ever disturbs the truth and consisteney of character or the harmony and proportion of the scenic picture is inexorably rejected by the actor of genius. His aim is not to win applause, dear as that may be to him, but to teach, refine, instruct, and to let men see, if he may, what his own imagination has bodied forth as the ideal of the human being whom he is called upon to represent. Thus the great German actor Schroeder could not bear to have it said that he played well at such or such a moment, or spoke well such or such a speech. Have I played the part well?' he would say. Have I been the very person I represented?' And what was Garrick's view? Writing to a French correspondent, he says, 'l'art d'un grand acteur est de se faire oublier jusqu'à son nom, quand il paroit sur la scène.' And of all the tributes to the excellence of Mrs. Siddons, the highest is that paid to her by a brother actor, Charles Young.

'Whatever she touched she ennobled. She never sought by unworthy means to entrap her audience. She disdained to apply to any of the petty resources of trickish minds, in order to startle and surprise her hearers. There was no habitual abruptness, no harshness about her. You never caught her slumbering through some scenes in order to produce by contrast an exaggerated effect in others. She neglected nothing. From the first moment to the last she was, according to theatric parlance, "in the character."'

Where this is the measure of excellence to be reached, great actors, it is obvious, must of necessity be few.

"The painter,' says Sir J. Reynolds, 'first makes himself master of the subject he is to represent by reading or otherwise, then works his imagination up to a kind of enthusiasm, till he in a degree perceives the whole event, as it were, before his eyes, when, as quick as lightning, he gives his rough sketch on paper or canvas. By this means his work has the air of genius stamped upon it.' The actor goes to work in the same way; but his pictures are produced under much severer conditions. Painter, sculptor, or poet may wait for their moments of inspiration. If their sketch fails, they may alter, efface, recast it at will. Not so the actor. His inevitable hour' comes with the prompter's bell. The stage waits and, ill or well, in the vein or not in the vein, he must begin his work, and this too before inquisitive and critical eyes. His picture must be made to grow before them, touch by touch, finished in its detail, clear in its outline, broad in its general effect. There is no retrieving a false tone or inapt gesture, no recovering an opportunity for expression once missed. Of all these he must be thoroughly master, and yet the very wellspring of his excellence is a sensitive and passionate nature, not easily held in check, and apt to impel him beyond the limits of

that

that reserve which is essential for all artistic work.* Tact and taste must go hand in hand with passion. Neither is it from within only that disturbances may come. The finest actor is at the mercy of the blunders, or the stupid or vulgar incompetence of those with whom he may find himself on the scene. But not only must he not suffer himself to be put out by these, but he must manage to make his audience forget them also. And how is this to be done, unless, on the one hand, being of imagination all compact,' he can keep his own ideal unfailingly before him, and be the thing that he foresaw,' and unless, on the other hand, the repose of conscious strength have become habitual with him, and the art of graduation intuitive, so that he is able to adapt himself to all contingencies by modifying or varying the details of his impersonation without injury to its general effect?

If, then, there be truth in Milton's aphorism, that 'he who would write heroic poems must make his whole life a heroic poem,' it can be no less true that the actor who is to reach the summit of his art must feed his thoughts with fancies chaste and noble,' and live in an atmosphere of culture and refinement. If I am only a vulgar and ordinary woman,' says Clairon, 'during twenty of the four-and-twenty hours of the day, whatever effort I may make, I shall be only an ordinary or vulgar woman in Agrippina or Semiramis during the remaining four.' How imperative, then, is it that the Portia or Imogen, the Juliet or Desdemona of the stage should bear within herself the reflex of the qualities which diffuse an ideal charm around these preeminently attractive among Shakspeare's women. Intrinsic worth and nobleness, a reverent culture to higher than selfish ends of the gifts that God gives,' can alone flower on the stage, as elsewhere, into the perfections of the consummate artist. Given such a combination, with the requisite graces of person, and the result is what Cicero describes Roscius to have been, a man to be looked up to with the highest regard, and as an actor matchless.†

6

The degrees of this excellence must, of necessity, be manifold; but something of it, we may be sure, has always existed in every actor or actress of eminence. They, like the poet, must have been of imagination all compact.' The details of their every

*Acting,' said Talma, 'is a complete paradox; we must possess the power of strong feeling, or we could never command and carry with us the sympathy of a mixed audience in a crowded theatre; but we must, at the same time, control our sensations on the stage, for their indulgence would enfeeble execution.'

+ Quum artifex ejusmodi sit ut solus dignus videatur esse qui in scenâ spectetur; tum vir ejusmodi est ut solus dignus videatur qui eo non accedat.. Propter excellentem artem et venustatem videbatur omnino mori non debuisse.Oratio Pro Quintio, c. 25.

day

day life may have been prosaic and commonplace enough, or even equivocal-may not as much be said of innumerable great poets, painters, and musicians?-but when they stepped upon the stage their meaner self slipped from them, and the better something, the deep poetic voice" within them, which must otherwise have died unheard within their breasts, found a vent in the embodiment of characters in which wit, grace, refinement, vivacity, tenderness, humour, passion, dignity, or pathos were called into play. Of this view of actors and their vocation very little is heard in books, but much of the vanities, the vices, and the Bohemian habits, for which the contemptuous treatment of the art and its followers by the Church and by society during several centuries is, in a great measure, responsible. Scarron and Le Sage have made every one familiar with the of the actor's life of a former day. The terrible vigour of seamy side Churchill, of Hogarth, and of Crabbe have stamped in indelible colours the sordid incidents of the Stroller's life in days not far removed from our own. this subject has become juster and more kindly, literary men And even while modern opinion on have generally been more ready to seize on the grotesque or vulgar aspects of the actor's vocation than to portray the inner life and purpose of those by whom the stage has been conscientiously adopted as an art. artistic sympathy would be required; while it is comparatively For this no ordinary power of easy to dash in the amusing but coarse outlines of a Fotheringay Crummles or a Folair. We recognise the truth of these sketches, just as we acknowledge the truth of Scott's Dick Tinto, or his Claude Halcro, as excellent examples of the ragged followers who hang on to the skirts of every

or a Snivellici, a

gentle craft.

