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the House of Molière high above all competitors. To belong to an august foundation may compensate even for poverty; and though a National Theatre, established in London, might in years to come attract the finest talent, it would be forced to depend at the outset on the energies of the young, to encourage the aspirations of the inexperienced.

Yet this compulsion would not be deplorable. The older actors might be left to their cumbrous furniture and their vainglorious advertisement. The National Theatre should be an autocracy, which brooked no interference. The staff of actors and actresses should be the servants of the management, though they might, as in Paris, have a vote in the choice of plays. The theatre should be governed by a man of letters, who had no plays of his own to push. He should enrol an ample company, and compose the best repertory that could be found. The theatre should be a school as well as a stage, and there the young actors, upon whom the manager relied, should be trained and instructed. They should be adequately, though not extravagantly, paid, and the abolition of stars, with the suppression of archæological scenery, would make a large and varied company possible. The repertory might be easily composed. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Congreve and Vanbrugh, Sheridan and Goldsmith, would make the nucleus. Racine and Molière might be translated. All modern plays, whether English or French, might be loyally considered, and all playwrights

whose eye looked higher than a long run would have their chance of distinction. The scenery, simple, elegant, and conventional, would cost little, and yet be perfectly appropriate. Thus in years to come a standard of acting might be established. No longer would a popular critic be able to declare that great actors in England "were never remarkable forelocutionary eloquence." The men and women who took service in our National Theatre would learn the necessary rudiments; they would speak with precision, and they would walk with grace. But they would recite the lines of Shakespeare, for instance, with a quiet simplicity. They would not be allowed to twist meanings of their own into the masterpieces of the past. And thus England might at last achieve a playhouse that was neither farcical nor fantastic, in which the actor was the servant, not the master, and in which intelligent men and women might sit without disgust.

Will England ever achieve this theatre? We are not optimistic. Destiny and experience are against us, and the people long ago ceased to chafe at the domination of the actor. Doubtless much will be said of a National Theatre, and nothing will be done. But in the meantime an American trust may purchase all our play-houses, and fill them with the particular brand of musical comedy popular in New York. And, after all, it does not matter very much, since the theatre, which might be the home of a beautiful and delicate art, is the scene of vulgar "pleasures taken in common." England has had her chance and sacrificed it, and the most interesting problem still unsolved is how long the actor will hold out victorious against the spirited attack of the stage-carpenter.

generally nothing more than which sincerity imparts to

Where the material of an art has triumphed over its essence, the gossamer web of fancy is rudely shattered, and nothing is more certain than that the shadowy inventions of M. Maeterlinck, for instance, can have no place upon the stage. No one is more conscious of this limitation than M. Maeterlinck himself, and when he declared that he composed some of his dramas for marionettes, he pronounced a sentence of condemnation upon the modern theatre. In truth, his plays, simple experiments as they are in folklore, cannot but lose their delicacy in the interpretation of actors, and for this reason whatever success he has captured has been a success of what the French call snobisme. And no sooner did he capture this success than he was generously misunderstood. He was covered with labels, symbolist, mystic, and what not. Little circles of intense persons swooned over him and all his works, and while they acknowledged him a prophet, they forgot that he was a man of letters. Now, M. Maeterlinck has never been concerned to astonish the Philistines. He has merely cultivated a curious gift of fancy, with all the skill

talent. He has seen the world through spectacles simple as Hans Andersen's. He has put beyond his contemplation the common sights and sounds of to-day; he has ousted experience by imagination. But he has never earned the opprobrium of foolish names, nor justified the folly of indiscreet worshippers. And his last book, ‘The Life of the Bee,'1 is so far from being curious or fantastic that it is a real classic. It is so seldom that we find a masterpiece in the jumble of modern books, that we welcome the more gladly this amiable treatise. Of course it will be pronounced an experiment in symbolism, and of course it is nothing of the kind. It is merely what it purports to be - an essay on the life of the bee, an essay such as Virgil might have written had he possessed the fulness of modern knowledge.

