ho in most cases is also the chief actor,
is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the
conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not
bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the
conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not
subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition,
the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual
talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle
insisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen
bars of the music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the
'cellos, in order that they might not add a mellowness which would
slightly veil the acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he
rearranged the composer's score for the convenience of his own
orchestra? What should we say if he left out a beautiful passage on the
horn because he had not got one of the two or three perfectly
accomplished horn-players in Europe? What should we say if he altered
the time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which he
would himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor of
an orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? The
musical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic critics
and the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yet
this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre
whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is
presented with any sort of public appeal.

In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:
the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the
actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious
play, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small,
unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any
sort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and
conditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal
vanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves
to account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with
show, poetry with the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a
lack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering of
imaginative work on the stage?

It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and