l gain, and who are
willing and ready to furnish any sort of entertainment that they think
will please a passing caprice, and thereby will turn a penny for
themselves. To judge the public entirely by this surface liking is to
find the public what Tennyson once called it--a many-headed beast. With
that animal every paltry and noxious thing can be made, for a time, to
flourish; and that fact leads observers who do not carefully look
beneath the surface to conclude that the public is always wrong. But the
deep preference of the public comes into the question, and observers who
are able to see and to consider that fact presently perceive that the
artist, whether actor or otherwise, who gives to the public, not what it
says it wants but what it ought to have, is in the long run the victor.
The deep preference is for the good thing, the real thing, the right. It
is not intelligent. It does not go with thinking and reasoning. It does
not pretend to have grounds of belief. It simply responds. But upon the
stage the actor who is able to reach it is omnipotent. Jefferson
conspicuously is an actor who appeals to the deep, instinctive, natural
preference of humanity, and who reaches it, arouses it, and satisfies
it. Throughout the whole of his mature career he has addressed the
nobler soul of humanity and given to the people what they ought to have;
and the actor who is really able to do that naturally conquers
everything. It is not a matter of artifice and simulation; it is a
matter of being genuine and not a sham.

Still further, Jefferson has aroused and touched and satisfied the
feelings of the people, not by attempting to interpret literature but by
being an actor. An actor is a man who acts. He may be an uneducated man,
deficient in learning and in mental discipline, and yet a fine actor.
The people care not at all for literature. They do not read it, and they
know nothing about it until it is brought home to their hearts by some
great interpreter of it. What they do know is action. They can see and
they can feel, and the actor who makes them see and feel can do
anything with them that he pleases. It is his privilege and his
responsibility. Jefferson is one of those artists (and they are few) who
depend for their effects not upon what authors have written but upon
impersonation. He takes liberties with the text. It would not perhaps be
saying too much to say that he does not primarily heed the text at all.
He is an actor; and