English acting had for some time past still been making a feint of
running the race that wins. The retort, the interruption, the call, the
reply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt tradition of suddenness and
life. You had, indeed, to wait for an interruption in dialogue--it is
true you had to wait for it; so had the interrupted speaker on the stage.
But when the interruption came, it had still a false air of vivacity; and
the waiting of the interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving an eye
and such an arrest and failure of convention, such a confession of a
blank, as to prove that there remained a kind of reluctant and inexpert
sense of movement. It still seemed as though the actor and the actress
acknowledged some forward tendency.

Not so now. The serious stage is openly the scene of the race that
loses. The donkey race is candidly the model of the talk in every
tragedy that has a chance of popular success. Who shall be last? The
hands of the public are for him, or for her. A certain actress who has
"come to the front of her profession" holds, for a time, the record of
delay. "Come to the front," do they say? Surely the front of her
profession must have moved in retreat, to gain upon her tardiness. It
must have become the back of her profession before ever it came up with
her.

It should rejoice those who enter for this kind of racing that the record
need never finally be beaten. The possibilities of success are
incalculable. The play has perforce to be finished in a night, it is
true, but the minor characters, the subordinate actors, can be made to
bear the burden of that necessity. The principals, or those who have
come "to the front of their profession," have an almost unlimited
opportunity and liberty of lagging.