overs the sky beyond the spires, and Faust eturns. Students pass in a neighboring street inging, and three girls come running in the ate, to stand still and watch, and then shut t softly, only to open it a second time and watch again. Some one within the little house bights the evening lamp. It is all as real and eautiful as life itself. In just such a garden many a trusting maiden has been wooed and ron by twilight in Nuremberg.

(2 On the Brocken Mr. Irving could not be realstic, as he could in the streets or gardens of Nuremberg. But in another sense realism was ossible. Goethe, by the words of Mephistophles and the witches, describes very vividly the cenes of the wild Walpurgis night, and many re the medieval legends on the subject. To eproduce his picture and to show the Blockserg under the conditions peculiar to Mayight revels, was therefore Mr. Irving's task. When the curtain first rises it is dark along he labyrinth of vales and rocky ramparts. Great crags are to the right; to the left is an byss overshadowed by rude fir-trees. As Faust und Mephistopheles appear and climb toilsomely pward from the cavern to the crag, the moon with its belated glow breaks through the louds. Weird, uncanny creatures fly through the air. The tempest raves, the forest grinds and cracks; but above the whistling and surging of the storm voices ring high, singing now near, now far, until along the mountainside the infuriate glamouring song sweeps as the witches, young and old, horrible and beautiful, in strange unearthly draperies, come slowly winding up from the depths below. They crowd and push and roar and clatter. Faust and Mephistopheles stand apart on the high cliff, and istopheles stand apart on the high cliff, and away above all loom up their shadows on the sky beyond, great specters of the Brocken. One dance ends only that another may begin, but at last Mephistopheles leaves the apes he has been caressing and bids the revelers begone. There is nothing more powerful than this single scene,one minute a wild shrieking, singing crowd of misty shapes, moving hither and thither, clambering over the rocks and up the trees, dancing and turning; the next, after one last shriek, wilder, shriller than the rest, a silent, storm-beaten mountain-top deserted but for one flaming form. Then, sum

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moning them once more, he himself plunges into the midst of the reveling. Now the dreary light, that has been strangely glimmering, here glows through film and haze, there sweeps in rolling vapor; now creeps like a thread, now leaps and plays, lighting up the great mountain and all the rugged slopes, and finally gushes forth, a shower of fiery rain, over the wild and howling crowd of witches, while the rocky ramparts on all their heights are set ablaze. Thus is the ideal Brocken of the poem realized on the stage, and, hardened play-goer that you are, you cannot but shudder as the curtain falls.

POSTSCRIPT. Since the above was written,

Mr. Irving has kept the promise he made on the evening of the first performance of "Faust," and

has added the Witches' Kitchen to the other scenes. We do not, however, think this an Faust, it is true, is excellent. Instead of the improvement. The gradual transformation of sudden change to which the opera has accustomed us, we see, as in the Chippewa upon the advance of youth. There is one legend, old age by slow degrees disappear second when Faust stands with the fresh, beaubrow cling the snowy locks of age; then he tiful face of a young man, while around his throws off all the weight of years with his

traditional transformation, that operatic managers would do well in this particular to imitate Mr. Irving. But from a pictorial standpoint the new scene has but little merit.

cloak. The effect is so much finer than the usual

St. Lorenz Platz, the little wine-shop with its In the scene that immediately follows on the St. Lorenz Platz, the little wine-shop with its wrought-iron-work scroll and bush has gone, and the foreground is bare and uninteresting. It is only right to add that, on the other cathedral to the opposite house in the midhand, the great buttress springing from the dle distance, and the hilly street beyond, are more effective than the back-ground which they have replaced. But all the lovely grouping, the meeting of the burghers, the lingering crowd at the cathedral door,the idle gossiping, which were by far the most beautiful of the Lyceum"Faust" pictures, have been sacrificed for a novelty unworthy of them.

