lish, and in
its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan
England--I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly,
effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the
vulgarity of an English hall--I will not say the Pavilion, which is too
cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there--for preference let us
say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw
for the time a living house--the dissolute paragraphists, the elegant
mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), the stolid, good-humoured
costers, the cheerful lights o' love, the extraordinary comics. What
delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality of
wit; all knew each other, all enjoyed each other's presence; in a word,
there was life. Then there were no cascades of real water, nor London
docks, nor offensively rich furniture, with hotel lifts down which some one
will certainly be thrown, but one scene representing a street; a man comes
on--not, mind you, in a real smock-frock, but in something that suggests
one--and sings of how he came up to London, and was "cleaned out" by
thieves. Simple, you will say; yes, but better than a _fricassee_ of
_Faust_, garnished with hags, imps, and blue flame; better, far better
than a drawing-room set at the St. James's, with an exhibition of passion
by Mrs. and Mr. Kendal; better, a million times better than the cheap
popularity of Wilson Barrett--an elderly man posturing in a low-necked
dress to some poor slut in the gallery; nor is there in the hall any
affectation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a
broken-winded barrel-organ playing _a, che la morte_, bad enough in
prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more than
natural deformity--but bright quips and cracks fresh from the back-yard of
the slum where the linen is drying, or the "pub" where the unfortunate wife
has just received a black eye that will last her a week. That inimitable
artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so curiously accentuated that
it is sublimated, that it is no longer repellent vulgarity but art, choice
and rare--see, here she comes with "What cheer, Rea; Rea's on the job." The
sketch is slight, but is welcome and refreshing after the eternal
drawing-room and Mrs. Kendal's cumbrous domesticity; it is curious, quaint,
perverted, and are not these the _aions_ and the attrib