"I followed Walden Sahib until he fell. We were only three, the Sahib, myself, and Gurdit Singh. I do not know how many there were behind the Blackwood's Magazine.

It was just the epitaph Walden would have asked for. And it was true enough. In his own pathetic way he was one of the bravest souls alive.

Edmund Candler.

"England is a strong land and a sturdy," wrote one of Chaucer's predecessors, "and the plenteousest corner of the world, so rich a land that unneth it needeth help of any land, and every other land needeth help of England." It is a peep into the life of this "strong land and sturdy"—a land "full of mirth and of game and men oft times able to mirth and game" that Mr. Coulton provides in his latest fascinating volume, "Chaucer and his England" (Methuen & Co.). The dark side is exhibited with the bright; the author, indeed, reveals a certain impatience with those who picture the Middle Age as a kingdom of innocence and gold. If the poor were little worse off then, they were little better. In all ages, indeed, as Mr. Coulton justly remarks, the past no less than the present, they find their suffering "limited only by the bounds of that which flesh and blood can endure." Nor were saintliness and meekness more characteristic of our race yesterday than to-day. There are complaints, as indignant yesterday as today, of the arrogance, the greed, the truculence of the English people. "The English," wrote Froissart, after he had told the story of all their great victories, "will never love or honor their king, but if he be victorious and a lover of arms and war against his neighbors, and especially against such as are greater and richer than themselves." "They take delight and solace in battles and slaughter," he notes,

"covetous and envious are they above measure of other men's wealth." For the characteristic mettle and temper of this proud people did not reside (as in feudal notions abroad) in an aristocratic caste; it lay in the proud free vigor of the common people. How far to-day could we boast of the descendants of an English peasantry, as Froissart could boast of their ancestors, that "specially there is no people under the s so perilous in the matter of its common folk as they are in England"? “England is best kept of all lands in the world; otherwise they could by no means live together." "Englishmen suffer indeed for a season but in the end they repay so cruelly that it may stand as a great warning; for no man may mock them; the lord who governs them rises and lays him down to rest in sore peril of his life."

It is a land of forests and villages and green gardens; where as yet is "no real divorce between town and country"; London alone, a huge aggregation of 40,000 persons, conspicuous for its wealth and population. Founded by Brut, the son of Æneas, who nained it Troymount or New Troy, the city could boast two hundred years before Chaucer that it "traded with every nation under heaven." "Could the ships of Tharshish," asks Matthew of Westminster, "so extolled in Holy Scripture, be compared with thine?" Froissart found the men of London of more weight than all the rest of England, and "where

they are at accord and fully agreed"

It

of such strength that "no men can gainsay them." "The only pests of London," said FitzStephen, "are the immoderate drinking and the frequency of fires." And this London is set in a secure and tranquil corner of a civilization, whose "only pests" are "immoderate drinking" and the "frequency of fires"-and too greedy and riotous pursuit of life's desirable things, and the uncontrollable judgments and scourges of earthquake, pestilence, and war. is a child world always, with the fascinations and also the perplexities of a world organized upon a basis of accident and caprice. The Middle Age has been shown as "peopled with living creatures," says Mr. Coulton, "beasts of prey, indeed, in very many cases, but always bright and swift and attractive, as wild beasts are in comparison with the commonplace stock of our fields and farmyards-bright in themselves, and heightened in color by the artificial brilliancy which perspective gives to all that we see through the wrong end of a telescope." He deprecates such a picture. Englishmen of the fourteenth century are far more akin to Englishmen of the twentieth; with the same passions, with the same difficulties in a short and hazardous journey toward a similar goal. Yet there is the child element far more dominant, with the simplicity, the gaiety, and something of the solemnity of childhood. Excess of law exists, regulating daily life with meticulous detail, yet the prohibitions, like the prohibitions which satisfy the consciences of the Americans to-day-a similar nation of children—are always cheerfully violated. The common people, with unerring instinct, recognize the law as the enemy. "Then began they to show forth in deeds part of their inmost purpose," wrote Walsingham of the peasants' revolt, "and to behead in revenge all and every lawyer in the land, from

the half-fledged pleader to the aged justice. For they said that all such must first be slain before the land could enjoy true freedom."

