s, and he watches the performance in a sort of
tranquil ecstasy.

Never has he seen anything so smooth, and harmonious, so artistic and
complete. He heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for
the first time, he sees something that deserves the name. He sees
dramatic effort refined to a point with which the English stage is
unacquainted. He sees that there are no limits to possible "finish,"
and that so trivial an act as taking a letter from a servant or
placing one's hat on a chair may be made a suggestive and interesting
incident. He sees these things and a great many more besides, but at
first he does not analyze them; he gives himself up to sympathetic
contemplation. He is in an ideal and exemplary world--a world that has
managed to attain all the felicities that the world we live in misses.
The people do the things that we should like to do; they are gifted
as we should like to be; they have mastered the accomplishments that
we have had to give up. The women are not all beautiful--decidedly
not, indeed--but they are graceful, agreeable, sympathetic, ladylike;
they have the best manners possible, and they are delightfully well
dressed. They have charming musical voices, and they speak with
irreproachable purity and sweetness; they walk with the most elegant
grace, and when they sit it is a pleasure to see their attitudes. They
go out and come in, they pass across the stage, they talk, and laugh,
and cry, they deliver long _tirades_ or remain statuesquely mute; they
are tender or tragic, they are comic or conventional; and through it
all you never observe an awkwardness, a roughness, an accident, a
crude spot, a false note.

As for the men, they are not handsome either; it must be confessed,
indeed, that at the present hour manly beauty is but scantily
represented at the Theatre Francais. Bressant, I believe, used to be
thought handsome; but Bressant has retired, and among the gentlemen of
the troupe I can think of no one but M. Mounet-Sully who may be
positively commended for his fine person. But M. Mounet-Sully is, from
the scenic point of view, an Adonis of the first magnitude. To be
handsome, however, is for an actor one of the last necessities; and
these gentlemen are mostly handsome enough. They look perfectly what
they are intended to look, and in cases where it is proposed that they
shall _seem_ handsome, they usually succeed. They are as well mannered
and as well dressed as their fairer comrade