The Last Leaf / Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe

by James Kendall Hosmer

HORACE MANN AND ANTIOCH COLLEGE

The cataclysm of the Civil War, in which as the preceding pages show I had been involved, had shaken me in my old moorings. I found myself not content in a quiet parish in the Connecticut Valley, and as I fared forth was fortunate enough to meet a leader in a remarkable personage. Horace Mann was indeed dead, but remained, as he still remains, a power. His brilliant gifts and self-consecration made him, first, a great educational path-breaker. From that he passed into politics, exhibiting in Congress abilities of the highest. Like an inconstant lover, however, he harked back to his old attachment, and putting aside a fine preferment, the governorship of Massachusetts, it was said, forsook his old home for the headship of Antioch College in south-western Ohio. I shall not dispute here whether or not he chose wisely; much less, how far a lame outcome at Antioch was due to his human limitations, and how far to the inevitable conditions. He was a potent and unselfish striver for the betterment of men, and his words and example still remain an inspiration.

My father in these years was a trustee of Antioch College, and this brought our household into touch with the illustrious figure of whom all men spoke. My memory holds more than a film of him, rather a vivid picture, his stately height dominating my boyish inches, as I stood in his presence. He was spare to the point of being gaunt, every fibre charged with a magnetism which caused a throb in the by-stander. Over penetrating eyes hung a beetling brow, and his aggressive, resonant voice commanded even in slight utterances. I recall him in a public address. The newspapers were full of the Strassburg geese, which, nails being driven through their web feet to hold them motionless, were fed to develop exaggerated livers,—these for the epicures of Paris. "For health and wholesome appetite," he exclaimed, "I counsel you to eschew les patés de foie gras, but climb a mountain or swing an axe." No great sentence in an exhortation to vigorous, manful living. But the scornful staccato with which he rolled out the French, and the ringing voice and gesture with which he accompanied his exhortation, stamped it indelibly. From that day to this, if I have felt a beguilement toward the flesh-pots, I still hear the stern tones of Horace Mann. In general his eloquence was extraordinary, and I suppose few Americans have possessed a power more marked for cutting, bitter speech. His invective was masterly, and too often perhaps merciless, and it was a weapon he was not slow to wield on occasions large and small. In Congress he lashed deservedly low-minded policies and misguided blatherskites, but his wrathful outpourings upon pupils for some trivial offence were sometimes over-copious. There are Boston schoolmasters, still living perhaps, who yet feel a smart from his scourge. His personality was so incisive that probably few were in any close or long contact with him without a good rasping now and then. My father was the most amiable of men, yet even he did not escape. As an Antioch trustee he was in charge of funds which were not to be applied unless certain conditions were satisfied. Horace Mann demanded the money, and it was withheld on occasions and a deluge of ire was poured upon my poor father's head. It did not cause him to falter in his conviction of Horace Mann's greatness and goodness. Nor has this over-ready impetuosity ever caused the world to falter in its reverence. He came bringing not peace but a sword, in all the spheres in which he moved, and in Horace Mann's world it was a time for the sword. He was a path-breaker in regions obstructed by mischievous accumulations. There was need of his virile championship, and none will say that there was ever in him undue thought of self or indifference to the best humanity.

My father held fast to the sharp-cornered saint and prophet, though somewhat excoriated in the association. He held fast to his trusteeship of Antioch; and in 1866, Horace Mann having some years before been laid in his untimely grave, he stood in his place as president of the college. Through the agency of my dear friends of those years, Dr. Henry W. Bellows and Dr. Edward Everett Hale, I was to go with him as, so to speak, his under-study, discharging the work of English professor and sometimes the duties of preacher. I went gladly. The spirit of the dead leader haunted pervasively the shades where he had laboured and died. The tradition of Horace Mann was paramount among the students, the graduates, and the whole environment. I had felt as a boy the spell of his voice and presence and knew no hero whom I could follow more cordially. It was a joy to become domiciled in the house which had been built for him and where he had breathed his last, and to labour day by day along the noble lines which he had laid down. This was my post for six years, one of which, however, was spent in Europe, in the hope of gaining an added fitness for my place.

I have no mind to set down here a record of those Antioch years. One experiment we tried in a field then very novel and looked upon askance. To-day in our schools and universities the pageant and the drama play a large part. Forty years ago they were unknown or in hiding, and it may be claimed that our little fresh-water college bore a part in initiating a development that has become memorable and widely salutary. In 1872 I wrote out the story of our attempt for Mr. Howells, in the Atlantic Monthly, a film which may appropriately be staged among my pictures.

The New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier; or, The Drama in Colleges

I have been distressed, dear Fastidiosus, by your remonstrance concerning the performance at our college at Sweetbrier of a "stage play." You have heard the facts rightly; that it was given under the superintendence of the English professor, the evening before Commencement, "with many of the accessories of a theatre." You urge that it is unprecedented to have at a dignified institution, which aims at a high standard, under the superintendence of a professor, such a performance; that it excites the prejudices of some people against us; and you quote the sharp remarks of David's Harp, the organ of the Dunkers. You urge that such things can be nothing more than the play of boys and girls, and are something worse than mere waste of time, for they set young people to thinking of the theatre, which is irretrievably sunk and only harmful. In your character of trustee, you are sorry it has been done, and beg that it may not be done again.