Yet that law itself does not yet become the cold, iron, indifferent machinery of to-day: justice is not yet bewigged as well as blindfolded: caprice, common sense, kindliness, and anger, as well as a certain ultimate perplexity before the ultimate ironies of fortune enter into all the efforts to adjust the relationships of human society. Mrs. Green has told a pleasant story of such difficulties a century later, in which an Aylesbury miller, finding that his mill needed repairs, sent his servants to dig clay on the highway, thereby making a deep pit in the road, into which fell a glover, journeying from Leighton Buzzard; and the pit, being filled with water by the winter rains, man and horse were both incontinently drowned. "The miller was charged with his death, but was acquitted on the ground that he had no malicious intent, and had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and because he really did not know of any other place to get the kind of clay he wanted save the high road." The human will pleased itself, uncontrolled by reference to general principles. Edward III. spares the citizens of Calais, because Philippa prays for them; the Black Prince, at the massacre of Limoges, remains indifferent to the cries of women and children for mercy, but is appeased by the spectacle of three French warriors fighting boldly for their lives. "Accident," says Jusserand, "plays a greater part in the fourteenth century than perhaps at any other epoch." Insecurity is normal: hardness and austerity is the lot of all: men see the sunrise but never the sunset: overcoats and fur robes are kept to wear indoors, instead of outside. The wars are conducted with a tedious brutality, amid promiscuous slaughter: diseases

born of uncleanliness are rampant; in the midst comes the Black Death, like the sudden shutting of a door, closing the life of an age. Yet with all this there is irrepressible gaiety, breaking out everywhere into sport and song and dances, defying the regulations of the law and the menaces of the Church. Across this gulf of time, triumphant on the moans of the suffering and the poor, comes the laughter of "Merrie England." One sees them, as in FitzStephen's "Description of London": "in the holidays all the summer the youths are exercised in leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, casting the stone, and practising their shields: the maidens trip with their timbrels, and dance as long as they can well see." When the great fen or moor is frozen in winter they play upon the ice. In the summer nights they dance with candles in their hands. They break down all regulations in restraint of their jolly, boisterous sports and pleasures, and the strength of their determination towards enjoyment is exhibited by the frequency of the attempts to limit and restrict their excesses. There are revels on Saint's days, revels at marriage feasts, revels at Christmas and Easter and May morning, revels even at executions and funerals. In 1370 at Christmastide a law is passed in London "that no one shall go in the streets of the city with vizor or mask, under pain of imprisonment." Measures are threatened against taking off the hoods of people—a primitive form of “Mafficking," and against football in the streets. In 1446 the Bishop of Exeter complains against unlawful games, such as tennis, in the Cathedral cloister, "by the which all the walls of the said cloister have been de-fouled, and the glass windows all to-burst." Repeatedly the Church endeavored to clear the people from unholy games (such as football) in the churchyards. There are prohibitions against the "Feast of fools," against

the "Scot-ales," complaints of the secular jollity in the pilgrimages, the singing of "wanton songs," "and some other pilgrimes will have with them bagge pipes." Yet everywhere and always, in days of prosperity and decline, this common people were determined to make the most of what pleasures this little life could give. With the enduring background of uncertainty-in rejoicing perhaps heightened and deepened by this uncertainty-the men and women of this far-off time appear as those who accept life instead of rejecting it, filling with zest and rivalry and laughter the hours of a day long dead.

And of religion? Here, also, the divergence is superficial rather than fundamental, between to-day and yesterday. Then, as now, religion meant, for the few the effort after the aspiration of the Spirit; for the many the attempt to escape from the consequences of the sins of the flesh. The spiritual background to life was, indeed, more universally accepted; devils and angels walked visibly on the earth, seen of many; in the great storm of 1361 "the Devil in man's likeness spake to men going by the way"; a herald who watched the rioters march past in 1381 "saw several devils among them"; the good Queen "yielded up her ghost; which," says the chronicler, "as I firmly believe, the holy angels of paradise seized and carried with great joy to the glory of Heaven." Yet even here is a current of underlying scepticism. Walsingham traced the horrors of the peasants' revolt to "the sins of the great folk, whose faith in God was feigned; for some of them (it is said) believed that there was no God, no sacrament of the altar, no resurrection from the dead, but that as a beast dies, so also there is an end of man." "One merchant told me the other day," says Gower, "how, to his mind, that man would have wrought folly who, being able to get the delights of this life,

ticism was exceptional; most men accepted the narrow path towards a certain goal; only the attractions of the fields outside proved overpowering and the path wearisome to the feet. Froissart describes his childhood, how they tried schooling on him, but he could not be at rest; he was beaten, he suffered, he repented, the next moment "when I saw my comrades pass down the street in front, I soon found an excuse to go and tumble with them again." The experience was unchanged through all the life of this child world; they sinned, they were scourged with plagues for their sin, they repented; a moment after they "found an excuse to go and tumble with them again." Old age was always adjuring them to keep innocency and do the thing which was right; youth was always accepting and always breaking the conditions of such conduct, always able to point to the time when old age had done likewise. "O youngë freshë folkës, he or she,"

The Nation.

cries Chaucer at the end of his days:In which that love upgroweth with

your age:

Repair ye home from worldly vanitie, And of your heart upcast ye the visage To that same God that after His image You made.

