there be, we can leave to him, whilst the rest of mankind marvel at his self-sufficient obtuseness, to hold that it was nothing but his own imagination which so much influenced Hazlitt when he was touched to the heart by Edmund Kean’s rendering of the words of the remorseful Moor, “Fool, fool, fool!” Why, the action of a player who knows how to convey to the audience that he is listening to another speaking, can not only help in the illusion of the general effect, but he himself can suggest a running commentary on what is spoken.  In every moment in which he is on the stage, an actor accomplished in his craft can convey ideas to the mind.

It is in the representation of passion that the intention of the actor appears in its greatest force.  He wishes to do a particular thing, and so far the wish is father to the thought that the brain begins to work in the required direction, and the emotional faculties and the whole nervous and muscular systems follow suit.  A skilled actor can count on this development of power, if it be given to him to rise at all to the height of a passion; and the inspiration of such moments may, now and again, reveal to him some new force or beauty in the character which he represents.  Thus he will gather in time a certain habitual strength in a particular representation of passion.  Diderot laid down a theory that an actor never feels the part he is acting.  It is of course true that the pain he suffers is not real pain, but I leave it to any one who has ever felt his own heart touched by the woes of another to say if he can even imagine a case where the man who follows in minutest detail the history of an emotion, from its inception onward, is the only one who cannot be stirred by it—­more especially when his own individuality must perforce be merged in that of the archetypal sufferer.  Talma knew that it was possible for an actor to feel to the full a simulated passion, and yet whilst being swept by it to retain his consciousness of his surroundings and his purpose.  In his own words—­“The intelligence accumulates and preserves all the creations of sensibility.”  And this is what Shakespeare means when he makes Hamlet tell the players—­“for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”

How can any one be temperate in the midst of his passion, lest it be that his consciousness and his purpose remain to him?  Let me say that it is this very discretion which marks the ultimate boundary of an Art, which stands within the line of demarcation between Art and Nature.  In Nature there is no such discretion.  Passion rules supreme and alone; discretion ceases, and certain consequences cease to be any deterrent or to convey any warning.  It must never be forgotten that all Art has the aim or object of seeming and not of being; and that to understate is as bad as to overstate the modesty or the efflorescence of Nature.  It is not possible to show within the scope of any