rescues national politics from the dictation of the spoilsmen so long as all these reservoirs of spoils remain. They permit the building up of organizations of voters lacking common principles and held together only by the cohesive power of patronage. These organizations in turn make up the national parties and stand for such small measure of ideas as can be rescued from the conflict of their local opinions, controlled chiefly by an eye on local spoils. Not until the whole field of politics, local as well as national, is freed from this misuse of government to build up party machinery can national parties be made effective instruments for carrying out political principles.

The British parliamentary system facilitates the division of the electorate on single, sharply defined issues. There questions of local administration and struggles for local power are largely separated from national politics and the voter's attention can be concentrated on the single matter of choosing his representation in the House of Commons, while here the voter is confronted by a complication of National, State and municipal considerations and by the necessity of selecting a large number of officials at the same time. Consequently his party alignment may mean little or nothing as an index of opinion. Yet England found the corruption of patronage threatening to destroy the free play of opinion and the achievement of the national political will. Even before the passage of the Reform Bill a beginning of examinations was made in self defense by officers to prevent the destruction of their own administration by the pressure of their own party incompetents. Now the competitive system practically excludes partisanship from administrative work. Far more is it necessary for the United States, with its highly complex political machinery, to free public opinion from the deadening influence of patronage and office from the burden of incompetence.

This is not the fad of Civil Service reformers, a dream of Utopia. It is a programme that, wherever applied, has made for more efficient and more representative government. It must be the vital concern of American democracy, unless democracy is ready to see its ideals stifled and its substance wasted by the administrative machinery created for its service.

ROSCOE C. E. BROWN.

CIVILIZATION AND THE FRENCH

THEATRE

BY STARK YOUNG

THE characteristically national art of the theatre in France, which is that of the Comédie Française, goes back to the Mediterranean. It derives from the Greek. Its outlines may be less august and spacious; its plastic quality infinitely less magnificent; its religion less profound and less political than the Greek; but the kinship remains. In smaller, and certainly in different, forms its instinct for finish parallels the Greek instinct. Its thinking turns on a sense of forces operant in the universe, or in society at least, that act upon individuals and bring on their struggle with themselves and with law or fate or universal nature. The action of these forces together determines the outlines of life, and within these outlines are included the nuance and detail of every individual and event. Art, following such a conception of the world, goes therefore to types, to large patterns within which are included and expressed the variety of human experience.

This classical conception of living is like those charts of mariners that lead to conceived and desired ends, to harbors and over tracks that have been plotted out. Under these lines of purpose and direction lies the sea, a ceaseless, ungoverned passion of energy and eternal power, an unfathomed and inexhaustible mystery of being, a boundless vitality and danger. But the chart remains and man's navigation may be informed by it. There are ports foreseen and attainable for the voyage he must make, whatever his will is or the weariness and perplexity of his heart. The art that follows such a conception is by its own nature driven to find its charts and possible ways. It plots out, above the immense and inexhaustible sources of human nature and living, an order, a plan, a course in art that will bring us to rational and sweet harbors, and into ports and havens from which we may look out over the ocean with some consolation of under

standing. From such habits of thought arose the Greek conception of an art of society for the sake of men's existence among themselves and in the midst of nature; the Greek irony when the mind turns on things not as they might be but as they are; the Greek sense of play as a further completion of living and a release of man's redundant vitality. From such conceptions as these derives the simplicity as of the universal soul and the exactitude of mind that characterizes the best Greek art of every kind.

The French classical theatre may be smaller in scope than the Greek. Its quality in general may have been trimmed down to the prose uses of a more limited realm of living. Its sophistication may be more trivial, its emotion often more relaxed to mere excitation, and its idealism too much softened with mere sentiment. It may have specialized itself into a limited channel, and chattered itself into something of an intellectual corner so far as European thought goes. Its whole end may be more petty and commercial than was the Greek. But the resemblance and kinship is there nevertheless. It comes out even in the acting of artists like Mlle. Sorel and her company, none of whom, obviously, are of the rank of the greatest French actors like Bernhardt and Mounet Sully. And it comes out even in so poor an example of French drama as le Demi-Monde by Dumas fils. If a young dreamer from Vermont came to see Mlle. Sorel and her company in le Demi-Monde-He is a fine instance, the ideal in his kind, not the usual young man from his part of the country. That usual young man is like him at bottom, perhaps; the difference is in sensibility, in exactitude and delicacy of response to experience. This young fellow is poetic. His life has been passed on a farm. He has made up his dreams from the hills and from long hours on winter nights. His mind has shaped itself without sharp and open contact with other minds. His soul is haunted with a reflective and personal relation to God. From him—though his case is limited and extreme and deep-you will get a racial reaction to this Dumas, Sorel and Parisian occasion that will express the fundamental difference and remoteness that lies between us and this French art of the theatre. This young man has an approach to Shakespeare. He does not yet understand, and never will, very likely, Shakespeare's complexity of

ornament and delight in mere mentality. But the core of Shakespeare is close to him. The art of his own race is as close to him as the French is far.

smart be

She is the She talks.

