had to come at last. But there seems to have been nothing hugger-mugger or disorderly in the actor's house, though this shadow was for ever hanging over it, the income small and the needs many. Mrs. Kemble says that her father's income was but eight hundred pounds a year, of which her eldest brother's expenses at the university took away about three hundred-a proof of his anxiety to equip his son in the best way for the struggle of life, which is very impressive and noble. Almost of course, this expensively trained son carried out none of the hopes set upon his head, but followed a spécialité of his own choosing, and en tout bien et tout honneur, gave his family more anxiety than aid. But the sacrifice thus made shows how little the conventional idea of the harum-scarum existence of the stage, with all its excitements and supposed irregularity, is to be credited. No family could be more actors than the Kembles, and the mother of the household had been on the stage from her childhood, brought up amid all its unwholesome commotions; but from the other side of the picture we see nothing but the most highly toned family life, and that heroic struggle to raise their children a step above their own precarious level of existence, and give them the means of advancement, which always enlists the spectator's best feelings and sympathies.

The most interesting portion of these recollections is that which describes the way in which Fanny stepped into the breach, and did her best to prop up the big theatre and the family fortune on her own delicate girlish shoulders-an heroic act, though one that did little more than postpone the evil day. She was nineteen when the crisis which had been long approaching seemed at last to have become inevitable. "My mother, coming in from walking one day," she tells us, "threw herself into a chair and burst into tears. . . . 'Oh, it has come at last!' she answered; our property is to be sold. I have seen that fine building all covered with placards and bills of sale. The theatre must be closed, and I know not how many poor people will be turned adrift without employment.'" This bad news filled the anxious and sympathetic girl with distress. She begged to be allowed to write to her father, to ask his permission to "seek employment as a governess, so as to relieve him, at once, at least of the burden of my maintenance.' To this forlorn plan the natural first idea of a generous girl longing to help somehow, and snatching at the first melancholy helpless way of doing so that presented itself to her mind-the mother gave an ambiguous answer; but next day suddenly spoke of the stage, and suggested that Fanny should study a part out of Shakespeare, and recite it to her. The girl chose

Portia-a character of which she speaks with unfailing enthusiasm; but on her recitation of this her mother made little comment. She said: "There is hardly passion enough in this part to test any tragic power. I wish you would study Juliet for me." When Mr. Kemble, who had been absent, returned, the little performance was repeated, "with indescribable trepidation" on the part of the novice.

They neither of them said anything beyond "Very well, very nice, my dear," with many kisses and caresses, from which I escaped to sit down on the stairs half-way between the drawing-room and my bedroom, and get rid of the repressed nervous fear I had struggled with while reciting, in floods of tears. A few days after this my father told me he wished to take me to the theatre with him, to try whether my voice was of sufficient strength to fill the building; so thither I went. That strange-looking place the stage, with its rocks of pasteboard and canvas, streets, forests, banqueting-halls, and dungeons, drawn apart on either side, was empty and silent; not a soul was stirring in the indistinct recesses of its mysterious depths, which seemed to stretch indefinitely behind me. In front the gray amphitheatre, equally empty and silent, wrapped in its gray Holland covers, would have been absolutely dark but for a long, sharp, thin shaft of light that darted here and there from some height and distance far above me, and alighted in a sudden vivid spot of brightness on the stage. Set down in the midst of twilight space, as it were, with only my father's voice coming to me from where he stood, hardly distinof pathetic passion, I was seized by the spirit of the guishable in the gloom, in those poetical utterances thing; my voice resounded through the great vault above and before me, and, completely carried away by the inspiration of the wonderful play, I acted Juliet as I do not believe I ever acted it again, for I had no visible Romeo, and no audience to thwart my imagination—at least I had no consciousness of one, though in truth I had one. In the back of one of the private boxes, commanding the stage, but perfectly invisible to me, sat an old and warmly-attached friend of my father's, Major D, the best judge, in many respects, that my father could have selected of my capacity for my profesNot till sion, and my chance of succeeding in it. after the event had justified my kind old friend's prophecy did I know that he had witnessed that morning's performance, and joining my father at the

end of it had said: "Bring her out at once; it will be a great success." And so three weeks from that time I was brought out, and it was a great suc

cess.

