THE ENGLISH VALERIE.

Miss F. H. KELLY is playing Valerie (the celebrated part of Mademoiselle Mans) with applause, and deserving the applause she obtains, in a mongrel piece called Valeria, spoiled for the English stage from the beautiful drama of SCRIBE. The character, which is at once pathetic and gay, and whose pathos affects with- out distressing, is well adapted to her powers. Miss KELLY is not formed like her namesake, to make those reiterated and prolonged demands on the sensibility that disconcert rather than soften, and dispose you to resistance. The horizon, even when cloudy, is never without sunshine ; the melancholy is not too profound to yield to a smile ; and her voice, without much variety of tone, rather sinks occasionally into sadness than dwells permanently in it. Speeches, too, like those of Valerie, of a tender and affectionate meaning, are never thrown away on Miss KELLY; whether feeling them or not herself, she usually makes them felt : and, as actors succeed best when prompted from within, it may be surmised that Miss KELLY does feel them. With a countenance on which gladness and grief sit equally well—voice capable alike of the plaintive and the cheerful—pleasing manners and person—youthful figure—and an air of innocence and goodness, she is the only actress on the English stage that could come within a hundred miles of Valerie.

If Miss KELLY has profited by the late visit of Mademoiselle Mans—and that she has availed herself of the opportunity is very apparent—she in some degree also suffers from it. Instead of accepting what was good in her performance with thankfulness. the Spectator having got a standard to measure it by, was more disposed to note her deficiencies than to acknowledge her merits, They, however, who have not seen Mademoiselle MARS, may derive from the acting of Miss KELLY all the pleasure which a translation can give to persons unacquainted with the ori,Mial author. The substantial fund of pathos is, with some deductions, preserved ; but the thousand untranslatable graces that enhanced it in the original, have, as is usual in translations, nearly all disappeared. The nature of the fugacious charm that has eluded the apprehen- sion of our amiable actress, or exceeded her powers of expression, we will .endeavour to explain. The peculiar condition of a person blind from infancy, but bred with tenderness and care, may be expected to produce a peculiar character. We look for a simplicity bordering on ignorance, yet without rus- ticity ; and for girlishness of manner, rather than the usual perfect graces of maturity. There will not only be an entire ahsence of affectation and formality, but nothing will remain to indicate practice or discipline, or familiarity with the forms of artificial breeding or the habits of society. VaVrie has expanded into woman without having lost the unconscious innocence of childhood. In the performance of Mademoiselle MARS, pathos was the principal but not the sole element. A rare and bewitch- ing naïveté pervaded the whole, and gave irresistible force to the tender and the pathetic. So unaffectedly sad, so innocently gay, so irrecoverably dark--" poor child! " you said to yourself, hardly knowing whether you were more pleased or pained ; whilst a noble magnanimity and a high fortitude, under the deep sense occasion- ally testified of her sad destiny, recalled you to juster thoughts, and pity for the child gave way to admiration for the woman. This was a refinement of art or nature beyond the reach of Miss KELLY. She was plaintive, tender, and moved her audience ; but she did not throw them into a rapture, wherein nobody could tell what feeling predominated. She closed her eyes, and people talked of her blindness ; but you did not read her lot in the inde- scribable tokens of her accent and manner. Her pathos was af- fecting, without being particularly characteristic of her condition ; and sometimes she was as one that talked with her eyes shut ra- ther than the born blind.* There were the gentleness and ele- gance of the woman, but not the inexperience and half-childish simplicity necessary to give them the character peculiar to her cir- cumstances. Under the burden of sixty years; MARS was a younger Valerie than Miss KELLY in the bloom of youth. It would be unjust, however, to charge Miss KELLY with the whole of the vast inferiority perceptible in her performance of the part. M. SCRIBE, the principal _author of Valerie, is a man of taste and judgment, who wrote with an eye both to the heroine of his piece and to the actress who was to personate her, and knew equally well what became the character of the one and the lips of the other. The dialogue is simple, chaste, elegant, with many strokes of naivet6 and tenderness ; and where there is not much to assist the conception, there is at least nothing to mar the en- deavours of the actress. The language which Miss- KELLY had to employ, is poor, vulgar, and affected ; and the felicities of the * This unhappy effect was in some degree occasioned by her preferring, as per- haps the easier mode of representing blindness, closed eye-lids, to the dull, dead gaze which indicates it when they are open. That she judged ill, cannot be doubted by any one who calls to mind the touching and profoundly melancholy expression of the fixed eye with which the original vaterie at once told the tale of her blindness load anottetttb spectator t esansasitut, original are invariably either blunted or suppressed. The attempt upon Valerie's ecstatic thanksgiving could be considered hi no otherlight than as an assault and battery, and should be punished

as such. Instead of thanking God briefly and emphatically,

the simple girl is made to address the" powers above,"—just as, in a strain equally unnatural, she elsewhere tells Ernest, that her ear is " greedy " of his accents. We forget whether it was Valerie or

