tural on the stage is most difficult, and yet a grain of
nature is worth a bushel of artifice. But you may say--what is nature?
I quoted just now Shakespeare's definition of the actor's art. After
the exhortation to hold the mirror up to nature, he adds the pregnant
warning: "This overdone or come tardy off, though it make the
unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of
which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others."
Nature may be overdone by triviality in conditions that demand
exaltation; for instance, Hamlet's first address to the Ghost lifts
his disposition to an altitude far beyond the ordinary reaches of our
souls, and his manner of speech should be adapted to this sentiment.
But such exaltation of utterance is wholly out of place in the purely
colloquial scene with the Gravedigger. When Macbeth says, "Go, bid thy
mistress, when my drink is ready, she strike upon the bell," he would
not use the tone of

"Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or Heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind."

Like the practised orator, the actor rises and descends with his
sentiment, and cannot always be in a fine phrenzy. This variety
is especially necessary in Shakespeare, whose work is essentially
different from the classic drama, because it presents every mood of
mind and form of speech, commonplace or exalted, as character and
situation dictate: whereas in such a play as Addison's _Cato_,
everybody is consistently eloquent about everything.

There are many causes for the growth of naturalism in dramatic art,
and amongst them we should remember the improvement in the mechanism
of the stage. For instance, there has been a remarkable development in
stage-lighting. In old pictures you will observe the actors constantly
standing in a line, because the oil-lamps of those days gave such an
indifferent illumination that everybody tried to get into what was
called the focus--the "blaze of publicity" furnished by the "float" or
footlights. The importance of this is illustrated by an amusing story
of Edmund Kean, who one night played _Othello_ with more than his
usual intensity. An admirer who met him in the street next day was
loud in his congratulations: "I really thought you would have choked
Iago, Mr. Kean--you seemed so tremendously in earnest." "In ear