a

brother, her child, and herself. He plays with the utmost possible success upon the passion, prejudice, and inhumanity of man. What ensues on the other side is entirely arbitrary and devoid of dramatic logic. The redemption of Margaret implies that heaven is a little less cruel than earth, but it is in no sense a result of Mephistopheles' action. Margaret would presumably have gone to heaven even if she had not been seduced. She arrives there, in effect, not because Mephistopheles' policy defeated itself (as the "Leitmotif" would require) but because higher power intervened to defeat it. As for Faust, the idea which most people seem to carry away from stageversions of the play is that he is saved through the superabundant merits, or the intercession, or, quite vaguely, through the "love," of Margaret. This idea of the redemption of man through the infinite devotion of woman became a commonplace of romanticism and haunted the mind even of Ibsen in his romantic period. If it is to be accepted, we may find in it a certain justification of Mr. Tree's "Leitmotif"; for in making Margaret the victim of Faust, Mephistopheles provided him with the intercessor who was ultimately to rescue him, and thus "willing the evil, achieved the good." But the idea of the redemption of the man through the woman does not seem to be Goethe's idea at all. It would appear to be founded on a misunderstanding (not inexcusable, I admit) of the last scene of the Second Part of Faust. The one thing quite certain is that the angels who bear Faust's immortal part to heaven ascribe his salvation to works, not to grace:

Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen.

wherein they make Faust express his intention of pursuing a life of beneficence, in the threefold form of sicknursing, engineering, and peace propaganda. It may be possible to reconcile this conception with the "Leitmotif" arguing that if Mephistopheles had not thrown Margaret in Faust's path he would never have had the strength to work out his own salvation. But what are we to think of the dramatic, or even the moral, value of this baffling of the powers of evil, in the last three minutes of the play, through Faust's mere expression of a desire to reform? Mephistopheles might aptly have quoted an adage which must have been tolerably familiar to him-"Hell is paved with good intentions." Read it how we may, and manipulate it how we may, the ethical significance of the action remains either utterly false or hopelessly obscure. This is what comes of presenting, in the hard light of the theatre, snippets from a great patchwork phantasmagory of poetry, metaphysics, and caprice.

At His Majesty's, then, we have the seduction-story robbed of its exquisite lyric vesture; the philosophy reduced to meaningless shreds and tatters; and the good old mediæval diablerie helped out by the mechanical appliances of the modern stage. This it is, without a doubt, which renders Faust perennially attractive to the great child-public, and correspondingly irritating to those who have, in a theatrical sense, arrived at years of discretion. I confess myself one of these unhappy persons. "No more, no more, ah, nevermore, on me," shall Mr. Tree, in scarlet, posing in a ruby limelight, produce the slightest ilI May it be mine to watch the couch of pain.

To him that faints in cities to bring dew,
To drain the marshland, circumscribe the

lusion of Satanic Majesty, or even of diabolic cynicism and wit. No array of terms can express the indifference with which I see Mephistopheles "shrink and cower" at sight of the Cross, or close his ears and dance about in agony at the sound of the churchbells. (Does Mr. Tree perform the latter manoeuvre? I really forget. It was one of Sir Henry Irving's greatest effects, and there seems to be no reason why Mr. Tree should eschew it.) Ladles spilling flames, pens and swords sparkling with electricity, witches riding through the air, showers of glittering gold-foil, and even transparencies in which lovely ladies recline in picture post-card attitudes-all these portents and marvels leave me inexpressibly cold. But the public delights in them, and I am far from quarrelling with its innocent pleasure. I am only trying, in a spirit of scientific curiosity to discover why an entertainment of such respectable parentage and such proved fascination for the masses, should be so very much the reverse of fascinating to people who look for a certain amount of intellectual satisfaction in their theatre-going.

In the matter of mounting, Mr. Tree has simply followed the Lyceum traThe Fortnightly Review.

dition, liberally and ably, indeed, but with no innovation of much importance. The production is neither better nor worse than Sir Henry Irving's: it stands on the same plane of theatrical art. There was, indeed, a certain novelty in the attempt to convey some slight suggestion of the Prologue in Heaven; but its pictorial effect, poor at best, was fatally marred by the selection of three charming young ladies to represent the Archangels Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael. Surely, surely something better than this might have been attempted. For those scenes and for all the supernatural passages in the play, Mr. Tree might have sought inspiration from two sources-one dead and one living-William Blake and Mr. Gordon Craig. I am no unqualified admirer of Mr. Craig's methods; but it is precisely in such a production as this that they are undeniably applicable. We must, on the whole, look to our laurels in the matter of stage-mounting. Time was when in this branch of art we were unquestionably in advance of all our neighbors. But of late years (partly through the influence of Mr. Craig) Germany and even Italy have gone ahead of us.

