g, sees all the
minute details of form, color, light, sound, and action which have
to be rendered complete on the stage? Is there nothing in what the
individual actor, who is gifted with fine sense and emotional power,
can add to mere words, however grand and rolling in themselves, and
whatsoever mighty image they may convey? Can it be possible that there
is any sane person who holds that there is no such thing as expression
in music so long as the written notes are correctly rendered--that the
musical expression of a Paganini or a Liszt, or that the voice of a
Malibran or a Grisi, has no special charm--nay more, that there is not
some special excellence in the instruments of Amati or Stradivarius?
If there be, we can leave to him, whilst the rest of mankind marvel
at his self-sufficient obtuseness, to hold that it was nothing but his
own imagination which so much influenced Hazlitt when he was touched
to the heart by Edmund Kean's rendering of the words of the remorseful
Moor, "Fool, fool, fool!" Why, the action of a player who knows how to
convey to the audience that he is listening to another speaking, can
not only help in the illusion of the general effect, but he himself
can suggest a running commentary on what is spoken. In every moment
in which he is on the stage, an actor accomplished in his craft can
convey ideas to the mind.

It is in the representation of passion that the intention of the actor
appears in its greatest force. He wishes to do a particular thing, and
so far the wish is father to the thought that the brain begins to work
in the required direction, and the emotional faculties and the whole
nervous and muscular systems follow suit. A skilled actor can count on
this development of power, if it be given to him to rise at all to the
height of a passion; and the inspiration of such moments may, now and
again, reveal to him some new force or beauty in the character which
he represents. Thus he will gather in time a certain habitual strength
in a particular representation of passion. Diderot laid down a theory
that an actor never feels the part he is acting. It is of course true
that the pain he suffers is not real pain, but I leave it to any one
who has ever felt his own heart touched by the woes of another to say
if he can even imagine a case where the man who follows in minutest
detail the history of an emotion, from its inception onward, is the
only one who cannot be stirred by it--more especially wh