1895.] on Acting : an Art. 425 



lightning flash and the crash of the thunderbolt. Who, then, is the 

 truest artist ? He it is who best realises these myriad beauties and 

 bounties of nature, and who best reproduces them so that others may 

 understand the emotion which they have created in him ; and 

 beside these truths of nature all lower things must stand back abashed. 



" Earth outgrows the mythic fancies 

 Sung beside her in her youth, 

 And these debonair romances 

 Sound but dull beside the truth. 

 Phoebus' chariot-course is run : 

 Look up, poets, to the sun ! 

 " Truth is fair : should we forego it ? 

 Can we sigh right for a wrong ? 

 God Himself is the best Poet, 

 And the Keal is His song. 



Sing His truth out fair and full, 

 And secure His beautiful ! " 



So speaks the poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And what says 

 the master-poet, Shakespeare ? — ■ 



" O'erstep not the modesty of nature ; for anything so overdone 

 is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, 

 was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature : to show virtue 

 her own feature, scorn her own image and the very age and body of 

 the time his form and pressure." 



Perhaps I may here quote Talma's words on the actor's art, since 

 they seem to illuminate, from an actor's standpoint, the applicability 

 of all the rules which Taine has given : — 



" The actor, in the first place, by repeated exercises, enters deeply 

 into the emotions, and his speech acquires the accent proper to the 

 personage he has to represent. This done, he goes to the theatre not 

 only to give theatrical effect to his studies, but also to yield himself 

 to the spontaneous flashes of his sensibility, and all the emotions 

 which it involuntarily produces in him. What does he then do ? In 

 order that his inspirations may not be lost, his memory, in the silence 

 of repose, recalls the accent of his voice, the expression of his features, 

 his action — in a word, the spontaneous workings of his mind, which 

 he had suffered to have free course, and, in effect, everything which, 

 in the moments of his exultation, contributed to the effects he had 

 produced. His intelligence then passes all these means in review, 

 connecting them and fixing them in his memory to re-employ them at 

 pleasure in succeeding representations. . . . By this kind of labour 

 the intelligence accumulates and preserves all the creations of sensi- 

 bility." 



Let me supplement this with the words of a famous American 

 critic of the past — Thomas R. Gould : — 



" Not with his usual vision of the germs and processes of genius 

 did Lamb write, that an actor is an imitator of the signs and terms of 

 passion. An actor of the understanding, a sensible actor, indeed, 

 always takes this method ; an imaginative actor, never. One takes 



