the profession of the stage, we all know that a considerable number of the well-born and well-educated have, as a matter of fact, become actors within the last few years. That they have done so ill-advisedly in many cases; and that without industry, without enthusiasm (in the highest sense), without even physical training, these walking gentlemen' would have done better sitting behind desks in the city, I am the last to deny. Still the fact remains; and this fact must insensibly affect the estimation in which the calling is held by the ordinary Philistine.

With our enormous female population and the greater emancipation from conventional trammels, which a closer intercourse with America has helped to produce, a wider range of employment has opened out for ladies of intelligence and independence. Why should the stage, which demands more special qualifications than many of these occupations, be the only one shut to those who possess characters and capacities that fit them for the career? Why should its perils be necessarily more imminent than those which attend the life-school and the Bohemian intercourse of artist-life? The female doctor, the hospital nurse, the district visitor- there is no calling to which admirable women devote themselves, and which philanthropy commends, that is not exposed to misapprehension and danger. Their safeguard lies in the strong shield of purity and truth and devotion to their cause, which wards off the shafts that would assail them. And so it has been, so it may be, on the stage. An actress devoted heart and soul to HER cause, a girl with a high standard of right, electing the clean and noble walks, and not the filthy alleys of theatrical life, can keep herself as unsullied from the mud as in any other position. True, she is exposed to the scrutiny and criticism of the public: so is the singer on the platform. She meets persons she cannot approve; she hears more evil than she did at home: so will any girl who has to fight her own way unprotected through the great battle of the world. If she be not strong enough for this, let her slink into the first haven she can reach, and not attempt to face the buffeting waves. The sensitive, the indolent, and the vain will do well to direct their steps into fields that do not demand the force and elevation of character which every woman needs who has a goal in view, the path to which is not all strewn with roses.

Mr. Burnand's warning, which takes no note of the individual aims and tendencies of the girls whom he wishes to dissuade from this career, is justified in its general application only if it be limited to those theatres where personal charms, very liberally displayed, are the main ingredient to success. But of such places of entertainment, and of the young women who earn their livelihood there, I do not desire to speak. Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa. It would be an insult to consider the one as the stage,' or the other as actresses.' Mr. Hollingshead has defined with cynical frankness VOL. XVII.-No. 97.

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the objects of both; and it is clearly unjust to build any theory of the immorality of the dramatic profession upon premises of such restricted area.

But, happily, there is a wider and healthier field of theatrical work; and I feel very sure that there is a number of well-educated, high-principled girls, with an aptitude for representation, who run no greater risks here than they do in any other arena where prudence and vigilance are needed; and I protest against the dictum that would restrict the labourers in this field to those who come of a hard-working professional theatrical family.' I maintain that the parts of gentlewomen on the stage can never be filled by those whose intonation, accent, and manners do not fit them for high comedy. It is no question of birth, still less is it one of wealth, except inasmuch as money will procure the best education. It is a question of natural aptitude to adopt the tone of that which surrounds us. The quicker a child is the more readily will it catch the cockney accent, and the vulgarities of enunciation which militate, too often, against a satisfactory representation of Shakespeare, Sheridan, or of any modern drawing-room comedy. I readily admit that these drawbacks are sometimes overcome in those who have not had the benefit of a careful training and refined associations in early life; but the exceptions are rare. It demands cleverness of no common kind to be able to assume habitually a tone and a demeanour other than those which have been natural to us from early youth. I appeal to all whose ears are sensitive, and whose critical faculty is not blinded by beauty or attractiveness, whether they have not often said to themselves, This girl has both imagination and sensibility; but she lacks the refinement which can only come with education: she is not a perfect lady.' This may seem a hard saying; but it is, none the less, true. Phoebe and Awdrey belong to a different category from that of Rosalind and Celia. Yet is there not room for each? The lists are now open to all: and it is to prevent their being closed by prejudice against any that I write.

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Those who have at heart the real welfare of the stage in Englandthose who would fain see it take a position somewhat analogous to that held among the Greeks-will do nothing to repel enthusiastic young worshippers who bring cultivated gifts and all the fervour of youth to serve at this altar. If the reviving taste for the poetical drama is to be fostered, it must be by the educated and refined of both sexes being encouraged to devote their talents to the cause. The tendency of Mr. Burnand's article is distinctly to discourage such. Though there is truth in much that he says, it is not the whole truth; and I believe by the omission of that which I have here endeavoured briefly to put forward in vindication of the stage, he has produced an effect not only derogatory and unjust to the profession at large, but hurtful to the true interests of the Drama.

HAMILTON AÏDE.

527

FINLAND: A RISING NATIONALITY.

NATIONAL questions are not in vogue now in Europe. After having so much exercised the generation of '48, they seem to be now in neglect. The poor results of a movement which caused so many illusions; the new problems that are coming to the front-the social problem taking the precedence of all; the prominence recently given to the ideas of unification and centralisation above those of territorial independence and federalism, by the sudden growth of a powerful military State in middle Europe,—all these have helped to repel into the background those questions of national independence which seemed to constitute the very essence of the history of Europe during the first half of our century. Faith in national programmes, formerly so firm, has been much shaken by the events of the last few years. Italian unity has not improved the lot of the lower classes of the Peninsula, and they have now to bear the burden of a State endeavouring to conquer a place among the great Powers. The formerly oppressed Hungary is oppressing in her turn the Sclavonic populations under her rule. The last Polish insurrection was crushed rather by the agrarian measures of the Russian Government than by its armies and scaffolds; and the heroic uprisings of the small nationalities of the Balkan Peninsula have merely made them tools in the hands of the diplomacy of their powerful neighbours. Moreover, the nationalist movements which are still in progress in Europe, are mostly confined to the remoter borders of the Continent, to populations which are almost unknown to old Europe and which cannot be realised by the general public otherwise than in the shape of loose agglomerations of shepherds, or robbers, unused to political organisation. They cannot therefore excite the same interest nor awake the same sympathies as the former uprisings of Greece, of Italy, of Hungary.

