Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/275

1868.] powers were fettered, or buried under her trailing, sable robes. She does not seem happy in them, and she looks as if she felt that the outre gown and the slip-shod feet were more natural, dearer to her than the richer garb. We are all rather glad at the end that she has 20,000 francs and the lover of her heart; but we fancy it is owing more to the old feeling of poetic justice within us, demanding that at the fall of the green curtain virtue shall always triumph, than at seeing her settle down to the somewhat hum-drum existence of a dairy-maid. We rather resent it—especially when that indifferent actor, Mr. Collier, plays Landry—that all the noble wine of her life should be poured out before such sober mortals as the respectable members of her husband's family. Fanchon, half-elf, half-woman, should have married a gypsy, and had nut-brown children about her tent door.

The love for the drama is confined to no class, no station. The son of the millionaire is nightly seen at Wallack's or Niblo's. The bootblack, if he cannot earn the entrance fee to the Bowery, borrows it from a more successful member of his guild, leaving his implements in pledge. And thus our youth are learning nightly, at the school of the drama, some lesson. It is well for them that they have a school such as Wallack's to attend, or at other houses a teacher like Maggie Mitchell to instruct them in a purer, more human method than they shall find elsewhere.

While the theatre remains the instructor of America's men and women—and we have sometimes thought it a greater—not a better—one than pulpit, press, or society, it is for us, the patrons of the drama, to say whether it shall teach us well or ill.

What is required is not tragedy, even Shakespeare cannot reconcile us to that, for acted tragedy is in itself a vast deformity. It is not a natural, pleasant thing to witness bloody death brought to our very feet, to see the expiring struggles, to listen to the last groans of butchered humanity. The player's potent art is to show us the inward workings of the mind, to interpret for us the moral sense struggling from within, inciting to noble deeds and gracious lives. Tragedy pushes nature to the wall, and shows us nothing but her agonized contortions of the body. That which the audiences of to-day require, is the representation of the lives, the accompanying trials, the joys of the best social class, and by that we do not mean the simply rich, but that middle class, standing between the rich and poor, which, being endowed with intelligence, religion, and energy, makes itself the salvation of the Commonwealth. This class restrains the enervation and extravagance of the upper and reforms the vices of the lower. The stage should be a school of humanity, holding up as in a mirror, nature in her purest, wisest, most gracious forms. It does this, when it shows us, not the revolting details of tragedy, but the graceful charm, wit, probity, and repose of comedy, or the pure and simple drama of a simple life.

Of this latter sort is the play of "Fanchon." It is the poetic idyl of rural middle life, its trials and its triumphs, and in its single representation of a night is embraced the history of its actors' lives from youth to age, teaching, with no offensive intrusiveness, how a stainless life and simple worth are better than largest wealth or "long-descent."

Knowing what we do of Miss Mitchell, we acquit her of any intention of reforming anything, yet she has done, and is nightly doing, a noble work for the theatre and for humanity by her matchless impersonation of the part of Fanchon. It is better than many sermons.