I

T is noted by the Christian Intelligencer, a periodical which represents the Dutch Reformed Church, that the recent hard times have not been as conducive as such times usually are, to the spread of religion. In former periods of comReligion in mercial depression, the IntelligenHard Times. cer says, the loss of material effects has made men more solicitous for spiritual gains, but this time it seems not to have worked that way. The Intelligencer regrets that the opportunity of the churches" to contrast the temporary nature of worldly prosperity and the permanency of spiritual acquisitions" has not been better improved. Perhaps one trouble has been that the churches have themselves been too much entangled with commercial concerns to grasp their spiritual opportunity with the requisite ardor.

Almost every church, small or great, has longed for better times to bring money into its treasury and help out its running expenses. The churches have not suffered as much as the clubs, but they have suffered in much the same way and from the same causes. They have felt the hard times, and have squirmed and worried like the rest of us, and it may be that they have been too busy computing interest and trying to tide over the long season of discipline to appreciate fully the nothingness of earthly possessions as compared with the priceless treasures of faith.

But probably the churches are not especially to blame for not turning the hard times to better account; and, indeed, if there has not been such a special increase of piety during the last four years as the Intelligencer would have liked to see, there has been a growth in some things very nearly akin to it. There has been a good deal of repentance, a great deal of selfdenial, and much serious resolve to lead better lives hereafter. Of course our notion of lead

ing a better life is a little mixed up with the desire so earnest and all but universal to have a little more available income to lead it on, but we need not blame ourselves overmuch for that. Money is a convenient measure for almost every sort of endeavor, and to want more money wherewith to discharge our obligations and to help the needy and promote good works, as well as to increase our personal comfort, comes very near being a pious desire. Thrift and honesty come near, in the eyes of contemporary thinkers, to godliness. We have certainly made a great gain in thrift, and there is no reason to think that, as a people, we have retrograded in honesty. We of this generation, when we get into a scrape, are not so much disposed to insist that it was God's will as to reason together and try to find out what stupid thing we have done, or what wise thing we have neglected, that has resulted so disastrously. This we do, not necessarily because we are less religious than our forebears, but perhaps because we are somewhat more reasonable than they. It does not seem certain that this increased sense of our own responsibility is a development that is to be regretted.

However, if any of our friends who are solicitous for our welfare have been disappointed in some of the effects, or lack of effect, of adversity upon us, let us hope that they will be disappointed again, and more agreeably, in the spiritual results of any prosperity that may be vouchsafed to us.

The chief basis of our present hopes of better times is in the richness of the harvests. There is nothing in contemporary philosophy to hinder us from being grateful for good crops. We can't make them grow; we can only make ready for them, and when they come it is reasonable enough for us to regard them with pious minds, and show our appre

ciation with a grateful spirit. Perhaps religion will revive with business. If we have not aspired to be saints merely because we were sick, there is the less reason to expect that we shall backslide when we feel better.

A

N art always loses its individuality, we are told, when it discards its own peculiar means of exciting interest and borrows those of another art. Story-telling pictures like those of Hogarth and Delaroche and David, while possessing a charm of their own, leave one wishing that the same subjects might have been treated by Fielding, or Scott, or Dickens. Colored sculpture, however authenticated by Etruscan or Greek precedent, seems to trench upon the domain of the painter; and no 'study in white" can compass the nuances of the glistening purity of Pentelic or Carraran marbles. Whether one recall Wordsworth realizing his own definition of poetry as "emotion remembered in tranquillity," or the vision of a Shelley or Burns crooning poems to himself in a mild poetic frenzy, one is pretty sure to admit that poetry has Feeling for its peculiar province. Just as plain is it, abstractly speaking, that acting is not Feeling but Representation.

Ineffectual Reserve on the Stage.

