dour as it catches the fancy of the tourist of to-day, may not, perhaps, hinder the action of the drama, but it certainly does not aid it, and any impression that is made thereby, however delightful, is essentially nondramatic.

So, too, with 'Romeo and Juliet.' Half of its beauty would be lost in any stage representation that was not pervaded through and through by the Italian passion and romance; a Northern Juliet would be ridiculous, but there is no reason in the world to insist on her being not only Italian, but Veronese into the bargain. It is true Shakespeare lays the scene in Verona, but that is only because his authorities did so; and as for anything further, unquestionably Verona had for him no special associations that it should be preferred above Padua or Milan; and for a candid mind there can be no doubt but that while Romeo and Juliet' lends additional interest to Verona, Verona can add but little to Romeo and Juliet.'

Scenery painted in the very streets of that dream-like city is delightful in itself, but it has no particular dramatic value; and indeed the associations that are only too apt to gather round the English traveller's remembrance of the place, with its railways and its hotels and its unnumbered beggars, are not such as it is altogether safe to call up unreservedly when a great imaginative drama is in question. In fact, one is strongly tempted to believe that an artist who had breathed the air of Italy, and saturated himself in her romance, could paint purely ideal landscapes that would recall the sacred soil far more forcibly than any literal transcripts from even the most beautiful of her towns.

in which the native English temper does not play a conspicuous part; and where that comes in, consistency must necessarily go overboard. board. Some of us, it is true, may still enjoy the conceits of Elizabethan England without concerning ourselves overmuch about the incongruities they involve; but for one who has studied the variations in costume in different climes, and can distinguish the fashion of the shoe worn at the beginning of the fifteenth century from that in vogue at the end, it must be gall and wormwood to have a rude country fellow of the true Elizabethan breed, whose very name is racy of our soil, parade the stage in a dress that could only have been possible for an Italian of a century earlier.

There is one more class of plays of which something should be said. No one, perhaps, would have the plays of 'Cymbeline' or 'King Lear' mounted with very great archæological precision; and yet the realistic theory, if it is good for anything, should logically be applicable to these. But what is to be said of 'Hamlet?' how are we to represent this type of modern Europe, compacted of doubts and scruples and fiery impulses, astray among the incongruous surroundings of a half-barbaric Northern court?

It is here that the problem meets us with the most emphatic persistency. Shakespeare took his fables from every age and every clime, transfusing them all to a greater or less degree with the humours of his contemporaries. He wrote, as we are often told, for all time; his greatest creations are doubtless everlastingly true; but his minor characters, which yet do so much to give body and life to his dramas, and help, by the very contrasts they afford, to illustrate and intensify, after a fashion unrivalled in any other literature, the lights and shadows of the larger natures round whom they are grouped-these are for the most part drawn from the experience of the Warwickshire yeoman's son.

Thus there are the two elements always present; the original fable and the atmosphere with which Shakespeare has surrounded it. Sometimes one has the preponderance, sometimes the other; but altogether to disregard either is indeed of evil precedent for a generation in which, as it is vehemently asserted, account is too often taken of the mass alone, and the rights of the minority overridden but too often by the clamorous requirements of the majority. It is all one whether, in putting the Shakespearean drama on the stage, we concern ourselves only with the historical basis, adopting to that end some antiquarian theory, either of our own fashioning or suggested by Italian novelists; or whether we dress Hamlet in ruff and trunk hose, and Portia in a farthingale; in either case an important element has been overlooked, and occasion for adding real force to the dramatic value of the representation has been let slip. But are there no means of reconciling the two elements? Perhaps complete reconciliation is not possible; but at least, if it is in any wise to be achieved, it will first be necessary to recognise the dualism of Shakespeare's plays more fully than has generally been

done. And in some instances, where the problem on being fairly faced proves insoluble, stage-managers giving up the attempt to make costume dramatic, must content themselves with allowing it to be merely beautiful. For it should be remembered that all this time we have been considering only the dramatic value of costume. The æsthetic value cannot but be a secondary matter, at least in the representation of a great poetic dramatist like Shakespeare. First get the mounting to help out the action of the piece as far as possible, or at all events make sure that it does not interfere with it, and then do your best to make it beautiful. For this, no doubt, the archæologist may prove of service, but he must be kept under very careful control.

It is surely not beyond hope that we should even yet witness a Shakespearean revival on some such lines as have been here suggested, a revival that should assert the supremacy of the imaginative qualities of the drama, and repudiate once for all, as robbing it of half its significance, the pedantic rule of a pretentious and uncertain realism.

