pity for the miserable, slimy wretch when he came to his frightful end.

The manner of Wallack, when Fagin is teaching Oliver how to pick pockets, was at once droll, benign, and baleful. He caused Fagin to assume a fatherlike manner, to become an eccentric, benevolent, elderly person, of genial disposition. He trotted up and down the room, having a silk handkerchief in the tail pocket of his coat, which Oliver had been told to snatch without attracting its owner's attention, and when he said, "I'm a nice leetle banker, an' I'm agoin' to the city, an' I must be ve-ery careful o' the thieves, for I've lots o' mon-ney," his voice was soft, his demeanor playful and ingratiating, and his sly assumption of vigilance comic. The nefarious instruction was made a sport to the poor boy, and his failure in the first attempt to steal the handkerchief was treated as a joke. Beneath the simulated kindness and levity of the impersonation, however, there was revealed to the auditors a grisly spirit of wickedness and cruelty, and that spirit, on occasion, flashed forth, viperlike and frightful, as when Fagin denounced Nancy to the murderous Sikes. Seldom, perhaps never, has deadly malevolence found such consummate and hideous expression as it did in Wallack's acting, at that point. The crafty meanness, the relentless malignity, the seething hatred, and the bloodthirsty exultation in the accomplishment of a purpose of revenge were indescribably odious and awful.

Wallack's Fagin was more massive, melodramatic, afflicting, and dreadful than its original. His portraiture combined sardonic humor, heartless cruelty, low cunning, the hideous degradation of a burnt-out sensualist, avarice incarnate and shuddering superstition, a compound, indeed, of all vile qualities, skilfully blended into a congruous, possible, exceedingly revolting character. His acting was, perhaps, most deeply felt in Fagin's final scene, which depicts that frightful creature's conduct in his last hour in the condemned cell and Oliver's visit to him. Fagin was shown behind an iron grill, frantic and awful, rushing to and fro in the cell, praying, cursing, and raving, an object of dishevelled, seared, haggard, shattered humanity, shocking to see and indescribably piteous to hear. A low nature, incapable of repentance, oppressed by terror and remorse, utterly unstrung in the presence of death and delirious with desperation, surely was never better displayed and interpreted than it was by Wallack in that scene. skill with which the actor contrived to diffuse through Fagin's ravings a suggestion of latent kindness in his nature and to make himself more an object of pity and less an object of loathing was truly superb. It was impossible not to feel sorry for the poor wretch, ignominious, bloody villain though he is, when, maddened by terror, he seized and shook the iron bars of his grated cell and wildly implored "little Oliver" to save him—“a poor old man, m' tear! a poor, 'elpless old man!" At his

The

best Wallack, in that scene, could, and did, stir his hearers to the very roots of being, and his achievement was the more admirable because absolutely a work of art, premeditated as to every detail and carried through with that perfect intellectual control of the emotions which is the decisive evidence and crowning glory of a great actor.

It is not always easy, even for experienced observers, to discriminate, as to an actor's personality, between that which is assumed and that which is actual. A reason for attributing, at least in some degree, the attributes of an assumed character to the actor who presents it is the fact-substantiated in experiencethat, in many instances, actors most excel in the exposition of natures measurably sympathetic with their own. Yet there are numerous examples of the consummate dramatic art with which the most genial and gentle of men and women have made themselves seem to be monsters of depravity in the process of theatrical representation. The fine comedian John E. Owens, a man remarkable for the sweetness of his disposition and the refinement and gentleness of his nature-a sure index to goodness-was once acting Uriah Heep, in a stage version of "David Copperfield." A friend who had seen the performance begged Owens never to act the part again. "I saw you, John," he said, "and I hated you. When you made love to Agnes and tried to take her hand I felt as if I should like to kill you for a vile,

sneaking villain." "No greater compliment has ever been paid to me," replied the actor. "It is most encouraging." I think of that story when I recall such performances as those of Henry Irving as Robert Macaire, Charles Couldock as King Louis the Eleventh, Edwin Booth as Sir Giles Overreach, Davenport as Sikes, and Wallack as Fagin, and remember what lovable men they were and how genial our companionship used to be, in other days.

It is not possible judiciously and without qualification to admire "Oliver Twist," either as a novel or a play. The commonplace and the brutal are commingled in it, and they make a sickening medley. But parts of it are irradiated by the light of humor, its drift is humanitarian, and it tends to diffuse benevolence. The spectator of it is reminded and warned of social conditions that cannot safely be ignored and is strongly stimulated to pity for the infirmities of human nature and to practical charity for the wretched. Its "lessons," to the effect that crime is often the offspring of poverty; that the world is full of unmerited and inexplicable misery, and that those persons who can help to regenerate the vicious and criminal classes ought to do their good work steadfastly and with ever watchful kindness,—are trite; but art can "touch to fine issues" the tritest of themes, and a vast deal of art has, first and last, been expended on "Oliver Twist."

XVI.

THE PLAYS OF AUGUSTUS THOMAS.

IT is the province of criticism to examine, analyze, classify, and expound, with praise for merit and censure for defect, the productions of artists, to maintain and apply the highest standard of taste, beauty, and morality, to advocate that which is right and to denounce that which is wrong. In the pursuit of that difficult and generally thankless vocation the great privilege sometimes comes to the critic of recognizing, honoring, and perhaps contributing to the advancement of genius. That privilege is afforded to the critic who is so fortunate as to examine the best plays of Augustus Thomas. The genius that is manifest in those plays is that which intuitively comprehends human nature, its strength and its weakness, its temptations and its trials; which sees the whole vast current of humanity, the diversified characters, pathetic or antipathetic; the blessings and the cruelties of condition; which discriminates between good and evil, being aware that those elements are strangely commingled in every human creature; and which can seize and reproduce those points and moments when