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N the strength of his Ulysses alone Mr. Stephen Phillips Stephen Phillips would not rank high either as a poet or as a dramatist. Deduct what we owe to Homer, Vergil, Dante, the stage manager and the sacred memories of our freshman year, and there remains only a fraction due to Mr. Phillips as creator. But the play is in harmony with the spirit of the masterpieces he has read and if his aim was to prove that high, familiar themes could be successfully treated in blank verse on the modern English stage, he has proved it. The lines are traditionally poetical and though from the very nature of the case there can be no dramatic interest in the plot there is curiosity as to what the author will do with his material. It is stately, elemental, picturesque, and uninspired, the sort of play that it is virtuous to write and virtuous also to enjoy. Gods and demigods are simple creatures with very few ideas and no nervous system, and it is creditable to our corrupt and complicated modern sense that we can like them in English blank verse. An ancient Greek hero treated in the classic manner has, as a stage person, an exceedingly narrow range of emotion and thought. Anything superhuman is generally less than human on the stage, and on seeing this play we felt as homesick for the sight of a human being as Ulysses did for his "gaunt Ithaca." The finest passages, by the way, are precisely those in which Ulysses longed for earthly things, as if in that at least the author were at one with him. In the main the limits of the subject exclude our sympathy, and Mr. Phillips keeps within the limits.

"Hermes, this world.

Begins to grip my heart with gradual cold! O how shall I descend in flesh and blood Unready and unripe?"

That is the way we feel about it. But there is poetical phrasing and some dramatic skill, a rare partnership, and there is no other good minor poet on our stage, or even poetoid, and Homer is a safe perch for any bard in pin feathers. Episodes from a great epic, dramatically arranged, told with dignity and accompanied by some admirable tableaux of Hades and Olympus-it does not at all imply the resurrection of the English stage, but it is one of the few things that have a claim to be taken somewhat seriously. As produced in New York it suffered from the noisiness and restlessness of the caste who played it as if the audience were a little deaf and very obtuse. Mr. Tyrone Power made an impressive but somewhat monotonous Ulysses, sighing constantly in very deep bass, and the booms of his beautiful but polyphloesbaan voice needed a little shading. It is a pity that so well-endowed an actor as he should not have learned the blessings of diversity.

The reviews of The Man from Blankley's prepared one for a different sort of a play. The satire is not subtle but on the contrary very broad and obvious. It is satire of the thoroughly English and relentless sort, no stiletto work but the steady play of a good, big club. When reviewers like a thing they empty straightway all the pockets of their vocabulary, and in this case they implied a certain fineness and delicacy. The author of Vice Versa and The Tinted Venus has other qualities just as good but these do not belong to him. As a picture of a vulgar middle class English family and

the barbarities of their social life it is as true as Thackeray's Osbornes. It is more amusing than the satire of Dickens and the characters are far more plausible, but it has the Dickens quality of universal and immediate appeal. Apparently no

one in the audience missed a single point, and this was accomplished without straining or over-emphasis, owing in large measure to the cleverness and good taste of Mr. Charles Hawtrey and his excellent company.

We pass reluctantly to the needless horrors of Hedda Gabler, in which a woman without motives or reasons, representing no known temperament, class, condition or country, holds the centre of the stage for the purpose of showing one of the peculiar forms that criminal abnormality might assume. It differs from the rest of Ibsen's plays in lacking any philosophic suggestiveness and shows his great dramatic energy applied successfully to the single object of making you squirm. Mrs. Fiske played it with all the unwomanliness she could muster, and made it inconceivable that the adoring husband and infatuated lover could remain in her company two minutes. The author hardly meant that Hedda, hateful as she was, should be outwardly so forbidding. Mrs. Fiske capped Ibsen's criminal with a shrew, speaking always in tart, snappy sentences, of which a third could be heard only on the stage. Mrs. Fiske and Mrs. Patrick Campbell are alike in their total indifference to the other persons of the play. Husbands, fathers, lovers, children are mere worms. Mrs. Campbell is too preoccupied even glance at the object of her affection, and Mrs. Fiske's sharp rising inflection makes you feel in your pocket to see if you forgot to mail those letters. It is a mere mannerism but it often obscures the intelligence of her acting and is a fruitful source of misunderstanding between her audience and herself. Hedda Gabler is a part that requires anything but tenderness but it does not call for a continuous

tone of petty severity-a tone that might almost go with a box on the ear.