Joseph and Elizabeth R. Pennell.

has been largely acclaimed and still more largely witnessed; it has had one of the longest of long runs, which, at the moment these words are written, shows no signs of abating. To the richness and ingenuity of the spectacle innumerable pens will have testified. The critic gives his impression, and that impression has been abundantly uttered. There is another one which also naturally has its turn. The mise-en-scène in the light of the acting, and the acting in the light of the mise-en-scène, are the respective halves of the interesting question. It is with the second half only that we ourselves are concerned.

In this connection the first thing that strikes us is a certain perversity in the manner in which Mr. Irving has approached and regarded his task, a perversity most singular on the part of a manager to whom the interests of the dramatic art have long appeared to be so dear. Saying to himself that he would give great attention to the machinery of the piece, he omitted to indulge at the same time in this indispensable reflection, that to prevent the impression of triviality which might easily arise from an abuse of pantomimic effects, he should take care to put at the service of the great story a consummate interpretation; to see that Faust and Margaret and Martha, as well as Mephistopheles, were embodied in such a manner as to enable them to hold up their heads and strike their respective notes in the midst of the wilderness of canvas and paint. To the canvas and paint-since he feels Goethe's poem, or indeed simply the wondrous legend, in that way; or even, as we may say, since he feels in that way the manner in which Mr. Wills feels Goethe and the legend -he was perfectly welcome; but surely he ought to have perceived that, given the grandly poetic, ironic, but at the same time very scantily dramatic nature of his drama; given the delicacy and subtlety of a work of genius of the complexion of " Faust," special precautions should be taken against the accessories seeming a more important part of the business than the action. Evidently, however, Mr. Irving argued indirectly the opposite way. It is as if he had said that he would pile the accessories so high that the rest of the affair would n't matter, it would be regarded so little.

It would n't matter, in the first place, that Mr. Wills should have turned him out an arrangement of Goethe so meager, so common, so trivial (one really must multiply epithets to express its inadequacy), that the responsibility of the impresario to the poet increased tenfold, rather than diminished, with his accepting it, there being so much more, as it were, to make up for. It would n't matter that from the beginning to the end of the play,

thanks to Mr. Wills's ingenious dissimulation of the fact, it might never occur to the audi tor that he was listening to one of the greatest productions of the human mind. It would n't matter that Mr. Irving should have conceived: and should execute his own part in the spirit of somewhat refined extravaganza; a manner which should differ only in degree from that of the star of a Christmas burlesque,—without breadth, without depth, with little tittering ef fects of low comedy. It would n't matter that. Faust should be represented by a young act or, whose general weakness should prevent him, in spite of zealous effort, from giving stat ure and relief to his conception of the character, and whose unformed delivery should interfere in the same degree with his imparting variety of accent to his different speeches. It would n't matter that, with Mr. Wills's version and such an interpretation, the exquisite episode of the wooing of Margaret should hold no place in the play should literally pass unperceived It would n't matter that Miss Ellen Terry, as picturesque and pleasing a figure as usual should give perhaps a stranger exhibition than she has ever given before of her want of art and style, and should play the divine, still concentrated part of Margaret without apparently a suspicion of what it consists. If it would n't matter that Mr. Irving himself should be thin, that Mr. Alexander should be insignificant, that Miss Terry should be rough, and that Mr. Wills should be all three, of course it would matter still less that the two extremely mature actresses who were successively to at tempt Martha should give the English public (so far at least as represented at the Lyceum) a really rare opportunity to respond to bad taste with bad taste, to greet with artless and irrepressi ble glee the strange gruntings and snortings with which the performers in question have seen fit to enrich the character. All these things, to our sense, should have mattered; it was far better that the overtopping scenery should have been sacrificed than that a concession should have been made in regard to the personal rendering of the piece. It was far better that the "points" should remain the points that Goethe made, even if the background had to be bare for it; that the immortal group the scholar with his passions rekindled, the girl who trusts and suffers, and the mocking spell-weaving fiend should hold itself well together, detach itself, and stamp itself strongly, even if the imagination had to do the work of putting in the gardens and spires of the Ger man city, the mists and goblins of the Brocken, and the blue fire that plays about Mephis topheles. Of course if Mr. Irving could both have mounted the play and caused the acting of it to be an equal feature, that would have

