MARY COWDEN CLARKE'S LIFE.* Mits. COWDEN CLARKE comes forward, at

eighty-seven years of age, with far more than the usual credentials for memoir-making. Her name is well known in connection with that of her husband, who died happily and quietly some twenty years ago, as an industrious and succesbful writer ; of the book-making order, it may be, but a very worthy type of a useful class. The value of her Shakespeare concord- ance is very high. Of book-making about herself and her own experiences of life and the world, at all events, she has proved herself in her present volume a most accomplished mistress. For as an observer of literary and artistic life she had opportunities which fall to few, and she has made worthy and attractive use of them. Outside of art and music and letters, in which world she lived, her book will Introduce her to no public characters of interest, and to few besides private friends. For she fulfilled thoroughly Victor Hugo's idea, that the artistic and literary life was the one worth leading. The fact that life in that especial form is fast dying out, and gradually blending with the world of fashion and dilettantism till the landmarks are beginning to be lost, lends a strange and lingering interest to the last records of one of the old school. Mrs. Cowden Clarke was full of keen and intelligent enthusiasm for all who had made themselves ( minent in the world of art and letters. No touch of jealousy mingles with her admiration and love for her famous sister, the Countess Gigliucci, so well known to those who still remember her as Clara Novello, who, to the present writer at all events, remains the most incomparable singer of our time. And she pays a tribute of little less than worship to Charles Dickens, not so much in his capacity of author as in another in which he was highly valued by his personal friends, that of theatrical manager. Mrs. Clarke was selected by him, under pleasant circumstances pleasantly described, for the "old women" of his famous little company, his Dame Quickly and his Mrs. Malaprop, and seems to have done full justice to the choice. Her appreciation of the drama was real and deep, and her critical judgment appears to us of far greater value than that of many more accredited judges. We can from personal experience thoroughly endorse her high estimate of the perform- ances of the classical drama, and more especially of the playa of Shakespeare, that have from time to time been in evidence upon the stage at Dresden. We doubt if the more celebrated boards of the Comedic Francaise have ever pro- duced the masterpieces of the higher drama in anything like the same degree of perfection ; and the intelligent love of the works of our great poet, which their management showed in Mrs. Clarke's day, as in the time which we ourselves re- member, should be in more than one sense a lesson to us. It is, we believe, an open secret that much of Sir Henry Irving's M9 11.00,g Lif• an dutobiopaphiz Sketch. By 3f ary Covden Lcndon:

intellectual skill in stage control was derived from his obser- vation of the methods of the famous Meiningen company ; but by them, if anything, individual excellence was a little sacrificed to the genius of ensemble. In Shakespearian work this may be carried too far, as Shakespeare wrote essentially what are called "star parts" for prominent players, and it is to the extraordinary excellence of Otto Devrient and Dettmer and Ellmenreich when Mrs. Clarke was at the Saxon capital, and of the Emil Devrient and Dawisen and Uhlrich of our own memory, backed by a capital company, that the Dresden. performances owed their especial charm. The Devi ients,.

who numbered amongst them Schroeder Devrient, the singer so famous as Fidelio, were to the German stage what the- Kembles were to ours. The present Posthumus of Sir Henry Irving's daring experiment upon Cymbeline—" such a strange broken-backed thing, you know," as Matthew Arnold once styled it, in a humorous mood—is by descent a Kemble. To. the Shakespearian, we suppose, all things should be Shake- spearian; but we confess that to ourselves Cymbeline is enough to test the faith of the most robust. There is a grain of truth inmost fables ; and we should not be surprised to learn that.. Bacon, in the dark hour of ambition to "write a play" which besets all the higher natures whether they like it or not, was personally guilty of Cy ntheline, and produced it under Shake- speare's name. Except the famous "Fear no more the heat of the sun "—no doubt introduced by the poet—there is not a line to be remembered in it from the beginning to. the end. Sir Henry Irving is a true stage magician, but

his last task is a bald one. On the German stage, how- ever, it is not with the Cymbelines, with the Benedicks and. lelacbeths and 'Violas, that our associations mainly dwell, and we fully believe how deeply the young Ellmenreich, who charmed Mrs. Clarke so much as -Viola, moved her in the German stage-version of Goethe's Gretchen. We always. wonder why a good translation of that version of Faust has not been attempted here, even as Schlegel helped to popularise Shakespeare in Germany. But we presume that the English public are too wedded to the pantomimic Faust to which melodramas and operas have accustomed it to be prepared. to listen to the masterpiece in its truer and more dramatic form. Before leaving her stage recollections it is worthy of

note that Mrs. Clarke fully confirms the general testimony of all observers to the surpassing greatness of Edmund Kean. It is even reported of him that he once made Posthumus possible.

