tion to the kind of training that imparts a
knowledge of manners and customs, and the teaching which pertains to
simple deportment on the stage is necessary and most useful; but you
cannot possibly be taught any tradition of character, for that has no
permanence. Nothing is more fleeting than any traditional method of
impersonation. You may learn where a particular personage used to
stand on the stage, or down which trap the ghost of Hamlet's father
vanished; but the soul of interpretation is lost, and it is this soul
which the actor has to re-create for himself. It is not mere attitude
or tone that has to be studied; you must be moved by the impulse of
being; you must impersonate and not recite.

There has always been a controversy as to the province of naturalism
in dramatic art. In England it has been too much the custom, I
believe, while demanding naturalism in comedy, to expect a false
inflation in tragedy. But there is no reason why an actor should
be less natural in tragic than in lighter moods. Passions vary in
expression according to moulds of character and manners, but their
reality should not be lost even when they are expressed in the heroic
forms of the drama. A very simple test is a reference to the records
of old actors. What was it in their performances that chiefly
impressed their contemporaries? Very rarely the measured recitation of
this or that speech, but very often a simple exclamation that deeply
moved their auditors, because it was a gleam of nature in the midst
of declamation. The "Prithee, undo this button!" of Garrick, was
remembered when many stately utterances were forgotten. In our day the
contrast between artificial declamation and the accents of nature is
less marked, because its delivery is more uniformly simple, and an
actor who lapses from a natural into a false tone is sure to find
that his hold upon his audience is proportionately weakened. But the
revolution which Garrick accomplished may be imagined from the story
told by Boswell. Dr. Johnson was discussing plays and players with
Mrs. Siddons, and he said: "Garrick, madam, was no declaimer; there
was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken 'To be
or not to be' better than he did; yet he was the only actor I ever saw
whom I could call a master, both in tragedy and comedy, though I
liked him best in comedy. A true conception of character and natural
expression of it were his distinguished excellences."

To be na