a congregation of fine qualities.  There should be considerable, though not necessarily systematic, culture.  There should be delicate instincts of taste cultivated, consciously, or unconsciously, to a degree of extreme and subtle nicety.  There should be a power, at once refined and strong, of both perceiving and expressing to others the significance of language, so that neither shades nor masses of meaning, so to speak, may be either lost or exaggerated.  Above all, there should be a sincere and abounding sympathy with all that is good and great and inspiring.  That sympathy, most certainly, must be under the control and manipulation of art, but it must be none the lest real and generous, and the artist who is a mere artist will stop short of the highest moral effects of his craft.  Little of this can be got in a mere training school, but all of it will come forth more or less fully armed from the actor’s brain in the process of learning his art by practice.  For the way to learn to do a thing is to do it; and in learning to act by acting, though there is plenty of incidental hard drill and hard work, there is nothing commonplace or unfruitful.

What is true of the art is true also of the social life of the artist.  No sensational change has been found necessary to alter his status though great changes have come.  The stage has literally lived down the rebuke and reproach under which it formerly cowered, while its professors have been simultaneously living down the prejudices which excluded them from society.  The stage is now seen to be an elevating instead of a lowering influence on national morality, and actors and actresses receive in society, as do the members of other professions, exactly the treatment which is earned by their personal conduct.  And so I would say of what we sometimes hear so much about—­dramatic reform.  It is not needed; or, if it is, all the reform that is wanted will be best effected by the operation of public opinion upon the administration of a good theatre.  That is the true reforming agency, with this great advantage, that reforms which come by public opinion are sure, while those which come without public opinion cannot be relied upon.  The dramatic reformers are very well-meaning people.  They show great enthusiasm.  They are new converts to the theatre, most of them, and they have the zeal of converts.  But it is scarcely according to knowledge.  These ladies and gentlemen have scarcely studied the conditions of theatrical enterprise, which must be carried on as a business or it will fail as an art.  It is an unwelcome, if not an unwarrantable intrusion to come among our people with elaborate advice, and endeavor to make them live after different fashions from those which are suitable to them, and it will be quite hopeless to attempt to induce the general body of a purely artistic class to make louder and more fussy professions of virtue and religion than other people.  In fact, it is a downright insult