Shadows of the Stage | Page 4

William Winter
is fashionable to extol. English influence, at all times stern
and exacting, stamped the character of our early theatre. The tone of
society, alike in the mother country, in the colonies, and in the first
years of our Republic, was, as to these matters, formal and severe.
Success upon the stage was exceedingly difficult to obtain, and it could
not be obtained without substantial merit. The youths who sought it
were often persons of liberal education. In Philadelphia, New York, and
Boston the stock-companies were composed of select and thoroughly
trained actors, many of whom were well-grounded classical scholars.
Furthermore, the epoch was one of far greater leisure and repose than
are possible now--- when the civilised world is at the summit of sixty
years of scientific development such as it had not experienced in all its
recorded centuries of previous progress. Naturally enough the dramatic

art of our ancestors was marked by scholar-like and thorough
elaboration, mellow richness of colour, absolute simplicity of character,
and great solidity of merit. Such actors as Wignell, Hodgkinson,
Jefferson, Francis, and Blissett offered no work that was not perfect of
its kind. The tradition had been established and accepted, and it was
transmitted and preserved. Everything was concentrated, and the public
grew to be entirely familiar with it. Men, accordingly, who obtained
their ideas of acting at a time when they were under influences
surviving from those ancient days are confused, bewildered, and
distressed by much that is offered in the theatres now. I have listened to
the talk of an aged American acquaintance (Thurlow Weed), who had
seen and known Edmund Kean, and who said that all modern
tragedians were insignificant in comparison with him. I have listened to
the talk of an aged English acquaintance (Fladgate), who had seen and
known John Philip Kemble, and who said that his equal has never since
been revealed. The present day knows what the old school was,[1]
when it sees William Warren, Joseph Jefferson, Charles Fisher, Mrs.
John Drew, John Gilbert, J.H. Stoddart, Mrs. G.H. Gilbert, William
Davidge, and Lester Wallack--the results and the remains of it. The old
touch survives in them and is under their control, and no one, seeing
their ripe and finished art, can feel surprise that the veteran moralist
should be wedded to his idols of the past, and should often be heard
sadly to declare that all the good actors--except these--are dead. He
forgets that scores of theatres now exist where once there were but two
or three; that the population of the United States has been increased by
about fifty millions within ninety years; that the field has been
enormously broadened; that the character of, the audience has become
one of illimitable diversity; that the prodigious growth of the
star-system, together with all sorts of experimental catch-penny
theatrical management, is one of the inevitable necessities of the
changed condition of civilisation; that the feverish tone of this great
struggling and seething mass of humanity is necessarily reflected in the
state of the theatre; and that the forces of the stage have become very
widely diffused. Such a moralist would necessarily be shocked by the
changes that have come upon our theatre within even the last
twenty-five years--by the advent of "the sensation drama," invented and
named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play,

with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs;
by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the
music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic
burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls.
Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived,
and there is just as fine a sense of dramatic art in the community as ever
existed in any of "the palmy days"; only, what was formerly
concentrated is now scattered.
The stage is keeping step with the progress of human thought in every
direction, and it will continue to advance. Evil influences impressed
upon it there certainly are, in liberal abundance--not the least of these
being that of the speculative shop-keeper, whose nature it is to seize
any means of turning a penny, and who deals in dramatic art precisely
as he would deal in groceries: but when we speak of "our stage" we do
not mean an aggregation of shows or of the schemes of showmen. The
stage is an institution that has grown out of a necessity in human nature.
It was as inevitable that man should evolve the theatre as it was that he
should evolve the church, the judiciary tribunal, the parliament, or any
other essential component of the State. Almost all human beings
possess the dramatic perception; a few possess the dramatic faculty.
These few are born for the stage, and each
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