At the Manhattan Mr. Leo Dietrichstein's Before and After has vastly amused the many who have seen it. The play is based upon a French original by MM. Hennequin and Milhaud, and in its complicated yet very neat construction it is a typical Palais Royal farce. The experienced mind can easily see how deftly Mr. Dietrichstein must have treated the original in order to make it void of serious offence in its English form; but he has succeeded, and has produced a most laughable three act play, which is performed by Mr. Fritz Williams and his associates with the light touch required by such a piece. Mr. Dietrichstein has given himself one of his favourite characters-the polished foreigner-and Miss Katherine Florence is very pleasing as the young wife who is the principal victim of the "nerve powder" which furnishes the central motive of the farce. Alfred Sutro It has been some years since we have had so many English literary visitors. There is Mr. Hall Caine, who however has been here so often of late that his coming no longer creates any great stir; a very cordial and genuine welcome was given to Mr. Jerome K. Jerome; and Mrs. Craigie's lecturing tour has been a distinct success. Then came Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, and about the middle of last month arrived another playright, Mr. Alfred Sutro, who, until the production of the Walls of Jericho, was best known to Americans as the consummately successful translator of Maeterlinck. Many men fired with literary ambition have plodded along in less congenial occupations with the sole purpose of earning enough to enable them to devote all their time to the pen: very few ever did so more unromantically than Mr. Sutro. He is the son of a country physican, and decided upon a business career in order to prepare himself for his chosen work of literature without fear of poverty. At the age of twenty he settled in London and engaged in the general produce commission business. He bought and sold all kinds of country produce and finally branched out as a manu LEO DIETRICHSTEIN facturer of glucose. He made a small fortune, and at thirty retired to write plays. His present success and future promise are a matter for congratulation among those who appreciate the best in modern dramatic literature. Mr. A. P. Watt was recently named as the literary executor of the late Dr. Two Literary Executors George MacDonald. Between the two there had long existed an intimate friendship, Mr. Watt's first transaction as a "literary agent" having been the sale of one of Dr. MacDonaald's books. M. Gustave Simon has been appointed to succeed the late Paul Meurice, the literary executor of Victor Hugo. M. Simon has been assisting Meurice during the last seven or eight months in the national edition of Hugo's works. This edition was commenced three years ago, but so far only three volumes have appeared, with a fourth due some time this month. The edition will require some forty volumes and will include great mass of unpublished docu There was produced a few weeks ago at the Vaudeville Theatre in Paris a play An Anecdote of Balzac. based on Balzac's Cousine Bette. From the Paris papers we should judge that the play created no greater stir than did the Duchesse de Langeais, which was dramatised and presented three or four years ago; yet these tardy recognitions must have pleased the shade of the great novelist, who always had a strong fondness for the theatre, albeit it was far from being his métier. This taste recalls an anecdote told by Théophile Gautier. One morning the author of Mademoiselle de Maupin received word from Balzac asking him to repair as quickly as possible to the home of the latter. Gautier went. "At last! You are here," cried Balzac. "Idler! Why did you not hurry? You should have been here an hour ago. I read to-morrow at Harel's a great drama in five acts." "Exactly, and you want my advice?” replied Gautier, sitting down in an armchair, prepared to submit to a long reading. At this attitude Balzac divined the thought of the poet and said with the simplest air imaginable, "But the drama is not written." "The deuce! Well, you must put off the reading for six weeks." "No." said Balzac, "we are going to rush through the dramorama in order to get the advance money." "From now till to-morrow? It is impossible. There would not be the time to transcribe it." "This is how I have arranged the matter: You will do one act, Ourliac another, Laurent-Jan the third, de Belloy the fourth, I the fifth, and I shall read at noon, as has been agreed. One act of a drama is four or five hundred lines; a man can write five hundred lines in a day and a night." "Tell me the subject," said Gautier. "Show me your plan. Point out in a few words the characters that I am to put into the work." "Ah!" cried Balzac, with an air of superb dejection and of magnificent disdain, "if I have to tell you the subject we shall never be through." That drama was Vautrin. Lionel Terry. The managers of the publicity departments in our modern American publishing houses are by no means lacking in daring and ingenuity, yet all of them must step aside and yield precedence to Mr. Lionel Terry, who is now under sentence of death at Wellington, New Zealand. Mr. Terry is an Englishman, thirty-six years old, was educated at Eton and at Oxford, has served against the Matabele, and has done a great deal of travelling. When he went to New Zealand, he became one of the most violent protesters against alien immigration. He wrote several books on this subject, and to call attention to the latest of these, The Shadow, he went into the Chinese quarter of Wellington and deliberately murdered an aged Chinaman. On the following day he informed a bookseller that the sale of The Shadow was certain to increase, and then promptly gave himself up to the police. Best in England. Not one of the six books that appeared in our last issue as enjoying the greatest popularity in the busiest season of the bookselling year is to be found in the list of the English best sellers for the same period. The most successful novel over there was Stanley Weyman's Starvecrow Farm, followed by The Hundred Days, of Max Pemberton; Lone Marie, by W. E. Norris; Love the Tyrant, by C. Garvice: The Lake, by George Moore; and Princess Priscilla's Fortnight, by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. The seventh book was Marion Crawford's Soprano, the English title of Fair Margaret, and a little farther down the list was Mrs. Atherton's Travelling Thirds. laudable desire of "cornering" his friend, gave him the following to wriggle through: "Femme," "Catilina," âme, fouina, jongle, citoyen, ongle, paien, mirabelle, Mirabeau, belle, flambeau, "Orestie," Gabrio (a pet name for the Countess Dash, a collaborator and guest, whose name was Gabrielle), répartie. agio, figue, faisan, ligue, parmesan, moisette, pâté, grisette, bâté! Such a motley crowd of words probably never came together in the French language before! Méry at once wrote a perfectly coherent poem to these bouts-rimés, and the poem was signed "Méry and Dumas." When on the poet's death the verse was returned to the romancer, Dumas conceived the idea of offering the autograph MS. to the reader of the Petit Journal, for which he was then writing, who could compose the best set of new lines to the endings. No less than two hundred and twenty poems were sent in, whereupon Dumas offered to make a book of them, if poets and public would subscribe 500 francs for the expenses, promising at the same time to add his autograph to each copy. |