plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides; but nothing of the kind happened: these actors
played the works of dead authors, or, very occasionally, of live
poets who were hardly regular professional playwrights. Sheridan
Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Wills, and Tennyson produced a few
glaringly artificial high horses for the great actors of their
time; but the playwrights proper, who really kept the theatre
going, and were kept going by the theatre, did not cater for the
great actors: they could not afford to compete with a bard who
was not for an age but for all time, and who had, moreover, the
overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging
author's fees. The result was that the playwrights and the great
actors ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with
one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as
well have belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving
was concerned; and the same was true of their respective
predecessors.

Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead
that it does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not
been there to play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and
Cleopatra. If Ellen Terry had never been born, Captain
Brassbound's Conversion would never have been effected. The
Devil's Disciple, with which I won my cordon bleu in America as a
potboiler, would have had a different sort of hero if Richard
Mansfield had been a different sort of actor, though the actual
commission to write it came from an English actor, William
Terriss, who was assassinated before he recovered from the dismay
into which the result of his rash proposal threw him. For it must
be said that the actor or actress who inspires or commissions a