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With the accession of the House of Coburg, English-speaking or rather English writing man is haunted by a shrinking, tremulous dread that he may be called too severe in his morality, too tenacious in his grasp upon the proprieties. Not yet does he hesitate

to be comfortably sober and decent, but it pains him to consider the possibility of being accused of scruples, or of principles, and the thought of being suspected of requiring scruples or principles in any other person, from a small street boy to a large capitalist racks him with unspeakable pangs. Consequently, only a newspaper here and there, contradictorily condemned by its fellows as "yellow" or priggish speaks otherwise than gently or sweetly, and the inordinate urbanity of which Meredith complained increases daily. It would be easy to find an instance in the history of the last month, but in new literature nothing is more significant than Professor Wilbur L. Cross's "Life and Times of Laurence Sterne." It is not many years since Sterne's name might have been sought in vain in school manuals of English literature, although the story of Le Fevre figures in many a "Reader" and certain Shandean proverbs are in the mouths of the most prim. Even now the chief source of opinion in spite of later more pretentious biographies has been Thackeray's lecture on Sterne and Goldsmith, and had Sterne been fashioned for no other purpose than to be the man of genius whom Thackeray would loathe and detest with his entire heart, soul, and commonsense, he would have been precisely what he was, as far as Thackeray knew. Professor Cross has found some new material, has detected many fairly astounding forgeries, and the figure for which he asks tolerance and a certain measure of admiration differs in many details from that visible to the imagination of Cole

ridge and Thackeray. Indeed, it differs so much that there is danger that the reader of even ordinary carelessness may fancy that Mr. Cross is but that common gentleman with the whitewash brush whose labors have So changed the aspect of many statues in the hall of fame. He is nothing of the sort, but merely the post-Victorian man with the post-Victorian dislike of apparent narrowness and with new knowledge. He refuses to judge Sterne as anything but what he was; to condemn him for not being other than he was; to forget that in spite of certain reckless sins against cleanliness of speech and thought he was delicately kind to his inferiors; patient with those dependent upon him; a faithful friend when no jest was toward, and above all no worse than his time. In all this, there is a curious absence of warmth and charity. Professor Cross is determined not to be narrow, but he makes no pretence at affection for his subject, and considering his coldness, the impression which he leaves upon the reader is evidence of the possession of a very strong sense of justice. Scott, although nearer to Sterne as far as the chronological tables are concerned, was more remote in spirit, and although he saw both the humor and the pathos of Sterne, disliked him. Mr. Fitzgerald presents him in so many aspects that a blurred composite photograph is definite compared to the general picture. Professor Cross offers a new glass, carefully polished, delicately adjusted, and invites examination of a newly mounted specimen carefully cleared of extraneous matter. Those who accept his offer will find themselves both entertained and enlightened, and they will not be disgusted by the too common post-Victorian exhortation to tolerance of evil when it is the comrade of genius. The Macmillan Co.

SEVENTH SERIES
VOLUME XLIV.

No. 3394 July 24, 1909.

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FROM BEGINNING
VOL. CCLXII.

CONTENTS

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1. Shakespeare and the Modern German Stage. By Eulenspiegel

CONTEMPORARY REVIEW 195

A Day in a Game Reserve. By J. Stevenson-Hamilton .

BLACK WOOD'S MAGAZINE 203

Hardy-on-the-Hill Book II. Chapter III. By M. E. Francis (Mrs.

Francis Blundell). (To be continued.)

TIMES 215

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VI.

The Lord of the Pigeons. By Howard Ashton. (To be concluded.)

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SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN GERMAN STAGE.

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I.

this blind subjection of art to the power of gold is its own destruction. Melpomene and Thalia should not imperceptibly and gradually be transformed into Phryne who goes achaffering with her charms."

"The old argument," the English actor-manager will say, with a shrug of his shoulders. "I know all about that," will be the reflection of the English playgoer, "but I don't think I should care for X. as Macbeth"; and he will telephone for a box for the 500th performance of "The Merry Widow." Yet this argument is not quoted from a treatise on the decadence of our English stage, however appropriate it may sound, but from an introductory note to a German translation of Mr. Sidney Lee's scholarly essay on "Shakespeare and the Modern Stage" which recently appeared in the Berlin Kreuz-Zeitung. We are so accustomed to having the German representation of Shakespeare held up to our theatre as a model that, as is our English way where foreign affairs are concerned, we accept the judgment of the few for the verdict of all, without looking closer into the bases for such an assumption or into the actual conditions on both sides.

