never was so large a number of theatres or of actors. And their
type is vastly improved by public recognition. The old days when
good-for-nothings passed into the profession are at an end; and the
old Bohemian habits, so far as they were evil and disreputable, have
also disappeared. The ranks of the art are being continually recruited
by deeply interested and earnest young men of good education and
belongings. Nor let us, while dissipating the remaining prejudices
of outsiders, give quarter to those which linger among players
themselves. There are some who acknowledge the value of improved
status to themselves and their art, but who lament that there are now
no schools for actors. This is a very idle lamentation. Every actor
in full employment gets plenty of schooling, for the best schooling
is practice, and there is no school so good as a well-conducted
playhouse. The truth is, that the cardinal secret of success in acting
are found within, while practice is the surest way of fertilizing
these germs. To efficiency in the art of acting there should come a
congregation of fine qualities. There should be considerable,
though not necessarily systematic, culture. There should be delicate
instincts of taste cultivated, consciously, or unconsciously, to a
degree of extreme and subtle nicety. There should be a power, at once
refined and strong, of both perceiving and expressing to others
the significance of language, so that neither shades nor masses of
meaning, so to speak, may be either lost or exaggerated. Above all,
there should be a sincere and abounding sympathy with all that is good
and great and inspiring. That sympathy, most certainly, must be under
the control and manipulation of art, but it must be none the lest real
and generous, and the artist who is a mere artist will stop short of
the highest moral effects of his craft. Little of this can be got in a
mere training school, but all of it will come forth more or less fully
armed from the actor's brain in the process of learning his art by