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Master and his wonderful gallery of persistently theatrical characters. Now everything that Dickens wrote, savored more or less of his earliest lovethe theatre; nearly all his characters are cast in perpetually accentuated, if not exaggerated mould, for the Early Victorians were in a chrysalis state of evolution themselves, and, in their own daily existence, were extravagant in their being and development. All these things Dickens knew and noted. The life that was led was extravagant in the extreme, and so were the manners and customs of the people, high and low. Dickens critically observed these things and aspects, and wrote as he found and knew, tinctured with the biography of his own personality, for it cannot be denied that Dickens was instinctively an actor "on and off the stage"; exhilaration was the essence of all his caricatures and creations. There never was a greater, or more convincing, or more impulsive actor and perhaps poser in his drawing of his fellowmen. Through his own love of dress and display, his own "getup" in private life-read the biography of James Hain Friswell by his daughter, Mrs. Mills you can recognize in a glorified form many of his magnetic creations. The fact is, Dickens tried his own dramatic impersonations in his own novels, and brought into the majority of them his own personality, with outside observations from here, there and everywhere. Mr. G. K. Chesterton asserts that Dickens's characters are not like men, women or children. "They are not like human beings. They are greater than that. They are like human souls." He has said many things in his time, but nothing so grotesque as that. All Dickens's characters are absolute everyday human beings, with souls, of course. When they had their day with the genius of Dickens to throw a glamour over their being, they did

not cease to be. They lived, and live more than ever now, and that is why they are so admirably adapted for portraiture on the stage. Every individual person he drew was impregnated with a surprisingly developed character, and characteristics of his own. Each one was enveloped in an idiosyncrasy or special individuality that was carefully carried through from start to finish. Dickens was so precise in his drawing that, indeed, a man would be a fool not to be able to enter into, and to grasp all the incidental asides that go forward to the final development-eccentric, comic or tragic, of every man, woman, and child, that Dickens presented in his marvelous panorama of existent personalities. If there is any one author who most strongly appeals to the instinct of the actor and the dramatist, it is Dickens. Take an everyday, or ordinary actor, who has not "got there," but who is striving, and you will find that he has two masters who command his most venerated study, and those two masters are Shakespeare and Dickens. Thackeray only comes third because he is less intimate, because he is elaborate and fonder of extraneous detail. Notwithstanding, Thackeray gives to the actor a definite desire of a fuller comprehension of the working of a man's mind, and his consequent and subsequent understanding of the furtive elusiveness of the power of his diagnosis of the movements of the mind, the heart and the soul, of the great, the little, and even the ignoble.

Moreover, in Dickens for stage purposes, you find everything. Dickens aspired to the stage always, and although he was naturally angry when he found himself pirated by the hacks of the unregenerate, subsidized purveyors of dramatic fare, yet he was not always displeased to see his name on the playbills, except when outrage outraged all honesty and decency, and

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in a measure desecrated and burlesqued some of his most cherished inventions and creations. It is conceded at once that Dickens was not capable of producing an absolutely consecutive dramatic plot in any of his works. elaboration necessary in a novel is of no use for stage purposes. This fault or quality detracts from the presentation pure and simple of the story on the stage. Everything must be direct so that the dullest persons in any audience of many and diverse tastes and intellects may have brought home to them the man and the woman playing the part on the boards, in order to work out the plot by inevitable and culminating degrees to its finale. In this, Dickens was not a success, because all his books contain innumerable miniature dramas. He almost invariably had in his main motive many intermediary comedies; I say comedies because he was stronger in the vis comica than in tragedy. Except in one book, A Tale of Two Cities. Here, in the dramatic sense, he was at his greatest. Quite half a dozen versions of this beautiful story have been done on the stage and always with the most gratifying success. In one of these, Dickens himself assisted in the dramatization with Tom Taylor, named after the book and played at the Lyceum in January, 1860, when Dickens "in the kindest manner superintended the production of the pieces." At the same theatre, Mr. Martin Harvey, years later, presented that admirable adaptation by the Revs. Freeman Wills and Frederic Langbridge, called "The Only Way," of which there is no need further to speak. In the middle and later Victorian days, nearly every one of Dickens's books was put on the stage with, of course, varying success,

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but generally with complete satisfaction to all concerned.