The moment the decision was made, every arrangement was hurried on to "bring her out at once," as necessity and policy both seemed to require. She had everything to learn, and, according to her own account, learned not very much.

"I do not wonder," Mrs. Kemble says, "when I remember this brief apprenticeship to my profession, that Mr. Macready once said that I did not know the elements of it." But though she does not wonder at this severe verdict, it is evident that she felt it painfully, since she returns again and again to the sentence thus passed upon her. Her own description of her system of acting shows exactly how Mr. Macready, who was nothing if not professional, and whose art was learned and elaborate, should have given forth such an opinion. She tells us that her acting varied, so that probably no two renderings were exactly the same. "My performances," she writes, "were always uneven in themselves, and perfectly unequal with each other; never complete as a whole, however striking in occasional parts, and never at the same level two nights together -depending for their effect upon the state of my health and spirits, instead of being the result of deliberate thought and consideration-study, in short, carefully and conscientiously applied to my work." The result was, that all her higher successes were gained, not by calculation, but by the sudden access of excitement or feeling which made her one with the character she represented, filling her with the divine intoxication of poetry-an influence not to be secured at will. This impulsive kind of acting would be likely, we should imagine, to have, in its moments of power, a greater effect than any other; but though magnificent, it is not art. In the mean time, however, she has not yet made her début, the story of which is very pretty too:

My mother, who had left the stage for upward of twenty years, determined to return to it on the night of my first appearance, and that I might have the comfort and support of her presence in my trial. We drove to the theatre very early indeed, while the late autumn sunlight yet lingered in the sky. It shone into the carriage upon me; and as I screened my eyes from it my mother said, "Heaven smiles on you, my child!" My poor mother went to her dressing-room to get herself ready, and did not return to me, for fear of increasing my agitation by her own. My dear aunt Dall and my maid and the theatre dresser performed my toilet for me, and at length I was placed in a chair with my satin train laid carefully over the back of it; and there I sat ready for execution, with the palms of my hands pressed convulsively together, and the tears I in vain endeavored to repress welling up into my eyes and brimming slowly over down my rouged cheeks; upon which my aunt, with a smile full of pity, renewed the color as often as those heavy drops made unsightly streaks in it. Once and again my father came to the door, and I heard his anxious "How is she?"-to which my aunt answered, sending him away with words of comforting cheer. At last, "Miss Kemble called for the stage, ma'am," accompanied

"Never

by a brisk tap at the door, started me upright on my feet, and I was led round to the side-scene opposite to the one from which I saw my mother advance on the stage; and while the uproar of her reception filled me with terror, dear old Mrs. Davenport, my nurse, and dear old Mr. Keeley, her Peter, and half the dramatis persone of the play (but not my father, stood round me as I lay all but insensible in my who had retreated, quite unable to endure the scene) aunt's s arms. Courage, courage, dear child! Poor thing, poor thing!" reiterated Mrs. Davenport. "Never mind 'em, Miss Kemble," urged Keeley, in that irresistibly comical, nervous, lachrymose voice of his, which I have never since heard without a thrill of anything but comical associations. mind 'em! don't think of 'em any more than if they were so many rows of cabbages.” "Nurse!" called my mother, and on waddled Mrs. Davenport, and turning back, called in her turn "Juliet!" My aunt gave me an impulse forward, and I ran straight across the stage, stunned with the tremendous shout that greeted me; my eyes covered with mist, and the green baize flooring of the stage feeling as if it rose up against my feet: but I got hold of my mother, and stood like a terrified creature at bay, confronting the huge theatre full of gazing human beings. I do not think a word I uttered during this scene could have been audible; in the next-the ballroom-I began to forget myself; in the following one-the balcony scene-I had done so, and for aught I knew, was Juliet, the passion I was uttering sending hot waves of blushes all over my neck and shoulders, while the poetry sounded to me like music while I spoke it, with no consciousness of anything before me, utterly transported into the imaginary existence of the play. After this I did not return into myself till all was over; and amid a tumultuous storm of applause, congratulation, tears, embraces, and a general joyous explosion of unutterable relief at the fortunate termination of my attempt, we went home.