It would be idle to attempt to deny that Shakespeare has come into his own in Germany, so that our great Englishman fulfils his purpose-since a dramatist cannot achieve his aim until his plays are represented-in a wider measure on foreign soil than in the land of his birth. It is true that the artistic taste and piety with which Shakespeare is approached by the German stage should make us not only reflect, but act-in both senses of the word. Yet one must not lose sight of the fact that the conditions of the

stage in the two countries are widely different. As the decadence of our stage lies not so much with the players as with the public, so here, too, Shakespeare's popularity in the land of his adoption is explained by the higher artistic demands of the German playgoer in respect of the theatrical fare set before him.

Generally speaking, the key to the situation is the National Theatre. The various Royal or municipal theatres with which the German Empire is so liberally provided, can, with their ample subsidies, easily afford to keep Shakespeare in regular rotation on their repertoire, and, moreover, cast adequately those minor Shakespearean characters which our actor-managers, with one eye on their own prominence and the other on their pockets, so grievously neglect. With an enormous free list, which in the larger cities and Residenzstaedte includes nightly the officers' corps of the different regiments of the garrisons, the ministries and the friends of the considerable permanent staff (management, actors and stage hands), there is no difficulty about filling the great subsidized theatres and giving the English visitor a deep impression of the intellectual culture of the German playgoer.

For the purpose of a comparison between the English and German Shakespeare, then, the subsidized theatres must be temporarily eliminated from the discussion. As a matter of fact, the citing of the repertoire of any State theatre as an indication of the popularity of a dramatic author is misleading. As an instarce of the truth of my contention I would cite the Prussian Royal theatres, which stand under the immediate control of the Emperor. The Assyrian ballet "Sardanapalus," in which the German Em

peror took an absorbing personal interest, and which cost an enormous sum to produce, was received in dead silence at the première, yet is still occasionally performed. The same is true of much of the verbose rubbish which the annual "Festspiele" at Wiesbaden, and gala performances on national anniversaries in Berlin, produce in the guise of patriotic drama.

Let us turn, therefore, to a more reliable source, the independent theatres. Here the popularity of Shakespeare strikes home at once. Last autumnthe principal German theatrical season is from September to Christmas-those ingenious advertisement pillars, which stand at the street corners in every German city and give the names of the plays and players at the theatres, offered a wonderful object-lesson to the English playgoer visiting Berlin. For there on several evenings throughout the winter he might read with amazement and incredulity that no less than five of Shakespeare's plays were being given in Berlin and suburbs simultaneously, compared with none in London. There was one or other of the Shakespeare repertoire at the Theatre Royal, "King Lear" at the Deutsches Theatre, "Julius Cæsar" at the Neues Schauspielhaus and the Schiller Theatre (Nord), and "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Schiller Theatre (Charlottenburg)! That means that four independent theatres find it a sound commercial undertaking to keep Shakespeare on their regular repertoire, verily a most convincing proof of the German playgoer's fidelity to the Bard.

Germany's educational system holds the secret of the Teutonic love for Shakespeare. The "Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft," with its essay competitions and regular Shakespeare birthday celebrations, and the dozens of performances of the poet's plays given nightly in theatres throughout

the Empire, would undoubtedly serve to keep the flame of the Shakespeare cult brightly burning, supposing it showed any tendency to flicker and expire. Of that, however, there is no fear. For the love of Shakespeare is planted in the bosom of the young German at his splendid Gymnasien and Realschulen, which impress our Shakespeare into service as literary aid to assist in the formation of the young mind as much for the Bard's reasoned outlook on life and his sane, sweet philosophy as for the beauty of his thought or the glory of his language.

Not so the English way with boys. There are "exams" to be passed, and Theobald and the First Folio are of more immediate importance to the examiners, and consequently to the crammers, than any "impracticable" musings on Shakespeare's world, that Utopia into which his divine humor and inspired passion transformed a universe humdrum three centuries ago as it is humdrum to-day. In Germany, theatre and school can work hand in hand in the task of popularizing Shakespeare. His plays are always on the repertoire, and the German boy, whom the system has taught to reason with himself about the play he is reading in class, can, and does, go to see Shakespeare with a mind open to consider the play in question as unfolded in all its beauty by the theatre, to weigh his impressions, and to correct or confirm his original judgment.

Yet the old order is changing, and the appetite for Shakespeare in the German playgoer, whetted early, although it still survives, has to be promoted by artificial means. It is quite wrong to suppose that Shakespeare holds his own on the modern German stage by the sole fascination of his muse. The German stage-manager, while forced by the high literary standard of public opinion to approach

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