88 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



have this kind of sensibility ; but to this extent sensibility is n( 

 rare. It may sometimes be recognised in amateurs acting for 

 the first time ; and we take it that no moderately successful 

 actor, even on a second-rate provincial stage, ever wanted sensi- 

 bility to this extent. Let us call it, for the purposes of future 

 reference, sensibility in the first degree, and then pass to what 

 Talma further requires and still calls sensibility namely, ' that 

 imagination which enables the actor to look on at the lives of 

 historical personages, or the impassioned figures created by genius , 

 which reveals to him as though by magic their physiognomy, 

 their heroic stature, their language, their habits, all the shades of 

 their character, all the movements of their soul, and even their 

 singularities.' We begin to feel that sensibility in the second 

 degree is more difficult of attainment, and here it is well to 

 remark that Talma does not place this faculty under the heading 

 of ' intelligence.' He does not tell the actor that he must 

 understand his author. This insight which he so justly acquires 

 is to be a matter of feeling. The revelation comes by magic, not 

 logic. Fanny Kemble says, in perfect accord with Talma, per- 

 ception rather than reflection reaches the aim proposed. It is 

 the absence of this sensibility to the second degree that makes 

 many ordinary fairly good actors so insufferably bad in great 

 parts. Probably they understand the words they speak, and 

 have a vague notion of what the person they represent may be 

 supposed to feel, but they have no insight into heroic thought 

 or feeling ; and, says Talma, i if the actor is not endowed with 

 a sensibility at least equal to that of any of his audience, he can 

 move them but very little.' Too often our actors have less of 

 this sensibility than many of those who hear them. Why then, 

 it may be asked, do not audience and actors change places ? 

 Because the sensitive hearers lack sensibility in the third degree 

 for Talma has not done with this word yet. He includes in 

 this term e the faculty of exaltation which agitates an actor, 

 takes possession of his senses, shakes even his very soul, and 

 enables him to enter into the most tragic situations and the 

 most terrible of the passions as if they were his own.' 



Now not one of the audience which condemn the second-rate 

 actor in a great part because they have more sensibility than he has 

 will be found capable of the kind of exaltation here described. We 