Το

To which the "youngë freshë folkë" could reply with some truth that "worldly vanity" had appeared less vain to the poet before old age had frozen the blood and enforced the contemplation of approaching death. the sterner moralists of the age the cup of man's iniquity appeared full, and God's patience exhausted: as man's iniquity has appeared full and God's patience exhausted to the sterner moralists of every age, from Pompeii to twentieth century England. "It seemeth to many," cries a contemporary of Wycliffe, "that we are fallen into those unhappy times wherein the lights of heaven seem to be turned to darkness, and the stars of heaven are fallen from earth." "More and more dreary, barren, base, and ugly seem to me all the aspects of this poor diminishing quick world," echoes a voice from the later nineteenth century, "fallen openly anarchic, doomed to a death which one can only wish to be speedy." Amid which stern judgments and warnings the world thus condemned has kept manfully on its way, finding youth always a garland of roses, if age always a crown of thorns.

The most successful, most fertile, and most ingenious of the makers of plays of the past fifty years has passed away, and at once we proclaim that his influence is over and had been declining for a long time. Tried by actual fact that assertion would be disproved by a list of the plays now being

represented in France, and we do not expect that the plays produced on the principles of Sardou are likely to diminish for a good many generations to come. The form will be modified and the accessories will be varied, but the method will persist, because it is the method that produces the kind of

play that has always given the greatest pleasure to the greatest number. It is too early for French enthusiasts to crow over the few victories of the natural drama, and it would be ridiculous for us in England who have had no victories to crow at all. In Paris MM. Brieux, Fabre, Hermant, and others aim at pleasing the intellectuels, and perhaps M. Bernstein will join them, but the average French playgoer asks for something very different.

In

The preference of the ordinary playgoer in England nearly as much as in France has been created by Sardou, though of course he did not originate his methods any more than his master Scribe originated the principles. delicacy of means, lightness of touch, and in the humanity of his characters Scribe was superior to Sardou, who was apt to be hard and to expose the machinery. Master and pupil were on the same road all the same, and the road is an old one, perhaps the only road for the playmaker, which he leaves at his peril and to which they all return. It is built on traditions handed down by generations of actors, talked over on strollers' journeys, tried on successive audiences. Farquhar among the eighteenth-century men knew it best, Heywood and the Elizabethan realists had been there. Pursue the line and, through minstrels and jongleurs, past the waning Empire of Rome to the islands of Greece, it will lead in the end to the cart of Thespis. It is not so long a journey as the vertebrates can be seen to make in a museum-case.

The development of this popular, natural, and theatrical drama has been the work of the practical playwright who knew or learnt that the public believe that it is natural and right for plays to be theatrical. They go to the theatre for that, not for the nature they see at home every day. Sardou

was the perfect playwright, by temperament a man of the theatre and by practice the most skilful of craftsmen. Like all men of marked specialty his skill showed itself early, and the difference between the early and the highest period is not very great. Les Pattes de Mouche is not excelled in workmanship by any of the later pieces. It is probably the centre of the Sardou system, the model from which with the necessary adjustments Divorçons, Nos Intimes, Mme. Sans-Gêne, Fedora, and all the others were taken. Sardou was praised for versatility because he was successful with many kinds of subject. But the method was the same with them all. He had devised an ingenious machine which could deal with all stage material. It was as if an inventor had constructed a machine that would work on metal, stone, cloth, wood, leather, and almost any other material and reproduce it fashioned to design as per specification. It turned out the finely elaborated work of the three-men scene in Diplomacy as surely as the love-passages of Theodora and the horror of La Tosca placing candles at the side of the dead man.

This machine was Victorien Sardou and it worked nearly every day of his life, and the sustained work went for at least half of his success. Playwrights magnify their trade-mystery into the other mystery in spite of etymology, but for the attainment of ordinary skill no more is required than the industry which amateurs cannot give. Sardou had natural aptitude, love of the stage, and a rare capacity for work. A man of the theatre, like Beaumarchais and Lord Lytton, though he was never an actor he saw and he felt like an actor, and that goes a long way to making a playwright. He was not imaginative, his mind was of the patient, experimental, scientific cast which works its material over and over again from different points of view.