In the forties of the nineteenth century the theatre was treated everywhere with great respect--and more than anywhere else was this the case in Russia. Italian opera had not yet reached the development it attained at St. Petersburg some twenty years later, and Russian opera, represented by poor singers, and treated as a step-daughter by the directors of the Imperial Theatres, offered but little attraction. It was the drama and occasionally the ballet, when some star like Fanny Elsler appeared on the horizon, which brought together the best elements of educated society and aroused the youth of all classes, including the university students. The dramatic stage was looked upon--to speak in the style of those years--as “a temple of Art,” a centre of far-reaching educational influence. As to the actors and actresses, they endeavoured, in their turn, not merely to render on the stage the characters created by the dramatist; they did their best to contribute themselves, like Cruickshank in his illustrations of Dickens’s novels, to the final creation of the character, by finding its true personification. Especially at Moscow did this intellectual intercourse between the stage and society go on, and a superior conception of dramatic art was there developed. The intercourse which Gógol established with the actors who played his _Inspector-General_, and especially with SCHÉPKIN; the influence of the literary and philosophical circles which had then their seat at Moscow; and the intelligent appreciation and criticism of their work which the actors found in the Press--all this concurred in making of the Moscow Mályi Teátr (Small Theatre) the cradle of a superior dramatic art. While St. Petersburg patronised the so-called “French” school of acting--declamatory and unnaturally refined--the Moscow stage attained a high degree of perfection in the development of the naturalistic school. I mean the school of which Duse is now such a great representative, and to which Lena Ashwell owed her great success in _Resurrection_; that is, the school in which the actor parts with the routine of conventional stage tradition, and provokes the deepest emotions in his audience by the depth of his own real feeling and by the natural truth and simplicity of its expression--the school which occupies the same position on the stage that the realism of Turguéneff and Tolstóy occupies in literature.