bringing to the theatre half what Colman
brought? No; for then he would get six
hundred pounds as his exceptional remuneration,
instead of the miserable half-price of
three hundred which is now offered to him.
Here are the results in plain figures:

"1803.—Poor starving theatre gets £22,000.
Amazingly successful author gets £1200.

"1858.—Poor starving theatre gets £11,000.
Amazingly successful author gets £300.

Where has that missing three hundred
pounds got to? It has got into the managers'
and actors' pockets.

It is useless to attempt a defence of the
present system by telling me that a different
plan of remunerating the dramatic author
was adopted in former times, and that a
different plan is also practised on the French
stage. I am not discussing which plan is
best, or which plan is worst. I am only
dealing with the plain fact, that the present
stage-estimate of the author is barbarously
low—an estimate which men who had any
value for literature, any idea of its importance,
any artist-like sympathy with its
great difficulties, and its great achievements,
would be ashamed to make. I prove that
fact by reference to the proceedings of a
better past time; and I leave the means of
effecting a reform to those who are bound
in common honour and common justice to
make the reform. It is not my business to
re-adjust the commercial machinery of
theatres; I don't sit in the treasury, and
handle the strings of the money-bags. I
say that the present system is a base one
towards literature, and that the history of
the past, and the experience of the present,
prove it to be so. All the reasoning in the
world which tries to convince us that a
wrong is necessary, will not succeed in
proving that wrong to be right.

Having now established the existence of
the abuse, it is easy enough to get on to
the consequences that have arisen from it.
At the present low rate of remuneration, a
man of ability wastes his powers if he writes
for the stage. There are men still in existence,
who occasionally write for it, for the
love and honour of their Art. Once, perhaps,
in two or three years, one of these devoted
men will try single-handed to dissipate the
dense dramatic fog that hangs over the
stage and the audience. For the brief
allotted space of time, the one toiling hand
lets in a little light, unthanked by the actors,
unaided by the critics, unnoticed by the
audience. The time expires—the fog gathers
back—the toiling hand disappears. Sometimes
it returns once more bravely to the
hard, hopeless work: and out of all the
hundreds whom it has tried to enlighten,
there shall not be one who is grateful enough
to know it again.

These exceptional men—too few, too
scattered, too personally unimportant in the
republic of letters, to have any strong or
lasting influence—are not the professed
dramatists of our times. These are not the
writers who make so much as a clerk's
income out of the stage. The few men of
practical ability who now write for the
English Theatre, are men of the world, who
know that they are throwing away their
talents if they take the trouble to invent,
for an average remuneration of one hundred
and fifty pounds. The well-paid Frenchman
supplies them with a story and characters
ready made. The Original Adaptation is
rattled off in a week: and the dramatic
author beats the clerk after all, by getting
so much more money for so much less
manual exercise in the shape of writing.
Below this clever tactician, who foils the
theatre with its own weapons, come the rank-
and-file of hack-writers, who work still more
cheaply, and give still less (I am rejoiced to
say) for the money. The stage results of this
sort of authorship, as you have said, virtually
drive the intelligent classes out of the theatre.
Half a century since, the prosperity of the
manager's treasury would have suffered in
consequence. But the increase of wealth
and population, and the railway connection
between London and the country, more than
supply in quantity what audiences have lost
in quality. Not only does the manager lose
nothing in the way of profit—he absolutely
gains by getting a vast nightly majority
into his theatre, whose ignorant insensibility
nothing can shock. Let him cast what garbage
he pleases before them, the unquestioning
mouths of his audience open, and snap at
it. I am sorry and ashamed to write in this
way of any assemblage of my own country-
men; but a large experience of theatres
forces me to confess that I am writing the
truth. If you want to find out who the
people are who know nothing whatever,
even by hearsay, of the progress of the
literature of their own time—who have caught
no chance vestige of any one of the ideas
which are floating about before their very
eyes—who are, to all social intents and purposes,
as far behind the age they live in, as
any people out of a lunatic asylum can be—
go to a theatre, and be very careful, in doing
so, to pick out the most popular performance
of the day. The actors themselves, when
they are men of any intelligence, are thoroughly
aware of the utter incapacity of the
tribunal which is supposed to judge them.
Not very long ago, an actor, standing
deservedly in the front rank of his profession,
happened to play even more admirably than
usual in a certain new part. Meeting him
soon afterwards, I offered him my mite of
praise in all sincerity. "Yes," was his reply.
" I know that I act my very best in that part,
for I hardly get a hand of applause in it
through the whole evening." Such is the
condition to which the dearth of good
literature has now reduced the audiences of