Dozens of adaptations of David Copperfield had been given before Sir Herbert Tree thought of his magnificently fine and human production which secured such enormous patronage at His Majesty's Theatre; "Little Em'ly," at the now forgotten Olympic Theatre in 1869 met with Dickens's own cordial approval and congratulations to the adapter, Andrew Halliday. In David Copperfield, there are quite four stage plays, taking it section by section and continuing where necessary, and the same applies to Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, Barnaby Rudge, with its spectacular effects, and even the unfinished Edwin Drood. Martin Chuzzlewit made several good plays, notably one at the Olympic in 1868, in which John Clarke played Mrs. Gamp, and Nellie Farren, Bailey Junr. As for Pickwick, well, portions have been done ever since the genial old boy was first created to delight the ages from 1837 to the present day, with special remembrances of Sir Henry Irving.

With discretion, all the novels of Dickens offer opportunities to the dramatist-what of The Old Curiosity Shop with Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness in the lighter scenes and what of Bleak House? "Jo" from this last-named novel, filled the old Globe for its first run for over a year, when long runs had scarcely been heard of. And it is always a sure card to play. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding the carping of "high-brow" criticism, Dickens's work well neutralized, and yet elaborated now and again, is always safe as an attraction in the theatre, where humor, pathos and the eccentricities and truth of human nature are appreciated.

S. J. Adair Fitz-Gerald.

PROFITEERS.

Hard things have been said about profiteers during the last three years. Hard things continue to be said about them. The profiteers, we imagine, having survived so many centuries as a mandarin race, have lost the capacity for feeling nervous-and we cannot wonder at it. The thunders of the Oid Testament days did not blast them; the legislation of the Middle Ages did not snare them in its net; the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries loosed them in vast numbers upon the world as men sent by God to build up their fortunes at the expense of their fellows.

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our civilization advanced, indeed, the more the profiteer seemed to stand out as a virtuous figure. Gain is never exalted into a position of absolute honor except in a complex civilization in which a well-organized and comfortable class finds it convenient-unconsciously of course-to invent a philosophy in defense of its comfort. Human society in its early stages knows nothing of the glorification of the rich tradesman competing with other rich tradesmen as to who shall make the greatest profit at the expense of the community. Selfishness, no doubt, isted even on the day after the expulsion from Eden. Kings and medicine-men early took advantage of their fellows to accumulate power and pelf. More and more of the communal land was marked out by strong and cunning individuals as their own, and every robbery had only to persist in order to become a right supported by all manner of divine sanctions. This was the method of the advance of the race, and there is no need to quarrel with it. We need not be over-severe on our forefathers. The evolution of the sense of the individual was as necessary as the evolution of the sense of the community, and human beings

were probably destined to acquire it by experimenting with tyranny, war, capitalism and a host of other things that the modern idealist is apt to dismiss as wholly evil. At the same time, we should be mad to allow the sense of the individual to oust the sense of the community altogether, as Nietzsche and the preachers of the silly gospel of Futurism before the war, like the bad sort of grocer, wished it to do. We may admit the uses of experimenting with greed in the past without necessarily believing in experimenting with greed in the future. The sense of the individual is not now so feeble in us that it needs a stimulus. It is the sense of the community in regard to which we are badly endowed. The fact that the profiteers flourish as they do at a time when the community is in peril shows that the social sense of modern man is not much more than out of its shell. At the beginning of the war the Daily Mail proclaimed a new brotherhood in which the rich man would be willing to share his last crust with the poor; but, when the rich man showed no inclination to do this and proposed to go on with his profit-making on the old lines, the Times came out in defense of his rights. England has socialized its manhood for the duration of the war, but it has refused to socialize its money. Society is still regarded by many people less as a community than as a trade union of profiteers.

Burke wrote in defense of this antisocial individualism when England was threatened with scarcity during the French war. He fulminated against the idea of interfering with profiteers of any kind in order either to raise wages or to lower prices as though this were to threaten the foundations of society. When it was suggested that

the farmers were profiteering at the expense of the laborers, he laid it dogmatically down that "it is plainly more the farmer's interest that his men should thrive than that his horses should be well fed, sleek, plump, and fit for use, or than that his wagon and ploughs should be strong, in good repair and fit for service." He did not ask himself whether the farmer realized that his interest lay in this direction. He took it for granted that the farmer would do so, though the most superficial knowledge of human nature would have taught him otherwise. He would not allow that even avarice could lead a farmer to pay a laborer less than was right:

But if the farmer is excessively avaricious? Why, so much the betterthe more he desires to increase his gains, the more interested is he in the good condition of those upon whose labor his gains must principally depend.

