sions, and for these he was magnificently endowed. Small and insignificant in figure, he could at times become impressively commanding by the lion-like power and grace of his bearing. I remember the last time I saw him play Othello, how puny he appeared beside Macready, until, in the third act when roused by Iago's taunts and insinuations he moved towards him with a gouty hobble, seized him by the throat, and in a well-known explosion, "Villain! be sure you prove," etc., seemed to swell into a stature which made Macready appear small. . . It was, one must confess, a patchy performance considered as a whole; some parts were miserably tricky, others misconceived, others gabbled over in haste to reach the "points"; but it was irradiated with such flashes that I would again risk broken ribs for the chance of a good place in the pit to see anything like it. . . . From the third act onwards all was wrought out with a mastery over the resources of expression such as has been seldom approached. In the successive unfolding of these great scenes he represented with incomparable effect the lion-like fury, the deep and haggard pathos, the forlorn sense of desolation alternating with gusts of stormy cries for vengeance, the misgivings and sudden reassurances, the calm and deadly resolution of one not easily moved, but who, being moved, was stirred to the very depths.

...

These words were written by Lewes near the end of his life looking back on the triumphs of an actor who had been dead forty years. In the year before Lewes's birth we find Hazlitt telling the same tale. "Mr. Kean's Othello is his best character and the highest effort of genius on the stage." And again:

He displayed the same excellences and the same defects as in his former characters. [There was not] throughout, that noble tide of deep and sustained passion, impetuous and majestic, that "flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb," which raises our ad

miration and pity of the lofty-minded Moor. There were, however, repeated bursts of feeling and energy which we have never seen surpassed. The whole of the latter part of the third act was a masterpiece of profound pathos and exquisite conception and its effect on the house was electrical.

One of the keenest criticisms ever passed on this actor is that attributed to Byron, that "to see him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning," so wonderfully would his genius light up a whole play from time to time in the midst of passages of dulness. So then in despite of all his characteristic irregularities and capricious lapses from taste Kean's Othello bears out what has been claimed for it; it was great because of the lofty nobility of soul that underlay and sustained his conception of it.

Appropriately enough his last appearance on the stage was made in this character, and under circumstances that suited well with his wild and picturesque career. On March 25th, 1833, he was announced to play Othello to the Iago of his son Charles. Worn out as he was by dissipation and a life lived at continual high pressure he could only keep up his sinking strength by doses of hot brandy and water. At first all went welï. His acting was as noble as ever, the audience enthusiastic. "Mind you keep near me," he whispered to his son as they began the third act.

His determination [says an eye-witness,] seemed more than a match for his weakness; and as Iago distilled the first drops of poison into his ear, the force, beauty, and truth of his acting exhibited the evidence of the unfading charm within. [But the exertion was too great,] and as he endeavored to abandon himself to the overwhelming storm of passion . . . . . a marked change came over the tragedian; he trembled stopped - tottered-reeled; Charles, fearing the worst, went forward and

extended his arms; the father made another effort and advanced towards his son with “Villain, be sure," but it was of no use, and with a whispered moan "I am dying, speak to them for me," he sank insensible into Charles' arms.

A few weeks later he died, leaving Macready undisputed master of the English stage. But Macready, great actor as he was, was never the man to rival his greater predecessor as Othello. The broad elemental passions, to quote Lewes once more, of the ideal characters of tragedy, were altogether outside his range.

The anguish of a weak, timid, prostrate mind he can represent with a sorrowing pathos as great as Kean in the heroic agony of Othello; and in all the touching domesticities of tragedy he is unrivalled. But he fails in the characters which demand impassioned grandeur and a certain largo of execution. His Macbeth and Othello have fine touches but they are essentially unheroic, their passion is fretful and irritable instead of being broad, vehement, overwhelming.

Let us now turn to the Iagos of stage history. It is obvious at once that the interest of the most important scenes, from the point of view of the theatre, lies in the contest between these two characters, a contest, that is, between soul and brain; the noble, impulsive giant-soul of the one man fighting blindly against the keen tormenting intellect of the other. But the tendency, already noted, to reduce Iago from an antagonist to a foil has not infrequently detracted from the effect of this situation, so that the representatives of Iago have received comparatively little notice from the chroniclers of the stage. Davies in his "Miscellanies of Acting" tells us that Colley Cibber acted Iago "in a style so drawling and hypocritical, and wore the mask of honesty so loosely that Othello, who