But the same people who would never dream of

accepting these as types of the painter or musician, will yet take their notions of what actors are from the caricatures of Thackeray and Dickens, without pausing to consider that Miss Bunion is not more unlike Mrs. Browning, or Poseidon Hicks more unlike the Laureate, than the players of Pendennis' and Nicholas Nickleby must be unlike an Iffland or a

entailed upon

Seydelmann,

a Talma or a Macready, a Ristori or a Helen Faucit. Artists who, like these, have worked under a deep sense of the responsibility them by their gifts, who have moved through the vulgar and prosaic accompaniments of their behind-the-scenes existence,' as Mrs. Jameson eloquently said of Adelaide Kemble, 'without allowing it to trench on the poetry of their conceptions, and thrown themselves upon the sympathy of an excited and admiring public, without being the slave of its caprices,' have yet to find their adequate representatives in English works of fiction.

It is, as we have said, one of the difficulties of the great actor, that he is much at the mercy of his fellow players. If these be stupid or vulgar, though they cannot drag him down to their level, still they can thwart, and embarrass him at every turn, and make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to work out his intentions with complete effect. Actors of spurious celebrity may like to surround themselves with foils, in whose ignorance their 'skill may stick fiery off indeed.' Ma femme et cinq poupées' has indeed been avowed to be the ideal of a company, and the principle is a favourite one both with bad actors and hand-to-mouth managers. But the genuine artist is never happier than when he is surrounded by ability. He rejoices in emulation with kindred genius; for, although, as Bacon has said, 'he that seeketh to be eminent amongst able men hath a great task,' nothing draws forth true power like collision with power equal or even greater. It was no more than natural for an ill-regulated genius like Edmund Kean, hungry only of applause and of money, to refuse to play side by side with Charles Young, feeling himself overshadowed by that accomplished actor's majestic deportment and sonorous utterance, and perhaps, more than all, by his thorough finish. But a true artist, with whom his art was paramount and self but a subordinate consideration, would rather have courted the opportunity to vie with him in honourable rivalry, as he would certainly have come out of the struggle with redoubled honour. Mind would have kindled with mind, and flashed out fresh beauties in the play of reciprocal emotion, while the audience would have been swept along in a current of twofold force. It was so, we know, when, in the same play, Mrs. Siddons, her brothers John and Charles Kemble, and Charles Young were seen together.

One fine actor upon the stage amid a crowd of imbeciles is like an admirably painted figure in a group of daubs. Nay, his case is even worse. We may fix our eyes on the single figure, and shut them to the daubs. But we cannot do this in the theatre. For what is the divinest Juliet, if the Romeo under her balcony be a boor? or what the most chivalrous Othello, if Desdemona be a dowdy? The greater the contrast, the more painfully is our attention called at every turning to their defects-the more surely is our imagination dragged down from the elevation which it would otherwise have kept. But if it be hard for us, the spectators, to believe in the illusion of the scene, when Romeo and Desdemona belie what is said of them by every look and movement and intonation, how much harder

must

must it be, although people never think of this, for the Juliet or Othello of the hour, with such counterparts before them, to infuse the glow of imaginative passion into their impersonations? In truth, we can never see an actor or actress at their best, unless we see them well acted up to, and the whole characters of the play worked out in just harmony and due proportion. Imagine for the moment Mrs. Siddons, with her grand manner, her noble voice and presence, by the side of any Macbeth of our present stage; or the distinction, the force, the exquisite finish of the elder Farren beside the slipshod feebleness of the new school! The broad emphatic style of these great artists will seem as much too highly pitched as that of the others will be unquestionably too low; and instead of a well balanced picture, we shall get one that is out of drawing, and harsh and dissonant in colour.

A general without soldiers, or soldiers without a general, are not, indeed, more helpless than a great actor unsupported by efficient subordinates, or the rank and file of actors without firstclass ability at their head. Accordingly, we find that great actors have, as a rule, been the nucleus of a cluster of able performers. Thus, Burbage's company, in Shakspeare's day, was a strong one. Betterton, again, was only the foremost in a company, which included, among others of note, his own wife, Mr. and Mrs. Monfort, Kynaston, Sandford, Mrs. Barry, and the charming Anne Bracegirdle; all of them, according to Cibber, 'original masters in their different style, and not mere auricular imitators of one another, which commonly is the highest merit of the middle rank.' It may well be doubted whether such a combination of talent has ever since been brought together in an English theatre. Nevertheless, Booth, Garrick, Henderson, the Kembles, Kean, Macready, were all fortunate in having around them a body of thoroughly trained actors, proud of their art, well versed in its traditions, and more or less accustomed to work together.

This was a state of things which very soon became impossible when the principles of free trade were applied to the drama, and the privileges of the patent theatres were withdrawn. Abolish these, said the reformers, with that irrepressible logic which the facts of human nature so constantly belie, and you will raise the public taste; for then, instead of the sulphurous melodramas on which their audiences are now fed, the minor theatres will devote themselves to plays of a higher class. Abolish them, said the most distinguished veterans of the drama, and you will, before long, make the acting of tragedy and comedy impossible.