and the thought of which makes the mere
starved scene and medium of the period, the _rest_ of the picture, a
more confessed and more heroic battle-ground. They have been more and
more eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, so
much so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost _all_ the
picture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of the
play from the performer--particularly of the play dealing with our
immediate life and manners and aspects--after a fashion which does half
the work, thus reducing the "personal equation," the demand for the
maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and
sparest. As a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so short
an impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine old
masterful _assouplissement_ of its victims--who were not the expert
spectators. The spectators were so expert, so broken in to material
suffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was only
material, they found the aesthetic reward, the critical relish of the
essence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of
large application. Everything but the "interpretation," the personal, in
the French theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and
futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly
impatient--let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at
the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger
on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical
torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add
to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness
of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till
modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its
counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious
prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic
and melodramatic "output." It _paid_ apparently, in the golden age of
acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places--since
to assume that the age _was_ in that particular respect golden (for
which we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains the
patience of the public. With the public the _actors_ were, according to
their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as
in the conditions most familiar to-d