found me out. lt won't do any more. I must drop my hysterics." It was his performance of Pescara in The Apostate which made Tieck recognize in Macready the promise of a fine actor. And yet Macready in his "Reminiscences" (vol. i. p. 145) mentions that when the part was given him, after the reading of the play to the actors, he received it mournfully and despondingly." Why, William," said Charles Kemble, with his wonted kindliness and good sense, "it is no doubt a disagreeable part, but there is passion in it." And this was just what Macready could turn to account, and he did it so effectively, that Tieck says of him: "The villian, Mr. Macready, was so admirably acted, so impetuous, true, and powerful, that (what never happened to me in England before) I felt myself reminded of the best periods of the actor's art in Germany. If the young man [Macready was then twenty-four] follows the lines on which he is now working, he is sure to make himself a name." At this time Kean was in the full blaze of his popularity. It was his third season in London. He had got rid of some of his earlier faults of unevenness and want of finish, and was in full possession of the fine physical qualities of eye and voice and figure to which his reckless habits afterward brought pre mature ruin. He is the stage hero of the present day (writes Tieck). Those who are ready enough to join in the censure of Kemble, and the mannerism of his school, start with the assumption that the favorite of their idolatry is far above criticism. Kean is a little, slightly built man, quick in his movements, and with brown, clever, expressive eyes. Many who remember Garrick maintain that Kean is like him; even Garrick's widow, who is still alive, is said to concur in this opinion; but she will hardly agree with the many admirers of Kean, who hold that he acts in Garrick's manner, and even surpasses him in many of his paths. The town was then talking of Kean's Hamlet, which he had played for the first time in London shortly before (March 14th, 1816). Like all his performances, it had fine moments; but, in the opinion of the best judges, Hazlitt included, it failed to impress the spectator with the pensiveness, the refinement," the weakness, and the melancholy," the humor playing with a lambent light over the profound pathos, and the fitful but short-lived passion, without which they could not recognize the Hamlet of Shakespeare. The conflict of criticism which raged on every side explains the anxiety which Tieck says he felt to see the new Hamlet. His All the playful, humorous speeches, all the bitter cutting passages, were given in the best style of comedy. But he could not touch the tragic side of the character. His mode of delivery is the very opposite of Kemble's. He speaks quickly, often with a rapidity that injures the effect of what he has to say. pauses and excess of emphasis are even more capricious and violent than Kemble's, added to which, by dumb show, or sudden stops, and such like artifices, he frequently imports into the verse a meaning which, in a general way, is not to be found in it. He stares, starts, wheels round, drops his voice, and then raises it suddenly to the highest pitch, goes off hurriedly, then comes back slowly, when one does not expect him; by all these epigrammatic surprises, crowding his impersonation with movement, showing an inexhaustible invention, breaking up his part into a thousand little frequent bons mots, tragical or comic, as it may happen; and it is by this clever way of, as it were, entirely recasting the characters allotted to him, that he has won the favor of the general public, especially of the women. If he does not weary the attention, as Kemble does, one is being constantly circumvented by him, and defrauded as by a skilful juggler of the impression, the emotion, which we have a right to expect. Now on the artist's part all this is done in mere caprice, with the deliberate purpose of giving a great variety of light and shade to his speeches, and of introducing turns and sudden alterations, of which neither the part nor the author has for the most part afforded the most remote suggestion. This is therefore playing with playing, and more violence is done to an author, especially if that author be Shakespeare, by this mode of treatment than by the declamatory manner of the Kembles. This criticism, in all essential points, agrees with that of Hazlitt ("Criticisms and Dramatic Essays," 2d ed. p. 178), who thought Kean's general delineation of the character wrong. It was (he writes) too strong and pointed. There was often a severity, approaching to virulence, in the common observations and answers. There is nothing of this in Hamlet. He is, as it were, wrapped up in the cloud of ers. his reflections, and only thinks aloud. There should therefore be no attempt to impress what he says upon others by any exaggeration of emphasis or manner; no talking at his hearThere should be as much of the gentleman and scholar as possible infused into the Hampart, and as little of the actor. let should be the most amiable of misanthropes. There