To boast of being able to appreciate Shakespeare more in reading him
than in seeing him acted used to be a common method of affecting
special intellectuality. I hope this delusion--a gross and pitiful
one to most of us--has almost absolutely died out. It certainly
conferred a very cheap badge of superiority on those who entertained
it. It seemed to each of them an inexpensive opportunity of
worshipping himself on a pedestal. But what did it amount to? It was
little more than a conceited and feather-headed assumption that an
unprepared reader, whose mind is usually full of far other things,
will see on the instant all that has been developed in hundreds of
years by the members of a studious and enthusiastic profession. My
own conviction is that there are few characters or passages of our
great dramatists which will not repay original study. But at least we
must recognise the vast advantages with which a practised actor,
impregnated by the associations of his life, and by study--with all
the practical and critical skill of his profession up to the date at
which he appears, whether he adopts or rejects tradition--addresses
himself to the interpretation of any great character, even if he have
no originality whatever. There is something still more than this,
however, in acting. Every one who has the smallest histrionic gift
has a natural dramatic fertility; so that as soon as he knows the
author's text, and obtains self-possession, and feels at home in a
part without being too familiar with it, the mere automatic action of
rehearsing and playing it at once begins to place the author in new
lights, and to give the personage being played an individuality partly
independent of, and yet consistent with, and rendering more powerfully
visible, the dramatist's conception. It is the vast power a good
actor has in this way which has led the French to speak of creating a
part when they mean its first being played, and French authors are as
conscious of the extent and value of this cooperation of actors with
them, that they have never objected to the phrase, but, on the
contrary, are uniformly lavish in their homage to the artists who have
created on the boards the parts which they themselves have created on
paper.