90 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



we have ever read what the actor's study really should be. 

 After a certain amount of preparation, he yields in a state of 

 exaltation to impulse ; suggestions crowd upon him ; tones, 

 cries, gestures, expressions, actions, are created. The exaltation 

 is extreme, and these moments when he is alone, and the god 

 works in him, may be those of keenest pleasure. But this state 

 is succeeded by a calm and critical mood, in which the true 

 artist chooses, rejects, and groups the partial effects obtained so 

 as to produce one great and consistent whole. In this work, he 

 will be greatly aided if he has a sympathetic friend of sound 

 judgment Talma's ' person of taste ' whose counsel he may 

 take. Those who know what this study means are driven almost 

 to distraction when they hear an actor perhaps a great actor- 

 complimented on being able to remember the words of his part:. 

 But, on the other hand, it must be almost as galling when a 

 great actor is told that he really understands his author's mean- 

 ing. One great charm in this essay by Talma lies in the total 

 absence of this contemptible worship of the human understand- 

 ing a very good thing in its way, though one of but small im- 

 portance in mere art. To Talma intelligence meant a sound 

 critical faculty, not logical, but perceptive, enabling its possessor 

 to keep what was good in art and reject that which was less 

 good. We find in this essay a clear solution of the question 

 continually asked, whether the actor really feels what he is 

 acting. Talma, as we understand him, only felt the emotion 

 once in its full intensity that is to say, at the moment of 

 creation during the solitary rehearsal. Subsequently the effect 

 was produced by the aid of memory ; but the body is so consti- 

 tuted that if by the aid of memory we perfectly reproduce a tone 

 or cry, that tone or cry brings back simultaneously a close 

 reproduction of the feeling by which it was first created. Thus 

 to act a great part a man must be capable of real greatness. As 

 Talma says : ' He will never rise to excellence as an actor whose 

 soul is not susceptible of the extremes of passion.' And yet the 

 representation night after night of these great feelings may 

 come to be almost mechanical, or, rather, the feelings of the 

 actor can be almost mechanically reawakened by the excellence 

 of his own art. Thus in describing Le Kain at his best period, 

 when his art was ripe, he says : 



