The actor, as I have on another occasion hazarded, is the child of the miscegenation of an art and a trade: of the drama and the theatre. Since acting must appeal to the many--this is obviously its only reason for being, for acting is primarily a filter through which drama may be lucidly distilled for heterogeneous theatre-goers--it must, logically, be popular or perish. Surely no authentic art can rest or thrive upon such a premise. The great actors and actresses, unlike great fashioners in other arts, have invariably been favourites of the crowd, and it is doubtless a too charitable hypothesis to assume that this crowd has ever been gifted with critical insight beyond cavil. If, therefore, the actor or actress who can sway great crowds is strictly to be termed an artist, why may we not also, by strict definition, similarly term as exponents of an authentic art others who can likewise sway the same crowds: a great politician like Roosevelt, say, or a great lecturer like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out these paradox shock-troops to clear the way for the more sober infantry.) I have said that I have no intention to argue for or against acting as an art yet, for all the circumstance that the case for the prosecution has long seemed the soundest and the most eloquent, there are still sporadic instances of imaginative histrionism that give one reason to ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently come to the more penetrating critic that what has on such occasions passed for an art has in reality been merely a reflected art: the art of drama interpreted not with the imagination of the actor but, more precisely, _with the imagination of the dramatist_. In other words, that actor or actress is the most competent and effective whose imagination is successful in meeting literally, and translating, the imagination of the dramatist which has created the rôle played by the particular actor or actress. To name the actor’s imagination in such a case a creative imagination is a rather wistful procedure, for it does not create but merely duplicates. Surely no advocate of acting as a creative art would be so bold as to contend that any actor, however great, has ever brought creative imagination to the already full and superb creative imagination of Shakespeare. This would be, on an actor’s part, the sheerest impudence. The greatest actor is simply he who is best fitted by figure, voice, training and intelligence not to invade and annul the power of the rôle which a great dramatist has imagined and created. Duse and D’Annunzio were, so to speak, spiritually and physically one: hence the unmatched perfection of the former’s histrionism in the latter’s rôles. To see Duse is, save one admit one’s self critically to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical art doubts and the convictions of such as Mr. Daly.