to rely on nature or on natural aptitudes. He had Procrustean rules of stage training to which all natural gifts must be made to bend. So many steps to a particular spot; such a gesture to express such an emotion; the arms to be moved in accord with a settled theory of plastic effect; the tones of the voice to be such as the master thought most likely to come over the footlights; and so on.

If in Miss Julia Neilson's mature methods there be a suspicion of anything rigid or arbitrary, it may be traced to these iron-bound laws laid down for and enforced upon her by Gilbert in the days of her girlhood. She was then, I think, not more than eighteen; with an original beauty of which the copy may now be seen in her daughter, Miss Neilson-Terry, the newest and perhaps strongest of debutantes, playing Viola in Twelfth Night at seventeen with a brilliant self-possession and ease of movement in her boy costume. In her case there is no Gilbert to control her individual impulses, and it is interesting to see how the daughter wanders at will in the Duke's Illyrian palace, or as Rosalind in the Forest of Arden. An unconquered freedom hers, if ever there were one. In his dealing with the formed artists to whom he entrusted his stage characters Gilbert was not less absolute. For the first night or the three-hundredth night his will was law, and there were penalties for a departure from it if ever any actor or actress proved hardy enough to vary by a hair's-breadth the instructions he imposed.

Certainly Gilbert's influence on the stage was, in respect of morals, altogether good. He himself said he had never cared to transgress the unwritten law of English life which would keep the theatres open to the English girl; as the French theatres

are not to the French girl. He added that he had never found the limitations a restriction upon his dramatic work or aims. But he went beyond that. A story will show you how far.

There was during the period of his best operas an English singer who both as singer and actress was at least the equal of the best who won fame at the Savoy. Musical critics thought her voice and training both of a high order. I asked Gilbert why she had never sung for him. He answered:

"Because my companies consist of ladies and gentlemen. The singer you name was for a short time with us during rehearsals, but she was impossible."

And he explained why she was impossible. The anecdote is not suitable for print but to Gilbert's mind it was conclusive. He drew a broad line between the Savoy operas and musical comedy or what was in those days known as burlesque. He would tolerate no licence on or off the stage. He was a more implacable censor than the Lord Chamberlain; and over the Lord Chamberlain or his reader, Mr. Redford, he had this advantage: that whereas Mr. Redford knew only what was in the manuscript submitted to him, Gilbert was his own producer of plays and no look or gesture or innuendo escaped him. While he lived and while his operas at the Savoy held the town, and while his plays were an attraction to a more select public, his influence was a very potent one. There was a period of a quarter of a century during which it was vital, and was always a purifying influence, and always tended to bring literature and dramatic art into closer relations. That is not all but with that we may well be content, as with his seventy-three years of completed achievement and with his death in a generous effort to save a younger life.

CHAPTER XXVI

MLLE. AIMÉE DESCLÉE-HER ART-HER

LETTERS-HER LIFE

READING lately proofs of some of these Memories I came upon a sentence about Mlle. Aimée Desclée. Of her I undertook to say something. It was a promise of which I needed no reminding, for if there is anything of which I have a vivid memory it is of her and her acting. In America she was unknown. She never crossed the Atlantic. In London she was not unknown, for she played here during one season at the Princess's Theatre, but she is forgotten. Often as we moralize on the oblivion which is the early fate of almost all great actors, this is the most melancholy of all. For Desclée was the greatest of emotional actresses, and nothing is so transitory as an emotion except the expression of it on the stage. M. Alexandre Dumas, fils, with whom as an author her fame as an actress is for ever bound up, says of Desclée without any qualification that in her art she was the first. He adds:

"It was for us to write Le Misanthrope; she would have been Célimène. It was for us to write Romeo; she would have been Juliet. We have done only what we could; she has done more than she ought, and thus it is that she killed herself."

I saw Aimée Desclée often in Paris at the Gymnase, and often in London at the Princess's. In neither city was she one of that glittering company of artists

whose celebrity lay outside of her art. I do not mean that she led a life of order; she did not; but that the splendour of a lawless existence had no attraction for her. The truth about the matter is to be found in that astonishing book, Lettres de Aimée Desclée à Fanfan, published in Paris in 1895; a human document if ever there were one. But it is one which ought never to have seen the light of day. The editor of it is M. Paul Duplan, a name of no great authority in literature. But the true author of it was M. Alexandre Dumas the younger. He inspired it, and for it he must be held responsible. He wanted at all costs a record of the career, of the genius, of the brilliant personality which he had enlisted in the service of his drama; of the actress for whom he wrote three of his best plays, and to whom he had been indebted for an interpretation of a kind which no other actress could have given him. He might well have written her life or paid an adequate tribute to the actress. He preferred instead to publish, or to sanction the publishing, it is the same thing, of her letters to her lover. That the public might be sure to remember the actress and the plays she had acted, he flung them the woman.

It is not known who Fanfan was. He has earned a sort of anonymous immortality and the name which Desclée gave him will be remembered by her letters. All that can be said about him is that he was an officer of the French army.

But to M. Paul Duplan Fanfan was known. They were kinsmen and friends. He too died young. His portrait is by the side of Desclée's in M. Duplan's study.

"There he is, as I knew him, with his happy, grave, good look; in uniform, his chest starred with

decorations. A tall young fellow, carrying jauntily, intelligently, a fine soldier's name; well taught, a man of letters, with a marked elegance of manner, an expressive face, a soldier's face, made more soldierly by a long moustache which his mistress, the gamine or mome as he calls her, used to love to lift, 'to see what there was underneath, and to find what she was looking for, white teeth and kisses.””

And that seems to be all we are likely to know of Fanfan, save what Desclée herself tells us in her letters. While the soul of the woman who loved him was stripped naked, his identity was carefully concealed. I would print his name if I knew it, but I do not. I have often asked. Nobody seemed to know, unusual as it is in Paris for secrets of that kind to remain secrets. It is fair to say that the French standard of honour is on this one point less rigid or less universal than in England or in America. A French lover kisses and tells; though Fanfan perhaps did not. The certainty or the possibility that he will tell ought to put virtue, and also vice, on its guard. It is not quite clear that it does. A French writer like Dumas, of the first order as a writer of plays, betrays the confidence a woman gives him when she trusts him with letters, her own and another's.

The public which thinks itself the gainer by this looseness of honour may be disposed to condone the offence. M. de Guibert must have been a consenting party to the printing of the letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse, incomparable letters as they are, yet, like those of Desclée, letters all passion. But since the letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse were written a century and a half ago and the letters of Desclée only yesterday, the offence in this last case seems less