is no one line in the play which should be spoken like any one line in Richard; yet Mr. Kean did not appear to us to keep the two characters always distinct. Hazlitt admits that in the great scene with Ophelia the genius of the actor made itself felt even through his faults. If there had been less vehemence of effort, it would not have lost any of its effect. But whatever minor faults might be found in this scene, they were amply redeemed by the manextremity of the stage, from a pang of parting ner of his coming back after he has gone to the tenderness, to press his lips to Ophelia's hand. It had an electrical effect on the house. It was the finest commentary that was ever made on Shakespeare. It explained the character at once (as he meant it), as one of disappointed hope, of bitter regret, of affection suspended and not obliterated by the distractions of the scene around him. Tieck does not seem to have been im pressed to the same extent by this fine and then novel interpretation of a scene of crucial difficulty; but he thought it at all events worthy of the following minute description: In the interview with Ophelia, after the famous monologue, overheard by the King and Polonius, Kean does not fall into the error of so many actors, who give this scene an entirely tender and sentimental coloring. He, on the other hand, is perhaps too bitter and severe. The words, "To a nunnery! Go!" which he has to speak a second time after a long intermediate speech, having previously given the same counsel to Ophelia twice in different words, were accentuated by him with an ascending emphasis, till it took the tone of a vehement menance and command, rising almost to a scream, with an expression of marked severity (Grausamkeit) in, voice, look, and action, after which he retires hurriedly, and has already grasped the handle of the door, when he stops, turns round, and casting back the saddest, almost tearful look, stands lingering for some time, and then, with a slow, al most gliding step, comes back, seizes Ophelia's hand, imprints a lingering kiss upon it with a deep-drawn sigh, and straightway dashes more impetuously than before out at the door, which he slams violently behind him. plause from all parts of the house rewarded this well-studied specimen of the favorite's art. Peals of ap Those who remember the Hamlet of Charles Kean in his best days will recognize in this vivid description the original of what made one of the most effective features of that performance. The conflicting judgments of theatrical critics are a source of constant perplexity to those who cannot judge for themselves. But it is hardly possible to imagine how two men, like Hazlitt and Tieck, should come to such diametrically opposite opinions as they have recorded of the performance of the Ghost by a Mr. Redmond. We cannot speak too highly of it," says Hazlitt. It glided across the stage with the preternatural grandeur of a spirit." His speaking, he admits, was not equally excellent. 'A spirit should not whine or shed tears. Contrast this with Tieck's commentary on the deportment of this poor ghost." 66 Although with us in Germany, especially in effect; but the English, who, although they do Up to a comparatively recent period the absurdities to which Tieck here calls attention kept their place upon our stage. They would not now be endured. But when will an English actor of the first rank, like Schröder, show his audience in the Ghost, or indeed in any subordinate part, that Shakespeare has put qualities into all his characters which only an artist can thoroughly develop? Tieck formed a very poor opinion of .Kean's Macbeth. He found it a great deal feebler than his Hamlet. "He has not," Tieck writes, "the gifts of mind nor the physique to produce a harmonious whole, but vibrates from one extreme to another, from want of imaginative grasp. Besides all the defects in his style, to which I have already adverted, he tears whole scenes to pieces in the manner of the French tragedians by speaking almost every word at the highest pitch of his voice, and with the strongest emphasis." Even Hazlitt, with all his admiration for Kean, admits that he missed the poetry of Macbeth's character. He finds nothing to praise in it but his acting of the scene after the murder. “The hesitation, the bewildered look, the coming to himself when he sees his hands bloody; the manner in which his voice clung to his throat, and choked his utterance; his agony and tears, the force of nature overcome by passion, beggared description." But Tieck loved and understood Shakespeare too well to be reconciled, by occasional striking passages in a performance, to a fundamental misconception of a character, or physical unfitness for it. Besides, he was irritated-as what Shakespearean scholar has not been ?