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BENEFICENT INFLUENCE 473

to mingle, and against the stultifying, vitiating influence of it she has, like all ambitious, high-principled artists of the Stage, been constrained to contend, as well as against the often-felt surge of a vulgar mob taste. I have heard her say, in moments of dejection, "I care for nothing but the money": but that is not a true statement of her feeling. She has really cared little "for the money"; she could readily have gained more money than she has gained by doing some things which, wisely and rightly, she has left undone. She is not a Siddons, or a Cushman, or a Faucit, but she is a superb actress. The sum of her influence on the Stage and her time has been distinctly and strongly helpful, and an artist who can truthfully claim that merit is entitled to expect and to receive from the public which she has served and benefited a rich remuneration for the work.

Julia Marlowe has fulfilled herself, her artistic destiny. She might continue for a long time to repeat her best performances with profit to herself and pleasure to her auditory, but she has done her share. Among parts that she

has not attempted there are few, if any, that she could make tributary to an ampler revelation of her faculties or a wider expansion of her beneficent influence than has already been manifested. She once thought of playing Isabella, in "Measure for Measure," but happily she abandoned the purpose. She might with fine effect act Constance, in "King John," but few auditors would be interested in it. She is wise to withdraw while she has presumably many years in which to enjoy the tranquillity and seclusion she loves: and, though her going will long be regretted, the sympathetic feeling of the public may well find expression in the lovely lines of Shakespeare:

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages."

XI.

THE THEATRE AND MORALITY.

"The Drama's laws the Drama's patrons give,
For we who live to please must please to live."

So wrote the wise, philosophic Dr. Johnson, one hundred and sixty-eight years ago (1915), and seldom has so much incisive truth been expressed in so few words: seldom, furthermore, has a felicitous statement of truth been so frequently and so perversely wrested from its meaning as this couplet has been, for the purpose of justifying and sustaining a radically false and pernicious view of the relation between the Stage and the Public. the Theatre is to prosper the Public, of course, must be pleased, but it does not follow that the Theatre must please the Public by giving the Public "what it wants" when it either happens to want, or is supposed to want, something

If

which it ought not to have. The moral sage who wrote that couplet wrote also:

""Tis yours, this night, to bid the reign commence

Of rescued Nature and reviving Sense,

To chase the charms of sound, the pomp of show,

For useful mirth and salutary woe,

Bid scenic virtue form the rising age

And truth diffuse her radiance from the stage."

Garrick published those words when he opened Drury Lane Theatre, September 15, 1747, and "order, decency, and decorum," says his biographer, Thomas Davies, "were the main objects which he kept constantly in his eye at the commencement of his administration."

The duty of the theatrical manager is intellectual. He is not a shop-keeper, he is the administrator of a great art. It is true that, also, he conducts a business: he must purchase plays and employ actors to represent them, and he "must watch the wild vicissitudes of taste," timing his productions so as to catch the favorable breeze of fortune: but he is under an intellectual obligation to manage the public as well

THE MANAGER'S DUTY 477

as the Theatre, to promote an educational tendency, and so to foster refinement and so to cultivate the public taste,-on which the Theatre depends, and must ever depend,-that the community in which he labors will neither "want" nor tolerate any production which, either in subject or treatment, is offensive to decency or corruptive of the moral sense. Failure on the part of many theatrical managers to recognize that obligation and fulfil that duty has been especially manifest and injurious within the last fifteen or twenty years, showing itself in the gross obtrusion on the Stage, throughout our country, of exhibitions which ought never to have been made or permitted there,-exhibitions which have gradually inured a multitude of persons to the tolerance of offensive themes and largely degraded the Theatre as a social institution. The theatrical audience at this time is enormous, but, except on rare occasions, it does not, in any community, comprise a major part of the home or family public-the best public upon which any manager could depend, and the active inter

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