rstandable manner by stage-plays the costumes, habits,
manners, and customs of countries and ages other than their own;
what insight have they thus obtained into facts and vicissitudes of
life--of passions and sorrows and ambitions outside the narrow scope
of their own lives, and which yet may and do mould the destinies of
men. All this is education--education in its widest sense, for it
broadens the sympathies and enlarges the intellectual grasp.
And beyond this again--for these are advantages on the material
side--there is that higher education of the heart, which raises in the
scale of creation all who are subject to its sweetening influences. To
hold his place therefore amongst these progressing forces, the actor
must at the start be well endowed with some special powers, and by
training, reading, and culture of many kinds, be equipped for the work
before him. No amount of training can give to a dense understanding
and a clumsy personality certain powers of quickness and spontaneity;
and, on the other hand, no genius can find its fullest expression
without some understanding of the principles and method of a craft. It
is the actor's part to represent or interpret the ideas and emotions
which the poet has created, and to do this he must at the first have
a full knowledge and understanding of them. This is in itself no easy
task. It requires much study and much labor of many kinds. Having then
acquired an idea, his intention to work it out into reality must be
put in force; and here new difficulties crop up at every further step
taken in advance. Now and again it suffices the poet to think and
write in abstractions; but the actor's work is absolutely concrete.
He is brought in every phase of his work into direct comparison with
existing things, and must be judged by the most exacting standards of
criticism. Not only must his dress be suitable to the part which he
assumes, but his bearing must not be in any way antagonistic to the
spirit of the time in which the play is fixed. The free bearing of
the sixteenth century is distinct from the artificial one of the
seventeenth, the mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless
one of the nineteenth. And all this quite exclusive of the minute
qualities and individualities of the character represented. The voice
must be modulated to the vogue of the time. The habitual action of a
rapier-bearing age is different to that of a mail-clad one--nay, the
armor of a period ruled in