lently, you have, along, of course, with other performances, the spectacle of the tableau vivant-the one thing which the musichall has borrowed from the drawing-room; and it was fair, no doubt, that the music-hall should borrow that one thing, for it has lent the drawing-room the skirt dance, even the high kick,' which, for a year at least, was as fashionable as philanthropy, and as much de rigueur as 'slumming.'.

I said that the tableau vivant had been borrowed from the drawing-room; but, in borrowing it, the display of the nude figure has, of course, been added to-that is to say, the paid model, accustomed to the poses of the studio, has, under artistic direction, exhibited her form to all the world in a degree which the best-endowed of amateurs would doubtless hesitate to follow. And in this has been found cause of offence-cause even of busy complaint on the part of the Puritan, for whom restriction, fussy interference, a narrow and continual forbidding, is as the very breath of life, and who is never altogether comfortable unless he is employed in palliating the mistakes of Providence and energetically bettering the arrangements of God.

That, in a word, expresses, and more effectually perhaps than by elaborate argument, my own view as to the wisdom and reasonableness of the opposition to the tableau vivant at the music-halls. I have no great opinion of the refinement of music-hall audiences. It is beyond a doubt that music-hall audiences-like modern theatrical audiences will stand the very riskiest of jokes. But somehow sight and apprehension are on a different footing; and just as no audience at an English theatre would endure the action of certain Parisian couchers,' or the action in a piece called Le Dindon at the Palais Royal this May, so no audience at an English music-hall would tolerate any show of undeniable indecency. Before the intervention of the Puritan became necessary, the public itself would have interfered. But, in the matter of the tableau vivant, the public rightly recognised what the Puritan ignored-that the nude in a tableau vivant, with all its accessories, with all its associations, is no longer an undressed woman, but the nude in art-the nude to be seen, therefore, with something, at least, of artistic appreciation of refined colour and of ordered and intricate line.

At the Empire and the Alhambra, from which I do not say that tableaux vivants are excluded, you have the yet greater spectacle of the Dance; the dance organised and performed upon a scale that makes the ballet of the opera a comparatively insignificant thing. I am not talking of the art of the single dancer. That may be seen probably almost as well in one place as in another. I am talking of the ballet en masse; the great concerted dance of every kindchahut (which is the pretty word for 'cancan '), minuet, gavotte,

Most dulcet giga, dreamiest saraband.

These two great variety theatres, the Alhambra and the Empire, have, in the matter of the Dance, conquered new worlds. One or two hundred dancers move or pause on their vast stages with a strange charm of ordered colour, which at first you think you are speaking of with perhaps a little flattery if you compare it with the charm of a cowslip meadow, the charm of a tulip garden, the charm of a tract of bluebells among the greenery of a wood in May. But by the comparison, so far as intricate and ordered colour is concerned, you are guilty of an injustice—an injustice not to Nature but to the modern dance. These things are arranged by great. artists in scenic effect. And their art is a new thing. Nature, I understand, is stationary; but their art improves with each new effort.

Of course, along with these organised splendours, whether of the tableau or the dance, the three great music-halls to which I have thus far confined my comments, have availed themselves, and have profited by availing themselves, of single 'turns' of exceptional-in some cases of temporary-public fascination. At one place you may have some incarnation of animal spirits and of telling eccentricity. At another, the svelte grace of a true young actress may be the medium for the mimicry of styles and ways that the young woman has noticed all around her. At a third-this time the Empire-it may be Yvette Guilbert with whom, as in Les Ingénues, or in the Demoiselles de Pensionnat, you are invited to laugh, and with whom you remain to weep almost, certainly to be most strongly moved by, as, fresh from the blithe Ambassadeur's,' she, in a sombre tale of outer Boulevards and nocturnal horrors,

Sings

The pity of unpitied human things.