Hitherto the limits of histrionic art have been well defined. Almost all of our players have overacted and underfelt. They have carefully studied the degree of exaggeration which is necessary to impart an appropriate theatrical value to their performance. They have not only sought by tone of voice and facial expression, by costume and gesture, to perfect the illusion, but they have given modern sentiment an antique investiture by suiting the action to the optical demands of the theatre. Indeed, it would require only the huge masks and thick-soled buskins of the Athenian make-up to show us that their acting, so far from being “natural,” in the ordinary sense, has been a species of statuesque posing. Beginning thus from the outside of the characters impersonated and striving principally for effects, the actor has concerned himself not so much with the question, how he shall express what he feels, as with the reverse how deeply should he feel what he expresses. This point of view has given rise to some peculiar conceptions, which, reacting upon the actor's technique, have affected audiences strangely. To a nunnery go," the

sad, wistful admonition of a heart-broken lover, has been delivered to Ophelia like a military command by many a Hamlet. Shylock has been rejuvenated by the roar and bustle of the romantic player, and other graybearded dignitaries have ambled across the stage with a nimbleness only consonant with the turgidity of their speech. In one generation Brutus is grandly reticent, in another he rants and mouths his words like the town-crier. Whether one errs by falling below or rising above the true measure of his part, every detail is deliberated and every inaccuracy proceeds from nice calculation. The advent of the " robustious, periwig-pated fellow" may be viewed as the denotement of a national vigor and health, just as the ruddy veins and unrestrained gestures of a Rubens embody the joyousness and exuberance that distinguish the generation of the Flemish master from the preceding period of Spanish persecution, with its waste and dissipation of energy, and from the placid low content of the years that followed.

Without necessarily implying that the stage is degenerating, it may be said with some degree of fairness that there has been recently developed a tendency to underact and overfeel. The exponents of the New Reserve assert that dramatic art is primarily symbolic, and that it is therefore inartistic to squander one's resources upon what can just as well be suggested. Economy of line and color is the main desideratum of the actor as well as of the painter. Time was when Greek met Greek in Olympian and Nemæan games and gained an ascendency by sheer display of his athletic figure; when the body had a dignity of its own and was not the instrument and vehicle of an over-cultured mind. But in a fuller development and higher civilization, after a long and strenuous effort “to keep the body under," the soul is perched inextinguishably on top, and now all physical manifestations are relegated to a secondary place, and dramatic art is occupied with a profound elaboration of the mind. Exaggeration, the adaptation of acting to the visual requirements of the theatre, is decried. The aim is to feel prodigiously, and, like a good engine, consume one's.own smoke. If the audience, in turn, "feels prodigiously " and is duly inflated with the inexpressible, the circuit is complete. The only danger will be that of spontaneous combustion, which can be easily averted, of course, by a

judicious application of scenic and pictorial rags to individual hot-journals. Where the suppressed emotion of the actor fails to awaken answering throbs and thrills, it is hinted that the fault is with the audience, whose artistic sense is inchoate and untrained.

In place of a minutely intellectual delineation of "Tess," such as has been aimed at by Mrs. Maddern Fiske, one can easily imagine a sensuous, melodramatic representation, in which the heart-rending words of the heroine should be graven on our very souls, and we should behold, no less than feel, a ground-swell of revolt against the existing injustices of society. Do not the majority of playgoers crave visible and audible emotionalism? Are they content to imagine all themselves, or is their fancy so inert that they wish all imagined for them upon the stage? May they not be counted upon, generally, to overlook subtleties? Will they not mistake silent intensity and undemonstrative repression for Quaker quietism and Dutch sluggishness? Must not the anger of an Othello hiss like a serpent, and the hate of the bastard son Edmund snarl and gnash its teeth in rage; and must not the languorously seductive love of a Cleopatra be portrayed rather than suggested? Where can the frostlike traceries and super-refinements of the veritist's art end but in the sublimation of all human passions to a pure intelligence? It has been said that painters and sculptors are physiologists, as writers are psychologists.

