The subject of my address is a very vast one, and is, I assure you, worthy of a careful study.  Writers such as Voltaire, Schlegel, Goethe, Lessing, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, and Schiller, have not disdained to treat it with that seriousness which Art specially demands—­which anything in life requires whose purpose is not immediate and imperative.  For my own part I can only bring you the experience of more than thirty years of hard and earnest work.  Out of wide experience let me point out that there are many degrees of merit, both of aim, of endeavor, and of execution in acting, as in all things.  I want you to think of acting at its best—­as it may be, as it can be, as it has been, and is—­and as it shall be, whilst it be followed by men and women of strong and earnest purpose.  I do not for a moment wish you to believe that only Shakespeare and the great writers are worthy of being played, and that all those efforts that in centuries have gathered themselves round great names are worthy of your praise.  In the House of Art are many mansions where men may strive worthily and live cleanly lives.  All Art is worthy, and can be seriously considered, so long as the intention be good and the efforts to achieve success be conducted with seemliness.  And let me here say, that of all the arts none requires greater intention than the art of acting.  Throughout it is necessary to do something, and that something cannot fittingly be left to chance, or the unknown inspiration of a moment.  I say “unknown,” for if known, then the intention is to reproduce, and the success of the effort can be in nowise due to chance.  It may be, of course, that in moments of passionate excitement the mind grasps some new idea, or the nervous tension suggests to the mechanical parts of the body some new form of expression; but such are accidents which belong to the great scheme of life, and not to this art, or any art, alone.  You all know the story of the painter who, in despair at not being able to carry out the intention of his imagination, dashed his brush at the imperfect canvas, and with the scattering paint produced by chance the very effect which his brush guided by his skill alone, had failed to achieve.  The actor’s business is primarily to reproduce the ideas of the author’s brain, to give them form, and substance, and color, and life, so that those who behold the action of a play may, so far as can be effected, be lured into the fleeting belief that they behold reality.  Macready, who was an earnest student, defined the art of the actor “to fathom the depths of character, to trace its latent motives, to feel its finest quivering of emotion, is to comprehend the thoughts that are hidden under words, and thus possess one’s-self of the actual mind of the individual man”; and Talma spoke of it as “the union of grandeur without pomp, and nature without triviality”; whilst Shakespeare wrote, “the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, 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.”