It is a charitable view, at least, that even upon the stage of the music-hall no great reputation is acquired that is not, or that has not been, to some extent, deserved. Yvette Guilbert's reputation is deserved at all events, so magnetic is her personality, so varied her art. In the favour of a large public-not altogether in critical estimation, however, and not at all in the esteem of those whom the occasional violation of good taste distresses-one or two women (children, as I suppose, of Central London) take a place by Yvette Guilbert's side. No London hall is too important for them to be welcomed in. They prosper in the heart of things; they prosper in the suburbs. 'By the pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes,' say the Witches in Macbeth-anticipating them. I am an old-fashioned person, and, I confess, their songs are not the songs that I would take any woman, of gentle or good mind, to listen to.

Incomparably the most reticent and finished artist among the men of the music-halls, is still Mr. Albert Chevalier. He has gone to

America, to make the polite society of Fifth Avenue and the coster of the Bowery and Fulton Market familiar with the coster of the Old Kent Road and the coster of Hoxton. Very clever as are two or three at least of the men who do low comedy in ways of their own in London halls, from the Eastern Empire at Bow to the Washington at Battersea, no one throws for a minute into the background-no one allows us to forget the gently incisive art of Mr. Chevalier, more especially as he exercised it before any one of his subjects became lachrymose--as he exercised it in Mrs. 'Enry 'Awkins, in the Little Nipper, and even if you like (though that was on the confines of exaggerated pathos) in My Old Dutch. I always used to think the Little Nipper was the greatest triumph of all. The pride of the man in his precocious offspring-the children of the streets are always, like Portia herself, as Shylock said of her, 'so much more elder' than their years the quick-witted audacity and cheek' of the little lad to whom nothing is denied, when he affectionately and confidently asserts equality with his parents-these were in the Little Nipper so accurately observed, so very finely rendered.

It is right to say, of course, that the stage of the music-hall may fairly boast two or three other men whose performances are vivid, amusing, not wanting in good taste, and who observe life and render it.

But then at the music-hall the list is so short a one of men whom we can praise at all with cordiality. In the regular theatre, when you leave the masters, you find, beneath their rank, dozens and scores of serious, not unworthy students. At the music-hall, below the rank of the big men, you find, I must suppose, here and there a man who has something of his own to give you that you can enjoy and even profit by. But you find him rarely. No. The moment in which I have praised warmly is the very moment for saying that the men, generally, at the music-halls—I mean the singing men and the comedians, not the gymnasts and athletes who give the musichall a certain raison d'être, and bring into the Strand and Leicester Square an Olympic game,' as it were, up to date and fitted for the needs of London-that the men, generally, at the music-halls (unless, indeed, they are to be judged from the point of view of the gallery) are incomparably tiresome, incomparably dull-not seldom even revolting.

In discussing women-in estimating something of their charm. upon the stage, if not exactly in weighing their pure artistic merit— it may be that the average frequenter of the halls and the occasional visitor, whose interest in an art may be presumed to be more serious, stand more on common ground. The fact may bring a little undue tenderness into the verdict; but is it, after all, unfair, and is it not, at all events, true that the ladies of the music-hall profession do reach at least a higher average of charm and of attainment than the men? Here of course the accomplishment of the dance comes in, and

must be taken account of, as well as a certain amount of talent, which rarely, I fear, reaches to high accomplishment,' in vocalisation or comedy. Very few indeed of the music-hall singers (I am talking now of the ladies) would appear to have ever thought it necessary, in their song, to add Art to Nature--to have studied voice-production. And either the quality of the voice is often pitiably unmusical, or it is strained to hold its own against the too loud accompaniment of the band, or it is practically sacrificed to jerky, loud effects and gestures supposed to be telling. There are, of course, certain exceptions-amongst them, one or two young people whose romping songs, whose graceful dances, have brought them lately from the Music-Hall to the Dramatic Stage.

