render the less enough to see it will never ing the last again be able to read "King Lear without a vague memory of veiled speech, restless gesture, and awkward gait. When we heard that Mr Herbert Trench was to open the Haymarket Theatre with "King Lear," it was with a feeling of dismay. There is no doubt of Mr Trench's courage; we trembled for his discretion. There is no play that makes SO wide a demand upon a manager's resources. Even if Lear be found, there remain the Fool and Mad Tom. It may be said at once that Mr Trench's courage was justified. "King Lear,' as it is seen at the Haymarket, is an admirable production. And, first, let us say a word about the mounting of the play. The scenery and accessories were simplicity itself. There are no solid sets, no inapposite suggestion of bricks and mortar, no real grass or real waterfalls,-not even a horse or a motor-car. For this simplicity we feel properly grateful. More than once in these pages we have pointed out that the smallest attempt at realism is the death of stage illusion; that as the acting is "make - believe," so also must the scenery be "make-believe." How great a gain it is to the drama, thus to be simplified, any one may judge who compares the method of the Haymarket with the sad and clumsy method of the old Lyceum. Then, again, Mr Trench has wisely abolished the crowd which, well drilled or ill, has done so much dur twenty years to ridiculous. It is as difficult to act in a jostling mob of supers as it is to emerge from a collection of ancient furniture; and a manager who knows his trade can make two men the symbol of a hundred. Mr Trench, then, started with the rare and signal advantage of adequate and seemly accessories. There was not a single scene that clashed with its purpose or distracted the attention from Shakespeare's play. The acting was, for the most part, as plain and reticent as the accessories. "King Lear was permitted by most of the cast to act itself, and no play ever fashioned by the hand or brain of man requires less interference than Shakespeare's masterpiece. We have said that of all modern dramas this one most nearly approaches the style and spirit of the Greek tragedy, and it is best produced with a Greek restraint. The actors of Athens wore masks and walked on pattens, and thus could not, if they would, give open expression to their own reading of their part. This system of repression has not been adopted in England, but the nearer we approach to it the better for the art of drama. The two greatest virtues of the actor are clarity and repose. To stand still is the hardest lesson to learn of all, and after that comes economy of gesture. Tried by this lofty standard, Mr Norman McKinnel, who personated Lear at the Hay market, comes forth triumph- shares the honours of the performance with Mr McKinnel. Kent and Gloucester and Cornwall, these also kept within the four corners of the picture, and were never out of tune. Of the others, one or two were possessed by the British vice of ingenuity, by the unconquerable desire of making themselves conspicuous. Mad Tom was the worst sinner of them all. If he had only stood still and given his words as simply as they should be given, he would not have jarred upon us as he did. But perhaps it is too much to hope ever to see a good Lear and a good Edgar in the same cast. And we carried away from the theatre these two reflections, that the actor should never be greater than his part, and that discipline, stoutly maintained and sternly administered, is worth far more on the stage than the wayward thing called genius. ant. To say that he is the best Lear we have ever seen is to give him faint praise. He presents Lear precisely as we would have it presented. Never once does he rant or tear his passion to rags. Never once does he interpose his own ingenuity between you and his original. One of the critics complains that he cannot "pour himself out in a torrent of rhetoric," as the critic thinks the ideal Lear should. But it was this refusal to pour himself out in rhetoric that seemed to us Mr McKinnel's eminent virtue. The text of Shakespeare needs no strain. The simple words which are put into Lear's mouth at moments of terror carry their own pitiless conviction with them. It is enough that they are said and heard. For the rest, Mr McKinnel was always dignified, as one accustomed to command. He did not stagger; he did not put off his crown, though it was but of straw. He spoke with lucidity and elevation. In brief, from beginning to end, his was a worthy performance, which it was a delight to see and which it is a pleasure to remember. He was well matched by Miss O'Malley, whose Cordelia was conceived in the same spirit of tranquillity. She, too, neither strove nor cried, but allowed Shakespeare's beautiful creation to reveal herself. How deep the effect was that she produced is proved by the fact that, though Cordelia is so brief a time on the stage, it is indubitably Miss O'Malley who He was a In the poet we reverse the values. It is genius, not discipline, that we seek. And never was there born into the world so pure and genuine a poet as Shelley. being compact of fire and air, about whose cradle genius hovered, and whom discipline never approached. To read the letters of this ethereal being is something of a shock. We cannot but feel a sort of surprise that he should be curious concerning the raising of money, or that he should scrutinise with severity the contracts he made with his publisher. We cannot but be astonished that, despite his dreams of revolution and philanthropy, he was an excellent man of business. Though the fact is immaterial, we wish it had not been forced upon our notice. It disturbs the sense of "oneness," to use Coleridge's word, which is inherent in every great man. That is the worst of letters and biographies. They tear away with a rough hand the veil from the temple. They uncover the secrecies of life. There is no grandeur which for the moment they cannot lessen. There is no mystery which they cannot pierce. This, then, is the fault which we have to find with Mr Ingpen's edition of Shelley's Letters,1-its completeness. Mr Ingpen spares us nothing. All is set down in black and white. The irrelevant little notes which Shelley wrote to booksellers, and which cannot, in the nature of things, differ from the irrelevant little notes that other men write, are displayed for our benefit. The many annoyances which clouded Shelley's life, and which might by this be forgotten, are preserved for all time by an unfortunate industry. A thousand pages are consecrated to the letters of this immortal child. How should he emerge from the ordeal of publicity? At every point in the struggle of life he was worsted. The greedy, the idle, the self-seeking found him an easy prey. We know nothing more lamentable in the whole range of biography than the insistence with which the old miscreant Godwin, and the shifty, shiftless Leigh