LETTER THE SECOND. FROM MR. AUTHOR TO
MR. READER.

MY DEAR SIR,—I thoroughly understand
your complaint, and I think I can answer
your question. My reply will probably a
little astonish you—for I mean to speak the
plain truth boldly. The public ought to
know the real state of the case, as regards
the present position of the English stage
towards English Literature, for the public
alone can work the needful reform.

You ask, if I attribute the present dearth
of stage literature to the dearth of good
actors? I reply to that in the negative.
When the good literature comes, the good
actors will come also, where they are wanted.
In many branches of the theatrical art they
are not wanted. We have as good living actors
among us now as ever trod the stage. And we
should have more if dramatic literature called
for more. It is literature that makes the
actor—not the actor that makes literature.
I could name men to you, now on the stage,
whose advance in their profession they owe
entirely to the rare opportunities, which the
occasional appearance of a genuinely good
play has afforded to them, of stepping out—
men whose sense of the picturesque and the
natural in their art, lay dormant, until the
pen of the writer woke it into action. Show
me a school of dramatists, and I will show
you a school of actors soon afterwards—as
surely as the effect follows the cause.

You have spoken of France. I will now
speak of France also; for the literary
comparison with our neighbours is as applicable
to the main point of my letter as it was to
the main point of yours.

Suppose me to be a French novelist. If I
am a successful man, my work has a certain
market value at the publishers. So far my
case is the same if I am an English novelist
—but there the analogy stops. In France,
the manager of the theatre can compete with
the publisher for the purchase of any new
idea that I have to sell. In France, the
market value of my new play is as high, or
higher, than the market value of my new
novel. If I can work well for the theatre in
France, I am just as sure of being able to
pay my butcher, my baker, my rent and
taxes, as I am when I work well for the publisher.
Remember, I am not now writing of
French theatres which have assistance from
the Government, but of French theatres
which depend, as our theatres do, entirely
on the public. Any one of those theatres
will give me as much, I repeat, for the
toil of my brains, on their behalf, as the
publisher will give for the toil of my brains
on his. Now, so far is this from being the
case in England, that it is a fact perfectly
well known to every literary man in the
country, that, while the remuneration for
every other species of literature has
enormously increased in the last hundred years,
the remuneration for dramatic writing has
steadily decreased, to such a minimum of
pecuniary recognition as to make it impossible
for a man who lives by the successful use of
his pen, as a writer of books, to alter the
nature of his literary practice, and live, or
nearly live, in comfortable circumstances, by
the use of his pen, as a writer of plays. It is
time that this fact was generally known, to
justify successful living authors for their
apparent neglect of one of the highest branches
of their Art. I tell you, in plain terms, that
I could only write a play for the English
stage—a successful play, mind—by consenting
to what would be, in my case, and even
more so in the cases of my more successful
brethren, a serious pecuniary sacrifice.

Let me make the meanness of the
remuneration for stage-writing in our day, as
compared with what that remuneration was
in past times, clear to your mind by one or
two examples. Rather more than a hundred
years ago, Doctor Johnson wrote a very bad
play called Irene, which proved a total failure
on representation, and which tottered rather
than "ran," for just nine nights, to wretched
houses. Excluding his literary copyright of
a hundred pounds, the Doctor's dramatic
profit on a play that was a failure—remember
that!—amounted to one hundred and
ninety-five pounds, being just forty-five pounds
more than the remuneration now paid, to my
certain knowledge, for many a play within
the last five years, which has had a successful
run of sixty, and, in some cases, even of a
hundred nights!

I can imagine your amazement at reading
this but I can also assure you that any
higher rate of remuneration is exceptional.
Let me, however, give the managers the
benefit of the exception. Sometimes two
hundred pounds have been paid, within the last
five years, for a play; and, on one or two
rare occasions, three hundred. If Shakspere
came to life again, and took Macbeth to an
English theatre, in this year, eighteen hundred
and fifty-eight, that is the highest market
remuneration he could get for it. You are
to understand that this miserable decline in
the money-reward held out to dramatic
literature is peculiar to our own day. Without
going back again so long as a century—without
going back farther than the time of
George Colman, the younger—I may remind
you that the Comedy of John Bull brought
the author twelve hundred pounds. Since
then, six or seven hundred pounds have
been paid for a new play; and, later yet, five
hundred pounds. We have now got to three
hundred pounds, as the exception, and to one
hundred and fifty, as the rule. I am speaking,
remember, of plays in not less than three
acts, which are, or are supposed to be,
original—of plays which run from sixty to a
hundred nights, and which put their bread
(buttered thickly on both sides) into the
mouths of actors and managers. As to the