I beg you to listen to a patient stating of the case. It is not without precedent. When you were at Worms, in Germany, do you remember in the Luther Memorial the superb figure of Reuchlin, on one of the outer corners? One or two of the statues may be somewhat grander, but no other seemed to me so handsome, as it stood colossal on its pillar, the scholar's gown falling from the stately shoulders, and the face so fine there in the bronze, under the abundant hair and cap. Reuchlin is said to be the proper founder of the German drama. Before his time there had been, to be sure, some performing of miracle-plays, and perhaps things of a different sort. The German literary historians, however, make it an era when Reuchlin came as professor to Heidelberg, and, in 1497, set up a stage, with students for actors, at the house of Johann, Kämmerer von Dalberg. He wrote his plays in Latin. If you wish, I can send you their titles. Each act, probably, was prefaced by a synopsis in German, and soon translations came into vogue, and were performed as well. On that little strip of level which the crags and the Neckar make so narrow, collected then, as now, a fair concourse of bounding youth. One can easily fancy how, when the prototypes of the trim Burschen of to-day stepped out in their representation, the applause sounded across to the vineyards about the Heiligenberg and Hirschgasse, and how now and then a knight and a dame from the court of the Kurfürst came down the Schlossberg to see it all. What Reuchlin began, came by no means to a speedy end. In the Jesuit seminaries in Germany, in Italy too, and elsewhere, as the Reformation came on, I find the boys were acting plays. This feature in the school was held out as an attraction to win students; and in Prague the Fathers themselves wrote dramas to satirise the Protestants, introducing Luther as the comic figure. But what occurred in the Protestant world was more noteworthy. As the choral singing of the schoolboys affected in an important way the development of music, so the school-plays had much to do with the development of the drama. Read Gervinus to see how for a century or two it was the schools and universities that remained true to a tolerably high standard, while in the world at large all nobler ideals were under eclipse. It was jocund Luther himself who took it under his especial sanction, as he did the fiddle and the dance, in his sweet large-heartedness finding Scriptural precedents for it, and encouraging the youths who came trooping to Wittenberg to relieve their wrestling with Aristotle and the dreary controversy with an occasional play. Melancthon, too, gave the practice encouragement, until not only Wittenberg, but the schools of Saxony in general, and Thuringia, whose hills were in sight, surpassed all the countries of Germany in their attention to plays. In Leipsic, Erfurt, and Magdeburg comedies were regularly represented before the schoolmasters. But it was at the University of Strassburg, even at the time when the unsmiling Calvin was seeking asylum there, that the dramatic life of the German seminaries found a splendid culmination. Yearly, in the academic theatre, took place a series of representations, by students, of marvellous pomp and elaboration. The school and college plays were of various characters. Sometimes they were from Terence, Plautus, or Aristophanes; sometimes modifications of the ancient mysteries, meant to enforce the Evangelical theology; sometimes comedies full of the contemporary life. There are several men that have earned mention in the history of German literature by writing plays for students. The representations became a principal means for celebrating great occasions. If special honour was to be done to a festival, or a princely visit was expected, the market-place, the Rathhaus, or the church was prepared, and it was the professor's or the schoolmaster's duty to direct the boys in their performance of a play. We get glimpses, in the chronicles, of the circumstances under which the representations took place. The magistrates, even the courts, lent brilliant dresses. One old writer laments that the ignorant people have so little sense for arts of this kind. "Often tumult and mocking are heard, for it is the greatest joy to the rabble if the spectators fall down through broken benches." The old three-storied stage of the mysteries was often retained, with heaven above, earth in the middle space, and hell below; where, according to the stage direction of the Golden Legend, "the devils walked about and made a great noise." Lazarus is described as represented in the sixteenth century before a hôtel, before which sat the rich man carousing, while Abraham, in a parson's coat, looked out of an upper window. This rudeness, however, belongs rather to the Volks-comödie than the Schul-comödie, whose adjuncts were generally far more rational, and sometimes even brilliant, as in the Strassburg representations. It was only in the seminaries that art was preserved from utter decay. One may trace the Schul-comödie until far down in the eighteenth century, and in the last mention of it I find appears an interesting figure. In 1780, at the military school in Stuttgart the birthday of the Duke of Würtemberg was celebrated by a performance of Goethe's Clavigo. The leading part was taken by a youth of twenty-one, with high cheek-bones, a broad, low, Greek brow above straight eyebrows, a prominent nose, and lips nervous with an extraordinary energy. The German narrator says he played the part "abominably, shrieking, roaring, unmannerly to a laughable degree." It was the young Schiller, wild as a pythoness upon her tripod, with the Robbers, which became famous in the following year.

But I do not mean, Fastidiosus, to cite only German precedents, nor to uphold the college drama with the names of Reuchlin, Melancthon, and Luther alone, majestic though they are. In the University of Paris the custom of acting plays was one of high antiquity. In 1392 the schoolboys of Angiers performed Robin and Marian, "as was their annual custom"; and in 1477 the scholars of Pontoise represented "a certain moralitie or farce, as is their custom." In 1558 the comedies of Jacques Grévin were acted at the College of Beauvais at Paris; but it is in the next century that we come upon the most interesting case. In the days of Louis XIV. the girls' school at St. Cyr, of which Madame de Maintenon was patroness, was, in one way and another, the object of much public attention. Mademoiselle de Caylus, niece of Madame de Maintenon, who became famous among the women of charming wit and grace who distinguished the time, was a pupil at St. Cyr, and in her memoirs gives a pleasant sketch of her school life. With the rest, "Madame de Brinon," she says,

