For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. tury. The date of the Audax he fixes, while the contemporaries of St. John were living between 120 and 160 A.D., and earlier than the Montanist controversy. The contents of the book, which is just the size of the Epistle to the Galatians, corresponds to this early date. It indeed offers a striking commentary in many parts upon various passages of St. Paul's epistles. The following is a brief analysis of it. The first portion of the book is practically identical with the conclusion (capp. xvii.-xxi.) of the Epistle of St. Barnabas. They are both recensions of the early Christian document, known as the "Two Ways," the way of life and the way of death. In this portion there are many striking quotations from the Sermon on the Mount, about returning good for evil, almsgiving, fasting, and the like. It contains prohibitions also of vices to which Christians would be exposed among an overwhelming pagan majority; as magic, augury, and performance of the mystic rites. The second part of the Aday is, however, the most interesting, as giving us a glimpse into the organization of the earliest Church. The legislative section, as we may call it, begins at cap. vii. Bap. tism, and that in the name of the Trinity, is the foundation stone of the edifice. The account given of both the sacra ments strikingly confirms and illustrates the New Testament and Justin Martyr. Baptism must be administered, if possible, in running water. If running water cannot be had, then in any other kind of water, even though warm. If immersion cannot be used, trine affusion may suffice, accompanied by fasting. As to the practice of fasting, it must not be like that of the hypocrites evidently referring to the Jews and using the language of the Sermon on the Mount. They fast on Mondays and Thursdays, the regular Pharisaic fasts. Christians must fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. Their prayers, too, must not be modelled on the Jewish fashion, but the Lord's Prayer must be used thrice a day. The Lord's Prayer is then inserted with the concluding doxol ogy, following very closely, though not entirely, the words of St. Matthew. The rules for the eucharist next follow, to gether with a form of consecration prayer for each element, but without any such recital of the words of institution as finds a place in every existing Christian ritual. To this succeeds a post-communion thanksgiving in that rapt self-forgetting tone of which the “Gloria in Excelsis" is a conspicuous example; praising God for what he is in himself, and interceding for the ingathering of the Church from the four winds of heaven. Attached, however, to this thanksgiving is a note or rubric, signifying that the prophets shall not be limited to these words, but be permitted to use such expressions as please them, reminding us of Justin's famous description of the eucharist. Then come the most curious details. We see the whole organization depicted by St. Paul in passages like 1 Cor. xii. 28, Ephes. iv. II, and in the pastoral epistles. Apostles, prophets, bishops, and deacons have their spheres of activity marked out, limited, and defined. The composition of the book is determined to a very early date by the use made of the word apostle. It was still in common every-day use. Distance had not yet thrown a halo round it and limited its application to the original witnesses of the revelation. Some of the tests used to discriminate between the false apostle or prophet and the true are very amusing. Thus, in cap. xi., the document proceeds: "Now, concerning apostles and prophets, thus do according to the commandment of the Gospel. Let every apostle who comes to you be received as the Lord. He shall remain only for one day; or, if necessary, for two. But if he remain a third, he is a false apostle. And when he departs he shall take nothing with him save provision for one stage; but if he asks for money, he is a false apostle." Rules for the prophets are next laid down. Their teaching is recognized as a "speaking in the Spirit,' if sound and good, but must be tested by their practice, as some were evidently making a trade of their prophetic claims. The apostles seem to have been missionaries or evangelists. The prophets, on the other hand, had fixed places of labor. Such were not to prophesy for money, but yet they must be supported by the gift of first fruits. Bishops and deacons are recognized in cap. xv. They shall be ordained, being found true and free from covetousness. This chapter will doubtless be the central point of interest as raising various questions concerning the nature and work of these bishops and deacons. In this document they seem to occupy some higher position than that of mere financial agents to the congregation assigned to them by some modern critics. They are described as discharging the ministry of prophets and teachers to the congregation. There is no mention of presbyters, while, on the other hand, the prophets are described as chief priests for the congregation (cap. xiii.). The Lord's Day is recognized in cap. xiv. as the Christian festival. On that day the eucharist shall be celebrated and quarrels composed; the prophecy of Malachi i. 11, 14, and the term voia being expressly applied to the eucharist. We have given but a brief outline of this most interesting work, so important for its bearing on questions about the canon of the New Testament and Church government. Upon it Bryennios has spent the loving labor of seven years, and has produced a treatise which proves that the spirit of Eusebius still lives in the Eastern Church, and that a Greek ecclesiastic_can be thoroughly abreast of the latest German, French, and English scholarship. He has provided for us in his learned dissertations all the materials for those critical discussions this interesting relic of Christian antiquity so amply deserves: and that at the low price of five francs, which seems to indicate that Oriental scholars value their time at a very unremunerative rate indeed. From The Saturday Review. THE ITALIAN IN LIFE AND ON THE STAGE. To say that the art of a nation or a period is the outcome of its whole social life, and that it must necessarily bear the impress of the circumstances that produced it, is merely to repeat one of the commonplaces of criticism; and yet it is a fact that is too often forgotten in judging the work of foreigners. What is placed before us seems new; its very strangeness excites dislike in some and an inordinate admiration in others. Those who love novelty suppose it to be original merely because it is not English; those who have endeavored to educate their taste by a careful study of more familiar models object to a departure from principles of which the artist probably never heard, or which it would have been quite impossible for him to have adopted in his own country. This is the case both with painting and poetry, but far more strikingly so with acting- an art whose too ephemeral charm largely depends on the taste, the manners, and the fashion of the day. It may not therefore be uninteresting to inquire how closely a few of the peculiarities of Italian acting are connected with the national character. In doing this, we shall refer as little as possible to the distinguished guest who is at present performing at Covent Garden, and who, whatever may be our opinion as to his reproduction of single parts, deserves our respect on account of the great influence he has exerted in the reform of tragic