growth.  Without it the mind is apt to take its stamp from the first forcible impression it receives, and to fall into a servile dependence upon traditions, which, robbed of the spirit that created them, are apt to be purely mischievous.  What was natural to the creator is often unnatural and lifeless in the imitator.  No two people form the same conceptions of character, and therefore it is always advantageous to see an independent and courageous exposition of an original ideal.  There can be no objection to the kind of training that imparts a knowledge of manners and customs, and the teaching which pertains to simple deportment on the stage is necessary and most useful; but you cannot possibly be taught any tradition of character, for that has no permanence.  Nothing is more fleeting than any traditional method of impersonation.  You may learn where a particular personage used to stand on the stage, or down which trap the ghost of Hamlet’s father vanished; but the soul of interpretation is lost, and it is this soul which the actor has to re-create for himself.  It is not mere attitude or tone that has to be studied; you must be moved by the impulse of being; you must impersonate and not recite.

There has always been a controversy as to the province of naturalism in dramatic art.  In England it has been too much the custom, I believe, while demanding naturalism in comedy, to expect a false inflation in tragedy.  But there is no reason why an actor should be less natural in tragic than in lighter moods.  Passions vary in expression according to moulds of character and manners, but their reality should not be lost even when they are expressed in the heroic forms of the drama.  A very simple test is a reference to the records of old actors.  What was it in their performances that chiefly impressed their contemporaries?  Very rarely the measured recitation of this or that speech, but very often a simple exclamation that deeply moved their auditors, because it was a gleam of nature in the midst of declamation.  The “Prithee, undo this button!” of Garrick, was remembered when many stately utterances were forgotten.  In our day the contrast between artificial declamation and the accents of nature is less marked, because its delivery is more uniformly simple, and an actor who lapses from a natural into a false tone is sure to find that his hold upon his audience is proportionately weakened.  But the revolution which Garrick accomplished may be imagined from the story told by Boswell.  Dr. Johnson was discussing plays and players with Mrs. Siddons, and he said:  “Garrick, madam, was no declaimer; there was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken ’To be or not to be’ better than he did; yet he was the only actor I ever saw whom I could call a master, both in tragedy and comedy, though I liked him best in comedy.  A true conception of character and natural expression of it were his distinguished excellences.”