Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?  We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of individual genius.  In him it was the expression of a romantic temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated like a rare plant, in a hothouse.  Irving was an incomparable orchid, a thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal.  We have one actress now living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius comes and goes:  I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell.  She enchants us, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations.  We have actresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of useful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable of giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form of poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came to us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans:  Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern?

The business of the manager, who 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.