But what are the facts--the ugly, hateful facts? Despite this great
advantage--this close familiarity with the noblest and best in our
literature--the taste of actors, their critical judgment, always has
been and still is, if not beneath contempt, at all events far below
the average intelligence of their day. By taste, I do not mean taste
in flounces and in furbelows, tunics and stockings; but in the
weightier matters of the truly sublime and the essentially ridiculous.
Salvini's Macbeth is undoubtedly a fine performance; and yet that
great actor, as the result of his study, has placed it on record that
he thinks the sleep-walking scene ought to be assigned to Macbeth
instead of to his wife. Shades of Shakespeare and Siddons, what think
you of that?

It is a strange fatality, but a proof of the inherent pettiness of the
actor's art, that though it places its votary in the very midst of
literary and artistic influences, and of necessity informs him of the
best and worthiest, he is yet, so far as his own culture is concerned,
left out in the cold--art's slave, not her child.

What have the devotees of the drama taught us? Nothing! it is we who
have taught them. We go first, and they come lumbering after. It was
not from the stage the voice arose bidding us recognise the supremacy
of Shakespeare's genius. Actors first ignored him, then hideously
mutilated him; and though now occasionally compelled, out of deference
to the taste of the day, to forego their green-room traditions, to
forswear their Tate and Brady emendations, in their heart of hearts
they love him not; and it is with a light step and a smiling face that
our great living tragedian flings aside Hamlet's tunic or Shylock's
gaberdine to revel in the melodramatic glories of _The Bells_ and