the stage and in the audience, studying and imitating only his contemporaries and rivals, receiving and consummating a tradition. This art he knew, and (though he had read examples of the classical) knew no other. He had not so much studied it as breathed its atmosphere-it was his element, and he became its tutelary spirit. Manners you learn, not from your dancingmaster, but in society; and a foreign language, not out of grammars and dictionaries, but in the country itself. So without a grammar he had possessed himself of the language of the stage, the means of communication established by a current convention or understanding between author and audience—the style, high or low, the verse, the stage devices, the loose but mobile structure of the story, the bold and yet artful mingling of the emotions (tragic and comic), together, the changes of scene-all that in generations the authors had taught their audience and the audience had taught their authors; and now nothing else under heaven mattered, not rules of the drama, or canons of taste, or any other question, but only how he, an author, could move the audience anew. If any one, he could do it-not posing for posterity, he had his eye fixed on no alien consideration such as the example or precept of antiquity or the laurels to crown his brow, but "on the object", solely on the characters he was calling upon the stage and on the audience to assemble before it—and into the business he threw his whole soul.

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VII

Such, I suppose, are the ideal conditions for the making of art— the supremely gifted genius, master of his medium and immediate heir to an artistic tradition, throwing himself into the undertaking prodigally and exuberantly, ignorant or regardless of æsthetic rules or principles, guided and guarded only by the healthy instincts and customs of his race, his temperament, and his day. Ex vivo vivum. Like Browning's, the touch of his hand, at least with the pen in it, is like an electric shock; and, as with Browning and Dickens both, even the inanimate things it touches start and quiver-whether it be jocund day standing tiptoe on the misty mountain top, or Mrs. Todgers's dingy skylight looking

distrustfully down her stairway. But it is to human beings that it gives life most abundantly-here, if anywhere, are the forms more real than living man. "He has the true cry, the right tone" [le cri vrai, l'accent juste], says Victor Hugo; "all the human multitude with its clamour." The logic or even the psychology

may be at fault, but at his best Shakespeare lends his characters each a particular and individual voice. Whatever they do -whatever they say-by the way they say it we know them, which is to love them. It is Cordelia, weeping, and no other, who says to Lear when he thinks, or fain would think, this lady to be his child Cordelia, "And so I am, I am!" It is Rosalind, smiling, and no other, who says to Orlando as she plays the part of the person she really is, "Come, woo me, woo me. What would you say to me now an I were your very, very Rosalind?" It is Falstaff, laughing, and rolling the jest on his tongue, who says of his conscripts to the jeering Prince, "Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.” What are these but the true and troubled accents of the human voice, broken with laughter, palpitating with happiness, choked with tears? It is quick and passionate speech, not as in Racine the rhetoric and eloquence of passion; a voice out of a throbbing human throat, not the less intimate note of flute or trumpet; the cry of the soul as alone we can ever know it, fluttering in its tight tenement of clay, not aloft and on the wing.

VIII

The main thing, of course, is that it was Shakespeare. He might have been given his full meed of praise in his lifetime, he might have been made so fully aware of his eminence as to publish all his plays correctly before his death. Still he would not really have known himself, still his plays would not have been “correct”. He was not elegant or exquisite-when he tried to be, he wrote badly, like Burns. He wrote, not like Congreve, without fault or blemish, but like Molière, hastily, far better plays. "He wanted arte"-was un-selfconscious-not merely because he was unrecognized and unaware, but because he was intent, engaged, and inexhaustible. Not critical, he was-oh, word abused!-creative; and when he recognized a defect or crudity in play or passage,

his way, I presume, was not to rewrite it but—almost before he knew-to write another. In rewriting it, he could not but write another, such was the teeming abundance of his brain. There is in his work a vast development but, you might say, no improvement or measurable approach to perfection. "He redeemed his vices with his virtues"-did not amend them. He soared to greater heights, and if he escaped pitfalls, it was only while his inspirations lasted, and because he was now stronger of wing. His art is more complex and compact, more varied, powerful, and subtle; but it is no wise purer or chaster; it is even less logical and orderly, is more intricate, tortuous, and obscure.

