almost any period, are meant to amuse people who have been working hard all day and have had either too much or too little dinner. Their object is permissible, but it has nothing to do with the dramatic art.

Bicycling, golf, and the music-hall have affected the business side of the theatre, and on the other side the impetus derived from Dumas fils, Augier, and Ibsen has spent itself. The theatre is losing its audience and its inspiration. That is why the question of an endowed theatre has come up again. The intelligent minority will not go to the theatre, an assertion which is not disproved by giving lists of successful men and women who go to the first nights that are fashionable among a certain class of people who believe themselves to be fashionable. People are getting tired of the theatre, of its cheap effects, its coarse methods, its vain repetitions, its stock personages, its unreality, and its ignorance of life. Already

they say that the dramatic form is exhausted, that its capacities have been over-estimated, that its vividness and directness are attained at the cost of truth and delicacy, that its necessary conditions gravely limit its range and reduce it to a relative inferiority. There is ground for these complaints, and evident danger that the methods of the stage are crystallising into rigid patterns. It has ceased to progress, a fatal sign of deterioration, as in the Italian painting, but that occurred after getting very near to perfection.

The deterioration of the stage is a serious matter. The loss of any form of art is the loss of a high pleasure, and the stage can get certain æsthetic results better than any other form. And if we are not to lose the results, the drama must find a means of renewing itself. It must develope some neglected methods and discard those

that are worn out. It must learn to treat the primary instincts in the spirit of truth and not in the spirit of melodrama. We do not want explosions of crude emotion, or character expressed by catchwords, and we do want more simple and flexible framework. The rigid mechanical plot is worn out. Plot is a necessity of drama, but not its material or its essence. There cannot be plays without plots? Certainly, and there cannot be houses without foundations, but that is no reason for living in the cellars. Action there must be, but not merely physical action. Motion is not of itself dramatic. Before movement can be dramatic it must be intelligible, and have behind it

an

intellectual or emotional state which it expresses or interprets. A play which shows a man rushing about the stage assaulting people, getting under tables, or hiding in cupboards, has action; but unless we know why he does these things, and unless he does them with reasonable and sufficient motive the action is not dramatic; it is only absurd. And violent action is often less dramatic than suspended action. Two men slashing each other with bowie-knives are less impressive than two men at issue under intense and controlled emotion. These are elementary matters, but since the University Extension lecturers revived Aristotle, you may always have him thrown at you by people who have not grasped the difference between the Greek and English drama.

We want, then, emotion that is sincere, plot that is simple and flexible, action that is necessary and interpretative. The drama should be able to state character; after that it should be able to give an exposition of character, and perhaps it might in time learn to exhibit the growth, development, and culmination of character,

and how it reacts under the pressure of event and circumstance. It could go further, and combine emotion, temperament, and intellect. Some day it might characterise emotion. For instance, why should all queens express emotion in exactly the same way, which happens to be the way of the actress who plays them? Queens, like their subjects, have their individual styles of expressing feeling. Berengaria of Cyprus and Anne of Austria probably did not feel in precisely the same fashion; they experienced the same emotions no doubt but not in the same degree, and they should be made to show them in their own way. That is to characterise emotion, and it can be done with kings as well as queens, and with the commonalty also. Dramatists, preoccupied with movement and action, have neglected speech as a means of revealing character, and they do not seem to know that the sound and cadence of language can express varieties of mood. In plays loaded with plot and incident dialogue must be explanatory. A natural and delicate method of expression, such as speech and language of this kind, has to be sacrificed; it demands more attention than the average playgoer will ever give, and more intelligence and cultivation than we have any right to expect of him. But no one expects that the average playgoer will

reform or improve the drama. The minority must do that.

The playgoer who has made the exodus from the theatrical nursery is in the reverse situation to the lover of music. There is music for the populace and music for the connoisseur. If you like Raff and Gade and Tschaihowsky, you can hear them; if you prefer symphonies to the marches of De Sousa, they are to be had. It is not the same with the lover of drama and acting. There are no symphonies and Raffs and Gades for him; he must put up with the lower forms of the art he loves. He has realised his position, and the demand for the endowed theatre is a demand for a higher form of art. It will be met in the theatre, as it was met in the concert-room, by the associated effort of private people. When musical people could not get what they wanted, they joined together and founded societies for oratorio, for instrumental music, for symphony, and for anything else they desired, with the result that the taste of the musical public is immeasurably higher, more informed, and more exacting than the taste of the theatrical public. Music has a standard, the theatre has not. Is there as much interest in the theatre as in music? If there be, those who care for it can do what the musical people have done.

