It is also a signal function of dramatic acting to reveal to ordinary people the extraordinary attributes of their own nature by exemplifying before them the transcendent heights and depths of the human soul. Average persons and their average lives are prosaic and monotonous, often mean and tiresome or repulsive. They have no conception of the august or appalling extremes reached by those of the greatest endowments, the intensities of their experience, the grandeurs and the mysteries of their fate. In contrast with the tame level of vulgar life, the dull plod of the humdrum world, the theatre shows the romantic side of life, the supernal passions and adventures of genius, the entrancements of dreaming ideality, the glimpsing hints and marvels of destiny. An actor like Garrick or Salvini, an actress like Rachel or Ristori, carrying the graduated signals of love to the climax of beatific bliss, or the signals of jealousy to the explosive point of madness, makes common persons feel that they had not dreamed what these passions were. In beholding a great play greatly performed an audience gain a new measure for the richness of experience and the width of its extremes. Thus average people are brought to see the exceptional greatnesses of humanity and initiated into some appreciation of those astonishing passions, feats, and utterances of genius which must otherwise have remained sealed mysteries to them. Rachel used to stand, every nerve seeming an adder, and freeze and thrill the audience with terror, as her fusing gestures, perfectly automatic although guided by will, glided in slow continuity of curves or darted in electric starts. The commanding majesty, intelligence, and passion of Siddons seemed to bring her audience before her and not her before her audience. A great actor enlarges the diapason of man. Our kind is aggrandized in him. He is copy to men of grosser faculty and teaches them how to feel. It was this sort of association in his mind that made Dryden say of the aged Betterton, with such magnifying pomp of phrase,— “He, like the sun, still shoots a glimmering ray, Like ancient Rome majestic in decay.”