And hardly could it have been otherwise. Like Browning, Balzac, Scott, and Dickens, Shakespeare was too preoccupied with life to study perfection in art or strictly meditate the Muse. Yet to him she was not thankless-her supreme favour, like that of other ladies, is for him who does not too strictly woo her-and the human figures, the thoughts, images, words, came only too thick and fast. He wrote easily, impetuously, for money, to be sure, but also because he liked it; because, once started, he could hardly stop; because, once stopped, he could, in the same mood and temper, hardly get started again. In twenty years he wrote thirty-seven plays, more in the same time, despite his duties as actor and man of affairs, than any other Englishman. "His mind and his hand went together," say Heminge and Condell; "and what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarse received from him a blot in his papers." Swiftly he wrote down what the spirit spoke. "He never blotted a line," echoes Jonson with a grunt, writing not for the Folio but for himself, in the Discoveries; "would he had blotted a thousand!" But the world (both then and now) does not join him and the other judges of his time, who loved what they called "art" rather than what they called "nature", in their wish. If Shakespeare had been the man to do that, nature would have there yielded to art— he would have known himself, which is the sum of wisdom, but, whether for him or for us, there would have been less to know. The "Master of those who know" was not a poet.

ELMER EDGAR STOLL.

MALVIDA VON MEYSENBUG

BY SIGMUND MÜNZ

CLOSELY linked with reminiscences of Rome a generation ago is the woman whose meditative figure was painted so realistically by Lenbach, the artist who also portrayed Gladstone, Bismarck, Moltke, Lord Acton, Mommsen, Helmholtz and Döllinger; her little face with the calm look out into the world; on her hair, parted in the middle, a lace cap which throws into bold relief her serene brow beneath which dwelt gentle thoughts. I had met her for the first time in the late autumn of 1885, in the house of Senator Marchese Carlo Guerrieri-Gonzaga. She was even then what people like to call an old little mother, but her voice was youthful and clear. Rome, where she had been living for thirty years, and where she was to find her last resting place by the Pyramid of Cestius next to Goethe's son and not far from Shelley, had become her second home.

In the Via Polveriera, near the Colosseum, Malvida von Meysenbug lived for twenty years in a quiet house, ear and mind turned towards the current of life. She lived most frugally, in keeping with her modest circumstances, but this did not prevent her admirers from finding their way to the street which had the appearance of a quarter of proletarians, and to the house which looked like an inn for them. In Rome hospitality was not practised in a Lucullan style; the evenings were passed in conversation and the guests were given a cup of tea, a glass of lemonade, or a glass of Marsala, with some biscuits; in this way it was possible for people who led a simple existence to receive the most distinguished guests. Especially on evenings when the moon bathed the Colosseum opposite in its magic light, her room was full of interesting visitors. There were always French and English elements present, but Germans and Italians were predominant.

When the last century was closing, Friedrich Nietzsche died.

That she had been attached to him in sisterly or, shall we say motherly, friendship, all the world knew, and so it happened that many wanted to hear from her lips what kind of man he had been and how it was that he had become the aphorist of superhumanity, when his spirit had not yet been crushed. Madame Meysenbug had met him for the first time in Bayreuth, in Richard Wagner's house, where she had often visited. She was therefore a living source of information with regard to the peculiarities of the composer of Parsifal. When I look at Lenbach's portrait of her, it brings back an evening on which I met that artist in the company of Wagner's stepdaughter, Countess Gravina, née Bülow, and her husband, the Sicilian nobleman, in the Via Polveriera. Lenbach's tongue was not less eloquent than his brush, though it may not have been quite so artistic; Frau Cosima, Wagner's wife, conversed with fascinating vivacity. And Nietzsche's and Wagner's and other great names did not by half exhaust the treasure of reminiscences of the woman of the Via Polveriera.

As long as thirty years before she died in 1903, she had struck the balance of her existence in Memoirs of an Idealist. Therefore, she must as early as that have thought herself an old woman. She was to live through another generation a contemplative life, of gentle and benevolent disposition and prepared to meet death, but also cheerfully meeting life. She was fond of calling herself the "Idealist", and at first had given to her great work of memoirs no other title. For a long time it was not known that it was she who, in a frame of mind which bordered on tearfulness, had written so fascinating a book which was to draw tears from many a reader's eyes.

Dreams and reality, developments springing from inside and developments caused from outside, complications and unraveling of knots in an existence which was for a long time that of a vagabond, all that she described with thrilling emotion. Hers was a magic style, magic like her outward appearance. So her books, too, contained more soul than body.

"It is lovely to get to know the world, to observe and to see how life unfolds itself in various countries and nations-but finally one has to find one's native place where the past labours