in Nature's power to conform. The conditions, for example, of dramatic art are imitative, as are those of all other arts, yet the drama can never be strictly said to be imitative of Nature, but only representative. To transfer life to the boards of the theatre demands a just appreciation of the difference between real and dramatic conditions; so that the spectator who goes to the play and (as many spectators do) institutes a direct comparison between the actor and the man, criticises on a false basis, and does not appreciate the artistic conditions.

natural, that open-air representation not only would not weaken, but would rather strengthen, their dramatic effect. With this belief the forest scenes from As You Like It were chosen for three open-air presentations, and were given at Coombe, in Surrey, in July, 1884, and repeated in May, 1885, followed in June and July by seven presentations of Fletcher's pastoral, The Faithfull Shepherdesse, as adapted by Godwin, and by three presentations in July, 1886, of Fair Rosamund, adapted by Godwin from Lord Tennyson's "Becket." No one

"Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France, or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

Of course not, and so the audience is asked not to demand too much, but to "eke out the performance with their minds;" for the chorus to the fourth act, speaking of the battle itself, says :

"And so our scene must to the battle fly,
Where (O for pity!) we shall much disgrace
With four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous,
The name of Agincourt."

Nor can it be said that, with all the resources of scenic invention which the modern stage-manager has at command, this difficulty is capable of being satisfactorily

surmounted. Rather it must be confessed that the more we encumber the stage with pseudo-realistic accessories the more do we challenge comparison with Nature herself, and we make allowance for the scene-painter's shortcomings with more difficulty than for those of the actor, because there is not one in a million of us who understands the technicalities of the scene-painter's art.

The representations of the Attic theatre, it may be urged, were unrealistic. Masks concealed the countenance of the actor, stilts magnified his stature, robes shrouded his person, a monotonous cadence prevailed in his delivery. But we could no longer be satisfied with types, however beautifully they were clothed and presented. We demand complexity, we demand sympathy, we demand character, we demand Nature. It is surely affectation to argue from the opposite standpoint that because acting is an artificial presentation of certain phases of life, and not life itself, so likewise must the environment of the actor be artificial. Rather it should be said that such artificiality handicaps the display of the actor's genius; for inasmuch as the finest acting makes the spectator forget that it is art, it follows that the more natural the acting the more patent is the discord with artificial surroundings. Where the environment of the actor is artificial, artificial acting may pass current. But Nature is the test, the touchstone; she shows up what is false, what is exaggerated, what is theatrical. She is the ever-present standard.

In the England of to-day sensational realism has reached its zenith. In the form dramatic art takes on the theatrical stage we see, for the most part, the realism of the common-place, the every-day life which, whether sensational or not, appeals in no way to our sense of beauty. On the pastoral stage the advantage gained is on the side of the romantic drama, for with such a setting we may pass from the realisation of the actual to the realisation of the ideal. Indeed, open-air acting means either this or nothing. Here Nature challenges the artist; it is the chance for the true artist, be he dilettanteprofessional or professional-amateur. The world is a * Chorus, Henry V., Act I.

great deal too thick with current writing on art, but it is plain that as long as there is discredit attached to the words "amateur" and "dilettante " in art-criticism, there must be a dead-lock; for what is the "amateur" but he who has the "amor or love of art, the "dilettante" but he who has "diletto" or pleasure in art? Every work of art also suggests its own mode of presentation, just as every work of art suggests its own form of criticism, and both in creation and in criticism what is essential is freedom of mood. The ordinary stage-manager is forced more or less to mould (perhaps to mutilate) a work of art to suit preconceived ideas and old traditions; the director of the natural stage (given that he chooses a suitable setting for his representation), to be successful, must avoid these customary stage conventions.

Before entering more deeply into this question, it is well that a few words should be said about our directorthe director of "The Pastoral Players." In the world of knowledge of Godwin was, we all know, unerring. His art, the deep dramatic insight and many-sided artistic fine discernment, crowned by knowledge, showed in everything he touched. It was evident to this great spirit (now moved into the fairer sunlight) that art demands a special treatment when brought into contact with Nature, just as Nature demands a special treatment when confronted with art, and we cannot but lament with Mr. W. G. Wills in his tender elegy, "genius flown, starved by a tasteless age, and unfulfilled," and with the author of "Helena in Troas" in his memorial sonnet :

"A man of men, born to be genial king
By frank election of the artist kind,
Attempting all things, and on everything
Setting the signet of a master-mind.
What others dreamed amiss, he did aright;

His dreams were visions of art's golden age;
Yet, self-betrayed, he fell in fortune's spite,
His royal birthright sold for scanty wage.
The best of comrades, winning old and young

With keen audacious charm, dandling the fool
That pleased his humour, but with scathing tongue
For blatant pedants of the bungler school.
They tell me he had faults; I know of one-
Dying too soon he left his best undone."

