and a democracy, people with titles and vaunted lineage, and the vulgar herd of Smiths, Browns, Joneses, and Robinsons.

Now, mark the difference of the vitality of these. The latter increase and multiply so vigorously that they are overspreading the earth. The aristocracy, on the other hand, are dying out like petted poodle-dogs, and those breeds of fancy poultry, the hens of which cannot hatch their own eggs.

The British House of Lords, in spite of the artificial efforts to drag in collateral branches to the family titles, cannot maintain its numbers without continual reinforcement from picked specimens of the most energetic of the democracy. There are some exceptions of course, some very energetic peers descended from a long line of peers; but a curiously large proportion of these are of mixed blood, owing to ancestral marriage with an actress, or the daughter of a wealthy self-made citizen, or other so-called "mésalliance." The rest really belong to the working classes, in spite of their titles. Their fathers have been hard-working politicians or working sportsmen, or, in a few rare cases, hard students.

Ergo. Every human being should earn his or her daily bread by daily work; the inheritance of such an amount of wealth as shall render a man or a woman a mere purposeless pleasure-seeker is a most degrading curse. The unemployed of Belgravia and May Fair are more to be pitied than those of Whitechapel. The latter may get work presently; the poodles are hopeless.

The Anglo-Saxon race is now the richest in the world. This great wealth will become a blessing or a curse, according to its distribution. All legislation should be based on this fundamental theorem.

A

THE DEGENERATION OF TOWNS-PEOPLE.

PAPER by J. Milner Fothergill, M.D., read, like that referred to in the last note, in the Anthropological Section of the Association, on “The Effect of Town Life upon the Human Body,” is closely connected with the above. Dr. Fothergill describes the effects of a few generations of town life, and tells us that "pulmonary phthisis and Bright's disease seem Dame Nature's means of weeding out degenerating town dwellers. The offspring of urban residents are another race from their cousins who remain in the country. The latter are large-limbed, stalwart, fair-haired Anglo-Danes, while their urban cousins are smaller, slighter, darker beings, of an earlier and lowlier ethnic form, and resembling the Celto-Iberian race. And amidst

this general reversion we can recognise a distinct liver-reversion to the early primitive uric acid formation of the bird and the reptile."

This is serious. It does not, of course, apply to the middleclasses of London and other great towns, as they, for the most part, have suburban or country residences, and many of their sons are athletes; but in all the crowded districts, where the inhabitants work and sleep in crowds, the description is too true, and the numbers of these are becoming so great as to constitute a great national calamity.

I have no hesitation in affirming that we have too much trade, too much commerce, too much manufacturing supremacy. In order to obtain our ordinary food we import raw cotton from America or India, card it, spin it, weave it into fabrics, and then send it over the seas again in exchange for agricultural produce, much of which might, and would be, grown at home if our home land were cultivated like that of the countries from which we thus obtain such food.

Farming, as I explained in this Magazine in April 1886, has become a lost art here. Our so-called farmers are, for the most part, mere graziers. Eggs, butter, cheese, fruit, bacon, and everything else demanding high farming, such farming as yields the greatest produce from the land by employing the greatest amount of labour, are disgracefully neglected.

In the essay above referred to, I predicted more and more trouble from town mobs, from both unemployed and ill-employed, i.e., from the men who by our ruinous system of big tenant farming are driven from the country to the slums, and these become the "roughs" whose roughness is just proportionate to their original rural vigour.

The egg and poultry business alone, if carried out to the extent of putting an end to the absurdity of importing such produce, would occupy the whole of the really unemployed of London, and all our other great towns, but it never has and never will succeed on large farms. Small freehold or very long leasehold labouring farmers are the only farmers who will attend personally to the petty details of this most productive of all farming, which gives employment and remuneration acre for acre to about ten times as many hands as mutton and beef growing on permanent pastures. England, which should develop into a garden, is reverting to the condition of a prairie.

M. MATTIEU WILLIAMS.

VOL, CCLXIII. NO. 1884.

TABLE TALK.

REALISM IN ART.

