Its progress in the past century has been the means of teaching to millions of people a great number of facts which had perhaps otherwise been lost to them.  How many are there who have had brought home to them in an understandable manner by stage-plays the costumes, habits, manners, and customs of countries and ages other than their own; what insight have they thus obtained into facts and vicissitudes of life—­of passions and sorrows and ambitions outside the narrow scope of their own lives, and which yet may and do mould the destinies of men.  All this is education—­education in its widest sense, for it broadens the sympathies and enlarges the intellectual grasp.  And beyond this again—­for these are advantages on the material side—­there is that higher education of the heart, which raises in the scale of creation all who are subject to its sweetening influences.  To hold his place therefore amongst these progressing forces, the actor must at the start be well endowed with some special powers, and by training, reading, and culture of many kinds, be equipped for the work before him.  No amount of training can give to a dense understanding and a clumsy personality certain powers of quickness and spontaneity; and, on the other hand, no genius can find its fullest expression without some understanding of the principles and method of a craft.  It is the actor’s part to represent or interpret the ideas and emotions which the poet has created, and to do this he must at the first have a full knowledge and understanding of them.  This is in itself no easy task.  It requires much study and much labor of many kinds.  Having then acquired an idea, his intention to work it out into reality must be put in force; and here new difficulties crop up at every further step taken in advance.  Now and again it suffices the poet to think and write in abstractions; but the actor’s work is absolutely concrete.  He is brought in every phase of his work into direct comparison with existing things, and must be judged by the most exacting standards of criticism.  Not only must his dress be suitable to the part which he assumes, but his bearing must not be in any way antagonistic to the spirit of the time in which the play is fixed.  The free bearing of the sixteenth century is distinct from the artificial one of the seventeenth, the mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless one of the nineteenth.  And all this quite exclusive of the minute qualities and individualities of the character represented.  The voice must be modulated to the vogue of the time.  The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age is different to that of a mail-clad one—­nay, the armor of a period ruled in real life the poise and bearing of the body; and all this must be reproduced on the stage, unless the intelligence of the audience, be they ever so little skilled in history, is to count as naught.