—by the introduction of Locke's Witch Music into the play, with its motley horde of fantastically arranged chorus singers, and by other arrangements of the scene which he discusses at great length, and denounces, not without cause, as tending "to pervert the poet's grand conceptions, and to make them ridiculous." He was thus not in a mood to see such merits in Kean's performance as it probably had. His judgment of that great actor's Richard III. was probably Instead warped from the same cause. of Shakespeare's play, he was presented with Cibber's perversion of it. He had some nights before seen Booth, an actor of short-lived reputation, who played the part in Kean's manner, but without his genius, and was shocked by the "unwarrantable omissions, no less than by "the pitiful additions," which in his eyes robbed the play of its distinctive excellence. The character of Richard was stripped of its heroic proportions; and he asks, with just indignation, what can be said of a play from which the im pressive Cassandra-like figure of Queen in Germany follow the same track, and conseMargaret has been omitted? Kean's scene in the tent, when he wakes up from his ghost-haunted sleep, was regarded by his admirers as one of his greatest achievements. Our own boyish recollections enable us to vouch for the accuracy of the following description of it by Tieck. The best critics of the present day will brobably agree that the German was not far wrong in thinking that true art was lost sight of in the attempt to produce a claptrap effect. As the ghosts disappeared, Richard sprang up from his sleep. But how? He had a naked sword by his side, and, leaning upon this, he staggered forward, sank on one knee, then started back as if he wished to rise, holding high in the air his other arm, which shook violently even to the finger-tips; then trembling, staring with wide-open eyes, he advanced in silent anguish on his knees with violent gesticulations, and yet slowly, into the proscenium, still shaking with fright, and staring at the audience with wide-set eyes. I cannot say how long this idiotic dumb show lasted, which seemed to me a mere mountebank's trick; but when, after a long interval, he wanted to proceed with the monologue, he had to wait almost as long, on account of the extravagant peals of applause, before he could begin. The great defect which Tieck found in the English stage was its want of completeness and ensemble. This was due, not as now to the way such good actors as exist are scattered up and down the theatres of the metropolis, and to the disappearance of permanent companies from the great provincial cities, but to the habit which prevailed of not regarding plays as a whole from a commanding central point, but "thinking only of this or that character, of special scenes, and so forth." We may fitly conclude this paper with some general remarks by Tieck upon what English acting was as he saw it, and what it ought to be, to bring it back to what it must have been, when it had no splendor of scenic accessories to rest upon, but was compelled to trust to its power of impressing the imagination of the audience by speech and gesture, and truth to nature, wisely tempered by art. They are not without significance at the present day. I have found that the performance of English tragedy is not nowadays essentially different from the French, and that the two stages approximate each other in points where both are most strikingly wrong. In point of fact, we quently it must be owned that the French school and manner are the best and finest of the three, for in France they have carried to the ripeness of perfection what both English and Germans are still struggling to attain in a tentative and hesitating way. We must, however, not forget that the English had for a great length of time been in possession of a fully developed stage, when the French had scarcely made their first quite insignificant essays in tragedy, which did not assume a national character among them till a much later period. So iu like manner the acting of Engfish tragedians was completely formed, and of a marked individuality, before the other countries in Europe had anything similar to show. This histrionic art, as we know from authentic records, and may with the greatest certainty conclude from its effects, was so perfect that the finest performances of later times can have been at best only an approximation to it. The ensemble in those days must have been no less excellent, because otherwise these great plays at their first appearance must have gone off as lamely as they do now, or rather they would never have come into existence at all. The acting of that time, however, I imagine, was very different in kind from that now employed by the French in their tragedies; true, simple, more or less colored and interpenetrated by whim and irony, the very antipodes to all declamation and false emphasis-no rhythmic chanting, no unnecessary pauses and falsetto accents. This spirited, living, natural style of acting, this just and simple manner of speaking, which alone gives scope for and makes every delicacy of gradation possible, sustained and elevated the productions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; it was in this style that Burbage and Alleyne were great; as Betterton was in later days, and so on down to Garrick. Therefore it is not to be wondered