And M. Maeterlinck has prepared himself for his task by many years of study. He has watched his hives for twenty years, and, aided by an incomparable gift of exposition, he is able to put before his readers the strange tragedy of love and work, of death and change, which is the life of the bee. His book, written with a simple eloquence, and rendered the more mysterious by the constant hiatus of science, recalls book so closely as Mr Frazer's ‘Golden Bough.' The lover of the Queen, who sacrifices himself for the race, and dies in

1 The Life of the Bee. By Maurice Maeterlinck. London: George Allen.

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Translated by A. Sutro.

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the fulfilment of his destiny, claims a distant kinship to the priest of Nemi; while the Spirit of the Hive, which no observation can surprise, suggests our mind the Spirit of the Grove. Both the one and the other are lost in uncertainty. M. Maeterlinck, having followed his inquiry after the true method of science, frankly confesses his ignorance; and Mr Frazer, after years of patient research, rather states than solves his problem. And yet, as we read M. Maeterlinck's treatise we could not but think that human folk-lore might be ingeniously paralleled by the experience of the bee, and that, if we appear to know more of the hive than of ourselves, it is because we see the hive in a truer perspective. We are yet so near to ourselves that we judge our own trials and ingenuities piecemeal, but we can watch the bees through a telltale glass; we can note their progress from the foundation of the hive to the massacre of the males, and though we cannot understand all that we see, we may mark the order and progress of events. And what strange personages take part in the drama! First of all, there is the Queen, whose work the City is, who is the City. "She is the unique organ of love," says M. Maeterlinck; "she is the mother of the City. She founded it amid uncertainty and poverty. She has peopled it with her own substance; and all who move within its walls workers, males, larvæ, nymphs, and the young princesses, whose approaching birth will hasten her own departure, one of them

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being already designed as her successor by the spirit of the hive-all have issued from her flanks." Such is the Queen, who is wooed and won in the lofty air, under the blue of heavenwon by the lover whose wing soars highest, and who dies miserably in the moment of conquest. But the Queen is herself obedient to the "spirit of the hive" that spirit which bids the bees desert their kingdom, not in moment of despair, but in efflorescence. They desert it not because they need, but because they are bidden. Were they poor or unhappy, they would stay to rebuild their fortune. Were they attacked, they would repel the invader with exemplary courage. But the spirit of the hive bids them depart, and they leave their home at the apogee of its prosperity; they leave it a time when, after the arduous labours of the spring, the immense palace of wax has its 120,000 well-arranged cells overflowing with new honey, and with the many - coloured flour, known as 'bees' bread,' on which the nymphs and larvæ are fed." In truth, the god of the bees is the future, and they obey their own mysterious laws with a patience and discretion which man cannot understand.

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But M. Maeterlinck has studied the hive from every point of view. He tells us how their lateral eyes have six or seven thousand facets; he explains to us their music" the ode of the Queen, the songs of abundance, the psalms of grief, and lastly the long and mysterious war-cries the adolescent princesses send forth during the combats and massacres which precede the nuptial flight." He assures us that they have in their midst chemists, capsulemakers, sweepers, and amazons of the guard. They are fearless, we are told, admirable in the art of sculpture, and peerless in the difficult science of finding their way. For their own fatality, they are willing to make the highest sacrifices, and well may M. Maeterlinck ask, "What far-seeing fatality, taking the place of this one, do we obey?" And worthily he answers, "We know not, as we know not the being who watches us as we watch the bees." But who shall unravel the mystery of the drones, of the miserable males "who comport themselves in the hive as did Penelope's suitors in the house of Ulysses"? The account which M. Maeter

linck gives of them is grotesque indeed. "Indelicate and wasteful," says he, "sleek and corpulent, fully content with their idle existence as honorary lovers, they feast and carouse, throng the alleys, obstruct the passages, and hinder the work; jostling and jostled, fatuously pompous, swelled with foolish good-natured contempt; harbouring never a suspicion of the deep and calculating scorn wherewith the workers regard them, of the constantly growing hatred to which they give rise, or the destiny that awaits them." That destiny is grim enough. "Suddenly the workers arise and execute vengeance. They fall upon the drunken lazy drones. They saw off their wings, they amputate their antennæ, and seek the rings

of their cuirass, through which their sword gives the coupde-grâce." Romantic and inexplicable as is this life, M. Maeterlinck has described it in a sort of prose epic, which all who are interested either in natural history or in prose will read with pleasure. We have praised his style, and in justification we will quote a passage, chosen at random.

