We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
50
Actorviews
pride in the word, the pride of a craftsman and artist.
Some actors, I dare say, are proud to be knights; Tree is a knight who is proud to be an actor. He has no use for the one that would be a gentleman first and an actor second. He has an artist’s horror of the genteel, and told me that the best advice he ever had given to a young player was: “For heaven’s sake, don’t be genteel; be natural and keep your vowels open.”
He did not tell me what he thought of the tribal dialects of the great Middle West that acclaims him, but he was emphatic in his disesteem of what he termed the cockneyisms of his own country, which now, it seems, have traversed from the V’d W’s of Dickens to what Sir Herbert calls “squeezed vowels.”
“These,” he said, “are infinitely worse than the vigorous vulgarity of the Victorian”; and asked me how I liked his v-ful alliteration, which you may be sure I liked almost as well as I liked his boyish way of liking it himself.
A big man’s boyishness is doubly striking; and Tree is very big at close range, with his high Du Maurier figure, still young eyes, deep-set in a face that is Britishly mastiff rather than Britishly bulldog.
Suddenly the talk went to war and presently he was relating an experience in Germany when he acted before and talked king-to-king with the Emperor.
“I had the honor of playing before the German Emperor in ‘Richard II,’ a play and a part I love. And I played direct to him in his box as I came to the speech :
“ For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings — ”