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: of the subsequent dramatic criticism. And further still, the man himself struck almost at the outset of his career the extreme good fortune of falling in with, and being personally liked by, a noteworthy group of French boosters. This group literally "made" Maeterlinck in the same uncritical way that, on a lower level in the England of the moment, Swinnerton's and Merrick's close friends are doing their damndest to "make" them. Intelligence and the Actor.—To argue that all actors—or, at least, the great majority of actors— are numskulls and to prove it is of a piece with arguing, and proving, that all fat men—or, at least, the great majority of fat men—perspire. To find fault with an actor for being a numskull is to find fault with a philosopher for being intelligent. Numskullery is one of the essential attributes of the actor; without it, he is an incompetent in his profession, a fellow ill-equipped for his life's work, a soul doomed to ignominious failure. Imagine an intelligent man—a man like Lincoln or Gladstone, say—rouging his lips and cheeks, blackening his bald spot, beading his eyelashes, dressing himself up like the top of an old-fashioned mantelpiece and, thus arrayed, swelling proudly at the handclapping of a houseful of yokels when with a tin sword he stands at the top of a papier-mache stairway in a J. Stanley Weyman opus and, yelling "For the glory of La Belle France!" at the top of his lungs, chases three nervous college-boy supers back into the wings. . . . What is often mistaken for intelligence in an actor is merely a talent for not reading incorrectly the work of the dramatist. But it actually requires no more authentic intrinsic intelligence to play, say, the King in Shakespeare's "Lear" than it requires to play the oboe in Beethoven's Op. 87. Applicatio...