relief was really introduced for the benefit of a future Protestant minority, the population having increased in the opposite way to what was at the time expected by many would be the case.

What then is the meaning of the conduct of the Liberal Government of Manitoba? We can only judge from what appears on the surface, and this subject alone would suffice for a separate article. They have continuously interposed delays and hindrances and opposition to any settlement of the difficulty on the plain lines of justice to the minority, but they have committed the fatal blunder of making too many excuses for their conduct. In their answer to the 'Remedial Order' they alleged the difficulties of maintaining an efficient system of education even under present circumstances, and that the establishment of separate schools for the Roman Catholics would greatly impair that system, while the possible prospect of further separate schools for the Church of England, for the Mennonites, and for the Icelanders would be simply appalling. The position is entirely imaginary, for there is no saving of such rights, except to 'the Protestant or Roman Catholic minority of the Queen's subjects.' It must always be borne in mind that the provincial Government is of one political type, while the federal Government is of the opposite.

Even after the introduction of their own Remedial Bill' in February last, the Dominion authorities did not neglect to give the Provincial Government an opportunity of themselves dealing with this matter. After the Bill had been read a second time, they so far endeavoured to meet the wishes of the provincial authorities as to send Sir Donald Smith and two of the Ministers as Special Commissioners to Winnipeg, to see if a satisfactory compromise could not be arrived at, but even these negotiations failed to bring about a settlement. The Government went on with their measure, but were met in Committee by the grossest obstruction, one member reading chapters of the Bible with dissertations thereon, and another spending an hour in giving selections from the Bab Ballads with appropriate comments. The committee sat continuously during the whole of Easter week, but the Opposition persistently played to the gallery,' knowing that the whole question would have to be threshed out again at the polls, and thus, as I have said, rendered it impossible to pass the measure in the short time remaining before the dissolution of Parliament.

Such are the main points in the history of the Manitoba schools difficulty, in grappling with which the Dominion Government are to be congratulated on having steadfastly followed the straight line of duty-justice to the minority under the Constitution.

T. C. DOWN.

THE MUSIC-HALLS

LATE on a Saturday evening, two months ago, I was standing at the portals of Gatti's Music-hall, in the Westminster Bridge Road, reading the programme of the entertainment within. Was it worth while to enter? Every one else had long since made up his mind: the evening was far spent; the sound of the accompanying orchestra -the band in fullest swing supporting some vocalist or dancer on the stage-penetrated to the street; no one now was expected; the ticket-giver behind the fortifications of his office was dozing in security; the functions of the 'chucker-out '--if such there be—were at all events suspended; and no one stood in the doorway but myself and an undersized, slightly built, ragged-bearded person of uncertain gait, who examined me while I examined the programme. One always knows when one is being looked at, so eventually I turned upon him: was he perhaps labouring under some temporary difficulty of locomotion? He was, in any case, one of whom it was safe to predicate that energetic action was never his characteristic. He was less an active participator in Life than an impartial observer of it. There are those who would have called him a 'loafer;' and it may be that a loafer' he was. Anyhow he desired speech with me, and remarked, with an infirmity of deliverance which it would have been charitable to attribute to a quite recent indulgence in whatever may take the place of the wine-cup in the Westminster Bridge Road, that I was looking at the bill of the hall. I admitted that circumstance, and further replied that it appeared to me the bill was not a strong one. He took some umbrage at the statement. He addressed me suddenly with unsuspected eloquence, though in a tone more philosophical than vehement. What, then, was his interest in the hall? It became clear, in a minute or two, that he had no interest in the hall whatever. But he looked at Life largely, and the line of his argument with me-so far as his long-accumulated infirmities and a very recent debauch allowed him to indicate it—was that if a man went into a place of entertainment, he must go to it with the intention of being entertained; not seeking curiously for any particular artist, nor weighing anxiously the items in the programme, nor wanting any 'specialty,' but minded to 'receive,' and above all to be satisfied with, whatever in the good

providence of the management might be proffered for his joy. I had read to me a moral lesson. I wished the ragged-bearded observer of the world Good-night, with the respect due to any fellow creature whose theories are sound-even if his practice be imperfect. I crossed Westminster Bridge again, sadder and wiser. And I trust that the large tolerance so conspicuous in my friend may not be wholly wanting to the tone of this article.

And indeed a large tolerance is very much required from any one who, having seen great Art, the art of Aimée Desclée and Sarah Bernhardt, of Got and Mrs. Kendal and Henry Irving, betakes himself to a little study of the Music-Hall—an institution which, though I would look at it without prejudice, as a thing which meets and satisfies at all events an immense popular demand, I yet cannot take very seriously in regard to the opportunity that it at present affords for the exhibition of the comedian's or the vocalist's art. I am, perhaps, old-fashioned in this matter: I know I lag behind Mr. Walter Sickert, and, I think, behind Mr. Arthur Symons. The music-hall is popular, and will continue to be popular; but it will have to develop itself further, and, in my opinion, to change at least certain of its ways if it is to continue to be fashionable. Indeed, even now it would be very easy to exaggerate its vogue. The fashionable music-halls are chiefly the two or three which have already left behind them many of the music-hall's older characteristics. The Palace Theatre of Varieties, and yet more the Empire and the Alhambra, rely in great measure upon sources of attraction not known to the earlier successors of the 'free-and-easy-that is, of the public-house concert, which was the real origin of the halls-and not known much, even to-day, to the average hall, frequented chiefly by the inhabitants of its particular quarter, whether the quarter be Drury Lane and the hall the Middlesex, or whether it be Pimlico and the hall the Standard, or Battersea and the hall the Washington.