"It prefers a statue to a phantom, and full noon to twilight. Free from mist and vapour, admitting nothing visionary or uncertain, its least details stand out sharply, strong in form and colour. Its dreams are of long cavalcades of milk-white steeds, ridden by lovely naked youths, defiling past against a ground of azure, as upon the friezes of the Parthenonor of processions of young girls, crowned with garlands and apparelled in strait tunics, bearing in their hands their ivory timbrels, and seeming as if they moved round an enormous urn. The mountains of its landscapes rise up sharp-edged against the sky, the sun reposing on the loftiest peaks, and opening wide, like a resting lion, his golden-lidded eye. Its clouds are shaped and cut, like marble splinters. Its streams fall in sculptured waves from the mouths of sculptured urns. shadows gather, dark-massed, beneath its trees. Between its tall reeds, green and vocal as those of Eurotas, glance the round and silvery flanks of a green-haired naiad; or between its sombre oaks Diana passes with arrow-sheaf and flying scarf, followed by her nymphs and yelping hounds."

Its

As it is with the arts of painting and sculpture, so is it with the art which deals in words. Dante, the mightiest of poet-painters who worked. in the Greek spirit, sets his scenes before the mind's eye with a graphic power which leaves nothing to the imagination. The great sights of the 'Inferno' stand out like pictures—an unforgetable series. There are the routs of the Giddy-aimless, stung by gad-flies and fierce hornets, running

behind the whirling flag; the crowds at Charon's ferry "staying for waftage," and the fierce old man with eyes like wheels of flame; the lovers of the second Circle, blown like cranes upon a mighty wind; the awful marsh, in the slime of which the Sullen writhed like eels, and in whose dark waters fought the spirits of the Angry; the city with the domes and towers of fire, upon the walls of which the bloodstained Furies, shrieking for Medusa, tore the serpents of their hair; the rapt and disdainful angel who sped dry-footed across the lake amidst the terror-stricken throngs; the great plain rough with lidless sepulchres, each filled with fire and holding its tormented spirit in a red-hot bed; the Tyrants standing in the river of blood, and the Centaurs galloping upon the bank; the forest whose stunted trees were spirits, with the Harpies tearing their poisonous fruit; the wilderness of raining flames and sands of lurid fire; the Simonists set head-downwards in their narrow holes, with feet which burned like lamps above the level of the rock; the black-winged demons, Dragagnazzo and Barbariccia, hovering with their prongs above the lake of pitch; the Hypocrites weighed down with gilded cowls of lead; the valley where sinners changed with agony to serpents, and serpents back to sinners; the flame-pent spirits dancing like strange fire-flies in the gloomy gorge; the trunk of Bertrand de Born holding up by the hair his speaking head; the sea of everlasting ice, where the forms of the tormented appeared like flies in crystal, and where Ugolino lifted his teeth from the skull of his enemy to relate his awful story. Spenser also, though his touch is sometimes indecisive, and he takes ten words to Dante's one, has

often vivid pictures-as that of the knight peering into the den of the monster by the light of his own gleaming mail; of Fury, chained in iron, with eyes that flashed sparkles, gnawing his ruddy beard; of Mammon in his armour of rusted iron and dull gold, counting his hoard of coins; or of the little fountain in the Bower of Bliss where the golden-haired girls were bathing.

But perhaps the finest examples in our language of sheer painting in words are to be found in Lord Tennyson's Palace of Art.' No device of the cunning artist is wanting there. The verse is of deliberate motion, like the slow rolling of a panorama, affording the successive imageries time to work their full effect. Sometimes, indeed, it stops entirely, so as to impress upon the mind the details of the scene

"Or in a clear-wall'd city on the sea,

Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair Wound with white roses, slept Saint Cecily."

Here the verse pauses. The picture of the sleeping saint is before the eye. The spectator may contemplate it at what length he pleases; the progress of the scenery is stopped for his convenience. When he is ready to proceed the next picture comes before him

"An Angel looked at her."

And the verse is stopped again.

It is hardly in the power of words to paint a picture with more distinctness than this scene of Saint Cecily sleeping at her organ, and watched over by an angel. But it is clear that the effect owes nothing to the sense of mystery of suggestion. The reader sees in his mind's eye, with sharp distinctness, the picture which the poet aimed to set there; but he sees no more. His imagination has no part to play. It lies idly by, and makes no sign.

