THE THEATRE.
MADAME SAND: A BIOGRAPHICAL COMEDY.* Do not hitch your wagon to a star if that vehicle has only three wheels., Mr. Philip Moeller has certainly a facility for dialogue. He can make a joke, which is not a common faculty, but in Madame Sand he has been completely overwhelmed by the effulgence of his characters—Liszt, Chopin, Heine, Alfred de Musset, and George Sand. When the play was acted the audience was left with the impression that the author had been so completely bouleverse by his high conspanysthat he had merely brought his characters on to the stage and hoped that once there they would do themselves justice. Pious aspirations do not make a play, and yet, though it is not quite a play, though it is not a little dull, it was not unpleasing as produced by Mr. Fagan. The costume, for one thing, was attractive, and in the book we perceive a quantity of moderately good epigrams. The idea of the play is to display George Sand as an amiable impulsive Tank, able to override the remonstrances of a mother and the reluctance of three lovers—one lover per act. She simul- taneously loves, sups, packs, end writes novels. Thus : tender pressure of the hand and melting glance ; bite of omelette (with left hand) ; sentence describing unhappy past, inscribed in current novel with quill pen (right hand) ; excursion to pack shawl ; repeat.
Though crushed under the weight of his characters, Mr. Philip Moeller remains a potential dramatist, but when next he writes a play let him invent his characters for himself, a feat of which he is obviously perfectly capable. The actors at the Duke of York's suffered from the dullness produced by the flattening out of the dramatist. They made heroic efforts, but they seemed to move and speak with something of the frantic energy, the ill-success, the muffled tone of those who struggle under the folds of a collapsed tent. Even Mrs. Pat rick Campbell's vigour did not quite suffice. However, the acting, like the play, though ineffeetual, was not altogether unpleasing ; at least, the play will send those who have read or witnessed it in search of La Petite Fadette at the London Library. It did not deserve a
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