As to the condition of the laborer who happened to be paid less than a subsistence-wage, he could claim nothing "according to the rules of commerce and the principles of justice," but came "within the jurisdiction of mercy." The law should simply leave him, Burke held, to charity. "In that province the magistrate has nothing at all to do; his interference is a violation of the property which it is his office to protect." And if the farmer ought to be protected in his right to pay as little as he could for labor and to charge as much as he could for produce, every other kind of profiteer had Burke equally on his side:

What is true of the farmer is equally true of the middle man, whether the middle man act as factor, jobber, salesman or speculator, in the markets of grain. These traders are to be left to their free course, and the more they make, and the richer they are, and the more largely they deal, the better both for the farmer and consumer, between

whom they form a natural and most useful link of connection; though by the machinations of the old evil counselor, Envy, they are hated and maligned by both parties.

Even Lord Devonport (who drew the line when the profits on swedes and haricot beans rose beyond a few hundred per cent) would have seemed to Burke like a sinister figure out of the French Revolution.

Since those days we have discovered a good many fallacies in Burke and the politicians and economists who came after him. We can appreciate their hatred of laws in restraint of trade. But we see the folly of their hatred of laws in restraint of tradesmen. We no longer take it for granted that all will go well with society so long as men of property are allowed to do what they like. Experience has in almost all ages led men to regard the profiteer as the enemy rather than the benefactor of society. Among the ancient Jews he who ground the faces of the poor was not praised for doing the poor good. Usury, the chief form of profiteering in those days, was forbidden, except when a nonHebrew was the victim. Among the Christians in the Middle Ages also interest was forbidden by scores of laws. Profit of this kind, as well as that exaggeration of it which we call profiteering, was regarded as both antisocial and unchristian. And other kinds of profiteers were in an equal degree criminals before the law. Engrossers who bought the corn crops in the field or in the stack and held them back for a time of high prices-forestallers and regrators who in other ways attempted to buy in the cheapest markets and sell in the dearest-were not supported (as they would have been in the nineteenth century) as model citizens. In The Economic History of England Mr. E. Lipson quotes from the municipal records of Bristol

a description of a forestaller which seems, apart from its opening words of condemnation, almost like the portrait of an efficient modern business man. The forestaller, we are told, is a manifest oppressor of the poor and a public enemy of the whole communalty and county, who hastens to buy before others grain, fish, herrings, or anything vendible whatsoever, coming by land or by water, . . . making gain, oppressing his poorer and despising his richer neighbors, and who designs to sell more dearly what he so unjustly acquired. Who also besets foreign merchants coming with their merchandise, offering to sell their goods for them, and suggesting to them that they could sell their goods more dearly than they were proposing to sell them, and so by fraudulent art or craft he misleads town and country.

Critics of the Middle Ages may justly raise the question whether the laws against extortion, and especially the laws against interest, may not in their effects at times have been laws against progress-laws, indeed, which acted to the disadvantage of the community at large. No doubt the laws were often better in their intentions than in their results. They are of especial interest to us at the present moment, however, not because they were perfectly successful in their operation, but because they remind us that the normal attitude of society to the profiteer is an attitude of suspicion and hostility. The love of gain, as we are beginning to see once more in these days, is a rather horrible vice and is secretly at war with all the fine passions, including patriotism. There were many centuries in which the love of profit was a pasThe New Statesman.

sion to which reputable men and women were strangers. The ill-name the Jews got in Europe was due largely to the way in which, closed out of the ordinary professions, they turned their hand to profiteering. Shylock only becomes dignified when he exchanges profiteering for the loftier vice of revenge. On the other hand, in recent centuries, the Christian has more and more become a man whose mind is normally occupied with the thought of gain. The average tradesman has been educated in the belief that to do anything except for the purpose of gain is a form of idleness. He preaches a more social creed to his restive employees, but he himself always regards it as his right to take the last possible farthing out of the pocket of the public.. The way in which the price of tobacco was raised some time ago beyond what was enough to cover the new taxation is a typical example of the sort of thing of which tradesmen should be ashamed, but are not. The ethics of trade, it is to be feared, are still of the shakiest. One often hears of unjust and snobbish prejudices against trade, but it seems to us the prejudice against trade is founded to some extent on a reasonable antipathy to a kingdom of exclusively money values. Men feel that a world in which so much trickery, extortion, cheating, and adulteration are taken for granted lacks something of dignity, even though peerages and knighthoods are scattered to it by the hundred. Most of us are in revolt just now against the tradesman's view of life. We begin to question his rights in the consciousness of our own exceeding wrongs.

MESSINES.

The operations which won the ridge of Messines were unique in the history

of war, and we are glad that Sir Douglas Haig has departed from his custom of

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