Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/200

192 made a mission full of sanctity for Miriam Rooth. "Purity of speech, on our stage, doesn't exist. Every one speaks as he likes, and audiences never notice; it's the last thing they think of. The place is given up to abominable dialects and individual tricks, any vulgarity nourishes, and on the top of it all the Americans, with every conceivable crudity, come in to make confusion worse confounded. And when one laments it people stare; they don't know what one means."

"Do you mean the grand manner, certain pompous pronunciations, the style of the Kembles?"

"I mean any style that is a style, that is a system, an art, that contributes a positive beauty to utterance. When I pay ten shillings to hear you speak, I want you to know how, que diable! Say that to people and they are mostly lost in stupor; only a few, the very intelligent ones, exclaim: 'Then do you want actors to be affected?'"

"And do you?" asked Miriam, full of interest.

"My poor child, what else, under the sun, should they be? Isn't their whole art the affectation par excellence? The public won't stand that to-day, so one hears it said. If that be true, it simply means that the theatre, as I care for it, that is as a personal art, is at an end."

"Never, never, never!" the girl cried, in a voice that made a dozen people look round.

"I sometimes think it—that the personal art is at an end, and that henceforth we shall have only the arts—capable, no doubt, of immense development in their way (indeed they have already reached it) of the stage-carpenter and the costumer. In London the drama is already smothered in scenery; the