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en best of all; but since the personal repsentation of a work at once so pregnant etically and so faulty as a dramatic comsition was the problem to challenge by its very Zifficulties an artist of his high reputation,artist universally acclaimed as leading the blic taste, not as waiting behind its chair, would have consulted best the interests of at reputation by "going in" for a dramatic Edistinguished from a spectacular success. We may as well confess frankly that we atch the most limited importance to the little S echanical artifices with which Mr. Irving has ught to enliven "Faust." We care nothing the spurting flames which play so large a rt, nor for the importunate lime-light which perpetually projected upon somebody or mething. It is not for these things that e go to see the great Goethe, or even or we must, after all, allow for inevitable diluons) the less celebrated Mr. Wills. We even rotest against the abuse of the said lime-light fect: it is always descending on some one rother, apropos of everything and of nothing; is disturbing and vulgarizing, and has nothg to do with the author's meaning. That lue vapors should attend on the steps of Mephistopheles is a very poor substitute for is giving us a moral shudder. That deep note entirely absent from Mr. Irving's rendering f him, though the actor, of course, at moents presents to the eye a remarkably sinister gure. He strikes us, however, as superficial -a terrible fault for an archfiend and his rotesqueness strikes us as cheap. We attach so but the slenderest importance to the scene of the Witches' Sabbath, which has been reluced to a mere bald hubbub of capering, creeching, and banging, irradiated by the irre: ressible blue fire, and without the smallest ariculation of Goethe's text. The scenic effect s the ugliest we have ever contemplated, and its gliness is not paid for by its having a meaning or our ears. It is a horror cheaply conceived, and executed with more zeal than discretion. It seems almost ungracious to say of an actess usually so pleasing as Miss Terry that the falls below her occasion, but it is impossible or us to consider her Margaret as a finished reation. Besides having a strange amateurshness of form (for the work of an actress who has had Miss Terry's years of practice), it is, o our sense, wanting in fineness of concepion, wanting in sweetness and quietness, wanting in taste. It is much too rough-and-ready. We prefer Miss Terry's pathos, however, to her comedy, and cannot but feel that the whole scene with the jewels in her room is a mistake. It is obstreperous, and not in the least in the poetic tone. If the passages in the garden fail of their effect, the respon

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sibility for this is not, however, more than very partially with the Margaret. It is explained in the first place by the fact that the actor who represents Faust is, as we have hinted, not "in it" at all, and in the second by the fact that the conversation between Mephistopheles and Margaret is terribly overaccentedquite out of the frame. Martha's flirtation, especially as Mrs. Stirling plays it, becomes the whole story, and Faust and Margaret are superseded. What can have beguiled Mr. Irving into the extraordinary error of intrusting the part of Marthe first to one and then to another actress of (on this occasion at least) signally little temperance and taste? The fault has been aggravated by being repeated; the opportunity of retrieving it might have been seized when Mrs. Stirling laid down her task. But Mrs. Chippendale has even a heavier hand. We should be sorry to fail of respect to the former actress, who, to-day full of years and honors, has always shown an eminent acquaintance with her art and has been remarkable for a certain oldfashioned richness of humor. As such matters go, on the English stage, she is supposed to have the "tradition." It is to be hoped, however, for the tradition's sake, that she violates it to-day by her tendency to spread, to drag," as the phrase is, to take too much elbow-room. This defect was sufficiently marked when a year or two ago she played the Nurse of Juliet, whom she put sadly out of focus. It is manifested in an even greater degree by her Martha, and it must be said that if she renders the part in the spirit of the tradition, the tradition will on this occasion have been strangely coarse. Yet Mrs. Stirling is distinction itself compared with the displeasing loudness to which her successor treats us; and of this latter lady's acting, it is enough to say that it compelled us to indulge in a melancholy "return" on an audience moved by such means to such mirth. The scene between Mephistopheles and Martha is the most successful of the play, judged by the visible appreciation of the public a fact which should surely minister to deep reflection on the part of those who, as artists, work for the public. All the same, Mr. Irving would have been well advised, from the artistic point of view, in causing Martha, by contact and example, to be represented in a higher style of comedy. We shall not attempt to point out still other instances in which, as it seems to us, he would have been well advised; we have said enough to substantiate our contention that it is not for the interest of the actor's art that it should be too precipitately, or too superficially, assumed that the great elaboration of a play as a spectacle is a complete expression of it—a complete solution of the problem.

