.

A personal experience may help you to realize this ideal of the
interpreter's art.

With a sense of protest, I had presented a play I loved to an audience
with which I felt little sympathy. By chance there was in that audience
one of our best teachers and critics. After my recital I sought his
criticism. Beginning, as the true critic always should, with a noting of
some point of power, he said, "I congratulate you upon your _illumined
moments_, but--they are too infrequent. You must multiply them." "What
do you mean by my illumined moments?" I asked. "The moments when you do
not get between your audience and the thought you are uttering--the
moments when you become a revealer of life to them. Your attitude toward
your audience is not sustained in the simplicity and clearness of some
of its moments. You suddenly ring down the curtain in the middle of the
scene. That spoils the scene, you know. You seem to feel a revolt
against the giving of your confidence to the audience, and thereupon you
immediately shut them away. You become conscious of yourself, and we,
the audience, lose the vision and become conscious of you and the way
you are reading or reciting or acting." Then he added, "Adelaide
Neilson, at first, had illumined moments in her playing of Juliet, but
finally her impersonation became one piece of illumination." That
delightful teacher, reader, and critic, the late Mr. Howard Ticknor,
suggested the same ideal in comparing a Juliet of to-day with Miss
Neilson's Juliet. "When Miss ---- is on the balcony," he said, "you hear
all around you: 'How lovely she looks!' 'Isn't that robe dear?' 'How
beautiful her voice is!' When Miss Neilson lived that little minute, a
breathless people prayed with Juliet, 'I would not for the world they
found thee here,' and sighed with Romeo--'O blessed, blessed night! I am
afeard, being in night, all this is but a dream.'" Miss Neilson _was_
Juliet. They, the audience, lived with these lovers one hour of lyric
rapture, and could never again be quite so commonplace in their attitude
toward the "deathless passion." They may not now remember Adelaide
Neilson, but they remember that story, and forever carry a new vision of
life and love, because the actress lost herself in the life of the play.
She did not exploit her personality and let it stand between the
audience and the drama. When some one says to you--the reader or
actress, "I shall never forget the way you raised your eyebrow a