"I have not forgotten," says M. Maeterlinck, "the first apiary I saw, where I learned to love the bees. It was many years ago in a large village of Dutch Flanders, the sweet and pleasant country, whose love for bril

liant colour rivals that of Zealand even; the concave mirror of Holland, a country that gladly spreads out before us, as so many pretty, thoughtful toys, her illuminated gables, and waggons and towers; her cupboards and clocks that gleam at the end of the passage; her little trees marshalled in line along quays and canalbanks, waiting, one almost might think, for some quiet, beneficent ceremony; her boats and her barges with sculptured poops, her flowerlike doors and windows, immaculate dams and elaborate, many-coloured drawbridges; and her little varnished houses, bright as new pottery, from which bell-shaped dames come forth, all a-glitter with silver and gold, to milk the cows in the white

hedged fields or spread the linen on flowery lawns, cut into patterns of oval and lozenge, and most astoundingly green."

It will be seen from this that Mr Sutro's translation befits the picturesque original. And with such a book as this we may console ourselves for the decay of the theatre, in whose turgid atmosphere its flowers of speech and leaves of thought would most assuredly shrivel up and die.

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Army organisation, scheme of, drawn
up by Mr Brodrick, 580 et seq.
ARMY REFORM, THE POSITION OF THE
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF AND, 573
ARMY SHOOTING, AND ITS IMPROVE-
MENT, 320.

Association rules, the, in football, origin
of, 492-statistics of international
contests under, 496-increasing popu-
larity of, 503.

BABIES IN THE BUSH, THE, 473.

Bridge, the game of, sudden enthusiasm
for, 309-rules for playing, ib. et seq.
-manuals on, 311 - hints to players
of, 312 et seq. -mental capabilities
of, 318.

British Association meeting of 1860,
encounter between Huxley and Wil-
berforce at the, 333.
British cavalry, the future training of,
717-rifle practice of, 719-weapons
of, 720-weight to be carried by the
horses of, 721-horses of, 722 et seq.
-men of, 724

British India, plan for a Russian in-
vasion of, 552.

Bannu, life of an English officer at, 782 Canadian Pacific steamer, trip on a,
et seq.

BETWEEN THE LINES, 813.

Bingham, the Hon. Dennis, reminis-
cences of, 467.

Bismarck, enmity of, towards England,
587 et seq.

Blackmore, R. D., reminiscences of, 606.
Blackwood, John, reminiscences of, 602
-hospitalities of, at Strathtyrum, 603
-visits of, to London, 605-gathering
at Magna Charta Island in honour of,
606 et seq.

Brakfontein, the feint attack of, 745
et seq.
BRIDGE, 307.

Brodrick, Mr, scheme of army organisa-
tion drawn up by, 580 et seq.
Bryce, Mr, pro-Boer sympathies of, 154.
Burdett-Coutts, Mr, indictment of the
Government by, as to treatment of
sick and wounded in South Africa,
374 et seq., 385.

Burton, John Hill, reminiscences of, 612.
BUSH, THE BABIES IN THE, 473.
Cairo, modern, description of, 700-use
of the English language in, 701-
English tone of society in, 702-
English military uniforms in, 703-
throng of tourists in, 704.

49 et seq.

CAPTIVITY OF THE PROFESSOR, THE, 161.
"CARIN', PAST," 684.
CASTLE, DOOM: A ROMANCE, Chaps.
XIII.-XV., 84 — XVI.-XIX., 242 - xx.-
XXIV., 340-xxv.xxx., 505-xxxI. -
XXXIV., 645-xxxv.-xxxvII., 764.
CAVALRY, THE FUTURE OF OUR, 715.
Central Asia, Russian aims in, 555.
'Century of Scottish History, a, from
the Days before the '45 to those
within Living Memory,' by Sir Henry
Craik, review of, 298 et seq.

CENTURY, THE LAST SESSION OF THE,
148.

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