Mrs. HUSSBY that alarmed the audience with the diplomatic word " reciprocity." M. SCRIBE, aware that the whole interest of the piece depended on one character, and that its success in repre- sentation must also depend on one performer, has contrived to

detain Valerie on the stage, and to make her the principal medium of explanations. But the traducer into English has been at as much pains to keep her from the stage, and has doomed the au- dience to an infinite deal of pseudo sympathy and twaddle about " poor Valeria" and her beauty, her blindness, her forlorn estate, &c. from the mouths of persons whom you are all the while wishing heartily at the D—. To concentrate the interest, too, as much as possible in the pro- per person, M. SCRIBE has judiciously kept the amours of Henri and Caroline in the back-ground. But in the English piece, these

personages know neither modesty nor keeping; and with their com- monplace jealousy and despair, absolutely supersede the lofty and

hallowed love of Valerie. And, as if all this intermixture of vul- gar earthliness were not enough to debaSe the purity of the piece, two new characters. are introduced—if characters can be called

that character have none ; and old age, which, in the presence of

Valerie, common sense and feeling would have made reverend, is drawn twaddling and querulous. After this, we need not stop to

ask what induced the cutter and maimer of M. SCRIBE to trans-

form the respectable old serving-man, who, in the original, con- ducts Vah"rie on the stage, and to whom her grateful attentions

are so becoming, into a gossipping chambermaid, whom nobody can see or hear with patience, and whose propinquity would be fatal to the effect of the most perfect acting.. So much for the piece. With regard to the actors, Mademoi- selle MARS had equally the advantage of Miss KELLY; ' not being surrounded by grimacing, ranting Thespians, who had the anxious air of schoolboys distressed at having forgotten their parts, but by persons who at least comported themselves quietly and looked like ladies and gentlemen. M. ARMAND, in particular, though a rather

antiquated Ernest, was an easy, equable, and well-bred performer, and Mademoiselle DELIA, though somewhat grim and ghostly,

wore the look neither of a hoyden nor of a simpleton, nor yet of a milliner's maid. Besides her faults of omission, Miss KELLY may on her part be charged with some less venial errors of commis-

sion. Poor Valerie, in the original, when feeling some strange in-

tern-al commotion at the pressure of an unexpected yet not absolutely unknown hand, puts her own to her heart, and exclaims—" Voilil cc que je j'eprouvais autrefois." We trust Miss KELLY acted

under directions, when she improved on the hint, and stole her hand to her friend's heart, and afterwards to her eyes, to detect the secret of her affections. For this artifice, inconsistent with the ex- treme simplicity of the character, the original gives us no authority; —there, Valerie is led to the discovery by feeling the tremulous- ness of her friend's hand, which she has accidentally taken in her own.

It is vain for Miss KELLY to attempt the expression of violent emotions ; whatever may be the truth and force of her conceptions, she is utterly without power to do them justice in representation : her acting at such times is anything but agreeable or natural. Is it possibie that she can have seen the graceful yet expressive manner of Mademoiselle MARS in the last scene—the scene of her greatest triumph—and yet imagine that vehement gesticulation, gasping, shrieking, darting to and fro, prostration and flinging of arms round necks, and all time vulgar Thespian indications of strong emotion, are either decorous or graceful in themselves, or becoming the singularly pure and delicate part she has assumed ? How beautiful and how full of feeling, in the representation of Mademoi-

selle Maas, is Valerie's affectionate recognition first of her friend and then of her lover !—how extravagant and over-acted, and

really passionless, in that of Miss KELLY 1—and the ecstacy of wonderment, fear, rapture, and gratitude, which in the one case made acre itself seem beautiful, as represented by the other, caused you to 'Cum aside your eyes from the sight even of youth and beauty. Two slight particulars occur to us to mention, as approaching within a perilous distance of the burlesque, and easily capable of

being reformed. Let Valerie or Valerza before the next perform- ance, entreat Mr. VINING to dispense with the everlasting two chairs, and not to insist on their sitting Darby and Joan like whilst Valerie relates her story. Above all, let her forbid Lord Melsom's chasing her with the green shade. It is a mortal foe to sentiment : the very sight of it made you shudder, and a single demonstration more on the part of Mr. COOPER towards putting it on Valerie must have wrecked the whole piece.

One word as to the propriety of founding the interest of a drama on a case of natural infirmity. No situation of life—no accident human nature is liable to, can be said to be unfit for the purposes of the stage, which is so used as to move in an audience feelings of sympathy with innocence, compassion for unmerited misfortune, and admiration of feminine magnanimity ; and he who objects to Valtrie, a circumstance that in a peculiar manner calls those feel- ings forth, either has them not or contends that it is wrong to in- dulge them. The play of M. SCRIBE introduces a blind girl led by Stu old raan, and the most affecting dram a antiquity resent4 blind old man led by a girl : the suffrages of all time have acknow- ledged the true pathos of the one, and the feelings of those who have feeling will in all time to come do equal justice to the dif- ferent but equally genuine sentiment of the other.