Is not the actor, like the former, obliged to approach humanity from a physical standpoint, and not only to feel what humanity feels but to express that feeling in easily appreciable terms and symbols? And, however well-grounded in psychology, must not he, as well as the writer, carefully avoid the exposure of the nerves of thought, and body forth, in full-rounded action, characters that are universally recognizable? Above all, should he not be quick to perceive the fatuity of all acting that is a feast of cleverness merely, from which one goes away celebrating the actor's praises instead of the truthfulness of his impersonation? Whether a tragedienne's voice is penetrating or tearful or suggestive of a state wherein she has "inly wept," whether her face be rigid or contorted, is a small matter compared with the obligation she is under to merge her personality in the rôle she essays, and imaginatively to identify herself with her emotion. It has been said that the spectator should leave the theatre thinking, not "Oh, how she has suffered!"-but "Oh, what suffering!"

As there is a mentality that is not of the imagination, there is a physical self-exploitation that, while not devoid of sensuous charm, only proclaims its limitations. In either case, spontaneity exhausts itself on trivialities. The New Reserve is likely to become, when it is consummated, an affectation and a subterfuge. In the hands of anyone but a genius, it signifies a short line rather than deep soundings, and fails to touch the heart.

A NEWLY DISCOVEred venUS

Τ

HE Editor, wishing to have the opinion of an expert archæologist on a supposed antique statue, referred the matter to Professor Allan Marquand, of Princeton, and received the reply that is herewith published:

In a storehouse, in the city of New York there is a statue, at present buried from public view. It is the property of a gentleman residing in the far West. Should he remove it to his home the statue might again be buried from the centre of population for many years to come. Hence we are fortunate in having a passing glimpse of so interesting, in many respects so puzzling, a work of sculpt

ure.

An examination of the very excellent photographs taken by Rockwood, enables us to see at once that the statue belongs to the class of which the Venus de' Medici is the typical example. The very fact that at the first glance the Venus de' Medici is so distinctly suggested, arouses our interest, and perhaps also our suspicions. A more attentive study of the photographs increases this interest. The type of face is less coquettish, nobler in character, nearer the best standards of Greek art than the face of her celebrated sister. Again, the dolphin at her side lacks the amoretti which in the Medici statue clamber on the dolphin's back. This seems to us a second indication that our statue represents an earlier type, less picturesque, less Alexandrian in character, and nearer the artist's original conception when he placed a dolphin alongside of Venus to indicate that she was born of the sea. The amoretti form certainly a modification of the original type.

As we continue our examination a still more interesting fact attracts our attention,

the motif of the statue. In the Medici statue, on the upper portion of the left arm are lines of indentation, where an armlet seems to have been originally worn. I do not know whether anyone has observed whether an actual armlet, perhaps of bronze, was ever fastened to this spot or not. Other marble statues have marble armlets actually in place, while the sculptor of the Medici statue has represented the place for the armlet, but no armlet. The new statue explains this in a most interesting way. Venus has removed her armlet and is dangling it on her right hand. This explanation is certainly a possible one, for the entire right arm of the Medici statue, and the left arm, from the elbow down, are restorations.

When I had reached this point in my study of the new statue, I felt like proclaiming it to the world as an important discovery, but an opportunity was then afforded me to see the statue, when my sense of security was somewhat shaken. The superficial coloring, which is reflected in the photograph, and which I had interpreted as due to weathering, I discovered to be the result of some other cause. The statue presents a brownish appearance, almost greasy in some places, and in others so ingrained into the marble as to make one imagine that a new kind of brown marble had come to light. It could hardly be that a Greek sculptor would have used a brown marble for a statue of Venus; some other expla nation is demanded. Can it be that this is an unsuccessful effort on the part of a modern forger to imitate ancient weathering? Or shall we believe the story of the antiquity dealer that the statue, when found, had been for a long time buried in the stable-yard? The coloring certainly arouses suspicion.

There are also other circumstances made apparent by an observation of the statue it