acting in his own country. In speaking of the Italian stage, we are thinking rather of the theatres of Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples than of Signor Salvini and his troupe. The Italian is a social, the Englishman to a considerable extent a solitary animal. The former lives a great deal in the open air and in places of public resort. He is always ready to enter into a conversation with the respectable stranger who sits at his own or the neighboring table. After a few such meetings he makes you his confidant in everything except his money affairs, and is ready to supply you with the details of his whole emotional and family history. His wife, it seems, is not a paragon, and, if you are not a marriageable man, he is ready to own that his eldest daughter has a bad temper. Life altogether is rather a paltry business, but one must not take things too seriously; carnival has not long been passed, and already Easter is near. These things he tells you while you are a perfect stranger, whom he would never think of inviting to his house; indeed, it is only when you are introduced to him that he becomes reticent. History has shown that the Italian is far more gifted both for intrigue and conspiracy than most of the northern nations —a fact which is probably in a great degree due to his sobriety. He is not addicted to drink, and he rarely, between his nineteenth and his fiftieth year, becomes the fool or the tool of a woman. He is thus protected against the two influences which the police find most useful when a plot is to be discovered. He is shrewd and cautious in business matters, too, and silent whenever he fancies that his speech would give you an advantage over him. These are serious matters, and must be treated seriously, but with his emotions it is different. If he has been disappointed in a love affair, if his mistress or his wife has proved unfaithful to him, he cannot thoroughly enjoy his desolation before he has brought it before his own little public, in which he generously includes not only his personal friends, but also any stranger he may chance to meet in a café or a railway carriage whom he finds or fancies to be simpatico. So far does this instinct for expression of the feelings go that in Naples it is the popular belief that any attempt to suppress or conceal a strong unsatisfied passion, whether it be love, hatred, or fear, is inju ous to the health; and so men who have ten times more courage than many of the Englishmen that laugh at them will there say, without shame, "I dare not - I am afraid." Thus, much that forms the most private and secret experience of men of northern races is openly discussed in every Italian café, and even those who suffer most perhaps find a comfort in the consciousness that they are, for the time at least, interesting. been murdered to do something more. The tragic actor must outbid the man in the street. Of course when he comes to England he ought to moderate his ges ticulation, and this the Italian celebrities who visit us almost invariably endeavor to do. It is unfair to them not to remember that this requires an effort greater than that of the Englishman who desires to rise "to the height of the scene." Before us they always act in chains. But the fact that the Italian knows nothing of our reticence, of the sanctity in which we hold our own hearts and homes, is a still more important matter. Even in the privacy of his bedchamber he is apt to imagine himself in the presence of a sympathetic audience, and to play a part. He utters noble sentiments to himself and his looking glass, and does not pause to inquire whether they spring from his heart or his imagination. The result is that he never can speak a monologue as a northern audience thinks it ought to be spoken. On his lips it is no piece of selfcommuning, no silent thought rendered audible for a dramatic purpose, as Shake Nature has granted the Italian the social gifts he himself values most highly -the charm of manner, the art of adding effectiveness to everything he says or does by gesture, tone, and facial expression. "Er weiss sich zu geben," as the Germans say, an art in which they themselves are sadly wanting; the result is that you generally find your German ac quaintances gain and the Italian lose on a nearer acquaintance, but for the moment the latter overwhelm you. To see even half-a-dozen peasants in the street is often like looking at a picture or a scene in a well-ordered theatre. They talk not only with their tongues, but with their whole bodies. They are a nation of rhetori-speare's soliloquies invariably are; it is an cians; it is therefore only natural that they should be peculiarly susceptible to the charms of an art in which they excel, and that words and postures which would seem to us theatrical claptrap will there decide an election, or even, in exceptional cases, a division. They do not suspect that the brilliant phrase and the studied attitude are signs of insincerity, as En-lery or a lady in the stalls. There are exglishmen instinctively do. They see the purpose, they will even criticise the means by which it is attained, but this does not render them impervious to the charm. Now all this must affect their acting. The subdued and most self-restrained of performers is obliged to adopt on the stage manners more accentuated and gestures more marked than he would think of employing in real life. From what level is he to calculate the necessary elevation? Obviously from that of his audience. Some years ago Signor Rossi was condemned by several Neapolitan critics for the tameness of his Hamlet, whereas his rendering of the part seemed almost farcical to an Englishman, and it was, even on the first evening, far more highly colored than he ever thinks of making it at Florence. The cause of this is clear enough. If the man from whom you buy your fish is accustomed to assume the most indig nant and pathetic attitudes when the question between you is one of a penny, you naturally expect a prince whose father has address to the audience, in which all the fine points are carefully insisted upon. It is his hearers, not himself, that the Italian Hamlet or Lear endeavors to persuade. When a second person enters, there is hardly a change in his voice or manner, except that his eyes are fixed on Ophelia or the clown, instead of on the third gal ceptions, of course; but even in the case of the greatest actors they are rare. The instinct of the Italian performer is to turn poetry into what seems to us mere rhetoric. And the same national characteristics affect his whole conception of character. The success or failure of the hero is to him always an external matter - a thing that can be seen and displayed. Shakespeare, on the other hand, loves to dwell on the hidden internal tragedy, on the horror of the soul at its own crime or weakness, and the loss and gain that no court of law can assess. It is, however, this intimate knowledge of the silent and hidden workings of the human heart that has rendered him the favorite dramatist of northern nations. The southerner is attracted less by this than by the splendid theatrical opportunities he constantly affords, the very characteristic of his work to which the German actor is generally all but blind. Thus, the one is too apt to give us the soul without the body, and the other the body without the soul." For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a a year: free of postal be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. |