But though dramatic by taste and literary by marriage, it was in an atmosphere of music that Mary Novello was brought up; and it is by musical amateurs perhaps that her book will be read with the greatest pleasure. The accounts of Clara Novello are delightful, and we should have liked to have a picture of her numbered amongst the illustrations to the book. The story of the little girl singing the best Italian airs before a tribunal of German masters, and carrying off the prize from all competitors, though so small that she had to be perched upon a stool to be visible, and perfectly childlike and composed the whole time, is as pretty as need, be ; and a fit prologue to the Clara Gigliucci whom the present writer himself remembers, singing song after song to the piano in what she called her "little button of a drawing-

room" at Nice, as fittingly and harmoniously as under tho roof of Exeter Hall. The following extract will give an idea

of Mrs. Clarke's opportunities in the world in which she lived

" We had not yet left Frith Street when a most memorable. musical evening took place there. It was just after Malibran'a marriage with De Beriot, and they both came to a party at our house. De Beriot played in a string quartette by Haydn, his tone being one of the loveliest I ever heard on the violin,— not excepting that of Paganini, who certainly was a marvellous executant. Then Malibran gave, in generously lavish succession,. Mozart's • Non pni di fiori,' with Willmann's obligate accompani- ment on the comb di bassetto ; a Santa Maria' of her host's composition (which she sang at eight with consummate effect and expression), a tenderly graceful air, 'Ah, rien n'est deux commo- la cola qui dit je t'aime,' and lastly a spirited mariner's song, with. a sailorly burden, chiming with their rope-hauling. In these two latter she accompanied herself; and when she had concluded, amid a roar of admiring plaudits from all present, she ran up to one of the heartiest among the applauding guests — Felix Mendelssohn—and said, in her own winning, playfully imperious manner, which a touch of foreign speech and accent made only the more fascinating, ' Now, Mr. Mendelssohn, I never do nothing for nothing : you must play for me now I have sung for you.' He, nothing loath, let her lead him to the pianoforte, where he dashed into a wonderfully impulsive extempore, —masterly, musician-like, full of gusto. In this marvellous improvisation he introduced the several pieces Malibran had just sung, working them with admirable skill one after the other, and finally in combination, the four subjects blended together in elaborate counter-point?'

Musical scenes like this are evidently Mrs. Clarke's favourite places in her volume; and here too, as in the drama, he found in "delightful Dresden " her most congenial sphere. She recalls to us our own happy experiences of the alternate nights of music and drama in the beautiful old Dresden theatre, neither too large nor yet too small, where all the best works were alternately presented with a quiet perfection of detail, backed by the greys and browns of carefully har- monised painting, which often make one speculate anxiously why the French should have succeeded in arrogating for themselves such a supposed eminence in the artistic world.

The unpretentious comfort and quiet hours of German music and drama, in those days at all events, were in marked con- trast to the feverish and long-spun-out discomfort of French theatres; and a great encouragement to loving students and critics like Mrs. Cowden Clarke. She had her other friends, too ; and has something to tell here of Richard Cobden, and then of Cardinal Wiseman, who was much amused when a maid-servant at Ugbrooke reverentially addressed him as " Your Immense" (he was a man of round proportions), and

informed him that half-a-dozen Jezebels—meaning Jesuits—

were there to meet him. Quaint anecdotes of Charles Lamb have their place in the volume. So has much pleasant discourse about Swiss and Italian scenery, and Mrs. Clarke will astonish many of our modern authors, militant here an earth, by an unfeigned enloginm upon the courtesy and liberality of publishers, English and American. She can tell us how Liston made Edmund Kean laugh on the stage for a wager, by suddenly revealing his india- rubber face from behind the veil of a Virgin of the Sun in Pizarro, and she varies her book by little excursions of her husband's, her friends', and her own, into the realm of poetry. That all this cultivation and intelligence does not always produce that unproducible thing, the ear for metre, may perhaps be gathered from such an enigmatic line as the following, out of an impromptu acrostic on Mozart, placed in a Mozart album at Salzburg by request of the committee :—

" Long as art-love shall exist, Mozart's name O'er all shall triumph in the rolls of fame."

We scarcely remember a line, with all respect to Mrs. Clarke, which defies all the laws of scansion quite so -cunningly as the first of these ; but neither she nor her

readers will quarrel with so slight a word of depreciation upon so pleasant and varied a book.