It is often supposed that great actors trust to the inspiration of the moment.  Nothing can be more erroneous.  There will, of course, be such moments, when an actor at a white heat illumines some passage with a flash of imagination (and this mental condition, by the way, is impossible to the student sitting in his arm-chair); but the great actor’s surprises are generally well weighed, studied, and balanced.  We know that Edmund Kean constantly practised before a mirror effects which startled his audience by their apparent spontaneity.  It is the accumulation of such effects which enables an actor, after many years, to present many great characters with remarkable completeness.

I do not want to overstate the case, or to appeal to anything that is not within common experience, so I can confidently ask you whether a scene in a great play has not been at some time vividly impressed on your minds by the delivery of a single line, or even of one forcible word.  Has not this made the passage far more real and human to you than all the thought you have devoted to it?  An accomplished critic has said that Shakespeare himself might have been surprised had he heard the “Fool, fool, fool!” of Edmund Kean.  And though all actors are not Keans, they have in varying degree this power of making a dramatic character step out of the page, and come nearer to our hearts and our understandings.

After all, the best and most convincing exposition of the whole art of acting is given by Shakespeare himself:  “To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”  Thus the poet recognized the actor’s art as a most potent ally in the representation of human life.  He believed that to hold the mirror up to nature was one of the worthiest functions in the sphere of labor, and actors are content to point to his definition of their work as the charter of their privileges.

III.

Practice of the art.

The practice of the art of acting is a subject difficult to treat with the necessary brevity.  Beginners are naturally anxious to know what course they should pursue.  In common with other actors, I receive letters from young people many of whom are very earnest in their ambition to adopt the dramatic calling, but not sufficiently alive to the fact that success does not depend on a few lessons in declamation.  When I was a boy I had a habit which I think would be useful to all young students.  Before going to see a play of Shakespeare’s I used to form—­in a very juvenile way—­a theory as to the working out of the whole drama, so as to correct my conceptions by those of the actors; and though I was, as a rule, absurdly wrong, there can be no doubt that any method of independent study is of enormous importance, not only to youngsters, but also to students of a larger