with every form of vice and evil. In every human heart there gleams
a bright 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. The love of acting is inherent in our nature. Watch your
children play, and you will see that almost their first conscious
effort is to act and to imitate. It is an instinct, and you can no
more repress it than you can extinguish thought. When this instinct
of all is developed by cultivation in the few, it becomes a wonderful
art, priceless to civilization in the solace it yields, the thought it
generates, the refinement it inspires. Some of its latest achievements
are not unworthy of their grandest predecessors. Some of its youngest
devotees are at least as proud of its glories and as anxious to
preserve them as any who have gone before. Theirs is a glorious
heritage! You honor it. They have a noble but a difficult, and
sometimes a disheartening, task. You encourage it. And no word of
kindly interest or criticism dropped in the public ear from friendly
lips goes unregarded or is unfertile of good. The universal study of
Shakespeare in our public schools is a splendid sign of the departure
of prejudice, and all criticism is welcome; but it is acting chiefly
that can open to others, with any spark of Shakespeare's mind, the
means of illuminating the world. Only the theatre can realize to us
in a life-like way what Shakespeare was to his own time. And it is,
indeed, a noble destiny for the theatre to vindicate in these later
days the greatness which sometimes it has seemed to vulgarize. It has
been too much the custom to talk of Shakespeare as nature's child--as
the lad who held horses for people who came to the play--as a sort of
chance phenomenon who wrote these plays by accident and unrecognized.
How supremely ridiculous! How utterly irreconcilable with the grand