Now set beside this a passage in which the power of mystery, of suggestion, is strong. Set beside it, for

instance, Mad Tom's snatch of song in 'King Lear,' "Child Rowland to the dark tower came." I call the song Mad Tom's, for who can doubt that Edgar studied the part from life, and that Mad Tom was a real and living person? But in what course of his rovings he picked up this fragment of old legend is beyond our knowing. Perhaps he discovered it in some odd corner of his brain; perhaps learned it of that strange demon who haunted him, as he tells us, with the voice of a nightingale. But, from whatever source it came, scarcely a better instance could be found of the power which springs from richness of suggestion. Who was this Child Rowland? What was the dark tower? What wild and strange adventures had its spectral walls beheld? Imagination wakes. A thousand shadowy memories arise, like phantoms, in the mind's eye, of legendary lands; of battle - dinted knights - at - arms; of dragon-guarded dungeons; of soft lutes heard pleading from barred casements; of combats against tenfold odds; of wild vows given and received; of "trumpets blown and hymns of festival"; of heads of enemies set up to bleach on battlemented towers. Or perhaps the story rises up complete before the mind, as a great living poet has imagined itthe story of the band of knights, of whom Child Rowland was the last, sworn to the quest of the Dark Tower in the midst of its wild waste of deathful country, to perish one by one before its walls.

Or consider the exquisitely beautiful series of pictures in De Musset's 'Nuit de Mai,' in the invitation of the Muse to the poet—

"Shall we sing of Hope, or Sorrow, or Joy? Shall we steep in blood the battalions of steel? Shall we suspend the lover on his silken ladder? Shall we dash to the winds the foam of the steed? Shall we cry to Tarquin, 'Night is come?' Shall we seek the pearl in the caves of ocean? Shall we lead the goat to the bitter ebony? Shall we lift to heaven the eyes of Melancholy? Shall we follow the hunter over the mountain crags? Shall we

Every piece of imagery here is penetrated with the power of charm, the power of suggestion. Like the image of Child Rowland coming to the dark tower, every line epitomises a romance. "Shall we lead the goat to the bitter ebony?" Behold the pastorals of Virgil and of Theocritus, the pipes of the shepherds, the songs, and the ivy-bowls. "Shall we dash to the winds the foam of the steed?" Behold Mazeppa bound on his wild horse, swept like a whirlwind through the waste. "Shall we suspend the lover on his silken ladder?" Behold the high-walled orchard-gardens of Verona, and Juliet looking from her window as the moon tips with silver the fruit-tree tops.

Or we may take an example in which the power of suggestion acts in a rather different manner. The following is from one of Victor Hugo's poems. It is a scene of evening, of Oriental night. The grass is dark; a sweet fresh smell issues from the tufts of asphodel; a whisper of rivulets is in the moss; a sound of sheepbells comes from far away.

"C'était l'heure tranquille où les lions vont boire."

("It was the still hour when the lions come to drink.")

It is, perhaps, the subtle charm, like that of music, of the words, which really gives this line its rich suggestions of tranquillity; and this, of course, is incommunicable, if it is not felt. But another and more obvious source of its effect may be observed. Instead of choosing the hart or hind, or other timorous and soft-natured creature, thinking to deepen the peace of the evening with the imagery of The peace, the poet chooses the lion. hind, with her fawn beside her, stealing forth at evening from her covert,

doubtless affords an image of tranquillity. But the hour has deeper influences yet. The lions, not now seeking blood, are coming to drink "at the waters that go softly."

But the spirit of suggestion is a dainty Ariel. The secret of its power is not often to be thus explored. Like the mysterious and occult suggestions of the melody of music, the laws of association on which its power depends are often too dim and too complex to be followed far. But as we know that in the melody of music there are combinations of simple notes which have power to stir the spirit to its depths, so also we know that there are combinations of simple words which act upon the mind with a mysterious and unaccountable power of charm. Passages in which this power is strong are among the rarest and most precious in all literature. To seek them is like seeking hidden treasure. To discover

them is to feel the joy of the diver who emerges from the sea-depths with a goodly pearl.

What reader has not felt the profound visionary effect of Wordsworth's

verse

"The Lady of the Mere Sole sitting by the shores of old Romance ;'

a verse which Southey considered to be the finest instance in our language of pure poetic charm. Perhaps he was not wrong. The word "shore" is itself a curious instance of subtle and mysterious power. "Beach" conveys identically the same idea. But make the exchange

"The Lady of the Mere Sole sitting by the beach of old Romance."

How poor and pale in comparison ! What loss of the strange richness of suggestion which comes from the sound of "shore"!

This visionary charm, this musiclike mastery of effect, occurs in many forms. It appears in Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence'

"The Hebrid isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main."