At the three great halls that I have mentioned of the newer and more fashionable kind-the Palace, Empire, Alhambra-what has happened is that an immense and novel importance has been assigned to 'spectacle.' Now, the essence of the music-hall proper-taking the word in its older sense-is that the place is a place for the exhibition of what may be supposed to be the talent or the charm of the individual performer; a dozen individual performers—sometimes, with the brevity of the modern 'turn,' two dozen individual performers succeeding each other rapidly: the chief spectacle, the spectacle of their talent, or of their attire, their art and charm --if you are minded to call it so-exhibited in front of a flat scene which, though frequently changed, as often as not has not, and does not profess to have, any necessary or even discernible connection with the figure strutting its hour in front of it. But at the Palace Theatre of Varieties, which the veteran Mr. Morton manages excel

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lently, you have, along, of course, with other performances, the spectacle of the tableau vivant-the one thing which the musichall has borrowed from the drawing-room; and it was fair, no doubt, that the music-hall should borrow that one thing, for it has lent the drawing-room the skirt dance, even the high kick,' which, for a year at least, was as fashionable as philanthropy, and as much de rigueur as slumming."

6

I said that the tableau vivant had been borrowed from the drawing-room; but, in borrowing it, the display of the nude figure has, of course, been added to that is to say, the paid model, accustomed to the poses of the studio, has, under artistic direction, exhibited her form to all the world in a degree which the best-endowed of amateurs would doubtless hesitate to follow. And in this has been found cause of offence-cause even of busy complaint on the part of the Puritan, for whom restriction, fussy interference, a narrow and continual forbidding, is as the very breath of life, and who is never altogether comfortable unless he is employed in palliating the mistakes of Providence and energetically bettering the arrangements of God.

That, in a word, expresses, and more effectually perhaps than by elaborate argument, my own view as to the wisdom and reasonableness of the opposition to the tableau vivant at the music-halls. I have no great opinion of the refinement of music-hall audiences. It is beyond a doubt that music-hall audiences-like modern theatrical audiences will stand the very riskiest of jokes. But somehow sight and apprehension are on a different footing; and just as no audience at an English theatre would endure the action of certain Parisian couchers,' or the action in a piece called Le Dindon at the Palais Royal this May, so no audience at an English music-hall would tolerate any show of undeniable indecency. Before the intervention of the Puritan became necessary, the public itself would have interfered. But, in the matter of the tableau vivant, the public rightly recognised what the Puritan ignored-that the nude in a tableau vivant, with all its accessories, with all its associations, is no longer an undressed woman, but the nude in art-the nude to be seen, therefore, with something, at least, of artistic appreciation of refined colour and of ordered and intricate line.

At the Empire and the Alhambra, from which I do not say that tableaux vivants are excluded, you have the yet greater spectacle of the Dance; the dance organised and performed upon a scale that makes the ballet of the opera a comparatively insignificant thing. I am not talking of the art of the single dancer. That may be seen probably almost as well in one place as in another. I am talking of the ballet en masse; the great concerted dance of every kind— chahut (which is the pretty word for 'cancan '), minuet, gavotte,

Most dulcet giga, dreamiest saraband.

These two great variety theatres, the Alhambra and the Empire, have, in the matter of the Dance, conquered new worlds. One or two hundred dancers move or pause on their vast stages with a strange charm of ordered colour, which at first you think you are speaking of with perhaps a little flattery if you compare it with the charm of a cowslip meadow, the charm of a tulip garden, the charm of a tract of bluebells among the greenery of a wood in May. But by the comparison, so far as intricate and ordered colour is concerned, you are guilty of an injustice-an injustice not to Nature but to the modern dance. These things are arranged by great artists in scenic effect. And their art is a new thing. Nature, I understand, is stationary; but their art improves with each new effort.

Of course, along with these organised splendours, whether of the tableau or the dance, the three great music-halls to which I have thus far confined my comments, have availed themselves, and have profited by availing themselves, of single 'turns' of exceptional-in some cases of temporary-public fascination. At one place you may have some incarnation of animal spirits and of telling eccentricity. At another, the svelte grace of a true young actress may be the medium for the mimicry of styles and ways that the young woman has noticed all around her. At a third-this time the Empire--it may be Yvette Guilbert with whom, as in Les Ingénues, or in the Demoiselles de Pensionnat, you are invited to laugh, and with whom you remain to weep almost, certainly to be most strongly moved by, as, fresh from the blithe Ambassadeur's,' she, in a sombre tale of outer Boulevards and nocturnal horrors,

Sings

The pity of unpitied human things.

It is a charitable view, at least, that even upon the stage of the music-hall no great reputation is acquired that is not, or that has not been, to some extent, deserved. Yvette Guilbert's reputation is deserved at all events, so magnetic is her personality, so varied her art. In the favour of a large public-not altogether in critical estimation, however, and not at all in the esteem of those whom the occasional violation of good taste distresses-one or two women (children, as I suppose, of Central London) take a place by Yvette Guilbert's side. No London hall is too important for them to be welcomed in. They prosper in the heart of things; they prosper in the suburbs. By the pricking in my thumbs, something wicked this way comes,' say the Witches in Macbeth-anticipating them. I am an old-fashioned person, and, I confess, their songs are not the songs that I would take any woman, of gentle or good mind, to listen to.

Incomparably the most reticent and finished artist among the men of the music-halls, is still Mr. Albert Chevalier. He has gone to