THE EMOTIONS. 465 



have to continually moisten ray mouth, or I shall become inarticulate. 

 I have to " swallow the lump," as I call it.' All artists who have had 

 much experience of emotional parts are absolutely unanimous. . . . 

 ' Playing with the brain,' says Miss Alma Murray, ' is far less fatiguing 

 than playing with the heart. An adventuress taxes the physique far 

 less than a sympathetic heroine. Muscular exertion has comparatively 

 little to do with it.' . . . ' Emotion while acting, 'writes Mr. Howe, 'will 

 induce perspiration much more than physical exertion. I always per- 

 spired profusely while acting Joseph Surface, which requires little or 

 n© exertion.' ... 'I suffer from fatigue,' writes Mr. Forbes Robertson, 

 ' in proportion to the amount of emotion I may have been called upon 

 to go through, and not from physical exertion.' . . . 'Though I have 

 played Othello,' writes Mr. Coleman, ' ever since I was seventeen (at 

 nineteen I had the honor of acting the Moor to Macready's lago), hus- 

 band my resources as I may, this is the one part, the part of parts, 

 which always leaves me physically prostrate. I have never been able to 

 find a pigment that would stay on my face, though I have tried every 

 preparation in existence. Even the titanic Edwin Forrest told me that 

 he was always knocked over in Othello, and I have heard Charles 

 Kean, Phelps, Brooke, Dillion, say the same thing. On the other hand, 

 I have frequently acted Richard III. without turning a hair.' " * 



The explanation for tlie discrepancy amongst actors is 

 probably that which these quotations suggest. The vis- 

 ceral and organic part of the expression can be suppressed 

 in some men, but not in others, and on this it is probable 

 that the chief part of the felt emotion depends. Coquelin 

 and the other actors who are inwardly cold are probably 

 able to affect the dissociation in a complete way. Prof. 

 Sikorsky of Kieff hasi contributed an important article on 

 the facial expression of the insane to the Neurologisches 

 Centralblatt for 1887. Having practised facial mimicry 

 himself a great deal, he says : 



" When I contract my facial muscles in any mimetic combination, 1 

 feel no emotional excitement, so that the mimicry is in the fullest sense 

 of the word artificial, although quite irreproachable from the expressive 

 point of view." f 



We find, however, from the context that Prof. S.'s prac= 

 tice before the mirror has developed in him such a virtu- 

 osity in the control of his facial muscles that he can entirely 

 disregard their natural association and contract them in 

 any order of grouping, on either side of the face isolatedly, 



* P. 394. t P. 496. 