is not drawn a fool, must have seen the villain through his thin disguises." He adds that Macklin, more famous as the restorer of Shakespeare's Shylock, was in 1744 the only proper Iago that had been seen for a century. But we must pass over more than another century before we come to an Iago over whom we need linger. In 1881 the leading English and American actors of the day, Henry Irving and Edwin Booth, appeared at the Lyceum in a magnificent revival of "Othello" in which they alternated the leading parts. Each excelled in Iago, for each possessed the qualities which make up an intellectual actor rather than the robuster characteristics, whether of physique or of temperament, that are requisite for the Moor. Of Irving Mr. William Archer wrote: "In proportion as a character addresses itself to the intellect rather than the sympathy of the audience in precisely the same proportion does Mr. Irving succeed in it. . . . His Iago, who speaks from the brain, comes as near perfection as anything he has done."

The criticism would apply almost equally well to the cold keenly-polished performance of Booth. The American actor has himself left us an interesting analysis of the character as he sees it.

To portray Iago properly you must seem to be what all the characters think you are, not what the spectators know you to be; try to win even them by your sincerity. Don't act the villain, don't look it, or speak it (by scowling and growling all the time I mean), but think it all the time. Be genial, sometimes jovial, always gentlemanly. Quick in motion as in thought; lithe and sinuous as a snake. A certain bluffness (which my temperament does not afford) should be added to preserve the military flavor of the character. In this particular I fail utterly, my Iago lacks the soldierly quality. My conIsolation is that we know him more as a courtier than a soldier.

It is a very significant fact that these two impersonations of Iago, the most notable in the history of the character, have been the work of modern actors; that, whereas the leading tragedians of the past have striven to portray the massive force of Othello, the modern school, which prefers "character acting" to tragedy, has been attracted rather by the delicate subtlety of Iago. Robust declamation, the full outlines

Macmillan's Magazine.

and the majestic style of former times have now given way to the colder triumphs of the analytical intellect, and polished keenness of style. If the tendency to dethrone Othello and exalt Iago is to be checked, this will be done by an actor who is able to apply his intellect, as distinct from his power of indicating the passions, to expressing the sublime simplicity of "the noble Moor."

Gordon Crosse.

I propose to offer for consideration some very general views upon the effects and inter-action of the ideas of Race and Religion upon the political grouping of the population in various countries of Eastern Europe and of Asia, with the object of showing how they unite and divide mankind over a great portion of the earth. It will be understood, I hope, that it is impossible in a brief discussion to go far or thoroughly over such a wide field. I can only try to indicate some salient points that may be worth attention.

If we look back upon the ancient world, as it was known to Greece and to Rome, and as it can be dimly surveyed through the records of classic antiquity, we find that before the Christian era the populations were divided and sub-divided into races or tribes, with names signifying a common origin or descent; at any rate some kind of tribal association. The designation of their country was usually derived from the name of some dominant race, as Gallia from the Gauls or Judea from the Jews; indeed

I might say, as France from the Franks or England from the Angles. Religious denominations of any large

*Presidential address delivered to the Social and Political Education League, May, 1902.

community were, I venture to suggest, unknown, at any rate in ancient Europe. The polytheism of these ages was too local and miscellaneous to weld together any considerable groups on the basis of a common worship or belief; for although three great religions then existed, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the faith of Zoroaster (still represented by the Parsees), these were confined to Central and Eastern Asia. And, moreover, these religions had not the missionary spirit; I mean that they made no vigorous open at; tempts to spread and gain proselytes, still less did they use force to convert great multitudes. But after the Christian era a change came over the face of the Western world. The Roman empire that greatest monument of human power, as Dean Church has called it-began the fusion of races into one vast political society; its dominion extended continuously from Britain on the west to Asia Minor and the countries bordering on the Caspian Sea; it settled the law and language of Southern Europe. The establishment of the Roman empire is a cardinal epoch of the world's political history. Then followed two events of immense political importance that changed the whole aspect and condition of the religious world-the

rise and spread of two powerful missionary and militant religions. First came Christianity to overspread the lands which the empire had levelled politically. Islam followed in the seventh century, and the conflict between these two rival faiths, each claiming universal spiritual dominion, altered not only the spiritual but also the temporal order of things in Europe and Western Asia.