In Her Own Way, Mr. Clyde Fitch adopts the simple and ancient plan of sending the true lover off to the wars and leaving the wicked rival behind, then baffling the villain and bringing the true lover back to life. Nor does he take the least pains to give the villain a fighting chance, for the lady never wavers and is not misled. Hence there is staleness and certainty throughout, mitigated only by some stretches of good dialogue. A children's birthday party on the stage and a leading lady remarkable for good looks. and incapacity were thrown in in case the dramatic interest gave out. Mr. Fitch seldom puts all his eggs in one basket. But the thinnest play of the month was Mrs. Deering's Divorce, having nothing in it that the mind could grasp at the time or remember afterwards, except a wellplayed burlesque of a new woman, and it is hard to support life on that. Nothing of any interest fell to Mrs. Langtry's share.

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In Hope's little story of Captain Dieppe many bewildering adventures crowded into a single night but he has space enough at his disposal to explain them. In the play the task of explaining falls heavily on the patient shoulders of John Drew, who as the Captain not only has to do these remarkable and complicated things but to make it clear just what they are and why they are remarkable. He does not make it clear in spite of several long and rapid speeches. In fact the story is only half dramatised. Part of it is told pleasantly in Hope's own lines, and the rest tossed over to John Drew, who is left struggling vainly to expound his splendid but unintelligible abilities. F. M. Colby.

I'

T has been reported of him that he used the blue pencil remorselessly. It is certainly true that the sight of anything written was apt to set him at the work of alteration, and it was the same with his own work as with that of his newest contributor. When he worked for other editors he sent back proofs which it cost as much to correct as it had done to set, and one has known a paper to be huddled to press in a desperate hurry because it was guessed that he would send a telegram demanding a revise. When the end of the world had come for some of us and the N. O. had passed out of his hands, there was a dinner at Solferino's. When he rose to make his speech, he leaned forward over the table and looked deliberately around the room. Then he said that he did not see a single man with whose "copy" he had not taken great liberties, and that he did not propose to make any apology, because he was perfectly sure that his work had always justified it.

This was as true as any broad statement could be. Sometimes an article or story would be printed without a change. When this happened two or three times in succession, you were more than a little distressed if he altered you. One of his men used to stick the cuttings from the N. O. into an album, carefully recording the original versions of mutilated stories or articles. When he had been contributing for a couple of years, he was invited to add to the long list of books made up of stuff originally contributed to the N. 0.

When he was preparing the book for the press he carefully stuck to the Henley version, and now, ten years later ("I feel chilly, and grow old"), he is surer than ever that he was a prudent

man.

There are editors who, though they love you well, and have plently of use for your work, deem it discreet never by any chance to praise you to your face, while, of course, they reserve to them

selves the privilege of condemnation. Mr. Henley was always a busy man, and he was often prostrate with the severest physical pain. Yet you quickly arrived at an infallible way of judging whether your stuff was good; or, as you may have been inclined to think, below the level of your best. If it was good, you quickly received a letter of enthusiastic praise. Here is one such written in 1892, when the N. O. was still published in Edinburgh, to a man whom he had never

met :

"A line-which should have been written last week-to say that I think better of soand-so-taken in every way-than of anything you've done. Also, that I hear naught but praise of it all round; which, indeed, is no more than its due. The other thing is very good too. You shall have a proof quam primum. Not yet, for I am very full of matter.. The worst of it is that you cannot now afford to go back, but must make up your mind to do better and even better. That this will be your luck I do most heartily rejoice to believe.-Yours very sincerely, W. E. H."

It seemed to the recipient then, as it seems to him now, that this letter was a most amazing exhibition of generosity. Also from the point of view of the writer and of the proprietor of the journal he conducted, the sending of such a letter was very good policy, because the man to whom it came one happy morning, in a grey, remote little town, where nobody (as it seemed to him) cared for art or letters, was at once desperately resolved to do yet better, and, indeed, never to let it be known in Thistle Street, Edinburgh, that he could occasionally do very much

worse.

In a little bundle of letters addressed to one of his contributors there are many hardly less generous. For instance, a very short review of a book by a French writer who was then altogether unknown.

Somehow or other his English confrère felt that this was a book he should read, and he said so in writing to Mr. Henley. He need not have troubled to write. By the first post next morning the book reached him, and when he had read it and spoken of it in a subsequent letter, Mr. Henley wrote in a postscript (he was given to these): "In great haste. But I add that I hoped the book would be suggestive as well as useful. It is odd that in such-and-such a thing you anticipate (in a sense) his story of the three blackguards: a thing which (I can't help think ing) should help you." This was a curious case in which a young man in a remote part of England was writing stories which (as the book in question showed) might have been turned into French and signed with the name of a man of whom he had never heard, and who probably had never heard of him. In another case Mr. Henley was misled by such a coincidence into an injustice. A story had been written by one of his men in October, and published in the N. O. early in November, and a few weeks later another story, by another author, appeared in a widely-circulated journal. Mr. Henley wrote to the member of his staff, indignantly pointing out that there were strange resemblances, and that he had been robbed. There was certainly a remarkable likeness between the two, but there could have been no robbery, because, from the circumstance of its publication, it was absolutely certain that the story which had been written earliest was given to the world later than the other.

