How true this is; how consistent with eternal truth! Nature has her moods, why not man; has her means of expressing them, why not man also? Nature has her tones; and with these why may not the heart of man vibrate and express itself? In this connection and with the same illustration—the orator compared with the actor—Irving put a new phase of the same idea: “It matters little whether the actor sheds tears or not, so long as he can make his audience shed them; but if tears can be summoned at will and subject to his control it is true art to utilise such a power, and happy is the actor whose sensibility has at once such delicacy and discipline. In this respect the actor is like the orator. Eloquence is all the more moving when it is animated and directed by a fine and subtle sympathy which affects the spectator though it does not master him.” VII DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS The last-mentioned utterance of Irving’s brings us at once to the deepest problem in the art of acting: the value and use of sensibility. Throughout his later life, from the time he first entered the polemics of his art, he held consistently to one theory. To him the main disputants were Diderot and Talma; any other was merely a supporter of the theory of either. Diderot in his _Paradox of Acting_ held that for good acting there must be no real feeling on the part of the actor: “Extreme sensibility makes middling actors; middling sensibility makes the ruck of bad actors; in complete absence of sensibility is the possibility of a sublime actor.” Irving’s comment on this theory is: “The exaltation of sensibility in Art may be difficult to define, but it is none the less real to all who have felt its power.” Talma[1] held quite the opposite view to that of Diderot. To him one of the first qualifications of an actor is sensibility, which indeed he considered the very source of imagination. To this quality, he held, there must be added intelligence: Footnote 1: When Irving began to consider this branch of the “true inwardness” of his work he was so much struck with the argument of Talma that he had it translated and inserted in _The Theatre_. This was easy of accomplishment, for with regard to that magazine he had only to ask.