well as its
use.

It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than great
actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as the worst of
their exponents. The consequence is that the great actor, instead of
putting pressure on contemporary authors to supply him with heroic
parts, falls back on the Shakespearean repertory, and takes what he
needs from a dead hand. In the nineteenth century, the careers of Kean,
Macready, Barry Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of
heroic plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides; but nothing of the kind happened: these actors played
the works of dead authors, or, very occasionally, of live poets who
were hardly regular professional playwrights. Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer
Lytton, Wills, and Tennyson produced a few glaringly artificial high
horses for the great actors of their time; but the playwrights proper,
who really kept the theatre going, and were kept going by the theatre,
did not cater for the great actors: they could not afford to compete
with a bard who was not for an age but for all time, and who had,
moreover, the overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not
charging author's fees. The result was that the playwrights and the
great actors ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with
one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as well have
belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving was concerned; and
the same was true of their respective predecessors.

Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead that
it does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not been there to
play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and Cleopatra. If Ellen
Terry had never been born, Captain Brassbound's Conversion would never
have been effected. The Devil's Disciple, with which I won my cordon
bleu in America as a potboiler, would have had a different sort of hero
if Richard Mansfield had been a different sort of actor, though the
actual commission to write it came from an English actor, William
Terriss, who was assassinated before he recovered from the dismay into
which the result of his rash proposal threw him. For it must be said
that the actor or actress who inspires or commissions a play as often
as not regards it as a Frankenstein's monster, and will have none of it.
That does not make him or her any the less parental in the fecundity of
the playwrigh