first superior of St. Cyr, loved verse and the drama; and in default of the pieces of Corneille and Racine, which she did not dare to have represented, she composed plays herself. It is to her, and her taste for the stage, that the world owes Esther and Athalie, which Racine wrote for the girls of St. Cyr. Madame de Maintenon wished to see one of Madame de Brinon's pieces. She found it such as it was, that is to say, so bad that she begged to have no more such played, and that instead some beautiful piece of Corneille or Racine should be selected, choosing such as contained least about love. These young girls, therefore, undertook the rendering of Cinna, quite passably for children who had been trained for the stage only by an old nun. They then played Andromaque; and, whether it was that the actresses were better chosen, or gained in grace through experience, it was only too well represented for Madame de Maintenon, causing her to fear that this amusement would fill them with sentiments the reverse of those which she wished to inspire. However, as she was persuaded that amusements of this sort were good for youth, she wrote to Racine, begging him to compose for her, in his moments of leisure, some sort of moral or historic poem, from which love should be entirely banished, and in which he need not believe that his reputation was concerned, since it would remain buried at St. Cyr. The letter threw Racine into great agitation. He wished to please Madame de Maintenon. To refuse was impossible for a courtier, and the commission was delicate for a man who, like him, had a great reputation to sustain. At last he found in the subject of Esther all that was necessary to please the Court.

So far Mademoiselle de Caylus. A French historian of literature draws a pleasing picture of the old Racine superintending the preparation of Esther,

giving advice full of sense and taste on the manner of reciting his verses, never breaking their harmony by a vulgar diction, nor hurting the sense by a wrong emphasis. What a charm must the verses where Esther recounts the history of her triumph over her rivals have had in the mouth of Mademoiselle de Veillanne, the prettiest and most graceful of the pupils of St. Cyr! How grand he must have been, when, with that noble figure which Louis XIV. admired, he taught Mademoiselle de Glapion, whose voice went to the heart, to declaim the beautiful verses of the part of Mordecai!

The genius of Racine glows finely in Esther. In the choruses, the inspirations of the Hebrew prophets, framed as it were in a Greek mould, give impressive relief to the dialogue, as in Sophocles and Aeschylus. It was played several times, and no favour was more envied at the Court than an invitation to the representations. The literature of the time has many allusions to them. The splendid world, in all its lace and powder, crowded to the quiet convent. The great soldiers, the wits, the beautiful women were all there. The king and Madame de Maintenon sat in stiff dignity in the foreground. The appliances were worthy of the magnificent Court. In Oriental attire of silk sweeping to their feet, set off with pearl and gold, the loveliest girls of France declaimed and sang the sonorous verse. It is really one of the most innocent and charming pictures that has come down to us of this age, when so much was hollow, pompous, and cruel.

Hamlet says to Polonius, "My lord, you played once in the university, you say." To which Polonius replies, "That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol." Do not suppose, Fastidiosus, that the playing of Polonius was any such light affair as you and I used to be concerned in up in the fourth story of "Stoughton," when we were members of the Hasty Pudding. In the Middle Ages, in convents and churches, flourished the mysteries; but, says Warton, in the History of English Poetry, as learning increased, the practice of acting plays went over to the schools and universities. Before the sixteenth century we may find traces of dramatic vitality among the great English seminaries; but if the supposition of Huber, in his account of English universities, is correct, the real founder of the college drama in England was a character no less dignified than its founder in Germany. Erasmus, as he sits enthroned in a scholar's chair in the market-place at Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he stands at Worms. But it was Erasmus, probably, who, among many other things he did while in England, lent an important impulse to the acting of plays by students. He, no doubt, was no further interested than to have masterpieces of Greek and Latin drama represented, that the students might have exercise in those languages; but before the reign of Henry VIII. was finished, the practice was becoming pursued for other ends, and growing in importance. Gammer Gurton's Needle, long supposed to be the first English comedy, was first acted by students at Cambridge. That our more rollicking boys had their counterparts then, we may know from its rousing drinking-song, which the fellows rang out at the opening of the second act, way back there in 1551. The chorus is not yet forgotten:

"Backe and side go bare, go bare,
Booth foot and hand go colde;
But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe,
Whether it be new or olde!"

For the most part, probably, the performances were of a more dignified character than this. Among the statutes of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1546, there is one entitled de praefectu ludorum qui imperator dicitur, under whose direction and authority Latin comedies are to be exhibited in the hall at Christmas. This "imperator" must be a master of arts, and the society was to be governed by a set of laws framed in Latin verse. The authority of this potentate lasted from Christmas to Candlemas, during which time six spectacles were to be represented. Dr. John Dee, a prodigy of that century, who might have been illustrious like Bacon almost, but who wasted his later years in astrological dreams, in his younger life, while Greek lecturer at Cambridge, superintended in the refectory of the college the representation of the [Greek: Eirhênê]; of Aristophanes, with no mean stage adjuncts, if we may trust his own account. He speaks particularly of the performance of a "Scarabeus, his flying up to Jupiter's palace with a man and his basket of victuals on his back; whereat was great wondering and many vain reports spread abroad of the means how that was effected." The great Roger Ascham, too, has left an indirect testimony to the splendour with which the Cambridge performances at this time were attended. In a journey on the Continent, wishing to express in the highest terms his sense of the beauty of Antwerp, he can say nothing stronger than that it as far surpasses other cities as the refectory of St. John's College at Cambridge, when adorned for the Christmas plays, surpasses its ordinary appearance. On these occasions, the most dignified personages of the University were invited, and at length, as was the German fashion, the representation of plays was adopted as part of the entertainment of visitors. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth visited Cambridge, and the picture transmitted to us of the festivities is full of brilliant lights. With the rest, five doctors of the University selected from all the colleges the youths of best appearance and address, who acted before the queen a series of plays of varied character, sometimes grave, sometimes gay, in part of classic, in part of contemporary authorship. The theatre for the time was no other place than the beautiful King's College chapel, across the entire width of which the stage was built. For light, the yeomen of the royal guard, their fine figures in brilliant uniform, stood in line from end to end of the chapel, each holding a torch. It was a superb scene, no doubt; the torches throwing their wavering glare against the tracery and the low, pointed arch of window and portal, so beautiful in this chapel, in the ruins of Kenilworth, or wherever it appears; the great space filled with the splendour that Roger Ascham thought so wonderful; and, among the glitter, the troop of handsome youths doing their best to please the sovereign. Froude gives a story from De Silva, the Spanish ambassador, which reflects so well the character of the time, and shows up boyish human nature with such amusing faithfulness, that I cannot omit it. When all was over, the students would not let well enough alone, but begged the tired queen to see one more play of their own devising, which they felt sure would give her special pleasure. The queen, however, departed, going ten miles on her journey to the seat of one of her nobility. The persistent boys followed her, and she granted them permission to perform before her in the evening. What should the unconscionable dogs do but drag in the bitter trouble of the time, and heedlessly trample on the queen's prejudices. The actors entered dressed like the bishops of Queen Mary, who were then in prison. Bonner carried a lamb, at which he rolled his eyes and gnashed his teeth. A dog brought up the rear, carrying the Host in his mouth. What further was to follow no one can say. The queen, who was never more than half a Protestant, and clung to the mass all the more devoutly because she was obliged to resign so much, filled the air with her indignation. She swore good round oaths, we may be sure, and left the room in a rage. The lights were put out, and the students made off in the dark as they could.

