It cannot therefore be seriously put forward in the face of such manifold requirements that no Art is required for the representation of suitable action.  Are we to imagine that inspiration or emotion of any kind is to supply the place of direct knowledge of facts—­of skill in the very grammar of craftsmanship?  Where a great result is arrived at much effort is required, whether the same be immediate or has been spread over a time of previous preparation.  In this nineteenth century the spirit of education stalks abroad and influences men directly and indirectly, by private generosity and national foresight, to accumulate as religiously as in former ages ecclesiastics and devotees gathered sacred relics, all that helps to give the people a full understanding of lives and times and countries other than their own.  Can it be that in such an age all that can help to aid the inspiration and to increase direct knowledge is of no account whatever, because, forsooth, it has a medium or method of its own?  There are those who say that Shakespeare is better in the closet than on the stage; that dramatic beauty is more convincing when read in private than when spoken on the stage to the accompaniment of suitable action.  And yet, if this be so, it is a strange thing that, with all the activity of the new-born printing-press, Shakespeare’s works were not known to the reading public till the fame of the writer had been made on the stage.  And it is a stranger thing still, if the drama be a mere poetic form of words, that the writer who began with Venus and Adonis, when he found the true method of expression to suit his genius, ended with Hamlet and The Tempest.

How is it, I ask, if these responsible makers of statements be correct, that every great writer down from the days of Elizabeth, when the drama took practical shape from the wish of the poets to render human life in all its phases, have been desirous of seeing their works, when written in dramatic form, represented on the stage—­and not only represented, but represented under the most favorable conditions obtainable, both as to the fitness of setting and the choice of the most skilled and excellent players?  Are we to take it that the poet, with his eye in a fine phrenzy rolling, sees all the minute details of form, color, light, sound, and action which have to be rendered complete on the stage?  Is there nothing in what the individual actor, who is gifted with fine sense and emotional power, can add to mere words, however grand and rolling in themselves, and whatsoever mighty image they may convey?  Can it be possible that there is any sane person who holds that there is no such thing as expression in music so long as the written notes are correctly rendered—­that the musical expression of a Paganini or a Liszt, or that the voice of a Malibran or a Grisi, has no special charm—­nay more, that there is not some special excellence in the instruments of Amati or Stradivarius?  If