would apply with equal force to poet or novelist. Do not imagine that
I am claiming for the actor sole and undivided authority. He should
himself be a student, and it is his business to put into practice
the best ideas he can gather from the general current of thought with
regard to the highest dramatic literature. But it is he who gives body
to those ideas--fire, force, and sensibility, without which they would
remain for most people mere airy abstractions.

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.