Α 66 man of men "indeed he was, and with that fine generosity that always accompanies true genius. It has been well said of him that "what he gave his age was a spirit to inform the work of others, a spirit which will grow, and spread and manifest itself in multitudinous forms of beauty." When he wrote of contemporary art, that most of it was "a mead of wild errors," it was because he set his ideal so exclusively among the Greek gods. Of workmanship perfected, he saw only the shield. of Achilles wrought by the glorious lame god Hephaistos. No man ever lived with greater singleness of purpose. To create beautiful things for the mere sake of their loveliness, this was his object; not wealth, not position, not fame even. Yet fame surely shall be his, for the muses taught him, and the mother of the muses had care for him. Poet of architects, and architect of all the arts, he possessed that rare gift, a feeling for the very essence of Beauty wherever and whenever it was to be found.

The arts seemed to yield their secrets to him, and for him Nature opened her scroll, while with exquisite spirit of choice, and delicate tact of omission, he would, from both these worlds of wonder, select all congruous elements of beauty and of strength, and combine them into works. of perfect symmetry and right proportion. Like the strength of Michael Angelo, his strength lay in that he always worked from some great conscious rest, and we know that the parallels he ruled were always trustworthy. In his last creative production, the presentation of Helena in Troas, we saw a manifestation of the remarkable power to which he had attained, though, indeed, he left his best undone. From the first moment of entering the theatre, as he had fashioned it, a sense of beauty, hushed and serene, stole over the spectator, such as one might fancy had never been felt since Greeks listened to the plays of Euripides. As the tragedy unfolded itself (dawn growing into noonday, and noon waning into night), the hush continued and grew more intense, for the rhythmical movements of the chorus made the story come and go like a shadow of fate, seen in clear water or in a crystal sphere-like the reverie of some god in the soul that dreams of a god's ways. With the death of Paris, and Helen's last sad words, the play was not over. When, like figures on a marble frieze, the band of white-robed maidens wound through the twilight past the altar of Dionysus, and one by one in slow procession climbed the steps, and passed away, the audience were absolutely stilled in their excitement. All minds were held in strong emotion as by the voice of some god which, "when ceased, men still stood fixed to hear." The pure keynote of beauty was again struck, and, line and colour taking the place of language, the play ultimately reverted to that plastic ideal which lies at the basis of all Greek art.

In the presentation of The Faithfull Shepherdesse and As You Like It, Godwin's combined delicacy and strength were equally shown. It seemed that with him the Woodland Gods (the Bird-Gods themselves) were in hidden sympathy, and that

from their hiding places in oak and fern they breathed and piped their secrets to his inmost soul, his keen eye and quick ear catching their slightest and subtlest suggestions, his large understanding seizing at once their mode in the garden of unity. Fletcher's pastoral he truly saw was no mere theatric play, but a parable rather, and a pageant: a parable where the thoughts and moods of our nature take visible form, put on comely attire, and appear before us; a pageant through

which the gracious old Arcadian life can, in an English woodland, stir again, and, while retaining its Greek clearness of outline, yet gain something from the mediæval magic of colour and from the Northern temper of romance.

As art

The composition of stage effect and the art of acting generally, whether in-doors or out-doors, meant for his wonderful genius what the art of musical composition meant for the wonderful genius of Wagner-it meant growth, originality, freedom from tradition. director of our natural stage, he urged inore than ever on the actor (whether that actor occupied the principal rôle, or that of the silent super) the necessity that the ordinary technique of the stage must be held by him subordinate, and sacrificed to pictorial and realistic effect. The conventional strut, the lover's speech (addressed wholly or in part to the audience, instead of to the object of his passion), the strange monotonous system of intoning blank verse (sacrificing entirely to cadence the more important quality of sense)--all this, where and when mother Nature is herself pressed into the service of the players, Godwin justly held as heresy. It was Nature, he said, who must be consulted, because her suggestions of method are not less varied and infinite than are her changes of mood-" concord in discord, lines of differing method meeting in one full centre of delight." This was the high art-standard he made for, in the woodland pictures of moving sound and colour which he created; he assimilated art to Nature, and Nature to art.

