Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/146

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN Possibly I did gush. Certainly I told her with all my heart how I had been thrilled and delighted, and never have I been more sincere. "Beautiful!" she applauded when I had finished. "I feel as renewed as if I had spent a week in the Adirondacks."

All this in support of the truth of acting. The acrobat or the dancer may leave the stage exhausted, but an actress who knows her business no more swoons at the finish of her big scene than Whistler had to be revived with smelling salts on completing an etching. The poor actress puts her heart into the rôle, the trained actress puts her head into it.

Mr. George Arliss has said it perfectly in one short sentence: "The art of the actor is to learn how not to be real on the stage without being found out by the audience."

A revolution in the theater from artificiality to realism has taken place in my time. It has been a change for the better, by and large, but much nonsense has been and still is talked of stage realism.

Incidental music and the soliloquy were theatrical devices in good standing long after I became an actor. The soliloquy was the drama's self-starter. At the rise of the curtain