The age-herald., 1901-02-10
A Bright Club Woman
 Discusses the Stage

At the meeting of the Highland Book Club the past week, a charming paper on the stage read. It is from the pen of one of the clubs most brilliant members, and I have been permitted to make the following extracts: fa. s;
 When see MT. Cleveland our most so- cially autocratic aristocratic President claiming for his most intimate comrade an actor, when We see actresses welcomed to our best homes-the only requirement. being that the actresses are womanly women- then we see there is no need to prattle about social distinctions. Good women in every land are glad to extend the hand of fellowship to other women who have kept their womanhood pure and unsullied. The nineteenth century has thrown the warm mantel of charity over all honest endeavor
 All America applauded when our own Mary Anderson refused to be introduced to the Prince of Wales.
 The lives of these actresses-even granting that MT. Hall Caine gave us the worst side of the picture in his Gloria Quayle is full of temptations, and beset with snares, but the greater the conflict the greater the vic- tory!! Let us not sit sheltered in our own protected homes and point with scorn at our sisters who fall along lifes dusty roads. In a recent number of The Digest, the fol- lowing article occurred.
 Time was when the church went its way with it's confessionals, possessions and one- sided ideals, and the world went its way with its business and pleasure, its balls, romps, routs, it's dancing and dissipation. If Christianity is a universal religion, it must neither ignore the world completely nor denounce it wholesale and irrationally. Take the attitude of the clergy to the thea trei The dramatic instinct cannot be crush ed out The noblest genius in days ancient and modern, has been consecrated to it from the days of Sophocies to Shakespeare; In Wfata ia Gnrnailla Racine, Victor Hugo and Tennyson. There have been noble actresses like Siddons noble actors, like Macready and bameless com edices, like Paul Pry. Nowadays theatrea, actors, playwrights are on the increase in every part of the world. No human power can stem the current, because the power of the drama is human, aye and at the best, it subserves the noblest moral as well as a most delightful recreative purpose.
 Where will you find more pathetic com ment on drunkenness, than in MT. Jefrer- sons Rip? Where a more appalling revela- tion of the guilty conscience than in MT. Henry Irving's Eugene Aram. The attitude the clergy towards the stage should be one of discriminating sympathy rather tnan wholesale condemnation If they want to reform the stage they must begin on the public They would do well to go to the play themselves and to get up and go out, when the play is revolting or its general tendency bad.
 The people. still more the actors will never believe that we parsons, know anything about the stage if we never go near it. We cannot afford to taboo it, we ought to be frightened, at not trying to direct for good such a tremendous force for good or evil as is the modern theatre.
 So much for the views of one of Eng lands greatest clergymen.
 Now is he not right? The stage reaches more people than any other one fntellectu- al institution Instead of condemning 1t and turning cold shoulders to those who minister to our wants and pleasures sbould we not rather encourage it, raise it's tone by our praise, condemn its evil by our censure?
 MT. Frederick Ward was overheard in a hotel lobby saying sadly that the twenty wears of his best manhood had been spent in trying to put classical plays before public which demanded comic opera and cheap melodrama.
 The laws of supply and demand regulate the stage just as well as the market If we raise the level of public taste we raise the level of our plays. Here in Birmingham we have focked in crowds to see some yulgarity of Roland Reed, while some grand tragedy has been enacted before empty benches. We all paid double prices to see MT. Mansfield in Cyrano de Bergs- rac and most of us were wishing that he would speak louder, more slowly, and also wishing that his play was some wholesome play that could appeal more to American and English ideals.
 It is exasperating to see our American public going wild after such Frenchy things as 'zaza," Camille" and "Cyrano,"