The history of the drama at Oxford has episodes of equal interest. The visitor who goes through the lovely Christ Church meadows to the Isis to see the boats, returning, will be sure to visit the refectory of Christ Church. The room is very fine in its proportions and decoration, and hung with the portraits of the multitude of brilliant men who in their young days were Christ Church men. During all the centuries that the rich dark stain has been gathering upon the carved oak in the ceiling and wainscot, it has been the scene of banquets and pageants without number, at which the most illustrious characters of English history have figured. I doubt, however, if any of its associations are finer than those connected with the student plays that have been performed here. Passing over occasions of this kind of less interest of which I find mention, in 1566 Elizabeth visited Oxford, to do honour to whom in this great hall of Christ Church plays were given. Oxford was determined not to be outdone by what had happened at Cambridge two years before. From the accounts, the delight of the hearty queen must have been intense; and as she was never afraid to testify most frankly her genuine feelings, we may be sure the Oxford authorities and their pupils must have presented their entertainments with extraordinary pomp. The plays, as at Cambridge, were of various character, but the one that gave especial pleasure was an English piece having the same subject as the Knighte's Tale of Chaucer, and called Palamon and Arcite. It would be pleasant to know that the poet followed as far as possible the words of Chaucer. There is a fine incident narrated connected with the performance. In the scene of the chase, when

"Theseus, with alle joye and blys,
With his Ypolite, the faire queene,
And Emelye, clothed al in greene,
On hontyng be they riden ryally,"

a "cry of hounds" was counterfeited under the windows in the quadrangle. The students present thought it was a real chase, and were seized with a sudden transport to join the hunters. At this, the delighted queen, sitting in stiff ruff and farthingale among her maids of honour, burst out above all the tumult with "Oh, excellent! These boys, in very truth, are ready to leap out of the windows to follow the hounds!" When the play was over, the queen called up the poet, who was present, and the actors, and loaded them with thanks and compliments.

When, forty years after, in 1605, the dull James came to Oxford, the poor boys had a harder time. A thing very noteworthy happened when the king entered the city in his progress from Woodstock. If Warton's notion is correct, scarcely the iron cross in the pavement that marks the spot where the bishops were burned, or the solemn chamber in which they were tried, yea, scarcely Guy Fawkes's lantern, which they show you at the Bodleian, or the Brazen Nose itself, are memorials as interesting as the archway leading into the quadrangle of St. John's College, under whose carving, quaint and graceful, one now gets the lovely glimpse into the green and bloom of the gardens at the back. At this gate, three youths dressed like witches met the king, declaring they were the same that once met Macbeth and Banquo, prophesying a kingdom to one and to the other a generation of monarchs, that they now appeared to show the confirmation of the prediction. Warton's conjecture is that Shakespeare heard of this, or perhaps was himself in the crowd that watched the boys as they came whirling out in their weird dance, and that then and there was conceived what was to become so mighty a product of the human brain,—Macbeth.

King James, however, received it all coldly. The University, kindled by the traditions of Elizabeth's visit, did its best. Leland gives a glimpse of the stage arrangements in Christ Church Hall. Towards the end "was a scene like a wall, painted and adorned by stately pillars, which pillars would turn about, by reason whereof, with the help of other painted cloths, their stage did vary three times." But the king liked the scholastic hair-splitting with which he was elsewhere entertained better than the plays. In Christ Church Hall he yawned and even went to sleep, saying it was all mere childish amusement. In fact, the poor boys had to put up with even a worse rebuff; the king spoke many words of dislike, and when, in one of the plays, a pastoral, certain characters came in somewhat scantily attired, the queen and maids of honour took great offence, in which the king, who was not ordinarily over-delicate, concurred.

The practice of acting plays prevailed in the schools as well. The visitor to Windsor will remember in what peace, as seen from the great tower, beyond the smooth, dark Thames, the buildings of Eton lie among the trees. Crossing into the old town and entering the school precincts, where the stone stairways are worn by so many generations of young feet, and where on the play-ground the old elms shadow turf where so many soldiers and statesmen have been trained to struggle in larger fields, there is nothing after all finer than the great hall. In every age since the wars of the Roses, it has buzzed with the boisterous life of the privileged boys of England, who have come up afterward by the hundred to be historic men. There are still the fireplaces with the monogram of Henry VI., the old stained glass, the superb wood carving, the dais at the end. If there were no other memory connected with the magnificent hall, it would be enough that here, about 1550, was performed by the Eton boys, Ralph Roister Bolster, the first proper English comedy, written by Nicholas Udal, then head-master, for the Christmas holidays. He had the name of being a stern master, because old Tusser has left it on record that Udal whipped him,—

"for fault but small, or none at all."