at, if with that monotonous and inflated voice and action, which approach to the French mannerism, together with the exaggeration, which is due simply to the want of imagination and creative power, the works of Shakespeare in these days of ours often make but little impression. In the matter of acting, Schröder's universal talent laid the foundation of a genuine German school, which of necessity was akin to that old English one to which I have just alluded. A firm reliance upon truth and nature, delight in a high tone of comedy, a freedom of opinion which stoops to no conventions, an enlightened emotional nature, which is not to be dazzled by bombast-all this, with an earnest striving after genuine and profound art, is, if we take the high point of view, our real German nature. And therefore Shakespeare, the incomparable, suits us better than any other poet. True help is only to be found in that uniquely great poet, of whose creative power his country unquestionably still shows that it has glimpses, although often feeble glimpses only. Tieck then refers to the salutary influence of Goethe in restoring a true dramatic style to the German drama, and of Schröder, Fleck, Reinicke, Scholz, and others in giving to his country a national stage. He then makes a remark, which the English, in their exaggerated estimate of the merits of foreign actors, would do well to remember. Let them think, for example, of what a French or Italian actress would make of Juliet, Imogen, Constance, Queen Katherine, Lady Macbeth, Isabella, Desdemona, Beatrice, Rosalind, and they will then appreciate the force of the following words: "To rise to supreme excellence as a German" (let us add, or English) "actor is, no doubt, infinitely more difficult than to become a great French tragedian ; just as it is a much higher feat to write a play in the sense in which Shakespeare's or Goethe's are plays, than to write a tragedy on the narrow conventional model."-The Nineteenth Century. YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO. BY R. L. STEVENSON. THE name at the head of this article is probably unknown to the English reader, and yet I think it should become a household word like that of Garibaldi. Some day soon we may expect to hear more fully the details of Yoshida's history, and the degree of his influence in the transformation of Japan; even now there must be Englishmen acquainted with the supject, and perhaps the appearance of this sketch may elicit something more complete and exact. I wish to say that I am not, rightly speaking, the author of the present paper: I tell the story on the authority of an intelligent, Japanese gentlemen, Mr. Taiso Masaki, who told it to me with an emotion that does honor to his heart; and though I have taken some pains, and sent my notes to him to be corrected, this can be no more than an imperfect outline. Yoshida-Torajiro was son to the hereditary military instructor of the house of Choshu. The name you are to pronounce with an equality of accent on the different syllables, almost as in French, the vowels as in Italian, but the consonants in the English manner-except thej, which has the French sound, or, as it has been cleverly proposed to write it, the sound of zh. Yoshida was very learned in Chinese letters, or, as we might say, in the classics, and in his father's subject; fortification was among his favorite studies, and he was a poet from his boyhood. He was born to a lively and intelligent patriotism, the condition of Japan was his great concern, and while he projected a better future he lost no opportunity of improving his With knowledge of her present state. this end he was continually travelling in his youth, going on foot and sometimes with three days' provision on his back, in the brave, self-helpful manner of all heroes. He kept a full diary while he was thus upon his journeys, but it is feared that these notes have been destroyed. If their value were in any respect such as we have reason to expect from the man's character, this would be a loss not easy to exaggerate. It is still wonderful to the Japanese how far he contrived to push these explorations; a cultured gentleman of that land and period would leave a complimentary poem wherever he had been hospitably entertained, and a friend of Mr. Masaki, who was likewise a great wanderer, has found such traces of Yoshida's passage in very remote regions of Japan. Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary; but Yoshida considered otherwise, and he studied the miseries of his fellowcountrymen with as much attention and research as though he had been going to write a book instead of merely to propose a remedy. To a man of his intensity and singleness there is no question but that this survey was melancholy in the extreme. His dissatisfaction is proved by the eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of reform, and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his task. he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of Japan that occupied his mind. The external feebleness of that country was then illustrated by As |