The halls contain, no doubt, a fair proportion of young women whose intelligence includes humour. Here and there one of them, possessed of the seven devils of her music-hall energy, triumphantly cultivates the eccentric and bizarre. But the stage of the halls does not, it seems, present us with many women whose sense of humour is made manifest by any exhibition of their own observation of life; and vivacity, sometimes natural, sometimes forced-animal spirit or the semblance of it-may have to take the place of the real sense of comedy.

Here and there again-it may be in their occasional excursions into pantomime-one sees, in this or that young artist,' spontaneous fun and happy humour, more range, more delicate capacity than the music-hall has ever permitted her to show. And then one hopes, of course, that the Stage proper will become that artist's recognised and customary place.

But let me take my reader into my confidence, and tell him, now, that when I venture to express a pious hope of this sort, I never feel quite sure that it will be shared at all, or at all appreciated, by whatever person happens to be the subject of it. For there comes in that which we have always with us-there comes the great question of money; and it needs a pure theatrical success, important, unmistakable, quite out of the common, to permit to gifted youth at the theatre any such receipts as may be gathered by rushing over the town in a professional's brougham, and dancing at three halls every evening. And now that I have raised the question of money, let it be said incidentally that the receipts of the profession vary almost beyond the limits in which they vary in any other calling. There are those who hold themselves, or whose managers hold them, not insufficiently remunerated by the salary of an ordinary ballet-girl— about a guinea and a half a week. Four hundred a week was paid, I think, this season, to Yvette Guilbert at the Empire; and it is said that Chevalier has been able to refuse an engagement which would have brought him in eight thousand a year.

As for the order of dancing seen at the music-halls-except for

some survivals at the Empire and Alhambra-most of it is French, or has, at least, affinity with French methods rather than with the Italian operatic dancing for which La Scala yet remains the greatest training-place. The French say it takes ten years to make a fine comedian. We English have it-although Miss Vera Beringer is going to prove the saying untrue-that nobody is fit to play Juliet till she is unable any longer to look it.' And in Italy they say-the masters at La Scala say-it takes ten years to learn to do much more upon your toes than other people do upon the soles of their feet. The Italian art, however, such as it is-and I am bound to say that, perhaps because I am ignorant, I am not particularly fond of it is something more than painfully acquired agility. The merit of such dancing is not obvious. It wants a trained spectator as well as a trained performer. It is a conventional art, in which every movement has a meaning the Italians understand. It is a language of the stage which has been handed down, like Masonic secrets. But, as has been implied already, there is perhaps no reason to be sorry for what must be described as its decline in England. In the English or French skirt or step dance, there is more grace, more joy. At least these give us the quick and lissom and unfettered movement of the whole elegant figure, and swaying lines of supple drapery, and changeful hues.

At music-halls,the songs, or those with the best chances of being popular, are written, chiefly, by only two or three writers; and to this fact sometimes is attributed what must be called their painful monotony, or, at the least, unhappy paucity, of theme. You have the mother-in-law, and the mother-in-law, of course, is a nuisance and an obstacle. You have the deceiving husband. You have the deceived, or the deceiving, wife. Every one, it seems, is busy in doing that which he pretends not to be doing, yet which all the world assumes that he is certain to do. Along with these outworn themes, from which one would fain seek relief in some fresh observation of life and of the passing manners of the day, you have, occasionally, if the hall is 'popular' rather than fashionable, some very broad compliment to what are called the working classes' as the base-the inevitable, priceless, base-of society's column; and you have, in times especially of excitement, appeals to patriotism, some of which are sound, but some of which make one think of M. de la Rochefoucauld's remark that there are 'few of us who have not sufficient strength to bear the misfortunes'-yes, even if those misfortunes be the wounds and death-' of other people.' The effect of familiarity and poverty of theme in the actual songs of the music-halls, is minimised, it is true, to some extent, by the measure of 'gag,' of fresh and personal matter, which the best comedians of the music-hall-and many who are not the best-allow themselves to introduce. But, after all, of the songs of the music-hall it has got to be said,