Summary
Wilde answers a Daily Telegraph article on remarks he made when chairing the Playgoers' Club. He stands by one part: the stage is to a play what a frame is to a painting, and actability is no test of art. The century's two great English plays, Shelley's Cenci and Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, are not actable, and the worth of Browning's plays was settled when he wrote their last lines.
The writer went wrong, working only from report, in saying Wilde called the stage a set of puppets. What Wilde said was that it is 'peopled with either living actors or moving puppets', and that the actor's personality can distort. Anybody can act, since most English people do nothing else, but acting a part means turning one's own personality into the character's. Puppets have many advantages: they never argue, have no private lives and never ask for their parts to be written up. A puppet Tempest in Paris delighted him, though Miranda ignored his flowers. For modern plays, he allows, living players are better.
Finally Wilde denies that John Gray, author of a lecture on 'The Modern Actor', is his protege. The modern artist's protection lies in high indifference, the pleasure of making beautiful things and contempt for popular opinion, and Gray needs no other.