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Notwithstanding all this, national questions are as real in Europe as ever, and it would be as unwise to shut our eyes to them as to deny their importance. Of course we know now that 'national problems' are not identical with the people's problems;' that the acquisition of political independence still leaves unachieved the economical independence of the labouring and wealth-producing classes. We can even say that a national movement which does not include in its platform the demand for an economical change advantageous to

the masses has no chance of success unless supported by foreign aid. But both these problems are so closely connected with one another that we are bound to recognise that no serious economical progress can be won, nor is any progressive development possible, until the awakened aspirations for autonomy have been satisfied. Though relegated now from the centre to the periphery, Europe has still to reckon with national movements. Irish Home Rule," the Schleswig 'difficulty,' and Norwegian separatism are problems which must be resolved; as also the national agitation that is steadily undermining Eastern Europe. There is no doubt that (to use the words of a recent English writer) 'not only a thorough discontent, but a chronic insurrectionary agitation' is going on among the Serbo-Croats, who are endeavouring to shake off the yoke of Hungary. The Czechs, the Slovaks, the Poles of Austria are struggling, too, for self-government; as also, to some extent, the Slowens, or Wends, and the Little Russians of Eastern Galicia; while neither peace nor regular development is possible on the Balkan Peninsula until the Bosnians, the Herzegovinians, the Serbs, the Bulgarians, and others, have freed themselves from Turkish rule, Russian protection,' and Austrian occupation,' and have succeeded in constituting a free South-Slavonian Federation. The Russian Empire, too, has to reckon with the autonomist tendencies of several of its parts. However feeble now, the Ukrainian autonomist movement cannot but take a further development. As to Poland, she cannot much longer submit to the denationalising policy of her Russian masters; the old Poland of the szlachta is broken down; but a new Poland-that of the peasants and working men-is growing up, with all the strength it has drawn from the abolition of serfdom. It will resume the struggle, and in the interests of her own progressive development Russia will be compelled, one day or the other, to abandon the reputedly rather than really strong defensive line of the Vistula.' Finally, in the North-east we have Finland, where one of the most interesting autonomist movements of our time has been steadily going on for more than sixty years.

One hardly hears of it in Western Europe. With the perseverance, however, that characterises the men of the North, and particularly those of Finland, this small yet rising nationality has within a short time achieved results so remarkable that it has ceased to be a Swedish or a Russian province more or less differing from its neighbours: it is a nation. Discussing once this question, "What is a nation?' Ernest Renan set forth in his vivid and graphic style that a nation is not an agglomeration of people speaking the same language a language may disappear; not even an aggregation with distinct anthropological features, all nations being products of heterogeneous assimilations; still less a union of economical interests which may be a Zollverein. National unity, he said, is the common inhe

ritance of traditions, of hopes and regrets, of common aspirations and common conceptions, which make of a nation a true organism instead of a loose aggregation. The naturalist would add to these essential features of a nation the necessary differentiation from other surrounding organisms, and the geographer, a kind of union between the people and the territory it occupies, from which territory it receives its national character and on which it impresses its own stamp, so as to make an indivisible whole both of men and territory.

None of these features is missing in Finland. Its people have their own language, their own anthropological features, their own economical interests; they are strongly differentiated from their neighbours; men and territory cannot be separated one from another. And for the last sixty years the best men of Finland have been working with great success in spreading that precious inheritance of common hopes and regrets, of common aspirations and conceptions, of which Renan spoke. Yksi kieli, yksi mieli' ('One language, one spirit'):-such is precisely the watchword of the Fennomanes.'

Comparative philology and anthropology may tell us that the Finns have but lately occupied the country they inhabit, and that during their long migrations from the Altaic Steppes they have undergone much admixture with other races. None the less do the present inhabitants of Finland appear as a quite separate world, having their own sharply defined anthropological and ethnical characters, which distinguish them from the populations by whom they are surrounded. Their nearest kinsfolk are found only on the other shore of the Gulf of Finland, among the Esthonians, on whom they already exercise a kind of attraction. Their southern brethren, the Magyars, are too distant, too separated, and too distinct ever to exercise any influence on Finland. As to the other members of the same family scattered through Eastern Russia, the Voguls, the Permians, the Mordovians, and so on, science may prove their common origin; but their national characters are being obliterated every day by contact with Russians, and nearly all of them have already lost any chance they may ever have had of constituting separate nationalities. Finland has thus no need to care about these scattered members of her family.

It is true that even the ordinary traveller soon discovers in Finland two different types-the Tawastes in the west, and the Karelians in the east; the square face of the former, their pale eyes and yellow hair, their heavy gait, strongly contrasting with the taller and more slender Karelians, with their elongated faces and darker hair, their animated and darker eyes. But the inhabitants of Central Finland, the Sawos, partaking of the physical features of both neighbours, are an intermediate link between the two; and all three-Karelians, Sawos, and Tawastes-speaking the same language, living the same manner of life, and having so much in common as to their national characteristics-melt together into one ethnical type-the Finnish. Even