OPINIONS OF A TEACHER.

HE musical world is surprised, and the professional portion of it not a little disturbed, by the appearance of a new method of writing and teaching music called the Tonic Sol-fa system. The first impulse of the musician is to condemn and reject the innovation. He issues a bull of excommunication against it, expecting it thereafter to disappear and take its place with the exploded theories and forgotten devices of the past. But presently he finds that his edict has failed to accomplish its purpose. The movement continues to live and shows signs of a boundless vitality. If he is disposed to be fair-minded and just, he then resolves to investigate the system in order to take an intelligent stand for or against it.

From that moment he finds himself the subject of a series of novel sensations, of which the prominent element is surprise. In the first place he is surprised to learn that the system has revolutionized popular music in Great Britain. If he visits that country, he sees its results on every side. He finds it in virtual possession of the Board (public) schools of the kingdom; he finds that all the church and Sunday-school hymnals have editions printed in the peculiar-looking tonic sol-fa notation; many of the churches he hears sung by the congregations music of a high classical character such as only a few of the best-trained choirs in America attempt.

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Being led by the visible results to a closer inspection of the cause, his sensations become even more positive than before. He sees that the educational influences of the system work with equal efficiency downward or upward. It furnishes such easy and natural steps for the elementary study of music as to bring it within reach of the children of the kindergarten, and at the same time supplies a key to the intricacies of higher art which enables the average singer, with but limited time for musical study, to master what the professional musician alone is able to acquire by the staff system. The observer finds vast gatherings of children singing Handel's Messiah and performing marvelous feats in sight-reading, hundreds of amateur societies rendering the most difficult works of the modern composers, unnumbered singers and players pursuing the study of har

mony for the mere pleasure of it; he finds that hereafter music is no more to be limited to the specially musical than the enjoyment of literature to the few who are able to pro duce it.

Music has two distinct sides—the instru mental and the vocal. The instrumental side is exceedingly complex. The complication are represented by the keyboard of a piano a an organ. Twelve scales are to be played, separate manipulation being required for each The form of the scale or the order of its in tervals is preserved by the use of sharps and flatsthe black keys. The staff notation gre into use gradually as an embodiment of a the possible complications of instrumenta music.

The vocal side of the art is, on the contrary of the utmost simplicity. In fact it is, in i earlier stages, rather a language than an an Little children will often use this language, i sing tunes correctly, before they can articu late. To the voice there is practically but on scale instead of twelve. It is, in effect, a mu sical alphabet of eight tones, produced in it different positions with no change of menta impression and no consciousness of sharps o flats. To illustrate: the singer is conscious o no difference between the key of B and th key of C, while the player uses five sharp in playing the former and none at all in play ing the latter. The tonic sol-fa notation is natural outgrowth of the vocal side of music: The following is a brief account of its origi and growth:

In the year 1844 a young nonconformist cler gyman named John Curwen became pastorof Congregational church at Plaistow, in the east ern suburbs of London. He had an unusual love for children, and great faith in music as a means of interesting and improving them. But he was, himself, musically deficient. His deficiency was so marked that a wager was made among his fellow-students at college. that he could not be taught to sing the scale correctly within a given time, Mr. Curwen agreeing to receive a certain amount of drilling each day. The story goes that he accomplished the feat, but with nothing to spare. after years he pursued the study very earnestly, and endeavored to impart to the children of his parish whatever he succeeded in gaining for himself. But the results were far from satisfactory. Hearing of a new method employed by a philanthropic lady at Norwich (Miss

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rah Glover), he visited her school, saw, and as conquered. "Now," said he, "I have a ol to work with."