The curtain rises on le Demi-Monde. The young man sees a group of persons of Parisian society and the Parisian under-world. The heroine is a woman who wishes to make an honest and profitable marriage and change her way of living. A rich man comes back from Africa; her former lover introduces her to him. There is in the group a young girl, sophisticated but still pure or virginal or whatever may be the way of putting this intact state that she preserves. The older woman's marriage plans all but work out; after lies, evasions, she will tell her lover the truth. But in the end she gives it all up so that the young girl may marry the man who was once her own lover. The Vermonter reads this inconsequent state of affairs in the synopsis that the programme ⚫affords; his ear is deaf to the French he hears on the stage. He has no time to be puzzled, for Mlle. Sorel enters. She spreads around her a sensation. Her walk, her manner, her gown, bands of fur and a fabric of dark rose with inwoven gold, are yond words. Even her boots are to be reckoned with. first really chic person the Vermonter has ever seen. Her voice is something he has never heard before. ticed, it has a range in pitch, in quality; it is bright, dark, it can be metallic, white; it can think things over without words at all but in an extraordinary humming resonance. The second act comes; more manners. Mlle. Sorel wears now a gown of bluish green gold cloth, with panniers and silver lace, and a cloak hanging back like eighteenth century portraits, of greenish, indescribable blue, with a grey fur collar. She is golden, she is fair, her smile, her hair, her hands, her sitting there listening, everything is heightened with the lustre of Parisian arts. In the third act a marvellous pale gown, then yet another, and another still in the last scene when the tragic renunciation comes, a gown of gold cloth, very dark, and a hat turned up in front with a lace veil over the face, covering the eyes in fact. And more of the glamorous boots. Mlle. Sorel has become the play, almost. She moves in and out there on the scene like a varnished pearl. She is like a mannequin from some milliner in heaven.

It is prac

The young man sees the play, however, though distractedly. It moves evidently in a world made up for the occasion. It patters through a Parisian atmosphere that is depraved and idealistic at the same time. It paints a world that is sordid and eloquent, short-sighted and intelligent, vain and witty. These characters on this stage are hard, they are low, but plainly they love beauty, and especially beauty in ideas. The gamut is run of seduction, compromising letters, jeune fille, and a sudden and rather thin rhetoric of self-sacrifice. The conflict portrayed is not human, it is schematic. The struggle is between the author's plan for a plot and the puppets he has invented and intends to make carry the plot through. This play has a certain worldly wisdom. It has no shadows, no flood of unseen living. It has sentiment, logic, but no creation. It has the logic of character, of events, of desire. It does not copy life's externals, the actual surroundings of the world set forth, which the Vermonter might, even without experience in it, recognize in part as true. It does not reveal life's inner truth. And yet, as the young man perceives, this stage piece takes its own course; it winds up, strikes its hour, and unwinds.

In all of it, about the whole business, the young Anglo-Saxon sees no merit whatever. In the face of it he feels rustic, rural, lonely, misunderstood, though he does not precisely recognize these emotions for what they are. He resents this French procedure. It seems to him cruel. It seems hard. It evidently is a result that comes only from long practice, expertness, learned economy. But why work so hard and arrive at such an empty thing as this? This only gets in the way of any truth about life. As for Mlle. Sorel, he sees that she is not beautiful, or young any more. And her face is wide in the cheek bones, her hair thinnish, her mouth large. But there is the effect, nevertheless; there is all the self-possession that implies charm, distinction, beauty. The paint, the blond powder, the black lines running out from the upper eyelids like a languishing portrait, the jewels, the variety of gowns and slippers which he can hear the women in the seats behind him discussing with Mlle. Sorel's every appearance, all these give an effect. But why get an effect that is no longer woman, no longer natural? In the tragic places Mlle. Sorel, and