"transvaluation of ideals." They mark the transition from one phase or period of art to another. At present we seem, as regards both poetry and the other arts, to be just in the middle of one of these transitions. The result, while the process is going on, is great confusion. Modern poetry is in the ferment of new growth. struggling alongside of romanticism, classicism, mysticism. As in music, in painting, and very notably in architecture, there is for the time no dominant style, and no very clearly defined purpose. It is a period partly of syncretism, partly of experiment in all sorts of directions. But just as there are signs that we are working towards some new and great architecture, which will express the modern spirit through realising and using modern materials and conditions, so it is with poetry; and the new poetry may be as great as any of those which have preceded it. What form it will take, which of the many elements and impulses which are now struggling with one another for expression will become dominant and give the new poetry its distinctive quality, its place in the history of human art and human expression, we cannot tell beforehand; that is for the next generation, or for one even more distant. But meanwhile, all the ferment, all the antagonism of divergent or even contrary motives, is part of one great movement which in time will take shape and clear itself. Wordsworth, the great realist, worked in the closest community and sympathy with Coleridge, the great romanticist. It is a far cry from Wordsworth's daffodils to those of Mr. Masefield. But Mr. Mase field's poetry is not merely in the line of succession from that older poetry in which the names of Wordsworth and Coleridge are twin splendours; it is part of the same epoch, part of the same movement, with the poetry, let us say, of Mr. Yeats. I do not think that our national taste is really debauched, any more than it was when Wordsworth thought so. At all events a poet who has the art of making the incidents of common life interesting will not miss his appeal, though he may, like Wordsworth, have to wait for his recognition. For those whose object appears to be rather to make the incidents of common life not merely uninteresting, but nauseous, there may be a temporary and trivial popularity, but we can neglect them now safely, as the next generation will neglect them certainly. Before I call on others to contribute to the discussion I will ask you to join me in thanking Mr. Coleridge for his paper. THE BURBAGES, FOUNDERS OF THE MODERN STAGE. BY MRS. CHARLOTTE CARMICHAEL STOPES, HON. F.R.S.L. [Delivered October 23rd, 1912.] If it is true of anyone, it is true of James Burbage, "the first builder of playhouses," that he was the founder of the modern stage. He had the inspiration to realise the demand of his times, and the courage, forethought and perseverance of a man determined to succeed in his efforts to supply it. We do not know when he was born-it may have been about 1535; we do not know where he was born. Some have suggested Stratford-on-Avon, because there was a bailiff there of his name in 1555, but there were also Burbages in Leicestershire, Somerset, Oxfordshire, Kent and London. We know nothing of his childhood. It may be supposed that he had learned to read and write; he might have been a chorister in some church; but he went to no university, and there is no trace of his having had any inheritance. The one fact which we do know of him is that he had been apprenticed to a joiner, and that he must have served his time to take up his freedom, as he was often in later years still called a "joiner." Let us pause for a moment to recall the world into which he stepped. It had been stirred to its depths by mighty religious influences spreading from Ger VOL. XXXII. 10 many and Switzerland, and had not yet found its natural level. The dissolution of the monasteries, one outcome of these influences, had resulted in social, economic and educational changes, as well as further religious developments. The Italian renaissance of letters had spread through France to this country, and stirred intellectual and literary fervours among all classes of society. The hunger for the new learning increased the number of translations, and the conservative and reproductive powers of the art of printing began to be utilised to the full. Everything that was written could have indefinitely multiplied copies. Books naturally grew cheap. Even the people began to buy books and to read them, discuss them, and understand them in a way hardly realised by modern readers. As a new world had been given to them out of the haze of the west, which widened their horizon and stimulated their faculty of wonder and imagination, so a new world had been unrolled to them in the miracles of the printer's shop. Everything seemed so new, and so fresh and interesting in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. It was a stock-taking time, during which men reckoned what they had and what they needed to have. They sent out large orders for new things, and they modified their old by the new. Music there had been in England for longchurch music, chamber music, folk music, dance music; of art, in its limited sense, there was none. There was not a sculptor in all England; there was hardly a native painter before Hilliard. If they wanted their portraits painted, they had to find a foreigner; if they wanted landscape pictures, they had to content themselves with natural scenes, or with gardens and architecture, the sole forms of art which had thriven in the country. Though the printers had introduced rude woodcuts into some of their books, they were rather as decorations than as illustrations. There was not a picture gallery to be seen; men had to wait for the coming of the Stuarts for that. They have had to wait till our own time to be fed ad nauseam upon pictures in all aspects of life and thought. But our ancestors had already begun to develop a native form of mixed art in the beginnings of the drama. It was fed from many sources, and it satisfied the unconscious art instincts of the people--musical, dramatic, spectacular. The old monks had performed miracle plays, to give the unlettered multitude crude views of sacred story; the Court moralities or allegorical plays were openly didactic, attempting to help in the formation of character and the formation of sound political and religious opinions. But both Court and people wanted to be amused as well as to be educated, and there arose for them lighter representations based upon classical translations, foreign romances or national traditions, generally made spicy by the jokes and gossip of the day; the mummery and masking of the revels under the lords of misrule at Christmas. The people themselves were not content with being only auditors, they wanted to express themselves as actors; hence the City mystery plays represented by the Trades Guilds, the processions with pageants and feats of agility at festival times and midsummer's eve, and the rude performances enacted by the people on their |