Once he had accepted your service, he was intensely eager that you should do the best it was in you to do. In the letters which have been referred to, there are repeated references to certain proposed journeyings into foreign parts. "Is it to be Japan?" he wrote once in one of those hurried postscripts; and again, "I think that if I'd known I should have advised you to go to Spain. You see, you're at the age when observation is instinctive; so that the more you are by way of laying

up experience, that becomes a part of yourself, and may presently be expressed in terms of art, the better is your chance in future years, and the more admirable the equipment you bring to the real business of life. Not that I think you have done any harm by refusing to go; on the contrary, you are full of these visions, and it is probably as well, now that you have a certain outlet, that you should work the vein and make what you can of the ore. Of course I speak not altogether disinterestedly, for I like your work, and I want the best you can give; but I feel bound to put the two courses before you in justice to both of us." In a postscript he writes, "Avoid all newspaper offices. They are short cuts to the Pit." Here is a hurried little note, which was written much later to a man who wanted to produce a certain book, but saw no way of doing so unless he obtained a commission. "A" is a literary agent; "B" a publisher. "All right. Tell A to tell B that I like the idea of the book, and strongly advise him to consider it. Also, that if he be so 'disposed' I'll talk of it when next we meet. No more possible to-night."

These last two letters are characteristic in every word. It is to be supposed that he thought that one had been misguided in refusing to go wandering and abiding in a rather dull village. Yet when he must needs turn round and declare just as emphatically that you had done entirely right. The praise is like him, and so are the two postscripts.

Although a great many of his men eventually became journalists-there are at least six attached to one London newspaper-he hated the profession, and never failed to express himself on the subject with all the force that was in him. "I think it right, on the face of things, to dissuade you very strongly from entertaining the idea of going into a newspaper office, where you never have any spare time, and where whatever you have in you is precious soon washed, and mangled, and clear-starched, and ironed out of you."

The author, president of the New York State Normal College, has added to his series of Arithmetics, a volume which provides a thorough course in the rudiments, covering the first three years in school.

General Zoology. Practical, Systematic, and Comparative. Being a Revision and Rearrangement of Orton's Comparative Zoology. By Charles Wright Dodge, M.S.

A book for high schools and for undergraduate work in colleges, presenting the established facts and principles of zoology.

Appleton and Company:

The History of Johnny Quæ Genus. The Little Foundling of the Late Doctor Syntax. A Poem by the Author of The Three Tours. With twenty-four coloured illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson.

A new edition of a work which was first published by R. Ackermann in the year 1822.

Place and Power. By Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Mrs. Alfred Laurence Felkin).

A new novel by the author of "A Double Thread" and "Concerning Isabel

Carnaby."

Like its predecessors, the story is an English one, but it lacks the snap of the earlier books.

Bryant's Complete Poetical Works. Roslyn Edition.

This volume contains chronologies of Bryant's life and poems, and a bibliography of his writings, by Henry C. Sturges, also a memoir of his life by the late Richard Henry Stoddard. A photograph of Bryant, taken by Sarony in 1873, is used as a frontispiece.

Admiral Porter. By James Russell Soley.

A new volume in the series entitled "Great Commanders." Mr. Soley writes with the knowledge which he gained while he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he has endeavoured to make the biography as thorough as possible. Jorrocks's Haunts and Jollities. By R. S. Surtees.

Being the hunting, shooting, racing, driving, sailing, eating, eccentric and extravagant exploits of that renowned sporting citizen, Mr. John Jorrocks, of St. Botolph Lane and Great Coram Street. This issue, with coloured illustrations by Henry Alken, is founded on the edition published by Mr. Ackermann in the year 1843.

Handley Cross; or, Mr. Jorrocks's Hunt. By R. S. Surtees.

A companion volume to the above. The original edition was published by Bradbury and Evans in the year 1854. The illustrations are by John Leech. Barnes and Company:

His Little World. The Story of Hunch Badeau. By Samuel Merwin.

Mr. Merwin is the author of "The Road to Frontenac and joint-author of Calumet K. The present book is a tale of one Hunch Badeau, in command of a squarenosed schooner which carried cargo on the Great Lakes.

Broadway Publishing Company:

Gold From Life's Rainbows. By James Hampton Lee.

A collection of "short stories and sweet songs," with a bright blue cover and brighter yellow illustrations.

Hagar. A Dramatic Poem in Three Acts. By Rollin J. Wells.