But the student of our old literature, reading the jolly play, will feel that, though he could handle the birch upon occasion, there was in him a fine genial vein. This was the first English comedy. The first English tragedy, too, Gorboduc, was acted first by students,—this time students of law of the Inner Temple,—and the place of performance was close at hand to what one still goes to see in the black centre of the heart of London, those blossoming gardens of the Temple, verdant to-day as when the red-cross knights walked in them, or the fateful red and white roses were plucked there, or the voices of the young declaimers were heard from them, rolling out the turgid lines of Sackville's piece, the somewhat unpromising day-spring which a glorious sun-burst was to succeed. From Lincoln's Inn, in 1613, when the Princess Elizabeth married the elector-palatine and went off to Heidelberg Castle, the students came to the palace with a piece written by Chapman, and the performance cost a thousand pounds.

A famed contemporary of Udal was Richard Mulcaster, head-master of St. Paul's school, and afterward of Merchant Taylors', concerning whom we have, from delightful old Fuller, this quaint and naive description:

In a morning he would exactly and plainly construe and parse the lesson to his scholars, which done, he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school; but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him just as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.

The name of this Rhadamanthus of the birch occurs twice in entries of
Elizabeth's paymaster, as receiving money for plays acted before
her; and a certain proficiency as actors possessed by students of
St. John's College at Oxford is ascribed to training given by old
Mulcaster at the Merchant Taylors' school.

But no one of the great English public schools has enjoyed so long a fame in this regard as Westminster. According to Staunton, in his Great schools of England, Elizabeth desired to have plays acted by the boys, "Quo juventus turn actioni tum pronunciationi decenti melius se assuescat," that the youth might be better trained in proper bearing and pronunciation. The noted Bishop Atterbury wrote to a friend, Trelawney, Bishop of Winchester, concerning a performance here of Trelawney's son: "I had written to your lordship again on Saturday, but that I spent the evening in seeing Phormio acted in the college chamber, where, in good truth, my lord, Mr. Trelawney played Antipho extremely well, and some parts he performed admirably." In 1695, Dryden's play of Cleomens was acted. Archbishop Markham, head-master one hundred years ago, gave a set of scenes designed by Garrick. In our own day, Dr. Williamson, head-master in 1828, drew attention in a pamphlet to the proper costuming of the performers; and when, in 1847, there was a talk of abolishing the plays, a memorial signed by six hundred old "Westminsters" was sent in, stating it as their "firm and deliberate belief, founded on experience and reflection, that the abolition of the Westminster play cannot fail to prove prejudicial to the interests and prosperity of the school." At the present time the best plays of Plautus and Terence are performed at Christmas in the school dormitory.

It all became excessive, and in Cromwell's time, with the accession of the Puritans to power, like a hundred other brilliant traits of the old English life from whose abuse had grown riot, it was purged away. Ben Jonson, in The Staple of Newes, puts into the mouth of a sour character a complaint which no doubt was becoming common in that day, and was probably well enough justified.

"They make all their schollers play-boyes! Is't not a fine sight to see all our children made enterluders? Doe we pay our money for this? Wee send them to learne their grammar and their Terence and they learne their play-bookes. Well they talk we shall have no more parliaments, God blesse us! But an we have, I hope Zeale-of-the-land Buzzy, and my gossip Rabby Trouble-Truth, will start up and see we have painfull good ministers to keepe schoole, and catechise our youth; and not teach 'em to speake plays and act fables of false newes."

Studying this rather unexplored subject, one gets many a glimpse of famous characters in interesting relations. Erasmus says that Sir Thomas More, "adolescens, comoediolas et scripsit et egit," and while a page with Archbishop Moreton, as plays were going on in the palace during the Christmas holidays, he would often, showing his schoolboy accomplishment, step on the stage without previous notice, and exhibit a part of his own which gave more satisfaction than the whole performance besides.

In Leland's report of the theatricals where King James behaved so ungraciously, "the machinery of the plays," he says, "was chiefly conducted by Mr. Jones, who undertook to furnish them with rare devices, but performed very little to what was expected." This is believed to have been Inigo Jones, who soon was to gain great fame as manager of the Court masques. The entertainment was probably ingenious and splendid enough, but every one took his cue from the king's pettishness, and poor "Mr. Jones" had to bear his share of the ill-humour.

In 1629 a Latin play was performed at Cambridge before the French ambassador. Among the student spectators sat a youth of twenty, with long locks parted in the middle falling upon his doublet, and the brow and eyes of the god Apollo, who curled his lip in scorn, and signalised himself by his stormy discontent. Here is his own description of his conduct: "I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticism, they were out and I hissed." It was the young Milton, in the year in which he wrote the Hymn on the Nativity.

Do I need to cite other precedents for the procedure at the Sweetbrier? I grant you it cannot be done from the practice of American colleges. The strictest form of Puritanism stamped itself too powerfully upon our New England institutions at their foundation, and has affected too deeply the newer seminaries elsewhere in the country, to make it possible that the drama should be anything but an outlaw here. Nevertheless, at Harvard, Yale, and probably every considerable college of the country, the drama has for a long time led a clandestine life in secret student societies, persecuted or at best ignored by the college government,—an unwholesome weed that deserved no tending, if it was not to be at once uprooted.