IN a recent lecture on the Real and the Ideal in Modern Fiction

to

subject, made a good if obvious point in asserting that to the narrator who is an artist, absolute realism is impossible. In modern days realism is made an excuse for showing people what they are very properly indisposed to see. It was different when the words realism and idealism were first discussed by Hegel and the German writers on Estheticism. Since that time literature has stooped in the name of realism to pick up the vilest language of the gutter and to depict the actions which humanity has the instinct to veil. It is pleasant to see that the so-called realism is already falling into evil odour and is disclaimed and resented even in the land of its origin. Meanwhile, as regards art, its influence is demonstrably deleterious. Take the art of dramatic exposition. The action on the stage is after all mimic. "We do but poison in jest," as Hamlet says, and while this is so, the farther back the feeling that all is unreal is carried the easier is it to win the acceptance of a cultivated audience. In favour, in the case of tragedy, of the old curtain with the legend "A Street in Verona," much may be urged. Where by the talent of scene painters and an employment of the various resources of the stage a scene in a foreign town is reproduced to the life, a further burden is thrown upon the actors who do not fit the dresses they wear nor the scenes amid which they move. In the framework of the stage the sign that the whole action is unreal is, of course, shown to the observer. Observers are few, and the mimic action has before now been interrupted by a too imaginative spectator who has supposed that the murder of Desdemona is being actually accomplished, or that the William of Black-Eyed Susan is really in danger from the law. Over the combination of the real and the ideal men will wrangle for centuries to come, unless, as some scientists surmise, a change of physical condition may relegate man, with all his aspirations and his opinions, to nothingness and glacialize not only the planet on which he moves but

the sun from which the system draws its warmth. The temporary ascendancy of realism in art is already, however, over and analysis of realism moral and physical is not to be the sole occupation of the novelist of the future.

I'

MR. IRVING AND M. COQUELIN.

T is not often that the opportunity is afforded of contemplating in the same character two actors of different nationalities, each of whom stands in his own country at the top of his profession. Such an opportunity has, however, been afforded the London playgoer by the appearance of M. Coquelin in "Le Juif Polonais" of MM. Erckmann-Chatrian, the original of "The Bells." Mr. Irving's position in the front of his art is now no longer disputed. Since the withdrawal from the Comédie Française of MM. Regnier and Bressant, M. Coquelin disputes in comedy the supremacy with M. Got. Upon seeing these two actors playing the character of Mathias, or Mathis, in the play of MM. Erckmann-Chatrian, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the personality of an actor pervades his work to such an extent as almost to overpower that of the author. How, otherwise, could two actors present the same character under aspects diametrically opposite? Mathias, with Mr. Irving, is little lower than Macbeth: Mathis, with M. Coquelin, is little, from the moral stand-point, higher than Robert Macaire. Both have committed a murder, and both have stopped short at one. Here are the only points in common. Brooding over his solitary crime Mathias finds life one prolonged sorrow, and, with all the affection and respect in which he is held, is a moody man, consumed by fruitless penitence and pursued, with unrelenting steps, by the Fates. Mathis, on the contrary, is a cheerful and humorous, if sordid, ruffian, who rubs his hands over the manner in which he has gulled his dolts of neighbours, and chuckles gleefully as he counts his ill-gotten gains. He is afraid of being found out, though he regards such a calamity as improbable; his pleasures are animal, and, at best, social, and his very violence is that of a low and furtive nature.

D

Two OPPOSITE SCHOOLS FOR ACTING.

IFFERENCES such as these point, of course, to essentially opposite views of art. Mr. Irving thus, whether the character be Shylock, or Mathias, or Eugene Aram, treats the whole from an imaginative stand-point and attaches to himself all the sympathy it

can possibly claim. M. Coquelin, on the contrary, is a realist, and with justifiable reliance upon his own consummate art dispenses with sympathy altogether. Always happiest when he presents insolence and vulgarity in alliance, it may be with sagacity he assigns Mathis no humanising trait. It is wholly for his own sake and in no wise for his daughter's that he selects Christian as her spouse. He has no superfluous geniality towards his neighbours, no excessive warmth towards his own belongings. He is most enamoured of his own ability and his conscience leaves him free from trouble. Upon the relative merits of these conceptions it is bootless to speak. Their reception, moreover, in England is a matter of no consequence. When M. Coquelin appeared as Mathis the ground was occupied. Used to the glowing performances of Mr. Irving, the public had no taste for the subtleties of his successor. What is wanting, perhaps, to give the experiment full interest is that Mr. Irving should play Mathias in Paris, and see if, after the presentations of MM. Tallien, Paulin Ménier, Dumaine, and Coquelin, his reading would find acceptance. As to the opinion of the authors of the play that is a foregone conclusion. The character they conceived, though it may not be exactly that presented by M. Coquelin, is at least wholly unlike the conception of Mr. Irving. This does not in the least detract from the right of Mr. Irving to form a view of his own, nor from the merit of the exposition he affords.

M

CHRISTMAS CARDS.

ESSRS. HILDESHEIMER & FAULKNER send me some specimens of their various artistic works for the coming Christmas season, including dainty Christmas cards of novel design, autograph cards in boxes, illustrated books in prose and verse, some printed in colours and some in monochrome, &c. All are good, and most of them very good indeed. Notwithstanding their high quality, the majority are far from dear, and the most exacting of present-buyers cannot fail to find something to suit him in this varied collection.- Mr. Bennet, of Queen Street, Cheapside, also sends some hand-painted cards, which are both novel and attractive.

SYLVANUS URBAN.

Spottiswoode & Co. Printers, New-street Square, London