Pity it is that the momentary beauties flowing from an harmonious elocution cannot, like those of poetry, be their own record! That the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that presents them; or, at best, can but imperfectly glimmer through the memory or imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators!

"But you do not have to go as far back as Cibber," I put in. "I am sure Mr. Jefferson was feeling a little afflicted when he said there was nothing so useless as a dead actor, and I know Lawrence Barrett used to lament lugubriously that it was his fate every night of his life to carve a statue in snow."

Whereat Mrs. Fiske indulged herself in the most irreverent smile I have ever

seen.

"Did Mr. Barrett really say that? Dear! dear! how seriously we take ourselves! And how absurd when we are paid in our own lifetime so much more in money and applause and fame than we often deserve, than any mortal could deserve! But, above all, how unthinkable that any one who looks at all beyond the hour of his death could be concerned with anything less personal and momentous than the fate of his own soul, could be anything but utterly engrossed by the intense wonder and curiosity as to what his life hereafter would be! There is something interesting. The great adventure.

"Yet, mind you," she went on, “I am not so sure there is no immortality for the actor. Of course the prodigious Mrs. Siddons she must have been prodigious -lives in the enthusiasm, the recorded enthusiasm, of the men and women who saw her at Drury Lane. But who shall say her work does not survive in still another way? The best dramatic school I know is just the privilege of watching the great performances, and I like to think that the players Sarah Siddons inspired have handed on the inspiration from generation to generation. Thus would genius be eternally rekindled, and every once in a great while, quite without warn

And here Mrs. Fiske laughed so gaily that it was impossible to be serious any more. Indeed, when she can be persuaded to talk about the theater at all, it is usually with incorrigible lightness. And as she brought her inquisitive lorgnette. to bear upon the program, I felt a sudden understanding and compassion for any one who had ever tried to interview her. I knew they had tried again and again, and if the results have been meager, I realized it was not because they were rebuffed, but because they were baffled. I was sure none of the tried and trusted baits would serve. I doubted if she would rise even to that old stand-by, "Mummer Worship," the contemptuous essay in which George Moore speaks of acting as "the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all," and one which "makes slender demands on the intelligence of the individual exercising it," the scornful paper in which he describes the modern mummer as one whose vanity has grown as weed never grew before till it "overtops all things human." Let the interviewer ask almost any actor what he thinks of "Mummer Worship," and he will get five columns of material without the need of another question. I wondered. I investigated. What did Mrs. Fiske think of "Mummer Worship"?

She gazed at me with mild surprise. "What do I think of it?" she asked. "Dear child, I wrote it."

I might have known.

"Of course," she added, "there is no end of offensive nonsense in it; but in the matter of acting's place among the arts, I am not sure that even our dear Mr. Lewes realized why he had been led to think so often that the actor was the less exalted and less creative artist. I suspect it was because he had seen most of them in Shakspere, an immeasurably greater artist than any actor we know of. None could be compared with him; yet, in the estimate

of the actor's place in the arts, they all have been compared with Shakspere, I think. But there are times when the actor as an artist is far greater and more creative than his material, when he does something more than 'repeat a portion of a story invented by another,' as Mr. Moore has it. Yet quite as distinguished a writer has said the least gifted author of a play, the least gifted creator of a drama, is a man of higher intellectual importance than his best interpreter. Now, distin

Erstwhile Susan"

guished though he be, this writer betrays himself as one untrained in the psychology of the theater. We actors are time and again compelled to read values into plays-values unprovided by our authors. Think of Duse in 'Magda.' Out of her knowledge of life, out of her vision, by virtue of her incomparable art, she created depths in that character which Sudermann not only never put there, but never could have put there."

"I remember," I said, "that somewhere

WHEN a blaze of anger from one of the women in the play brought down the curtain at the end of the first act, Mrs. Fiske devoted herself to a few moments of approving applause.

"Admirable!" she exclaimed. "That, my friend, was the essence of acting."

And I pounced on the phrase, for here was a little problem in dramatic criticism that interested me enormously, because it seemed to hold the key to half the wild confusion of thought in contemporary comment on the art of acting. "The essence of acting!" I fished from my pocket a frowzy envelop on which some time before I had scribbled sentences from two essays of the day. One of them had said, "A good actor is one who is successful in completely immersing his own personality in the rôle he is playing." And the other had said, "The very essence of acting lies in the capacity of assumption and impersonation of a conceived character and personality different from that of the player."

I showed them to Mrs. Fiske not merely because, to me, they seemed wild, but because they seemed typically wild, not merely because these men had said them, but because many had implied them and reared thereon shaky structures of dramatic criticism. She read them with the smile with which one greets an old friend.

"Speaking as a dramatic critic," Mrs. Fiske began in a profoundly judicial manner. Then she paused, and smiled a little as though some mischievous thought were trying to dispel her judicial calm.

"But what," I persisted, "is the answer?"

"Answer? There are seven answers which occur to me offhand.” "Tell me one.'

"Duse," she replied triumphantly. "And the other six are Irving, Terry, Mansfield, Jefferson, Réjane, and Sarah Bernhardt. I am sure if we went back over all the reams and reams that were written about this splendid seven, we should find a good deal about their 'just playing themselves.' Yet when the writers on the stage brandish that phrase, when they talk of 'immersing the personality,' I suspect they are engrossed for the moment with personal appearance, mannerisms, matters of mimicry, and disguise. They are engrossed with externals. Yet can they possibly think these factors, incalculably important though they be, are involved in the essence of acting? So much of the confusion of thought can be traced, I think, to the very use of the words 'mannerisms' and 'personality' when they mean a larger thing. They mean style. What they see recurrent in each impersonation of a great artist is just this style. It is a part of the art of all artists, but only the actor is scolded for it. Wagner is intensely Wagnerian even in the most humorous passages of 'Die Meistersinger.' Whistler is always Whistler, and Sargent always Sargent. Dickens was always Dickens. The one time he lapsed from his own style was when he wrote 'The Tale of Two Cities,' and only those who do not love Dickens at all like that book the best. Only Charles Reade was at his best when he was not himself. Chesterton is always extravagantly himself even when he writes for the theater. Imagine a Barrie book that was not Barriesque, or a Barrie play that was not at all Barrie. In that sense Duse was always Duse and Irving was always Irving."

"Suppose," I ventured, "that an actor in your company were called upon to play an old Scotch gardener in a towering rage. What would be the essential thing?"

"The rage," she answered instantly,

"Then the essential thing is the emotion-"

"I am afraid of the word. It has been depreciated by 'emotionalism,' whatever that may mean. If it does not mean acting, it does not mean anything. No," she went on reflectively, "I have never tried before to put it into words, but it seems to me that the essence of acting is the conveyance of certain states of mind and heart, certain spiritual things, certain abstract qualities. It is the conveyance of truth by the actor as a medium. What

ence of acting deals with the perfecting of that medium. The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage."

She laughed a little.

"Are we getting too mystical?" she asked.

"Somewhat."

"It will do us good. But be sure of this, the essence of acting is the expression of the abstract thing, courage, fear, despair, anguish, anger, pity, piety. The great rôles are, in that sense, abstractions.

So Juliet is youthful love, and Lady Macbeth is will power or ruthless ambition, as you will. Think of Duse in 'La Locandiera.' As for her mannerisms, as to the extent of her disguise, as for the difference between her rôle and her own personality, I do not remember. In many matters of externals she was careless. You know she was almost theatrical in her untheatricalism. Her make-up for Mirandolina and Santuzza was virtually the same. Mirandolina in that delightful comedy is the coquettish hostess of the inn. I do not remember how exactly she represented or suggested a hostess of an inn. What I do remember is that she was more than a coquettish hostess. She was more than a coquette. She achieved a sublimation. She was coquetry. I think of her in the book scene from 'Paolo and Francesca.' There she played the guilty lover, but she was more than a guilty lover: she was guilty love. And so, said Mrs. Fiske, "I think there must be something amiss with those definitions on the back of your envelop, for when we look on the great actors of our time, the questions those definitions raise may vanish utterly -vanish into thin air. Indeed, the greatest actors have, in a sense, always played themselves. When I remember Duse, I cannot think of her degree of success in this or that impersonation. I cannot think of her variations. I think only of the essential thing, the style, the quality, that was Duse. Just as we think of a certain style and quality at the very mention of Whistler's name. When I remember Irving and Terry, I am inclined to think that Miss Terry was the greater actor, the more luminous medium, just because, while I can think of Irving in widely varied characterizations, I can think of her only as the quality that was Ellen Terry, the indescribable iridescence of her, the brilliance that was like sunlight shimmering on the waters of a fountain. When I think of Ellen Terry in her prime, were it Portia or Olivia or Beatrice, I think of light, light, radiance, radiance, always moving, moving, moving, always motion."

I wish that Ellen Terry, and all the rest of the world, for that matter, could have seen and heard Mrs. Fiske as she spoke these words for remembrance.

"But," she added, smiling, "it is n't Ellen Terry this afternoon, and here is our second act."

WHEN the curtain fell again, and the house began to buzz even more vigorously than while the scene was in progress, we caught at the loose ends of our first entr'acte.

"We made our little definition on the spur of the moment," said Mrs. Fiske, "but I think I could prove it by the great actors I have seen."

"Who was the greatest actor you ever saw?" I demanded, who have a passion for such things. "What was the greatest single performance?"

Mrs. Fiske gazed distractedly about her. "I could not possibly tell."

"Of course not. We never can. What was the greatest short story? Shall we say 'A Lodging for the Night' to save the trouble of thinking it out? Ask any novelist to name the greatest novel, and he will say "Tom Jones.'"

"But," said the heretic, "it might embarrass him dreadfully, poor man, if you were to ask him to name any of the characters in 'Tom Jones." "

"Of course it's an impossible question, I know; but I should like to know what names come to your mind when you try to answer it. Suppose," I persisted-"suppose you were asked at the point of a loaded gun to name the greatest performance you ever saw, what would you say?" Mrs. Fiske had an answer for that: "Shoot!" So I threw away the gun and surrendered.

"But, you see," she explained, "I have had such mere snatches as a playgoer. I have been very little to the theater. Often the great actors have played here in the city when I was here, and yet, evening for evening and matinée for matinée, I, too, was playing and could not see them. We of the stage who are critical, but responsive, playgoers, and who go more than