Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/555

Rh into her part that she puts on features not described by the author, but conformable to its character, thus going far toward completing the personality—filling in the outlines—which the author has sketched. M. Paul Mounet says that one can not master a character till he has mastered its reflex actions, its unconscious movements, gait, etc. M. Got tells us that the comedian's great pleasure is the pleasure of metamorphosis, of becoming for the moment in various things the personage he represents. M. Truffier believes that his profession would be in a crude state without the gift of such metamorphoses. He adds that he experiences these metamorphoses more completely in old plays, which take him out of the range of present life, than in those of to-day.

An important fact to be noted is that each actor plays a part according to the sensibility peculiar to him. M. Mounet Sully speaks of a combination of the character of the personage evoked and that of the actor, and observes that no two actors play the same part in the same way. Madame Bartet says that she is not capable of rendering every kind of emotions, and that she represents some categories better than others. Actors usually play parts having a certain degree of agreement with one another, and are liable to fail when they undertake a part of a different type. This restriction of ability is in part of physical origin, but is also largely moral or emotional.

The power of sustaining emotion and the duration of it vary among actors much, as M. Le Bargy has observed, as some horses excel in speed and others in bottom.

As to the exact nature of artistic emotion, Madame Bartet regards it as real in the sense that it produces the same physical effects in the organism as one would feel on his own account. She is oppressed in a scene of continued grief, is transported in another scene, and becomes wearied with the condition, especially when the emotions correspond with those natural to her.

Artistic emotion has, however, the two peculiar characteristics of being always agreeable and of being subject to the will. The answers we have reviewed are very precise. OthereOthers [sic] are less definite; and some of the comedians to whom we have applied have simply answered that the factitious emotions inspired by the parts are less intense than real ones; but M. Mounet Sully is of the opinion that the emotion is lived and felt as if it were real.

We come now to Diderot's principal argument, that one can not be moved by emotion and be critical at the same time. Without availing ourselves of the fruits of recent researches on complex consciousness, we will merely refer here to what we have learned concerning the case in hand. M. Got found no difficulty in supposing the combination of the two functions, in dramatic