And yet, I suggest, it is the peculiarity of the actor’s medium that has often withheld from him, at any rate with unthinking people, his title to rank as an artist. He is his own medium, his own paint and canvas, his own brick and marble. The works of other artists, the picture, the poem, the sonata, have an independent life, they survive their authors; the actor’s works are inseparable from his actual presence, and die with him. Hence a certain difficulty for the unsophisticated in distinguishing the artist from what the philosophers call the empirical man; the Edmund Kean whose genius is illuminating and revitalizing Shylock from the Edmund Kean who is notoriously fond of the bottle and who has lately got into trouble with an alderman’s wife. The physique, the temperament, of the empirical man furnish the medium for the artist. He arrives at the theatre in a taxi, or his own Rolls-Royce, smoking a big cigar, every inch of him a man of to-day; the next moment he is pretending to be an old mad King of Britain. This confusion is behind Johnson’s “fellow who claps a hump on his back and calls himself Richard the Third.” It leaves out of account the imaginative side of him, the artist. Johnson might just as well have dismissed Shakespeare as a “fellow who supposed a hump clapped on the back of one of his fancies, which he calls Richard the Third.” Lamb raised another objection, that the bodily presence of the actor materialized, coarsened, the finer elements of the part—hid from sight “the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity, the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard.” The medium, in other words, is a hindrance to the art, not so much a medium as a nuisance. These are the objections of ignorance or of whim. Certainly the peculiarity of his medium imposes peculiar restrictions on the actor. If the painter lacks a certain pigment he can get it at the colour-man’s. If the composer needs a certain _timbre_ he can add the necessary instrument to his orchestra. All the quarries are open to the architect. But no “make up” box will furnish a resonant voice to a shrill-piped actor or make Garrick six feet high. An actress may be at the height of her powers, and yet too old to play Juliet. Sir Henry Irving’s physical oddities went far to ruin some of his impersonations. But these limitations of the medium do not affect the actor’s status as an artist. They only restrict the range in which he may exercise his art.