The monologue is an artistic whole, and must be understood as a whole. Each part must be felt to be like the limb of a tree, a part of an organism. As each leaf on the tree quivers with the life hidden in trunk and root, so each word of the monologue must vibrate with the thought and feeling of the whole. Hence, the interpreter of the monologue must command all the natural, expressive modulations of voice and body. He must have imagination and insight into human motives, and his voice and body must respond to this insight and understanding. He must know the language of pause, of touch, of change of pitch, of inflection, of the modulation of resonance, of changes in movement. He must realize, consciously or subconsciously, the importance of a look, of a turn of the head, of a smile, of a transition of the body, of a motion of the hand; in brief, throughout all the complex parts constituting the bodily organism he should be master of natural action, which appeals directly to the eye and precedes all speech. Every inflection must be natural; every variation of pitch must be spontaneous; every emotion must modulate the color of the voice; every attitude of the interpreter must be simple and sustained. He must have what is known as the "mercurial temperament" to assume every point of view and assimilate every feeling. The first great law of art is consistency, hence all the parts of a higher work of art must inhere, as do all parts of a plant or flower; but this unity and consistency should not be mechanical or artificial. Delivery can never be built; it must grow. True expression must be spontaneous and free. One must enjoy a monologue; one must live it. Every act or inflection must suggest a dozen others that might be given. The fulness of the life within, in thinking and feeling, must be delicately suggested. The most important point to be considered is a suggestion of the reality of life and the intensity of feeling. The interpreter must study nature. He must speak as the bird sings, not mechanically, but out of a full heart, yet not chaotically or from random impulses. All his movements must come, like the blooming of the rose, from within outward; but this can only result from meditation and command of mind, body, and voice. "Everything in nature," said Carlyle, "has an index finger pointing to something beyond it"; so every phrase, every word, action, or pause, every voice modulation, must have a relation to every other modulation. In the art of interpreting the monologue, which is a different art from the writing of one, all must be as much like nature as possible. Yet this likeness is secured, not by imitation or by reproducing external experiences, but by sympathetic identification and imaginative realization.