Roger shrugged his shoulders. “Well, there are others that make more, and if Nina is worth a million, Sheila is worth two of her. And she’ll prove it, too. And why shouldn’t actors get rich? They do the world as much good as your manufacturers of shoes and electricity and automobiles. Why shouldn’t they make as much money?”
Tilton said: “Well, perhaps they should, but they haven’t done so till recently. It’s a big change from the time when you actors were rated as beggars and vagabonds; you’ll admit that much, won’t you?”
He had touched Kemble on a sensitive spot, a subject that he had fumed over and studied. Roger was always ready to deliver a lecture on the topic. He blustered now:
“That old idiocy! Do you believe it, too? Don’t you know that the law that branded actors as vagrants referred only to actors without a license and not enrolled in an authorized company? At that very time the chief noblemen had their own troupes and the actors were entertained royally in castles and palaces.
“For a time the monks and nuns used to give plays, and there was a female playwright who was a nun in the tenth century. The Church sometimes fought against the theater during the dark ages, but so it fought against sculpture and painting the human form. Actors were forbidden Christian burial once and were treated as outlaws, but so were the Catholics in Protestant countries and Protestants in Catholic regions, and Presbyterians and Episcopalians in each other’s realms, and Quakers in Boston.
“The Puritans did not believe in the theater any more than the theater believed in the Puritans, and there was a period in England when plays had to be given secretly in private houses. But what does that prove? Religious services had to be given the same way; and political meetings.
“There are plenty of people who hate the theater to-day. It always will have enemies—like the other sciences and arts.
“But one thing is sure. Wherever actors have been permitted at all, they have always gone with the best people. Several English actors have been knighted recently, but that’s nothing new. The actor Roscius was knighted at Rome in 50 b.c. In Greece they carved the successful actors’ names in stone.
“We made big money then, too. The actor Æsopus—Cicero’s friend—left his good-for-nothing son so much money that the cub dissolved a pearl in vinegar and drank it. He tossed off what would amount, in our money, to a forty-thousand-dollar cocktail.
“In the Roman Empire actors like Paris stood so high at court that Juvenal said, ‘If you want to get the royal favor ask an actor, not a lord.’ When Josephus went to Rome to plead for the lives of some priests, a Jewish actor named Aliturus introduced him to Nero and his empress and got him his petition. It seems funny to think of a Jewish actor at the court of Nero. The Roman emperor Justinian married an actress and put her on the throne beside him.