demonstrate that the incontestable superiority
of average French acting to English is by no means so strongly marked
in tragedy as in comedy--is indeed sometimes not strongly marked at
all. The reason of this is in a great measure, I think, that we have
had Shakespeare to exercise ourselves upon, and that an inferior
dramatic instinct exercised upon Shakespeare may become more flexible
than a superior one exercised upon Corneille and Racine. When it comes
to ranting--ranting even in a modified and comparatively reasonable
sense--we do, I suspect, quite as well as the French, if not rather
better.) Mr. G. H. Lewes, in his entertaining little book upon "Actors
and the Art of Acting," mentions M. Talbot, of the Francais, as a
surprisingly incompetent performer. My memory assents to his judgment
at the same time that it proposes an amendment. This actor's special
line is the buffeted, bemuddled, besotted old fathers, uncles, and
guardians of classic comedy, and he plays them with his face much more
than with his tongue. Nature has endowed him with a visage so admirably
adapted, once for all, to his role, that he has only to sit in a chair,
with his hands folded on his stomach, to look like a monument to
bewildered senility. After that it doesn't matter what he says or how
he says it.

The Comedie Francaise sometimes does weaker things than in keeping M.
Talbot. Last autumn, for instance, it was really depressing to see
Mlle. Dudley brought all the way from Brussels (and with not a little
flourish either) to "create" the guilty vestal in "Rome Vaincue." As
far as the interests of art are concerned, Mlle. Dudley had much better
have remained in the Flemish capital, of whose language she is
apparently a perfect mistress. It is hard, too, to forgive M. Perrin
(M. Perrin is the present director of the Theatre Francais) for
bringing out "L'Ami Fritz" of M. Erckmann-Chatrian. The two gentlemen
who write under this name have a double claim to kindness. In the first
place, they have produced some delightful little novels; every one
knows and admires "Le Conscrit de 1813"; every one admires, indeed, the
charming tale on which the play in question is founded. In the second
place, they were, before the production of their piece, the objects of
a scurrilous attack by the "Figaro" newspaper, which held the authors
up to reprobation for having "insulted the army," and did its best to
lay the train for a hostile manifestation on the first