harles 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 ne