Nupkins Awakened

On tbe subject of the theater, an enhusiastio young first nighter wou UI robably have given Morris up after the irst attempt to gather his opinión of 'The Secoud Mrs. Tanqneray" aa an onlinary citizen wbo had Bever formed he habit of playgoing, and neither knew nor cared anything about the theater except asatreatforchildren once a year during the pantoniine season. But Morris would have written for the stage if ;here had been any stage tbat a poet and artist oould write for. When the Socialst league once proposed to raise the wind by a dramatic entertainment and suggested that he should provide the )lay, he set to at once and provided it. And what kind of play was it? Was it a miracle play on the lines of those scènes in the Towneley mysteries between the "shepherds abiding in the field," wbich he used to quote with great relish as bis idea of a good bit of comedy? Kot at all. It was a topical exravaganza, entitled ' 'Nupkins Awakened," the chief "character parts" bemg Sir Peter Edlin, Tenuyaon and an imaginary archbishop of Canterbury. Sir Peter owed the compliment to his activity at that time in sending socialists to prison on charges of "obstruction," which was always proved by getting a policeman to swear that if any passerby or vehicle had wishcd to pass aver the particular spot in a thoronghfare on which the speaker or his audience happened to be standing their presence would have okwtructed him. This contention, which was regarded as quite sensible and unanswerable by the newspapers of the day, was put into a nutshell in the course of Sir Peter's summing up in the play. "In f act, gentlemen, it is a matter of grave doubt whetherweare not all of uscontinually committing this offense from our eradles to our graves. " This speech, which the real Sir Peter of course never made, though he certainly would have doue so had he had wit enough to see the absurdity of solemnly sending a man to prison for two montbs because another man could not walk through hiro, especially when it would have been so easy to lock him up for three months on some respectablo pretext, will probably keep Sir Peter's memory green when all his actual judicial utterances are forgotten. As to Tennyson, Morris took a socialist who happened to combine the right sort of beardwith a mei aucholy temperament and drilled him in a certain portentons incivility of speech which, taken from thequality of his remarles, threw a light on Morris' opinión of Tennyson which was all the more instructive because he delighted in Tennyson's verse as keenly as Wagner delighted in the music of Mendelssohn, whose credit for qualities oí larger scope he nevertheless wrote down and destroyed. Morris played the ideal Archbishop himself. He made no attempt to make up the part in the ordinary stage fashion. 'He always contended that uo more was necessary for stage illusion than some iudiscinot conventional symbol, such as a halo for a saint, a crook for a bishop, or, if you liked, a cloak and dagger for the villain and a red wig for the comedian. A pair of clerical bands and black stockings proclaimed the Archbishop. The rest he did by obliterating his humor and intelligence and preseuting his own person to the audience like a lantern with the light blownout, with a dull absorption in his own dignity which several minutes of the wildest screaming laughter at him when he entered could not disturb. I laughed immoderately myself, and I can still see quite clearly the long top floor of that warehouse in the Farringdon road as I saw it iu glimpses between my paroxysms, with Morris gravely on the stage in his bands at one end ; Mrs. Stillmau, a tall and beautiful figure, rising like a delicate spire above a sky line of city chimney nots, at the otber, and a motley sea of rolling, wallowing, guiïawing socialists between. There has been no other such successful first uight within living memory, I believe, but I remember only one dramatic critio who took care to be piesont - William Archer. Morris was so interested by his experiment in this sort of composition that he for some time talked of tryinghis hand at aserious drama aud would no doubt have done it had there been any practical occasion for it or any means of consumruating it by stage representation under proper conditions without spending more time on the job than itwasworth. Later, at one of theannualfestivitiesof the Hammersmith Socialist society, he played the oid gentleman in the bath chair in a short pieoe called "The Duchess of Bayswater" (not by himself), which once served its turn at the Haymarket as a curtain raiser. It was impossible for such a bom teller and devourer of stories as hewas to be indifferent to an art which is nothing more than the most vivid and real of all ways of story telling. No man woulcl more willingly have seeu 'his figures move and heard their