I do not advocate, Fastidiosus, a return to the ancient state of things, which I doubt not was connected with many evils; but is there not reason to think a partial revival of the old customs would be worth while? It was not for mirth merely that the old professors and teachers countenanced the drama. To the editors of David's Harp I have sent this passage from Milton, noblest among the Puritans, and have besought them to lay it before their consistory: "Whether eloquent and graceful incitements, instructing and bettering the nation at all opportunities, not only in pulpits, but after another persuasive method, in theatres, porches, or whatever place or way, may not win upon the people to receive both recreation and instruction, let them in authority consult." The German schoolmasters and professors superintended their boys in the representation of religious plays to instruct them in the theology which they thought all-important; in the performance of Aristophanes and Lucian, Plautus and Terence, mainly in the hope of improving them in Greek and Latin: and when the plays were in the vernacular, it was often to train their taste, manners, and elocution. Erasmus and the Oxford and Cambridge authorities certainly had the same ideas as the Continental scholars. So the English schoolmasters in general, who also managed in the plays to give useful hints in all ways. For instance, Nicholas Udal, in the ingenious letter in Ralph Roister Doister, which is either loving or insulting according to the position of a few commas or periods, must have meant to enforce the doctrine of Chaucer's couplet:

"He that pointeth ill,
A good sentence may oft spill."

Madame de Maintenon was persuaded that amusements of this sort have a value, "imparting grace, teaching a polite pronunciation, and cultivating the memory"; and Racine commends the management of St. Cyr, where "the hours of recreation, so to speak, are put to profit by making the pupils recite the finest passages of the best poets." Here is the dramatic instinct, almost universal among young people, and which has almost no chance to exercise itself, except in the performance of the farces to which we are treated in "private theatricals." Can it not be put to a better use? It would be a cumbrous matter to represent or listen to the Aulularia, or the Miles Gloriosus, or the [Greek: Eirhênê], in which Dr. Dee and his Scarabeus figured so successfully. The world is turned away from that[1]; but here is the magnificent wealth of our own old dramatic literature, in which is contained the richest poetry of our language. It was never intended to be read, but to be heard in living presentment. For the most part it lies almost unknown, except in the case of Shakespeare, and him the world knows far too little. Who does not feel what a treasure in the memory are passages of fine poetry committed early in life?

[Footnote 1: The developments of the last forty years show this judgment to be erroneous.]

Who can doubt the value to the bearing, the fine address, the literary culture of a youth of either sex that might come from the careful study and the attempt to render adequately a fine conception of some golden writer of our golden age, earnestly made, if only partially successful?

I say only partially successful, but can you doubt the capacity of our young people to render in a creditable way the conceptions of a great poet? Let us look at the precedents again. When Mademoiselle de Caylus, in her account of St. Cyr, speaks of the representation of Andromaque, she writes, "It was only too well done." And prim Madame de Maintenon wrote to Racine: "Our young girls have played it so well they shall play it no more"; begging him to write some moral or historic poem. Hence came the beautiful masterpiece Esther, to which the young ladies seem to have done the fullest justice, for listen to the testimony. The brilliant Madame de Lafayette wrote: "There was no one, great or small, that did not want to go, and this mere drama of a convent became the most serious affair of the court." That the admiration was not merely feigned because it was the fashion, here is the testimony of a woman of the finest taste, Madame de Sévigné, given in her intimate letters to her daughter, who, in these confidences, spared no one who deserved criticism:

The king and all the Court are charmed with Esther. The prince has wept over it. I cannot tell you how delightful the piece is. There is so perfect a relation between the music, the verses, the songs, and the personages, that one seeks nothing more. The airs set to the words have a beauty which cannot be borne without tears, and according to one's taste is the measure of approbation given to the piece. The king addressed me and said, "Madame, I am sure you have been pleased." I, without being astonished, answered, "Sire, I am charmed. What I feel is beyond words." The king said to me, "Racine has much genius." I said to him, "Sire, he has much, but in truth these young girls have much too; they enter into the subject as if they had done nothing else." "Ah! as to that," said he, "it is true." And then his Majesty went away and left me the object of envy.

Racine himself says in the Preface to Esther:

The young ladies have declaimed and sung this work with so much modesty and piety, it has not been possible to keep it shut up in the secrecy of the institution; so that a diversion of young people has become a subject of interest for all the Court;

and what is still more speaking, he wrote at once the Athalie, "la chef d'oeuvre de la poésie française," in the judgment of the French critics, to be rendered by the some young tyros. When, in 1556, in Christ Church Hall, Palamon and Arcite was finished, outspoken Queen Bess, with her frank eyes full of pleasure, declared "that Palamon must have been in love indeed. Arcite was a right martial knight, having a swart and manly countenance, yet like a Venus clad in armour." To the son of the dean of Christ Church, the boy of fourteen, who played Emilie in the dress of a princess, her compliment was still higher. It was a present of eight guineas,—for the penurious sovereign, perhaps, the most emphatic expression of approval possible.

Shall I admit for a moment that our American young folks have less grace and sensibility than the French girls, and the Oxford youths who pleased Elizabeth? Your face now, Fastidiosus, wears a frown like that of Rhadamanthus; but I remember our Hasty-Pudding days, when you played the part of a queen, and behaved in your disguise like Thor, in the old saga, when he went to Riesenheim in the garb of Freya, and honest giants, like Thrym, were frightened back the whole width of the hall. Well, I do not censure it, and I do not believe you recall it with a sigh; and the reminiscence emboldens me to ask you whether it would not be still better if our dear Harvard, say (the steam of the pudding infects me through twenty years), among the many new wrinkles she in her old age so appropriately contracts, should devote an evening of Commencement-time to a performance, by the students, under the sanction and direction of professors, of some fine old masterpiece?