What he saw in Miss Glover's school was is. Discouraged, as so many have been, in e effort to teach the complicated signs of the aff, she had discarded it altogether, and was ing in its place a notation made up of the itials of the musical syllables; the letter d 0 2 "anding for do, r for re, etc.

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It was the farthest possible from Mr. Curen's thoughts that through this new notaon he was destined to reorganize the whole t of music, but such proved to be the case. is success in teaching the young people of s charge led a few others to make a trial of e novel device. They, in turn, carried the ght to others, and thus the system gradually ained a foothold among the people. But the rogress was very slow, and for a number of ears the work was almost entirely non-profesonal. The movement was the offspring of hilanthropy, and it was long dependent upthat worthy parent for its sustenance and rowth. Every form of prejudice was instinctrely arrayed against it,-religious, for it was humble dissenter, and could lay no claim ither to artistic or apostolic succession; social, or at first it was used chiefly in ragged schools nd among the lower classes; musical, for it set at naught the traditions of the elders, and oldly proposed to show " a better way to he professional scribes and pharisees who ocupied the highest seats in the synagogues. It was indeed, as Mr. Curwen afterward decribed it, "a pariah in the musical world." Yet the bantling exhibited a marvelous vitalty. Discouragement was its meat and drink, nd misfortune was as oil to the flame. Mr. Curwen was

a wise master-builder. His own musical deficiency was made the chief comer-stone of the edifice. Distrusting his personal ability to carry on so great a work, e gathered around him a corps of earnest and able teachers, nearly all of whom were children of the system, and, with their advice and cooperation, he slowly and patiently shaped the method. After realizing the eduCational power of the new notation, it was his aim to develop Miss Glover's device into a complete system, leading by natural steps from the simplest expression of music as a language to its highest revelation as an art. Being a born educator, he saw that the instrumental notation of music, the staff, needed a vocal notation as an interpreter. He also saw that the familiar musical syllables invented by Guido d'Arezzo eight centuries ago furnish the groundwork of a perfect notation for the singer, and thus create a natural highway through the world

of music.

His published works are voluminous, covering all musical facts and principles, from the first lesson as given to a little child up to the most abstruse law of acoustics as set forth by Helmholtz and other eminent scientists.

The details of Mr. Curwen's work do not fall within the purpose of this sketch. The following are the leading features of the subsequent history:

A partial failure of his health compelled him to give up his pastorate, and his time was thenceforth devoted exclusively to perfecting the tonic sol-fa system and to extending the movement, till it became, as .the London "Times" expressed it," the only national and popular system of teaching vocal music worthy of the name."

In 1851 he began the publication of the "Tonic Sol-fa Reporter," which has since continued as a monthly journal, and the official organ of the movement. The work spread quietly among the people, and was unknown to the general public till the year 1857, when a concert was given, with a chorus of three thousand children, in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. An audience of thirty thousand was called together by the novelty, and one of the London papers said: "It was left for an almost unknown institution to draw a larger concourse of persons than has ever been attracted in this country to a musical performance."

This extraordinary success at once lifted the movement into national importance.

During the following year a concert was given in Exeter Hall, which, in a different way, exercised an equally effective influence in favor of the system. The programme was made up entirely of classical music, to show that the notation is as useful in high art as in elementary work. The first concert won the favor of the general public, the second, of cultivated musicians, and thus the whole ground was practically covered.

In 1867 a chorus of seventy tonic sol-fa singers went to Paris with their conductor, Mr. J. Proudman, to take part in a musical competition in connection with the International Exhibition. They won a triumphant_success. Their singing excited the utmost enthusiasm. A special laurel-wreath was bestowed upon them by the Emperor, with a gold medal, a diploma, and the badge of the Orpheonists of France. Their return to London was equally triumphant. They were accorded a public reception by the most eminent musicians of the kingdom, who thus gave a recognition which some had been slow to concede to what they regarded as a musical heresy.

To gain possession of the Board schools was naturally a prominent desire of the pro