William Archer.

V.

cried Miss Mabel Le Mesurier, ætat.

"Go away!"

Baby, baby bunting!

Father's gone a-hunting;
Mother's gone to get a skin,

To wrap the baby bunting in!

"Go away! Damn you! I hate you!"

"Oh, you naughty, shocking boy!"

ruddy golden hair with a shake of her pretty head. "How dare you say such wicked words! Where do you suppose that you will go to when you die if you swear like that? If I were to tell father he would whip you."

"No, he wouldn't," said Saleh savagely.

"Yes, he would."

"He wouldn't dare, because I should

kill him," said Saleh, with the calmness of utter conviction, while the tears still stood upon his face.

"You couldn't kill my dad if you tried ever so, he is much too big and strong and brave, so there; but he would beat you worse than anything if he heard the awful wicked things you say."

"Go away! I hate you!"

"I shan't go away. This is my garden-house, not yours. I shall stay here just as long as I like. You are a horrid little savage blackamoor, that's what you are, or you wouldn't be so dreadfully rude and wicked."

"I'm not rude and wicked and a blackamoor," cried poor Saleh, throwing his arms across the little rustic table before him, and sinking his head face downward between them. "I'm unhappy, and I hate everybody, and I wish I was dead." His shoulders heaved with a fresh paroxysm of sobs. Mabel stood looking at him thoughtfully, biting at the corner of her blue pinafore the while. She was a tenderhearted little woman, and she had come there to comfort, not to aggravate, Saleh's sorrows. She had only given way to her natural instinct when she had derided his unmauly tears. She had not intended to hurt him wantonly. Now she stepped nearer to him, and laid a tiny grubby hand upon his shoulder. He shook it off with an irritable shrug, but she declined to take offence. "Don't cry, Sally. Dear Sally, don't cry," she whispered. "Tell me what's the matter. Why do you hate every one, and why do you say such naughty, wicked things?"

For a time Saleh strove sullenly to repel her advances; but her persistency and his own craving for sympathy at last prevailed, so presently he found himself telling her, brokenly, inarticulately, for the strange tongue still fettered his thought, the story of his misery. To the little girl more than half of what he said was unintelligible, for

the things that most irked this oriental boy were to her matters of course, to which custom had inured her from babyhood. Also Saleh, apart from the difficulty he experienced in giving form to his ideas, discovered that it was one thing to be acutely conscious of a sensation, and a wholly different matter to describe that feeling in words. But the little girl, with the ready sympathy that belongs to womenkind, even to womenkind in the bud, listened to his halting explanations, and made no sign when she failed to follow the meaning which they were intended to convey, while Saleh was aware of a sensible alleviation of his trouble, merely because he had met with someone who was willing to listen to him kindly, someone of whom he was not shy.

The sharp pangs of homesickness had become numbed into a dull ache; the awful fear with which this world of white men had at first inspired him had passed away; in his new home he was treated with kindness, and he no longer felt it necessary to stand on the defensive, no longer had the panicstricken sensations of a trapped animal. None the less his surroundings were utterly uncongenial to him. Their iron regularity oppressed him. The household was as punctual as a nicely adjusted piece of clockwork, and he, who had never been taught the value of time, chafed at the extravagant importance which the Le Mesuriers attached to never being so much as a minute late for meals, play, or lessons. Then discipline-another thing entirely new to him-had come to the ordering of his days. Each hour was earmarked for the special use to which it was to be put. To Saleh this was the veriest tyranny,-the tyranny of the slave-driver,-and he felt himself to be covered with ignominy because he was obliged to submit to it. Then, too, this world of the white men seemed to be ruled by ideas, abstractions, which pre

viously had had no meaning to him. Mr. Le Mesurier was perpetually putting his son George, and Saleh with him, upon their "honor" to do this, that, or the other, and George would turn upon Saleh, calling him a "cad" with the bitterest contempt, if he sought to break through the impalpable barriers thus arbitrarily set up. Saleh, who in common with most Malays had a keen desire to stand well in the estimation of his fellows, did not want to be looked upon as a "cad," but he could not for the life of him understand why Mr. Le Mesurier, of whose general wisdom he was profoundly convinced, had the wanton folly to put trust in any one. Then also he had made the acquaintance of another obscure thing called "Duty." He was constantly being told that it was his duty to do this or that; or it was declared that duty required of him that he should abstain from doing something upon which his heart was set. Here was a notion which as yet was altogether beyond his powers of comprehension; but the children about him accepted it as a matter of course, and were obviously ill at ease, and out of conceit with themselves, when they succumbed to the temptation to sin against its precepts. Those other abstractions, "Right" and "Wrong," were a perpetual puzzle to him. In his own country he had been used to hear of things that were pâtut or ta' pâtut-fitting or not fitting-but they had been largely questions of good or bad taste, matters of opinion dependent upon the point of view of the individual. Among white men, however, Saleh discovered, to his astonishment, that they were hard-and-fast categories into which actions were divided past all possibility of debate, and the simple answer, "It would not be right," sufficed in most cases to deter his new comrades from participating in the most tempting pleasures. Once again, for the life of