At our little Sweetbrier we have young men and young women together, as at Oberlin, Antioch, and Massachusetts normal schools. I have no doubt our Hermione, when we gave the Winter's Tale, had all the charm of Mademoiselle de Veillanne, who played Esther at St. Cyr. I have no doubt our Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, in the trial scene, her fine stature and figure robed in the doctor's long silk gown, which fell to her feet, and her abundant hair gathered out of sight into an ample velvet cap, so that she looked like a most wise and fair young judge, recited

"The quality of mercy is not strained,"

in a voice as thrilling as that in which Mademoiselle de Glapion gave the part of Mordecai. I am sure Queen Elizabeth would think our young cavaliers, well-knit and brown from the baseball-field, "right martial knights, having swart and manly countenances." If she could have seen our Antoninus, when we gave the act from Massinger's most sweet and tender tragedy of the Virgin Martyr, or the noble Caesar, in our selections from Beaumont and Fletcher's False One, she would have been as ready with the guineas as she was in the case of the son of the dean of Christ Church.

Our play at the last Commencement was Much Ado about Nothing. It was selected six months before, and studied with the material in mind, the students in the literature class, available for the different parts. What is there, thought I, in Beatrice—sprightliness covering intense womanly feeling—that our vivacious, healthful Ruth Brown cannot master; and what in Benedick, her masculine counterpart, beyond the power of Moore to conceive and render? It is chiefly girlish beauty and simple sweetness that Hero requires, so she shall be Edith Grey. Claudio, Leonato, Don John, Pedro,—we have clean-limbed, presentable fellows that will look and speak them all well; and as for lumbering Dogberry, Abbot, with his fine sense of the ludicrous, will carry it out in the best manner. A dash of the pencil here and there through the lines where Shakespeare was suiting his own time, and not the world as it was to be after three hundred refining years, and the marking out of a few scenes that could be spared from the action, and the play was ready; trimmed a little, but with not a whit taken from its sparkle or pathos, and all its lovelier poetry untouched.

Then came long weeks of drill. In the passage,

"O my lord,
When you went onward to this ended action,
I looked upon her with a soldier's eye," etc.,

Claudio caught the fervour and softness at last, and seemed (it would have pleased Queen Bess better than Madame de Main tenon) like Palamon, in love indeed. Ursula and Hero rose easily to the delicate poetry of the passages that begin,

"The pleasantest angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,"

and

"Look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs."

Pedro got to perfection his turn and gesture in

"The wolves have preyed; and look, the gentle day,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray."

With the rough comedy of Dogberry and the watchmen, that foils so well the sad tragedy of poor Hero's heart-breaking, and contrasts in its blunders with the diamond-cut-diamond dialogue of Benedick and Beatrice, there was less difficulty. From first to last, it was engrossing labour, as hard for the trainer as the trained, yet still delightful work; for what is a conscientious manager, but an artist striving to perfect a beautiful dramatic picture? The different personages are the pieces for his mosaic, who, in emphasis, tone, gesture, by-play, must be carved and filed until there are no flaws in the joining, and the shading is perfect. But all was ready at last, from the roar of Dogberry at the speech of Conrade,

"Away! you're an ass! you're an ass!"

to the scarcely articulate agony of Hero when she sinks to the earth at her lover's sudden accusation,

"O Heavens! how am I beset!
What kind of catechising call you this?"

I fancy you ask, rather sneeringly, as to our scenery and stage adjuncts. Once, in the great court theatre at Munich, I saw Wagner's Rheingold. The king was present, and all was done for splendour that could be done in that centre of art. When the curtain rose, the whole great river Rhine seemed to be flowing before you across the stage, into the side of whose flood you looked as one looks through the glass side of an aquarium. At the bottom were rocks in picturesque piles; and, looking up through the tide to the top, as a diver might, the spectator saw the surface of the river, with the current rippling forward upon it, and the sunlight just touching the waves. Through the flood swam the daughters of the Rhine, sweeping fair arms backward as they floated, their drapery trailing heavy behind them, darting straight as arrows, or winding sinuously, from bottom to top, from side to side, singing wildly as the Lorelei. The scene changed, and it was the depths of the earth, red-glowing and full of gnomes. And a third time, after a change, you saw from mountain-tops the city which the giants had built in the heavens for the gods,—a glittering dome or pinnacle now and then breaking the line of white palaces, now and then a superb cloud floating before it, until, at last, a mist seemed to rise from valleys below, wrapping it little by little, till all became invisible in soft gradations of vapoury gloom. I shall never again see anything like that, where an art-loving court subsidises heavily scene-painter and machinist; but for all that, is it wise to have only sneers for what can be brought to pass with more modest means? Our hall at Sweetbrier is as large as the Christ Church refectory, and handsomely proportioned and decorated. A wide stage runs across the end. We found some ample curtains of crimson, set off with a heavy yellow silken border of quite rich material, which had been used to drape a window that had disappeared in the course of repairs. This, stretched from side to side, made a wall of brilliant colour against the gray tint of the room; and possibly Roger Ascham, seeing our audience-room before and after the hanging of it, might have had a thought of Antwerp. The stage is the one thing in the world privileged to deceive. The most devoted reader of Ruskin can tolerate shams here. The costumes were devised with constant reference to Charles Knight, and, to the eye, were of the gayest silk, satin, and velvet. There was, moreover, a profusion of jewels, which, for all one could see, sparkled with all the lustre of the great Florentine diamond, as you see it suspended above the imperial crowns in the Austrian Schatz-Kammer at Vienna. The contrasts of tint were well attended to. Pedro was in white and gold, Claudio in blue and silver, Leonato in red; while our handsome Benedick, a youth of dark Italian favour, in doublet of orange, a broad black velvet sash, and scarlet cloak, shone like a bird of paradise.