With regard to

on

material or scenic treatment, as I have said elsewhere, in my essay "Rainbow Music," "Nature is jealous of line, of hue, and even of sound; she insists that wherever art is confronted with her, it shall partake of her own essence." Therefore those artificial lines and dyes, those sounds which are in accord with a certain given condition of Nature, are alone admissible; she exacts of them that they shall enhance her own beauty by contrast or by harmony.

So also psychologically and dramatically, if we are to live and move with our heroes and heroines in a pastoral story, joy with their joys and weep with their sorrows, our sympathies

must be the more awakened and intensified through Nature's own operation; for, as spectators, we are wrought upon from without as well as from within, subjected to the same psychological influences which are felt unconsciously by the players themselves (pace Diderot), and which must also have been felt by the people

her ceaselessly pulsating life. In effect, it is through the feelings she inspires, under certain conditions of harmony, that the sensitive spectator is moved to a delight which finds its expression in tears. Nature is then as the voice of the beloved, singing to one alone. Breathing above all else of the woods, of song-birds, and wild flowers are these most beautiful scenes in As You Like It, where indeed are found "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." And, in truth, one can understand.

theatre. That a certain element of discord with the realistic word-painting of Shakespeare should be too often painfully evident in the theatre is not to be wondered at, and if we regard the art of Shakespeare from this naturalistic standpoint we can perceive the basis of reasoning from which spring the sentiments often expressed against all representations of Shakespeare's plays. From this point of view, indeed the expression of such sentiment loses that ring of mere conventional affectation, with which it is apt to strike the ear of the Shakespearean enthusiast.

At the representations of our "forest scenes," the fact that many among the more observant spectators confessed to finding themselves the only notes out of tune with the natural surroundings, is perhaps the best proof that a union of art with Nature was then and there consummated. The audience really became the only external conventionality which appeared out of place, because Nature had not absorbed them, as it were, and made them her own. Having established the fact that we were treating with the wood and its natural surroundings as we found them, it would be an impertinence to enter into a description of natural effects that changed with every hour of the day. Some regard was had to the selection of the spot, so that the axis of the auditorium and natural stage should fall in such a manner as to make the most of the trees, glades, background, and landscape. To any one not present the thought would naturally occur that the sides (technically known as wings on the stage) would be exposed, and that either exits and entrances would seem unnatural, or that long pauses would have to be introduced in the action of the piece. This, however, was overcome by taking advantage of the circumstances of the locality.

As regards the costume, as the play distinctly refers to a time when there were dukedoms in France, the style of dress was that in use prior to the absorption of the Duchy of Brittany by the Crown, therefore before A.D. 1483. The rich and picturesque apparel in vogue during the ten or twenty years preceding this was the model. which guided us. It was acknowledged on all sides that

the banished Duke, the nobles, the foresters, and the shepherds were somehow in place; that the high huntingboots and by-cocket caps, the dull velvets and worn leather, the newer habits of those "young gentlemen of estate" who daily sought the exiled lords to hunt with them, the hooded cape, the belted tunic, and the bow and spear, were at home among these high trees and chequered glades. As it was the love of the beautiful which led to the inception, no discordant note of colour was struck out of harmony with Nature's key in which we played; for each tone of colour introduced had been borrowed from Nature's own woodland hues. The dresses of Rosalind and Celia struck the bright russet tones of bracken and bark; Orlando's, the mellowed tinge of golden-greens which belongs to dead leaves and ferns; while Phebe, tripping along in the hues of the violet or heart's-ease, seemed a flower born of the woods; and so on through the varied and subdued forest-tones, notes were struck in the different impersonations, all resolving into one perfect harmony.

On Rosalind, frequently pronounced one of the most charming of Shakespeare's heroines, much has been written. Orlando has been neglected. Yet if he is of comparatively less importance, measured by his less voluble flow of speech, there is, nevertheless, a poetry about his character which has a fascination peculiarly its own, and, contrasted with the sparkling vivacity of Rosalind, its mellow light appears more dreamily poetical.

It seems remarkable that whilst Hamlet, Romeo, even Shylock, and many other male Shakespearean characters have been played by women, we do not hear that