C. G. COMPTON.

THE regular march of Russian aggression, or, let us say, expansion during the last two centuries has been a striking and, to those people who do not happen to be Russians, an alarming phenomenon. But a closer scrutiny of contemporary facts in the light of the history that has led up to them tends on the whole to show that the alarm which the great Empire of the North inspires in her neighbours (and to-day the phrase covers nearly all nations of the globe) is, if not indeed unreal, at least greatly exaggerated. For instance, one of the most prominent features of the situation to-day is that Russia, by the very fact of her expansion in the Far East, has curtailed her own possibilities of expansion to the South. The secret of the long tragedies of Armenia and Macedonia lies largely in her incapacity of acting under modern conditions in two directions at once. And this incapacity, or at least its recognition by Russian statesmen, is a fact of comparatively recent origin.

In the eighteenth century indeed Russia struggled with a reckless and feverish energy for territorial expansion in all directions, displaying in the process a relentless purpose and a lavishness of blood and treasure, and achieving a success only equalled by our own. The truth is that the great empire - building period of Russia coincides almost with that

of England. Roughly speaking, Catharine the Second was the contemporary of the two Pitts, and in many ways the types of character developed in the two countries during

that tumultuous period are, in spite of a great racial difference, singularly akin. It is not impossible that the Russian type has subsequently undergone much the same modifications as our own, has experienced a certain cooling of the blood, a change from the recklessness of youth to that modern prudential temper which prevails, on the whole, among us latterday English. What is clear, at least, is that the study of Russian history, and notably that of the reign of Catharine, is to be recommended to all who desire an intellectual grasp of one great group of international problems. Apart from any such result it is a study of the keenest human interest and one, it must be added, that to the English mind presents a great but stimulating difficulty.

A passage in Alphonse Daudet's reminiscences describes a conversation with Tourguenieff, in which the Russian novelist discusses, in confidence between men of letters, what it is precisely that constitutes the Slavonic temperament. Characteristically enough of the race, if not of the man, his description consists mainly in a pure negative, in renouncing the attempt to describe. We do not think, we do not feel as you do, he says; our morality is not yours; your hard and fast distinctions vanish in our atmosphere; the element our inner life moves in is, in short, the Slavonic mist (le brouillard Slave). Certain extracts from the book of his own youth made Tourguenieff's meaning clear to his hearer; the Slavonic mist it appears,

would be a medium highly antipathetic to the Shorter Catechism

one in which many of the properties, or even the decencies, of life, as we view it, tend to disappear. But it is nevertheless a profoundly interesting phenomenon, and, when we penetrate it a little, not without a bizarre and, perhaps, a redeeming charm of its own.

Russian history, when not of the merely official and academic kind, at once fascinates and perplexes, both because of the colossal types of humanity it displays and of a pervading sense that the world they move in is morally and spiritually a whole hemisphere away from the civilisation and the platitudes of the West. Nowhere, perhaps, have the characteristics been more incisively displayed than in M. Waliszewski's work AUTOUR D'UN TRÔNE, that extremely erudite study of the personalities surrounding Catharine the Second and of the great and enigmatic figure of the Northern Semiramis herself. Of the learned author's accuracy it would be impertinent to speak, except only to note that his work is chiefly based on correspondence, diaries, conversations taken down from the lips of Catharine, documents, in fact, as authentic as history can ever obtain, collated and weighted with the exhaustive patience of a highly critical mind. And in vividness and realistic effect, M. Waliszewski's pages leave nothing for modern curiosity to desire.

