The keynote of Mrs. Fiske’s acting is akin to that of naturalistic drama itself, as the dramatist himself understands it. He must portray humanity as it is, with the selection and stress necessary for effectiveness in the theatre. His heroines must be embodied through similar methods. Such impersonation Mrs. Fiske accomplishes with the utmost economy of gesture, action and voice. There is no staginess, none of the aggressive grace of the actress playing a part; she is rather the woman living it. There is obvious none of the routine technique which actors frequently learn of each other, or in schools. This is not to say that her style is not an outgrowth of an earlier technique of a period when no doubt she was sufficiently “stagey” and conventional. In the later period she has refined, out of this earlier experience and her own insight, a method remarkable for its suggestion, its repression, its freedom from familiar device. To the end of theatric effect and illusion she, like all artists, has well defined, recognizable means--some, like her wide-ranged, emotion-charged voice, natural gifts; others more or less deliberate. How deliberate, it would be hard to say, so closely knit in good acting are calculation and instinctive action. Her power of imparting the details of impersonation is notable. Gesture, walk, pose, facial play, intonation, pause, all are worked out with precision and yet with a reticent naturalness that makes strongly for effectiveness. Particularly convincing is her power of pregnant silence. In Hedda Gabler, “Mrs. Fiske’s power of ominously significant silence, of play of feature that reveals the working brain behind, rises very high in the final scene with Brack. He knows her share in Lovborg’s ruin; he can bring his knowledge into play in the sordid theatre of the police court. The price of silence is the submission that Hedda, with all her curiosity and zest for evil, is too coldly cowardly to pay. All her tragedy has curdled mean. Her only refuge is the meaner and cowardly escape of suicide. She does not speak, yet one sees the idea germinate, mount and possess her, until it flowers into reckless action.”[171]