training to the interpretation of me exactly as I am!” Brushing aside the theory that the true artist is the actor who can transform his voice, his manner, his character; who will disappear behind his part instead of imposing himself on it and adding himself to it--a simple feat, since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli and Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean actors, are true histrionic artists--Mr. Walkley, in his essay on “The English Actor of Today,” bravely takes up the defence from what he regards as a more difficult approach. “In the art of acting as in any other art,” he says, “the first requisite is life. The actor’s part is a series of speeches and stage directions, mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead. If the actor disappears behind it, there is nothing left but a Golgotha.” Here is indeed gay news! Hamlet, Iago, Romeo, Shylock--mere “cold print,” inert Shakespearian masses that, in order to live, have to be raised somehow from the dead by members of the Lambs’ Club! It is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly takes to cover after launching this torpedo, and devotes the balance of his interesting comments to a prudent and circumspect _pas seul_ on the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter. For no sooner has he described the majestic drama of Shakespeare as “mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead,” than he seems suddenly, and not without a touch of horror, to realize that he has ridiculously made of Shakespeare a mere blank canvas and pot of paint for the use of this or that actor whom he has named, by implication and with magnificent liberalness, a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble for the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined Mercié. II Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable art takes its key from Rémond de Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman whose pragmatic critical credo was, “If it makes me feel, it is art.” While it may be reasonable that a purely emotional art may aptly be criticized according to the degree of emotional reaction which it induces, it is the quality of emotion resident in the critic that offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion. A perfectly attuned and sound emotional equipment--an emotional equipment of absolute pitch, so to speak--is a rare thing, even among critics of brilliant intelligence, taste, imagination and experience. Goethe, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention only five, were physio-psychological units of dubious emotional structure, if we may trust the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of their critical dramatic writing may be accepted without qualm, a distinct measure of distrust would attach itself to any critical estimate of acting which they might have written or actually did write.