cessity
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 and every generation
contributes its number to the service of this art. The problem is one of
selection and embarkation. Of the true actor it may be said, as Ben
Jonson says of the true poet, that he is made as well as born. The
finest natural faculties have never yet been known to avail without
training and culture. But this is a problem which, in a great measure,
takes care of itself and in time works out and submits its own solution.
The anomaly, every day presented, of the young person who, knowing
nothing, feeling nothing, and having nothing to communicate except the
desire of communication, nevertheless rushes upon the stage, is felt to
be absurd. Where the faculty as well as the instinct exists, however,
impulse soon recognises the curb of common sense, and the aspirant finds
his level. In this way the dramatic profession is recruited. In this way
the several types of dramatic artist--each type being distinct and each
being expressive of a sequence from mental and spiritual ancestry--are
maintained. It is not too much to say that a natural law operates
silently and surely behind each seemingly capricious chance, in this
field of the conduct of life. A thoroughly adequate dramatic
stock-company may almost be said to be a thing of natural accretion. It
is made up, like every other group, of the old, the middle-aged, and the
young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to
present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and
to reproduce, with the delicate exaggeration essential to dramatic art,
every species of person; in order that all human life--whether of the
street, the dwelling, the court, the camp, man in his common joys and
sorrows, his vices, crimes, miseries, his loftiest aspirations and most
ideal state--may be so copied that the picture will express all its
beauty and sweetness, all its happiness and mirth, all its dignity, and
all its moral admonition and significance, for the benefit of the world.
Such a dramatic stock-company, for example (and this is but one of the
commendable products of the modern stage), has grown up a