better understanding between theatre and public has been educated.
Question is made nowadays if the actor's be not the most difficult, as it is the most complex, of all the arts; and it is pretty well established as a judgment that to be great as an actor entitles the man to a station not less than, nor removed from, that to which fame conducts poet, or painter, or sculptor, or statesman, or preacher. "A theatre," one time said Macready, "ought to be a place of recreation for the sober-minded and intelligent." So, indeed, the true theatre is; for the theatre is not the building from whose plan of construction it takes its name, but the vital drama, plays of life and character and thought and condition and purpose. The great pity is that the drama proper is confounded with amusements, that the theatre is made to take in everything in which there are the arc of a circle and a stage. In any serious discussion of the drama, it is always presumed that the reference is to its representative parts, those things in it that are best, noblest, enduring. Mr. Irving says, as soundly as felicitously:
"The truth is that the immortal part of the stage is its noble part. Ignoble accidents and interludes come and go, but this lasts on forever. It lives like the human soul in the body of humanity, associated with much that is inferior, and hampered by many hindrances,—but it never sinks into nothingness, and never fails to find new and noble work in exactness of permanent and memorable excellence. Heaven forbid that I should seem to cover, even with a counterpane of courtesy, exhibitions of deliberate immorality. Happily this sort of thing is not common, and although it has hardly been practised by anyone who, without a strain of meaning, can be associated with the profession of acting; yet public censure, not active enough to repress the evil, is ever ready to pass a sweeping condemnation on the stage which harbors it. Our cause is a good one. We go forth, armed with the luminous panoply which genius has forged for us, to do battle with dulness, with coarseness, with apathy, with every form of vice and evil. In every human heart there gleams a higher reflection of this shining armor. The stage has no lights or shadows that are not lights of life and shadows of the heart. To each human consciousness it appeals in alternating mirth and sadness, and will not be denied. Err it must, for it is human; but, being human, it must endure."
Admission is made of the fact that the interests of the theatre are sometimes degraded by panders to low, vicious, and morbid tastes; but fair-minded, intelligent people find no difficulty in discriminating the devotees of the drama from the hucksters and tradespeople of the play-house, nor do they confound the pursuit of a noble art with the practices of a contemptible commerce between ignorance and vulgarity. But even in such cases there is this to be observed, that the stage "holds out long against the invitation to pander; and such invitations, from the publicity and decorum that attend the whole matter, are neither frequent nor eager. A sort of decency sets in upon the coarsest person in entering even the roughest theatre. I have sometimes thought that, considering the liability to descend and the facility of descent, a special providence watches over the morals and tone of our English stage." He might have said, of the English-speaking stage; for certainly nothing is more indicative of a protecting spirit of the drama than the high moral tone of the stage of this country, where the only censorship of the drama, and the only restraint upon the theatre, is public opinion.
May we not see in the survival and triumph of the drama through ages of assault and contumely, of persecutions and prohibitions, a divine purpose somewhat wiser than the will of man? Mr. Irving has suggested the reason why "the stage has literally lived down the rebuke and reproach under which it formerly cowered, while its professors have been simultaneously living down the prejudices which excluded them from society." That reason is, "The stage is now seen to be an elevating instead of a lowering influence on national morality, and actors and actresses receive in society, as do members of other professions, exactly the treatment which is earned by their professional conduct." The conditions were very different when each of the four great actors discussed in one of these lectures strove for the laurel. Their obligation in the service of their profession was that of pioneers. They commanded the emotions of men, and prepared the way for the persuasion of their intelligence.
Thomas Sheridan, in 1746, in Dublin, precipitated a notorious riot by declaring in the face of a rich young ruffian, who, with others had made a disorder in the theatre, "I am as good a gentleman as you are." This impudence on the part of an actor—though he was the son of old Dr. Sheridan, scholar and gentleman, and a graduate of the university—was "tolerable and not to be endured," and for some hours the audacious Thespian was in mortal danger. At the same time Garrick was trying to be a gentleman in London, and, if not wholly successful in having himself accepted by the noble lords who patronized and condescended to him, he did beat down some of the barriers and cleared a way for others to
