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.