In Asia the victorious creed of Mahomed imposed upon immense multitudes a religious denomination; they became Mussulmans. In Western Europe the dominion of the Roman empire had by this time fallen to pieces; it was torn asunder by barbarian invaders; but upon the ruins of that empire was built up the great Catholic Church of Rome, which gathered together all races of the West under the common denomination of Christianity. Beneath the canopies of these two great religions the primitive grouping of the people survived; throughout Europe there were no settled kingdoms or nations, but a jumble of races and tribes contending for land and power. Now we know that in Western Europe this strife and confusion of the Middle Ages at last ended in the formation, on a large scale, of separate nationalities, and perhaps we may take, roughly, the end of the fifteenth century as the period when the great territorial kingdoms were definitely marked out, and when the rulers were rounding off their possessions under designations that may be called national. In these countries the sub-divisions according to race had now lost almost all political significance; but in the sixteenth century another great disturbing element reappeared. The great wars of religion again made a fresh division of the people into two camps of Roman Catholics and Protestants. This ferment has gradually subsided, and at the

present time all minor groups of the population in Western Europe have been absorbed under large national designations; the nations are marked off within clearly cut frontiers, and separated by the paramount distinction of languages. In Western Europe you do not now define a man by his original race or by his religion, you ask whose natural-born subject he is, in whose territory he lives, and you class him accordingly as French, English, Spanish or Italian.

Now it has been, I think, one result of this consolidation of the West into States and Nationalities, with religion mostly corresponding to the region, that the persistence in other parts of the world of the earlier ideas of race and religion, the primordial grouping of mankind, has been far too commonly overlooked and undervalued. My present object is to lay stress on the importance of realizing and understanding them. And I may begin by throwing out the suggestion that this oversight, this neglect of ideas and facts that still have great strength and vitality, may be connected with the influence, in France and England, of a certain school of political philosophy that arose in the eighteenth century, in France. The Encyclopédistes, as they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French Encyclopædia, treated in theory all notions of separate races, religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a common civilization, which was to unite all peoples on general principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from local or national prejudices. As a theory this might not have had much practical effect; but at the end of the eighteenth century came the French Revolution, when these philosophical notions took a very seriously practical shape; for the French Republican armies invaded the kingdoms of Western Europe with the

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war-cry of universal fraternity and equality. Revolutionary France ignored both race and religion. It proclaimed, De Tocqueville says, above and instead of all peculiar nationalities, an intellectual citizenship that was intended to include the people of every country to which it extended, superseding all distinctions of language, tradition, and national character. Under Napoleon this fierce impulse of democratic levelling was transformed into Imperialism: aimed at restoring an Empire in the West. But this aroused equally fierce resistance, and when Napoleon had been beaten down, the national feeling emerged stronger than ever. The doctrines of the French Encyclopédistes were inherited by the English school of Utilitarians, led by Bentham and the two Mills; and John Stuart Mill in particular, declared that one of the chief obstacles to human improvement was the tendency to regard difference of race as indelible. In fact, all this school, which had considerable influence some forty years ago, treated religious and social distinctions as inconvenient and decaying barriers against rational progress, or as fictions invented by indolent thinkers to save themselves the trouble of investigating the true causes that modify human character.

There is undoubtedly a certain degree of truth underlying this view. In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion, politically, in other parts of the world, and particularly in some Asiatic countries with which England is closely connected and concerned. For, in the

first place, there has been a notable revival of the sentiment of race in Eastern Europe. And, secondly, the spread of European dominion over Asia may be regarded as one of the most prominent and powerful movements in the politics of the latter half of the nineteenth century; one which may become the dominant feature of politics in the twentieth century. It is this movement that is forcing upon our serious attention the immense practical importance of race and religion.

The plan which I shall attempt to follow in making a brief survey of my subject, is to begin with a glance at the political condition of Central Europe, and to travel rapidly Eastward. In the West, as I have said, we have compact and permanently established States with national governments. But as soon as we pass to Central Europe we find the Austro-Hungarian empire distracted and threatened by internal feuds, arising out of the contention for ascendency of two races, Germans and Slavonians, and also out of the demands of the various provinces and dependencies for political recognition of their separate identities, founded on claims to represent internal sections or sub-divisions of the two chief races. The Slavonic populations in the northwest of the Empire are parted asunder from those in the south-east by the Hungarians, who came in from the east, and are of a different stock, and who have succeeded in establishing the federated kingdom of Hungary. I will not trouble you with statistical or geographical details. For my present purpose it is enough to mention that the subjects of Austria, apart from Hungary, are classed in eight separate sections, differentiated by separate languages, and that Poles, Bohemians, Germans, and Italians, are all and each claiming a kind of home rule within the empire, and show an increasing tendency to group them