I do not recommend actors to allow their feelings to carry them away like this; but it is necessary to warn you against the theory expounded with brilliant ingenuity by Diderot, that the actor never feels.  When Macready played Virginius, after burying his beloved daughter, he confessed that his real experience gave a new force to his acting in the most pathetic situations of the play.  Are we to suppose that this was a delusion, or that the sensibility of the man was a genuine aid to the actor?  Bannister said of John Kemble that he was never pathetic because he had no children.  Talma says that when deeply moved he found himself making a rapid and fugitive observation on the alternation of his voice, and on a certain spasmodic vibration which it contracted in tears.  Has not the actor who can thus make his feelings a part of his art an advantage over the actor who never feels, but who makes his observations solely from the feelings of others?  It is necessary to this art that the mind should have, as it were, a double consciousness, in which all the emotions proper to the occasion may have full swing, while the actor is all the time on the alert for every detail of his method.  It may be that his playing will be more spirited one night than another.  But the actor who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art must have a greater power over his audiences than the passionless actor who gives a most artistic simulation of the emotions he never experiences.

Now, in the practice of acting, a most important point is the study of elocution; and in elocution one great difficulty is the use of sufficient force to be generally heard without being unnaturally loud, and without acquiring a stilted delivery.  The advice of the old actors was that you should always pitch your voice so as to be heard by the back row of the gallery—­no easy task to accomplish without offending the ears of the front of the orchestra.  And I should tell you that this exaggeration applies to everything on the stage.  To appear to be natural, you must in reality be much broader than nature.  To act on the stage as one really would in a room, would be ineffective and colorless.  I never knew an actor who brought the art of elocution to greater perfection than the late Charles Mathews, whose utterance on the stage appeared so natural that one was surprised to find when near him that he was really speaking in a very loud key.  There is a great actor in your own country to whose elocution one always listens with the utmost enjoyment—­I mean Edwin Booth.  He has inherited this gift, I believe, from his famous father, of whom I have heard it said, that he always insisted on a thorough use of the “instruments”—­by which he meant the teeth—­in the formation of words.

An imperfect elocution is apt to degenerate into a monotonous uniformity of tone.  Some wholesome advice on this point we find in the Life of Betterton.