120 Mr. Herbert Beerbohm Tree [May 26, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, May 26, 1893. 



Sie James Crichton-Browne, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S. 

 Treasurer and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Esq. 



The Imaginative Faculty. 



When the gift of the Imagination was conferred upon mankind, a 

 double-edged sword covered with flowers was thrust into its baby- 

 hands. Just as the highest joys which are known to us are those of 

 the imagination, so also are our deepest sorrows — the sorrows of our 

 fantasy. Love, ambition, heroism, the sense of beauty, virtue itself, 

 become intensified by the imagination, until they reach that acute and 

 passionate expression which renders them potent factors for good or 

 evil in individuals. Even so has the imagination ever been the 

 strongest power in fostering the aspirations, in shaping the destina- 

 tions of nations. It is the vision through whose lens we see the 

 realities of life, either in the convex or in the concave, diabolically 

 distorted or divinely out of drawing. ... 



" Can acting be taught ? " is a question which has been theoretically 

 propounded in many a magazine article, and has vexed the spirit of 

 countless debating societies. It is answered in practice on the stage, 

 and I think, triumphantly answered in the negative. Acting, in fact, 

 is purely an affair of the imagination — the actor more than any other 

 artist may be said, to be the " passion-winged minister of thought." 

 Children are born actors. They lose the faculty only when the 

 wings of their imagination are weighted by self-consciousness. It is 

 not every one to whom is given the capacity of always remaining a 

 child. It is this blessed gift of receptive sensibility which it should 

 be the endeavour (the unconscious endeavour, perhaps) of every artist 

 to cultivate and to retain. There are those who would have us be- 

 lieve that technique is the end and aim of art. There are those who 

 would persuade us that the art of acting is subject to certain mathe- 

 matical laws, forgetting that these laws are but the footnotes of 

 adroit commentators, and in no sense the well-springs of art. What 

 I venture to assert is that all that is most essential, most luminous, 

 in acting may be traced to the imaginative faculty. It is this that 

 makes the actor's calling at once the most simple and the most com- 

 plex of all the arts. It is this very simplicity which has caused 

 many to deny to acting a place among the arts, and which has so often 

 baffled those who would appraise the art of acting as a precise science, 

 and measure it by the yard-measure of unimaginative criticism. Yet 

 in another sense no art is more complex than the dramatic art in its 



