of tenors it must sometimes
actually happen; even the least of them swells visibly as he sings, and
permanently as he grows older....

But why are actors, in general, such blatant and obnoxious asses, such
arrant posturers and wind-bags? Why is it as surprising to find an
unassuming and likable fellow among them as to find a Greek without
fleas? The answer is quite simple. To reach it one needs but consider
the type of young man who normally gets stage-struck. Is he, taking
averages, the intelligent, alert, ingenious, ambitious young fellow? Is
he the young fellow with ideas in him, and a yearning for hard and
difficult work? Is he the diligent reader, the hard student, the eager
inquirer? No. He is, in the overwhelming main, the neighborhood fop and
beau, the human clothes-horse, the nimble squire of dames. The youths of
more active mind, emerging from adolescence, turn to business and the
professions; the men that they admire and seek to follow are men of
genuine distinction, men who have actually done difficult and valuable
things, men who have fought good (if often dishonest) fights and are
respected and envied by other men. The stage-struck youth is of a softer
and more shallow sort. He seeks, not a chance to test his mettle by hard
and useful work, but an easy chance to shine. He craves the regard, not
of men, but of women. He is, in brief, a hollow and incompetent
creature, a strutter and poseur, a popinjay, a pretty one....

I thus beg the question, but explain the actor. He is this silly
youngster grown older, but otherwise unchanged. An initiate of a
profession requiring little more information, culture or capacity for
ratiocination than that of the lady of joy, and surrounded in his
work-shop by men who are as stupid, as vain and as empty as he himself
will be in the years to come, he suffers an arrest of development, and
the little intelligence that may happen to be in him gets no chance to
show itself. The result, in its usual manifestation, is the average bad
actor--a man with the cerebrum of a floor-walker and the vanity of a
fashionable clergyman. The result, in its highest and holiest form is
the actor-manager, with his retinue of press-agents, parasites and
worshipping wenches--perhaps the most preposterous and awe-inspiring
donkey that civilization has yet produced. To look for sense in a fellow
of such equipment and such a history would be like looking for
serviettes in a sailors' boarding-house.