descend and the facility of descent, a special Providence watches
over the morals and tone of our English stage. I do not desire to
overcharge the eulogy. There never was a time when the stage had not
conspicuous faults. There never was a time when these were not freely
admitted by those most concerned for the maintenance of the stage
at its best. In Shakespeare, whenever the subject of the theatre is
approached, we perceive signs that that great spirit, though it had
a practical and business-like vein, and essayed no impossible
enterprises, groaned under the necessities, or the demands of a
public which desired frivolities and deformities which jarred upon the
poet-manager's feelings. As we descend the course of time we find that
each generation looked back to a supposed previous period when taste
ranged higher, and when the inferior and offensive peculiarities of
the existing stage were unknown. Yet from most of these generations
we inherit works as well as traditions and biographical recollections
which the world will never let die. The truth is that the immortal
part of the stage is its nobler 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 creations 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 any one 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,