Anything is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things,
either M. Silvain's oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats' method
would almost certainly drift. But I cannot feel that it is possible to
do much good by a ready-made method of any kind. Let the actor be taught
how to breathe, how to articulate, let his voice be trained to express
what he wants to express, and then let him be made to feel something of
what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr.
Yeats' readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teach
him to unlearn something and to learn something more. But then let him
forget his notes and Mr. Yeats' method, if he is to make verse live on
the stage.
GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH
Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?
We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of
individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic
temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated
like a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a
thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now
living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius
comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs.
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