rue selves more readily
among this class of people. The cool-headed are more difficult to
fathom. Their system of cozenage is not only applied to persons outside
the profession, from whom they expect material gains; it is always at
work to take in and delude the members of the guild. Of course they find
it less easy to checkmate the initiated in their own devices. But if
they have attained to the position of being necessary to their comrades
in the trade, there is no sort of impropriety, pretence, injustice,
swindling, tyranny, which they do not deem it lawful to employ.

These arts, which the progress of our century has extended to many kinds
of persons who are not of the profession, have a certain marked
character among the tribe of actors. Other people, when detected, show
some sense of shame and self-abasement. The unmasked comedian, after all
his turns and twists have been employed in vain, is so unprejudiced and
candid that he laughs good-humouredly in the face of his detective, and
seems to exclaim with indescribable effrontery: "You are a great fool
if you flatter yourself that you have made a notable discovery."

Such is my experience. But of course it is possible that among the
innumerable actors, male and female, whom I have known, conversed with,
and studied, some phoenix of the one or the other sex may have escaped
my observation.

In what concerns the practice of their art, all that these people know
is how to read and write; one better, and one worse. Indeed, I have been
acquainted with both actors and actresses who have not even had that
minimum of education, and yet they carried on their business without
flinching. They got their lines read out to them by some friend or some
associate, whenever a new part had to be impressed in outline on their
memory. Keeping their ears open to the prompter, they entered boldly on
the stage, and played a hero or a heroine without a touch of truth. The
presentation of such characters by actors of the sort I have described
abounds in blunders, stops and stays, and harkings back upon the leading
motive, which would put to shame the player in his common walk of life.

Barefaced boldness is the prime quality, the chief stock-in-trade, the
ground-element of education in these artists. Assiduous use of this one
talent makes not a few of them both passable and even able actors.

These are the reasons why a civil war is always raging in our companies
about the first parts i