There was a garden-scene, in the foreground of which, where the eyes of the spectators were near enough to discriminate, were rustic baskets with geraniums, fuchsias, and cactuses, to give a southern air. In the middle distance, armfuls of honeysuckle in full bloom were brought in and twined about white pilasters. There was an arbour overhung with heavy masses of the trumpet-creeper. A tall column or two surmounted with graceful garden-vases were covered about with raspberry-vines, the stems of brilliant scarlet showing among the green. A thick clump of dogwood, whose large white blossoms could easily pass for magnolias, gave background. The green was lit with showy colour of every sort,—handfuls of nasturtiums, now and then a peony, larkspurs for blue, patches of poppies, and in the garden-vases high on the pillars (the imposition!) clusters of pink hollyhocks which were meant to pass for oleander-blossoms, and did, still, wet with the drops of the afternoon shower, which had not dried away when all was in place. When it comes to rain and dewdrops, dear Dr. Holmes, a "fresh-water college" has an advantage. First, it was given under gas; then, the hall being darkened, a magnesium-light gave a moon-like radiance, in which the dew on the buds glistened, and the mignonette seemed to exhale a double perfume, and a dreamy melody of Mendelssohn sung by two sweet girl-voices floated out about the "pleached bower," like a song of nightingales. Then toward the end came the scene of the chapel and Hero's tomb. No lovelier form was ever sculptured than that of the beautiful Queen Louisa of Prussia, as she lies in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg, carved by Rauch, asleep on the tomb in white purity. To the eye, our Hero's tomb was just such a block of spotless marble seen against a background of black, with just such a fair figure recumbent upon it, whose palms and lids and draping the chisel of an artist seemed to have folded and closed and hung,—all idealised again by the magic of the magnesium-light. As the crimson curtain was drawn apart, an organ sounded, and a far-away choir sent into the hush the Ave Verum of Mozart, low-breathed and solemn.

It was not Munich, Fastidiosus. They were American young men and young women, with no resources but those of a rural college, and such as their own taste and the woods and gardens could furnish; but the young men were shapely and intelligent, and the young women had grace and brightness; their hearts were in it, and in the result surely there was a measure of "sweetness and light" for them and those who beheld.

You fear it may beget in young minds a taste for the theatre, now hopelessly given over in great part to abominations. Why not a taste that will lift them above the abominations? Old Joachim Greff, schoolmaster at Dessau in 1545, who has a place in the history of German poetry, has left it on record that he trained his scholars to render noble dramas in the conscientious hope "that a little spark of art might be kept alive in the schools under the ashes of barbarism." "And this little spark," says Gervinus, "did these bold men, indeed, through two hundred years, keep honestly until it could again break out into flame." Instead of fearing the evil result, rather would I welcome a revival of what Warton calls "this very liberal exercise." Were Joachim Greffs masters in our high schools and in the English chairs in our colleges, we might now and then catch a glimpse of precious things at present hidden away in never-opened store-houses, and see something done toward the development of a taste that should drive out the opera-bouffe.

Here, at the end, Fastidiosus, is what I now shape in mind. Hippolyte Taine, in one of his rich descriptions, thus pictures the performance of a masque:

The élite of the kingdom is there upon the stage, the ladies of the court, the great lords, the queen, in all the splendour of their rank and their pride, in diamonds, earnest to display their luxury so that all the brilliant features of the nation's life are concentrated in the price they give, like gems in a casket. What adornment! What profusion of magnificence! What variety! What metamorphoses! Gold sparkles, jewels emit light, the purple draping imprisons within its rich folds the radiance of the lustres. The light is reflected from shining silk. Threads of pearl are spread in rows upon brocades sewed with thread of silver. Golden embroideries intertwine in capricious arabesques, costumes, jewels, appointments so extraordinarily rich that the stage seems a mine of glory.

The fashionable world of our time has little taste for such pleasures. This old splendour we cannot produce; but the words which the magnificent lords and ladies spoke to one another as they blazed, were those that make up the Poetry of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd, and, finest of all, the Comus of Milton. They are the most matchless frames of language in which sweet thoughts and fancies were ever set. After all, before this higher beauty, royal pomp even seems only a coarse excrescence, and all would be better if the accessories of the rendering were very simple. Already in my mind is the grove for Comus designed; the mass of green which shall stand in the centre, the blasted trunk that shall rise for contrast to one side, and the vine that shall half conceal the splintered summit, the banks of wild-flowers that shall be transferred, the light the laboratory shall yield us to make all seem as if seen through enchanter's incense. I have in mind the sweet-voiced girl who shall be the lost lady and sing the invocation to Sabrina; the swart youth who shall be the magician and say the lines,

"At every fall, smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled";

and the golden-haired maid who shall glide in and out in silvery attire, as the attendant spirit. Come, Fastidiosus,—I shall invite too the editors of David's Harp,—and you shall all own the truth of Milton's own words, "that sanctity and virtue and truth herself may in this wise be elegantly dressed," when the attendant spirit recites:

"Now my task is smoothly done,
I can fly or I can run
Quickly to the green earth's end,
Where the bowed welkin low doth bend;
And from thence can soar as soon
To the corners of the moon.
Mortals that would follow me,
Love virtue; she alone is free,
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her."