Of the above-mentioned twenty-eight stars, eighteen acted in
Shakespeare's plays. All stars played a week's engagement--many played
two weeks, therefore at least twenty-four of our forty-two week season
was given over to Shakespearean productions, and every actor and actress
had the Bard at their tongue's tip.

In the far past the great disgrace of our profession was the inebriety of
its men. At the time I write of, the severity of the managers had nearly
eradicated the terrible habit, and I never saw but two of that class of
brilliant actor-drunkards, beloved of newspaper story writers, who made
too much of their absurd vagaries.

Looking back to the actors of '65, I can't help noticing the difference
between their attitude of mind toward their profession, and that of the
actor of to-day. Salaries were much smaller then, work was harder, but
life was simpler. The actor had no social standing; he was no longer
looked down upon, but he was an unknown quantity; he was, in short, an
actor pure and simple. He had enthusiasm for his profession--he lived to
act, not merely living by acting. He had more superstition than religion,
and no politics at all; but he was patriotic and shouldered his gun and
marched away in the ranks as cheerfully as any other citizen soldier.

But above all and beyond all else, the men and women _respected_ their
chosen profession. Their constant association of mind with Shakespeare
seemed to have given them a certain dignity of bearing as well as of
speech.

To-day our actors have in many cases won some social recognition, and
they must therefore give a portion of their time to social duties. They
are clubmen and another portion of their time goes in club lounging.
They draw large salaries and too frequently they have to act in long
running plays, that are made up of smartish wit and cheapest
cynicism--mere froth and frivolity, while the effective smashing of the
Seventh Commandment has been for so long a time the principal _motif_ of
both drama and farce, that one cannot wonder much at the general tone of
flippancy prevailing among the theatrical people of to-day. They guy
everything and everybody, and would jeer at their profession as readily
as they would at an old man on the street wearing a last year's hat.

They are sober, they are honest, they are generous, but they seem to have
grown utterly flippant, and I can't help wondering if this alteration can
have come about through the change