said the tragedian, "I should think so! Hang the fellow, he was trying
to keep me out of the focus."

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,