The vivacity of the latter no longer charms (save in
Boswell); the chairs of the former still render rest impossible in a
hundred homes.' This view, however, seems to me to be exaggerated. It
rests on the assumption that acting is simply a mimetic art, and takes no
account of its imaginative and intellectual basis. It is quite true, of
course, that the personality of the player passes away, and with it that
pleasure-giving power by virtue of which the arts exist. Yet the
artistic method of a great actor survives. It lives on in tradition, and
becomes part of the science of a school. It has all the intellectual
life of a principle. In England, at the present moment, the influence of
Garrick on our actors is far stronger than that of Reynolds on our
painters of portraits, and if we turn to France it is easy to discern the
tradition of Talma, but where is the tradition of David?

Madame Ristori's memoirs, then, have not merely the charm that always
attaches to the autobiography of a brilliant and beautiful woman, but
have also a definite and distinct artistic value. Her analysis of the
character of Lady Macbeth, for instance, is full of psychological
interest, and shows us that the subtleties of Shakespearian criticism are
not necessarily confined to those who have views on weak endings and
rhyming tags, but may also be suggested by the art of acting itself. The
author of Obiter Dicta seeks to deny to actors all critical insight and
all literary appreciation. The actor, he tells us, is art's slave, not
her child, and lives entirely outside literature, 'with its words for
ever on his lips, and none of its truths engraven on his heart.' But
this seems to me to be a harsh and reckless generalisation. Indeed, so
far from agreeing with it, I would be inclined to say that the mere
artistic process of acting, the translation of literature back again into
life, and the presentation of thought under the conditions of action, is
in itself a critical method of a very high order; nor do I think that a
study of the careers of our great English actors will really sustain the
charge of want of literary appreciation. It may be true that actors pass
too quickly away from the form, in order to get at the feeling that gives
the form beauty and colour, and that, where the literary critic studies
the language, the actor looks simply for the life; and yet, how well the
great actors have appreciated that marvellous music of words which in
Shakespeare, at any rate, is so vital an element of poetic power, if,
indeed, it be not equally so in the case of all who have any claim to be
regarded as true poets. 'The sensual life of verse,' says Keats, in a
dramatic criticism published in the Champion, 'springs warm from the lips
of Kean, and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics, learned in
the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual
grandeur, his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left
them honeyless.' This particular feeling, of which Keats speaks, is
familiar to all who have heard Salvini, Sarah Bernhardt, Ristori, or any
of the great artists of our day, and it is a feeling that one cannot, I
think, gain merely by reading the passage to oneself.