Such is the training demanded of the consummate actor in that Artistic School which combines the excellences of the three preceding schools, cleansing them of their excesses and supplying all that they lack. The prejudice against this sort of discipline, that it must be fatal to all charm of impulse and fire of genius and reduce everything to a frigid construction by rule, is either a fruit of ignorance or an excuse of sloth. It is absurd to suppose that the perfecting of his mechanism makes a man mechanical. On the contrary it spiritualizes him. It is stiff obstructions or dead contractions in the organism that approximate a man to a marionette. It is a ridiculous prejudice which fancies that the strengthening, purification, and release of the organism from all strictures destroys natural life and replaces it with artifice, or banishes the fresh play of ideas and the surprising loveliness of impulse by reducing the divine spontaneity of passion to a cold set of formulas. The Delsartean drill so far from preventing inspiration invites and enhances it by preparing a fit vehicle and providing the needful conditions. The circulating curves of this æsthetic gymnastic, whose soft elliptical lines supersede the hard and violent angles of the vulgar style of exercise, redeem discordant man from his fragmentary condition to a harmonious unity. He is raised from the likeness of a puppet towards the likeness of a god. Then, as the influence of thought and feeling breathes through him, the changes of the features and the movement of the limbs and of the different zones of the body are so fused and interfluent that they modulate the flesh as if it were materialized music. “Unmarked he stands amid the throng, In rumination deep and long, Till you may see, with sudden grace, The very thought come o’er his face, And by the motion of his form Anticipate the bursting of the storm, And by the uplifting of his brow Tell where the bolt will strike, and how.”