position in his particular walk; but this ideal cannot be
cherished by the young man who is induced to fritter away his time and
his mind in thoughtless company.

But in the midst of all this turmoil about the stage, one fact stands
out clearly: the dramatic art is steadily growing in credit with the
educated classes. It is drawing more recruits from those classes. The
enthusiasm for our calling has never reached a higher pitch. There is
quite an extraordinary number of ladies who want to become actresses,
and the cardinal difficulty in the way is not the social deterioration
which some people think they would incur, but simply their inability
to act. Men of education who become actors do not find that their
education is useless. If they have the necessary aptitude--the inborn
instinct for the stage--all their mental training will be of great
value to them. It is true that there must always be grades in the
theatre, that an educated man who is an indifferent actor can never
expect to reach the front rank. If he do no more than figure in the
army at Bosworth Field, or look imposing in a doorway; if he never
play any but the smallest parts; if in these respects he be no
better than men who could not pass an examination in any branch of
knowledge--he has no more reason to complain than the highly-educated
man who longs to write poetry, and possesses every qualification--save
the poetic faculty. There are people who seem to think that only
irresistible genius justifies any one in adopting the stage as a
vocation. They make it an argument against the profession that many
enter it from a low sphere of life, without any particular fitness for
acting, but simply to earn a livelihood by doing the subordinate and
mechanical work which is necessary in every theatre. And so men and
women of refinement--especially women--are warned that they must do
themselves injury by passing through the rank and file during their
term of probation in the actors' craft. Now, I need not remind you
that on the stage everybody cannot be great, any more than students
of music can all become great musicians; but very many will do sound
artistic work which is of great value. As for any question of conduct,
Heaven forbid that I should be dogmatic; but it does not seem to me
logical that while genius is its own law in the pursuit of a noble
art, all inferior merit or ambition is to be deterred from the same
path by appalling pictures of its temptations.