Hunt, plundered the poet of his narrow substance. Their wants were never satisfied, and poor Shelley must scrape and borrow and back bills to serve their necessities. The one consolation we find in looking back upon a long series of squalid episodes is that Shelley shrewdly saw through Godwin's rapacity, and, while he gave lavishly, spared him little of what he deserved. In brief, this edition is complete, and therein, as we have said, is its greatest sin. Had its editor taken the thornier path, and given us a scrupulous selection. of the best, we should have owed him a debt of gratitude. As it is, with the best will in the world, he has done another injury to the poet's fame. The wrongs Shelley was a child, who was judged and will still be judged as a man, and judged wrongfully, whatever be the verdict. In truth, he stands in no need of judgment. which he did, and they were many, were done as in the wayward heartlessness of childhood. At eighteen he was fighting the battles of a man, fighting them with childish gravity, and coming beaten from the fray. Wherever he went he still lived in fairyland. He saw visions and heard voices, and he invented for all those whom he knew fantastic 1 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ingpen. London: Pitman. Collected and edited by Roger characters which were never theirs. To drag up the poor Miss Hitchener from her grave and let her masquerade once more as a miracle of intellect seems a wanton cruelty to her and to the child whose imagination made her glorious. And, unhappily for those who peopled his world, Shelley after a while was wont to find out the discrepancy between the real man or woman and his ideal, and cast them out as a child casts out his broken toys. To read of such adventures of the soul is an intrusion, and we wish that the curiosity which literature seems always to evoke had found another victim than Shelley. Now from Shelley, to whom the gods gave many gifts, the gift of humour was withheld. The withholding did no injury to his poetry; it was his life that it hurt. He could look upon nothing save with the eye of seriousness. He believed that in the least of his escapades the universe was engaged. The passion for revolution, which never left him, was a passion which in the most of men and poets passes with youth. To Shelley it was the most sternly real fact of existence. He believed, in the sincerity of his heart, that republicanism would cure all the ills of mankind. When, in 1812, he went to Ireland, he had a firm hope that his pamphlets would regenerate the country. "Oh! that I may be a successful apostle of this only live religion, the religion of Philanthropy. At all events I will have a Debat ing Society, and see what will grow out of that." Thus he wrote from Dublin, and we can only wonder at the vast end he kept in view and the disproportionate means he devised to reach it. 66 With the same simplicity of heart he stood on a balcony in Sackville Street to distribute his golden words. "I'm sure you would laugh," wrote Harriett, who had the gift of humour which he lacked, were you to see us give the pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in the streets. For myself I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's hood of a cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could hardly get on, my muscles were so irritated." This artless effusion does more to explain the tragedy of Harriett's life than all the idle, foolish gabble of biographers. And Shelley, being a child and having a child's judgment of men, is also inhuman like a child. Of one man only-Lord Byron, the most difficult to paint-does he give a true and lively portrait. He feared him a little, as he might have feared a big boy at school. But he recognised his great qualities of heart and mind, he described his life at Venice with the nearest approach to humour that you will find in his writings, and he wrote admirably wise and just criticisms of his poetry. For the rest, he talks with the greatest pleasure of his own poems, and of the natural scenery, which meant more to him than human intercourse. His wonder at the grandeur of the Alps, as at the treasures contained in palaces and libraries, never ceased. Of these he writes, with just such a touch of the guide-book as you might expect in a boy's letters from abroad. "The Doge's palace," he tells Peacock, "with its library, is a fine monument of aristocratic power. I saw the dungeons where these scoundrels used to torment their victims," and so on. His skill in landscape is so widely shown, that the reader will select for himself the passages that he likes best. We will content ourself with giving one example of his coloured prose : "We crossed a path of orangetrees by the river-side "it was at Velino-"laden with their golden fruit, and came to a forest of ilex of large size, whose evergreen and acorn-bearing boughs were intertwined over our winding path. Around, hemming in the narrow vale, were pinnacles of lofty mountains clothed with all evergreen plants and trees; the vast pine, whose feather foliage trembled in the blue air; the ilex, that ancestral inhabitant of these mountains; the arbutus with its crimsoncoloured fruit and glittering leaves." Of his own works he speaks with straightforward sincerity and with the modesty of greatness. He makes light of his version of the "Symposium," one of the very best specimens of a difficult art that exists. "I am employed just now," he says, "having little better to do, in translating into my faint and inefficient periods the divine eloquence of Plato's 'Symposium,' only as an exercise, or perhaps to give Mary some idea of the manners and feelings of the Athenians." Begun as an exercise, Shelley's version of the "Symposium" is an imperishable masterpiece, which puts into the shade the best efforts of the scholars, and proves once more that the poet, though his Greek be halting, is a far clearer interpreter than the most accomplished pedant. Of his other works, he considered the "Cenci" as eminently suited for popularity and the stage. He declares that in it he has laid aside "the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and is content to paint, with such colours as his own heart furnishes, that which has been." He loved his "Prometheus" best, which proves him that rarest of all things, a fair critic of his own 666 'Prometheus works. Unbound,'" thus he writes to Ollier, "is my favourite poem ; I charge you, therefore, specially to pet him and to feed him with fine ink and good paper. 'Cenci' is written for the multitude, and ought to sell well. I think, if I may judge by its merits, the 'Prometheus' cannot sell beyond twenty copies." He loved also his "Adonais," as who would not? "The 'Adonais,' "" he tells his publisher, in spite of his mysticism, "is the least imperfect of my compositions, and as the image of my regret and homage for poor Keats, I wish it to be so," He wrote, and the world |