She was still not twenty when she thus entered the stormy ways of life, and the simplicity of the girlish heroine could scarcely be better shown than by the incident that followed. “I sat down to supper that night with my poor rejoicing parents, well content, God knows, with the issue of my trial, and still better pleased with a lovely little Geneva watch, the first I had ever possessed, all incrusted with goldwork and jewels, which my father laid by my plate, and I immediately christened Romeo, and went, a blissful girl, to sleep with it under my pillow." This pretty piece of childishness touches the reader's made happy. Her life became a fairy life after heart for the impassioned Juliet who was so easily this for a time, and she got everything that girl could desire, with a pleasant natural girlish unconsciousness that it was her own earnings which procured these advantages, and total absence of all self-assertion and independence. "Oh, H—,” she cries, "I am exceedingly happy! et pour peu

de chose, you will perhaps think: my father has given me leave to have riding-lessons." Besides this wonderful delight (and it was a genuine delight to her, as she became an admirable horsewoman) the happy difference between poverty and comparative wealth made itself instantly felt. She who had enjoyed the revenue of “ twenty pounds a year, which my poor father squeezed out of his hard-earned income for my allowance," had now gloves and shoes in abundance; fashionably-made dresses, instead of "faded, threadbare, and dyed frocks"; and all the adulation of success and the flattery of society, to boot. And it is easy to imagine her happiness when, knowing so well, as she did, what the needs of the household were, she presented herself, on the first Saturday after her beginning, "for the first and last time, at the treasury of the theatre," to receive her salary," and carried it clinking to my mother; the first money I ever earned."

The young performer remained the chief attraction of Govent Garden for a considerable time; and her theatrical life is perhaps more piquant, as being much less common, than her society life, which was brilliant and pleasant, without containing much that is different from other people's experience. There is, however, always an interest in knowing something of that dingy world behind the scenes where ordinary human creatures are changed into dazzling heroes and heroines; and where the feet, especially of the young, are surrounded by so many snares. But Fanny Kemble's life behind the scenes seems to have been much like her life at home. She was taken to the theatre by one of her family, “and there in my dressing-room sat through the entire play, when I was not on the stage, with some piece of tapestry or needlework, with which, during the intervals of my tragic sorrows, I busied my fingers." The greenroom, with all its intrigues and commotions, was as much a mystery to her as to the girls who stay at home. "When I was called for the stage, my aunt came with me, carrying my train. . . She remained at the side-scene till I came off again, and, folding a shawl round me, escorted me back to my dressing-room and my tapestry." This seclusion of the brilliant heroine, the cynosure of all eyes, between the intervals of public applause-her Berlin-wool and her careful aunt, the mixture of the cloister or the domestic parlor (perhaps a still completer image of sobriety and dullness) with the overwhelming excitement and illusion of the theatre-is wonderfully amusing and original. And the criticism to which

the young actress was subjected is equally interesting. She does not tell us, like Macready, of any tremblings of anxiety about the newspaper criticism of the morning. A pair of anxious eyes, more alarming than those of any critic, watched her every movement; and this was the tribunal before which she trembled.

There are many other very interesting sketches in the book-as, for instance, that of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the sentimental painter, who nearly turned young Fanny's head, and who had brought confusion before her time into the house of her aunt Siddons, two of whose daughters he had loved in bewildering succession, though without (since death was beforehand with him) marrying either. His gallantry and his enthusiasm and his woes made up a curious little sketch which will be new to many readers. While her mother watched her performance with such jealous eyes, and delivered such uncompromising judgments at night, Lawrence sent her long letters in the morning, going over every point with minute criticism. Surely never was girl of genius so carefully watched over. Meanwhile the lively girl acted of nights, and lived an easy girlish life at home during the day, going to every dance she could get a chance of, becoming a bold and fine rider, reading good books-Blunt's "Scripture Characters," and such-like—and writing long letters about everything to one beloved and constant friend. We are bound to add that young Miss Fanny Kemble at twenty does not write with half so much spirit and vivacity as does Mrs. Fanny Kemble nearly fifty years after. The letters are not only less interesting, but much less youthful and bright at the earlier date

which is a curious effect enough, though perhaps, when one comes to think of it, not an unnatural one; for there is nothing so solemn, so conscientious, so oppressed by a sense of its own importance and responsibilities (when it happens to take that turn) as youth.

