Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/133

Rh the actress saw us standing there. Her face brightened, and waving her free hand, she said cheerily:

"Hello, Eddie! Isn't this a wonderful house though?"

Her fingers wrenched loose and her hand flung aside, she advanced to greet us, and while the audience still sobbed she asked us to her dressing room and there chatted amiably of everything save the woes of her heroine, until the call for the third act.

Of course she did, as any actor should have known without seeing. Acting is an art, not a spasm. The actress who makes her hearers weep is not the one who weeps herself but the one who seems to weep. Had she not been completely self-possessed, making her every move deliberately with shrewd preknowledge of its effect, she would have had no effect. Had she lost control of herself for an instant, that instant she would have lost control of her audience. Bernhardt, of course, was in the keenest sympathy with the rôle, but she was controlling that sympathy and using it, not permitting it to use her.

The secret of fine acting, the secret of all art, is suggestion, the inflaming of the spectator's