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.
64
Actorviews
“The people who matter are the people with enough imagination to read a play for themselves and see it acted in their imagination much better than any group of mimes could hope to act it. Listen!
“I’ve been an actor now for sixteen years. In that time I’ve given two good performances — just two: this one and the one in ‘Justice.’ And those two performances— the sum of sixteen years’ training and more or less work and ambition — don’t hold a candle to what you or I could imagine them to be just by sitting down and reading the plays and letting our imaginations run. Listen!
“In all the theatergoing that I’ve done in sixteen years and more, I’ve seen just two performances that were better than you or I could stage in the theater of our imagination, with no physical props but the play-books. One of these performances was the Russian ballet, ‘Petroucha,’ and the other was ‘Sumurun.’ Wait!
“The acting of a good play is as useless and as gratuitous as the illustrating of a good novel. Yes, yes, I know you are going to hold up Du Maurier. But he happened to be a great novelist who could draw; just as Thackeray happened to be one who couldn’t. Listen !
“An actor’s performance, at best, is the way he happens to feel about a certain character. And why should the way an actor feels be important to persons capable of doing their own feeling? Why, the only really great performance I ever gave in my life was when I was stewed stiff and scared stiffer.”
No longer does he have to cry “Listen!”
“A friend of my grandmother’s,” he takes up with a slow smile, “gave me a set of lapis lazuli links and studs. Thev were lovely, but I was very broke and