stage before we can judge their value. Even the most experienced managers and playreaders insist that you never can tell, you never can be sure of the success of any play. This certainly means that the actor has his important share in the creation of the play. To say that his work is imitative is absurd.

Rostand wrote Cyrano de Bergerac, and declared to the world that Coquelin was the perfect embodiment of his creation. If we accept the view that acting is merely a supine imitation of the author's work, surely any actor who wished to play Cyrano, in order to give the best performance of the author's conception, would imitate Coquelin. Anyone knows that such a course would mean failure. The actor who plays Cyrano today does not bother his head about Coquelin's method, he creates his own Cyrano; he expresses his own conception-just as Rostand himself did in the beginning.

And let Rostand select six great actors who could play Cyrano, and let him talk to them until he was black in the face explaining to

the minutest detail just how the part should be played. Then let the six actors separate and work out their character individually. What would be the result? There would be six different Cyranos, of course! There would be just as much difference in them as there was in the Hamlets of Booth, Irving, Fechter, and Mounet-Sully! The reason for this is not far to seek. Each actor must create his characters according to his abilities.

This great play of Rostand's, as a play, is quite useless until some qualified actor takes it from its library shelf and, by his creative power, gives it a new birth, a new lease of life as a play. It would have a very short stage-life if a poor actor attempted it. The same is true of Hamlet. If Hamlet should be produced in New York today with an ordinary actor in the part, it would be pretty promptly withdrawn, for it is only great acting that will induce the public to see again a play they know so well.

And again if a well-known actor were secured to play Hamlet, and told that he should

give a faithful copy of Booth's Hamlet, or Irving's or anybody else's but his own, it is easy to imagine what the result would be. Every actor must express his own conception of any character, and must express it in his own way; out of the imagination of the actor must grow the image that is to appeal to our imagination.

Acting in its true sense is as boundless in its scope, as unfettered, as "creative as any of the other fine arts. I believe that the art of Modjeska and Ristori, and Booth and Irving cannot fairly be judged by a lower aesthetic standard than the art of Whistler or the art of Beethoven or the art of Goethe or the art of Rodin. I sincerely hope that this little book has shown that the art of the actor calls into play the same imaginative and creative faculties as the art of the painter or the composer or the poet or the sculptor, and that the beginner in the profession should guide and judge his work by ideals as lofty and exacting as theirs.

INDEX