It is perhaps unnecessary to caution the reader that a work like AUTOUR D'UN TRÔNE is not fully intelligible unless supplemented to some extent from other sources. For an obvious instance, Prince Gregor Orlof, the first of the great Imperial favourites in order of time, the man who more than any other set Catharine on her husband's throne, distinguished

himself during the years when he almost reigned as Emperor by one solitary achievement, the pacification of Moscow. What was precisely the matter at Moscow is indicated in M. Waliszewski's pages by a single Russian word of unfamiliar aspect to most, samovaniets. It was in fact the great outbreak of plague in 1771, when panic-stricken crowds flocked round the holy image of the Mother of God and many persons were suffocated in the throng, till at length the Archbishop, an " enlightened man," caused the image to be removed. "He is in conspiracy with the doctors to make us die, he forbids us to pray to the Mother of God," the populace cried; and in the ensuing riot the Archbishop fell, and anarchy was let loose on the city till Gregor Orlof arrived to govern it. The incident is typical of much of Catharine's reign, the half-barbaric passion, the wholly barbarous ignorance, the veneer of enlightenment, are all highly characteristic of the Russia that she found and that she left. And, strangely enough, it is still more typical that an apparent trifler, a debauchee, as Orlof was in ordinary life, should suddenly have shown himself master of so portentous a situation.

What strikes one most in the great figures of Catharine's reign is their singular alternation between the wildest orgies and the most splendid achievements, between childish irresponsibility and successful statecraft. The contrast between the official history and the genuine biographies of the men who made it is at times so startling that one is tempted to believe them swayed in their public actions by some instinctive natural force "not themselves," which made, if not directly for righteousness, at least for the greatness of the Russian Empire. Under Catharine Russia

acquired a vast sweep of territory from the Baltic to the Euxine, including of course the majority of Poland and the Crimea; she for the first time set her grasp on the Black Sea, her arms were everywhere victorious, great internal reforms were given the force of law, and even to some extent carried out. And yet, but for a perception of great spontaneous forces at work in the obscuring medium of the Slavonic mist, we might imagine that the more personal and intimate history of the time resembled rather that of an empire rotting to its fall.

"I have made war without generals and governed without ministers," Catharine declared, and though the remark must be taken as an epigram, it has its truth. To the Western mind the following highly authenticated description of Panine, who was virtually prime-minister during the earlier years of her reign, might well seem incredible. "He rises at two o'clock (p.m.) to commence a toilet which his infirmities render lengthy. At four he is ready to receive the persons who habitually wait on him, but dinner is immediately served, and followed by a drive or a siesta lasting an hour. At half-past seven minister receives his company of boon companions and the day is finished. The interval from half-past six to half-past seven is the only time in which one can address him on business of State." Another witness informs us, a few years later, that Panine slept from half-past six to eight, after which the strenuous efforts of two valets were necessary to arouse him.

the

When Potemkin was at the height of his greatness his chariot, with six horses ready harnessed, was often to be seen at his door day after day for months together "before he could decide to leave the palace where he happened to find himself."

Yet the work of government went

on not unsuccessfully, in a manner mysterious to the Western mind. An inconceivable mass of vices and ineptitudes seemed to leave the latent genius of these men unsubdued, to flash fitfully indeed, but at the right moment. When Saltikof, one of the greatest leaders in the Seven Years' War, died in disgrace and was buried with maimed rites, Count Panine was. found standing sentinel at his tomb. He would stand there, he declared, till relieved by a guard of honour, which was duly sent. And when the question of the marriage of the Empress to Alexis Orlof was touched on in the Imperial Council, it was Panine, awake for once, who made a solitary and effectual protest : "The Empress will do as she pleases, but Madam Orlof will never be sovereign of Russia."

The greatest figure of the reign was certainly Potemkin; yet even here it is hard to penetrate the Slavonic mist. M. Waliszewski still finds it difficult to be certain whether the most imposing of Catharine's ministers or favourites was in truth a genius or a madman. The element of insanity, that a phlegmatic commonsense may be excused for seeing in Potemkin, was at least fortunate in its methods of expression. Owing his advance to the Orlofs, whom he was shortly to supplant, Potemkin was first introduced into the palace to amuse the Empress with his talent for imitating voices, and the masterstroke of the entertainment proved to be an imitation of Catharine's own voice, so successful that the amiable Sovereign cried with laughter. The Orlofs certainly owed their protégé something, for in a fracas resulting from a quarrel with the gigantic and brutal Alexis Orlof, the hero of Tchesme and hitherto the most notable favourite of Catharine, Potemkin had lost an eye, and unhappily