We have made no reference to the literary efforts in which the clever girl, up to the moment of her début, considered her chances of fame to lie-the tragedies, one of which Mrs. Jameson thought beautiful, and which affected that graceful critic so powerfully. Mr. Murray gave her four hundred pounds for the copyright of one of these dramas-"Francis I.," which, we are obliged to confess, we never heard of, but which enabled her to buy, she tells us, a commission for her brother, which was an admirably good raison d'être for any drama.

Blackwood's Magazine.

THE

PAGANISM IN FICTION.

HE utter exclusion of every form of religious belief or sentiment from many novels is a surprising if not a significant circumstance. It is not that these novels are in any way irreligious; they are simply non-religious. They are not hostile to religion in any of its forms, they do not deny the validity of faith, nor oppose, either directly or by implication, any of the creeds or any current dogma; they simply are as silent in regard to religion as if there were no such thing in the world. They are not more completely insensible to conditions of mind and thought that may be supposed to exist in the planetary worlds around us, than they are dumb to certain phases of feeling which all the while are in reality the profoundest and the most prevailing of any that exist.

We confess to no great liking for the specially religious novel, in which there is often a parade of devotion and intrusion of pious sentiment that are so forced and artificial as to be distinctly offensive; but that any one should undertake to portray conflicts of passion and emotion, to give what are designed to be faithful delineations of life, and yet eliminate currents of thought and motives of action which enter into and color all phases of human existence and human experience, seems to us very extraordinary. If we can imagine any one wholly ignorant of our civilization, we may suppose him endeavoring to learn something of our habits and manners, of our morals, of our phases of feeling, of our tendencies of thought, by perusing such popular books as are declared to give the "age and body of the time its form and pressure." Let us follow a student of this kind through the pages of Mr. Black's "Macleod of Dare," this being the most widely read novel of the day. For the first time in his life, we may believe, he finds himself in contact with people who are utterly without the religious instinct-who, being oppressed by sorrows, suffering under misfortunes, thwarted in their hopes, plunged into grief and despair, exhibit not the slightest perception of a grand Christian scheme which is designed to bring solace to the heavy-hearted and offer compensation in the future for sufferings endured here. Neither the grief-stricken mother and her attendants in Castle Dare on the bleak and remote Scottish coast, nor the gay pleasure-seekers in the heart of fashionable London, seem ever to have heard of such a thing as an overruling

TABLE.

Providence, of such a trust as faith, of such a duty as submission, of such a promise as immortality, of such a possession as Christianity. We have designated this utter exclusion of religious thought as paganism-but even the pagans called upon their gods, and had vague surmises as to worlds beyond this, while the men and women who move and have their being in the story we have mentioned are as insensible to every religious aspiration as so many statues. The inquisitive stranger who peruses this book and others of its kind would be puzzled indeed if he knew in advance that the surface of the country is dotted with churches, and a most elaborate institution organized the teachings of which begin in a man's infancy and follow him through life to his dying hour.

Are we to assume that this elimination of Christianity was conscious or unconscious-a deliberate purpose to cast out God, or simply an evasion of an idea that would have uncomfortably complicated the artistic design of the author? We suspect the latter suggestion to be the true solution, yet how is it that religious convictions should thus complicate the purpose of a writer? And how, if this were true, is he privileged to disregard an important factor in his problem simply because it adds to his difficulties? The author of "Macleod of Dare" is skillful and tireless in his analysis of motive and feeling; he penetrates the workings of the heart, and attempts to reveal all its mysteries, yet he deliberately eliminates a whole range of emotions, casts out a definite and powerful body of influences. Whether Mr. Black is a believer or not can make no difference in this matter. Whatever his own religious convictions may be, he was bound, in depicting his imaginary people, to show them governed by the ideas and living under the conditions that pertain to men and women in real life. Our readers understand, of course, that we are not citing Mr. Black for special criticism, but simply as a representative of the modern secular novelist. In numerous novels a similar paganism is evinced. In Mr. Hardy's "The Return of the Native" religious thought is not so completely ignored as in "Macleod of Dare," but the heroine, Eustacia Vye, is as thorough a pagan as ever lived-self-indulgent, sensuous, thirsting for pleasure, full of the life and the passion of the world, almost without an idea of responsibilities or Christian duties, giving scarcely an intimation that she had always lived under the influences of the civilization of to-day.