him, he could not understand it. When he had suggested to George that indulgence in a certain vice-a vice for which in his father's court men and women mainly lived-would relieve the tedium of their studies, the English boy had looked upon him with horror, had threatened to "knock his head off" if he talked like that again, and had shown him with true British bluntness how unfathomable was his disgust.

Honor, duty, morality-straitening things which seemed to clog the feet of liberty, as Saleh had always understood it had come upon him suddenly, new ideas difficult to assimilate, and in their own fashion more numbing to the brain, more paralyzing, more appalling than those other revelations, the vastness of the universe and the multitude of humanity, had been. Then, too, the life in which he found himself was strenuous, earnest, instinct with a restless energy that jarred upon his indolent nature. It seemed to him as though he had been transported to some lofty mountain-top, and were called upon, without preparation, to breathe the rarefied atmosphere of the upper airs. He stood there morally panting, gasping,-moving with acute discomfort on a plane too high for him. He longed for the denser atmosphere of his fatherland, and he despaired of ever becoming habituated to that which seemingly was natural, congenial, to those with whom he now associated. As to ever winning to a real understanding of the extraordinary points of view of these people, that obviously was a patent impossibility.

Beyond this there were half a hundred minor matters which appealed to Saleh as incongruous. His manhood was offended, revolted, by the position occupied among white folk by the women. Even after weeks of use, his meals were a humiliation to him because Mrs. Le Mesurier and her daughters sat at table. Even his own mother would

not have dreamed of taking such a liberty with her son. The service rendered by the maid-servants was natural enough, but it hurt his pride and his self-respect to find that he was expected to give way to the daughters of the house in everything, that he was chidden if he neglected to offer to carry a cloak for a lady, if he did not run willingly on trifling errands for Mrs. Le Mesurier, if he was not active in forestalling the wants of her and of her daughters. From the moment of their first meeting Mrs. Le Mesurier, by her grace and kindness, had won his heart; but still, to his thinking, she was but a woman,-a being of inferior clay to the material from which he was fashioned, and he was irked by a system that made of her a central pivot round which the household revolved. This unquestionably was ta' pâtut-not fitting yet seemingly it offended the sense of propriety of no one save himself. The absence of all forms, too, struck him as barbarous. All his life he had been hedged about by ritual, Those who had spoken to him had described themselves as pâtek-thy slave; for was he not the son of a king?-but here all ceremony was dropped, and, shorn of his titles, he found himself answering to the name of "Sally," and being scoffed at and mocked because "Sally" was in England a woman's name. George, the young barbarian, even called him "Aunt Sally" at times, and once at a fair had gravely introduced him to a dilapidated cockshy, which he declared must be one of his near relatives,-a hideous idol of the white men at which certain savage creatures were engaged in throwing missiles with grotesque antics and an outrageous uproar. It was when he next was addressed as "Aunt Sally," that he had first tried to fight George, and finding that the attempt was a failure, for what could a man do who had no knife ready to his hand?-had

retired to the arbor in tears. "Chaff," as George would have called it, was again something foreign to Saleh's experience. To him it was simply a rudeness, a brutality-not fitting.

As much of all this as his mental and linguistic limitations could make articulate he now sobbed out to Mabel, omitting only all reference to his disapproval of the undue exaltation of her sex, for Malays are not devoid of a certain instinctive tact. His trouble was of a nature too complex to be readily comprehended by his little listener; but, fortunately for mankind, a woman's sympathy is not always dependent upon her understanding, and Mabel, knowing he was very unhappy, without inquiring too closely into the causes, patted his shoulder and whispered words of consolation into his ear.

He

"Don't cry, Saleh dear," she said. "We all like you very much, and you are going to live with us for a long time and be very happy too when you get used to us. You mustn't mind George. He is a boy, you know, and boys are like that. He is always trying to get a rise out of all of us. He likes you very much too, really. was only saying the other day how beautifully you swim, and how clever you are in the gym. He says you can do things on the bar at the first try which it takes English boys years and years to learn. He only calls you 'Aunt Sally' for fun, just as he calls me 'Furze-bush' when I have had my hair in curl-papers."

Saleh shuddered at the recollection, His taste, moulded by the lank, sleek, oil-dressed heads of his own womenkind, was greviously offended by the sight of curls.

"And you called me a blackamoor," he said sulkily.