THE STAGE.

Press, Volume XXIX, Issue 3894, 15 January 1878, Page 3

THE STAGE.

[From the " Charing Cross Magazine."J " To hold the mirror up to nature, show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." This is the work of the playwright, if he know and love his art. What h« represents on the mimic stage must be a reflection of the world—the great stage on which we all strut, phy our parts on, well or ill, then make our final exit. He must not only show us what the world is like, but in what it is most unlike the thing it should be ; there must be no false coloring for the sake of effect, no drawing an improbable condition of things from his own inner consciousness, for the sake of harmony, no reflection, in short, from a blotched or ill-shaped glass; the mirror may be small when the dramatic instinct is not grent, but it must be true. The virtue he would have us love musb be clothed in spotless white, her features- must be clearly seen, her beauty must be transcendtnt, her form of matchless shape, so that the most vicious and criminal of his audience shall inwardly bow the knee and pay her rightful homage. Around the vice or sin he would depict there most be no false halo of superficial goodness, no show of greatness of soul to hide a want of prii»eipte, the moral odiousnese must be lettered in capitals so that the groundlings may have no need of ppectarfes. Laetly, he must depict the age in which he lives, he 'must regard himself as the historian of society to whom future ages will look for a faithful picture of his timo. This is the real, work of tbe dramatist, and this is what Shakepeare did. He upheld a mirro? that could not lie; that reflected not only the positive, the practical, the avexage form of things, bat their differences, their distinctions ; all the lights and sbsdea were true— never too bright, never too dork. He used his fancy, his poetic im&grnation, to embellish the real, not to create the ideal. He won our love oi virtue by no stagey byporbofes, no. clap-trap of over-wrought pathos; but by j producing her in all her nalive moral beauty, that c&ptivatea the nemnant of the divine within _. lie never makes ns laugh at virtue, even in our »l»eves, nor laugh aloud with vie, and if at times we cannot repress an inward chuckle, we rejoice because it is \ hidden, lie made all things lovable by the j very strength of their goodness; h* made j crime and sin hideous *n<l hateful, vice and f_2y cqmtempt&le and ridiculona. The "Tarter " aaye that General Skobebff is of Scottish extraction ; his grandfather was jv !>el oalmaster in Ayrshire, and hie name was