It is right enough, artistically, for novelists to depict their heroes and heroines as rejecting Christianity; they may imagine at pleasure communities of infidels and pagans, and they may trace the growth of a man's heart and mind who has been educated, as John Stuart Mill was, in entire neglect of religion; but how can they be justified in portraying characters who, being reared in the midst of Christian influences, yet act as if there were no such thing as Christianity? We ask this question more in the interest of art than of morals. It is not at all certain that the novel would be chastened or its influence rendered better by the incorporation of religious sentiment-which may so readily be caricatured or distorted—but it is clear that pictures of life can not be considered true or adequate that fail to measure the sum of things that make up our civilization and go to form the average man and woman.

FITNESS IN ART.

IN the article entitled "Musical Romanticism," which we publish elsewhere in this number of the "Journal," there occurs one passage which seems to us to challenge comment. For the convenience of the reader we will repeat it here:

A composer who sets a cheerful piece to dismal words, or a dismal piece to cheerful words, may be reprehensible for not reflecting that the mind thus receives together two contrary impressions, and he may be condemned for want of logic and good sense; but not a word can be said against his artistic merit any more than we could say a word against the artistic merit of the great iron-worker of the Renaissance, who closed the holy place where lies the Virgin's sacred girdle with a screen of passion-flowers, in whose petals hide goats and ducks, on whose tendrils are balanced pecking cranes, and in the curling leaves of which little naked winged Cupids are drawing their bows and sharpening their arrows even as in the bas-reliefs of a pagan sarcophagus. In the free and spontaneous activity of musical conception the composer may forget the words he is setting, as the painter may forget the subject he is painting in the fervor of plastic imagination; for the musician conceives not emotions, but modulations; and the painter conceives not actions, but gestures and atti

tudes. Thence it comes that Mozart has made regicide Romans storm and weep as he would have made Zerlina and Cherubino laugh, just as Titian made Magdalen smite her breast in the wilderness with the smile of Flora on her feast-day; hence that confusion in all save form, that indifference to all save beauty, which characterizes all the great epochs of art, that sublime jumble of times and peoples, of tragic and comic, that motley crowding together of satyrs and anchorites, of Saracens and ancient Romans, of antique warriors and medieval burghers,

of Gothic tracery and Grecian arabesque, of Theseus and Titania, of Puck and Bottom, that great masquerade of art which we, poor critics, would fain reduce to law and rule, to chronological and ethnological propriety!

It is doubtful whether artists and the lay public will ever come to understand each other. It is true there are common grounds on which they do and can meet, but there are certain canons which the art

world proclaims with abundant confidence that the rest of mankind can never in their hearts accept or comprehend, however placidly they may listen to them. It would seem, for instance, to an observer of ordinary intelligence that fitness must be a necessary quality in every high work of art, in order that the imagination even, not to say the intelligence, should be satisfied, and rest contented with the performance. The writer from whom we have quoted speaks of that "indifference to all save beauty which characterizes all the great epochs of art." But is not fitness an element of beauty? Is it possible for a discerning intelligence to find pleasure in misplaced ideals, in things which are not consonant to the purpose for which they are created, and the thought they are attempting to express ? "That great masquerade of art," that "sublime jumble of times and peoples, of tragic and comic," which the writer describes, gives evidence of intense activity, but indicates low intellectualism, the absence of discipline, of pure method and perfect knowledge, and, so far from being characteristic of all great epochs of art, is peculiar to the medieval spirit solely—to the tumultuous and unformed instincts of a semi-barbaric age. We have only to name Greek art to dispose of these sweeping assertions—an art in which law and fitness were predominant, where impulse and boundless activity were chastened by taste and made amenable to law. It is affirmed by our writer that, while a certain performance may be " condemned for want of logic and good sense, not a word can be said against its artistic merit," apparently because, having purity of form and grace in grouping, it answers to all the artistic demands that may be made upon it. According to this doctrine, all art has simply to be beautiful in itself without regard to place or purpose. Copies of the Venus de' Medici may stand in the vestibules of our churches, and paintings of pagan gods and goddesses adorn their chancels; laughing cherubs may be carved upon our tombstones, and copies of Raphael's "Madonna" or Murillo's " Assumption" may be chosen to grace our billiard-rooms and dancinghalls. We see to what absurdities this theory would lead us. So far from artistic merit being independent of "logic and good sense," we doubt whether