Training for the Stage Author:Arthur Hornblow Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: has rung down? The sculptor, the author, the composer, the architect have created something tangible which they leave for future generations to admire. But the p... more »layactor, the power and charm of whose acting has held thousands spell-bound, has nothing to leave but memories that fade, alas, all too soon. How many among the new generation of theatregoers remember the exquisite humor of Jefferson's Bob Acres, the nobility and dignity of Edwin Booth's Hamlet, the majesty of Forrest's Lear? To-day these past glories of the American stage are names—nothing more. ' THE ART OP THE ACTOR A Fool cannot be an actor, though an actor may act a fool's part, observed Sophocles sagely two thousand years ago. What the Athenian dramatist said is still true, but perhaps less true now than in theclassic age when on the boards strode actors of heroic stature, noble in mien, voice, and gesture, trained to declaim with lofty eloquence the poet's mighty verse. To-day the tragedian's once splendid art is lightly dismissed as old style, its gifted exponents are disappearing one after the other, and in a profession which practically raises no barriers to inexperience and incompetence, where every greenhorn deems himself worthy to wear the cothurnus, it is inevitable that there must be some fools. The actor's art has no definite laws. " The end of all acting," said Henry Irving, " is ' to hold the mirror up to Nature.' Different actors have different methods, but that is their common purpose which can be accomplished only by the closest study and observation. Acting, like every other art, has a mechanism. No painter, however great his imaginative power, can succeed in pure ignorance of the technicalities of his art; and no actor can make much progress till he has mastered a certain mechanism which is...« less