In his defence of acting as an art equal to that of poetry and literature, Henry Irving has observed, “It has been said that acting is unworthy because it represents feigned emotions, but this censure would apply with equal force to poet or novelist.” But would it? The poet and the novelist may feign emotions, but it is their own active imaginations which feign them. The actor merely feigns passively the emotions which the imagination of the poet has actively feigned; if there is feigning, the actor merely parrots it. If there is feigned emotion in, say, the second stanza of Swinburne’s “Rococo,” and I mount an illuminated platform and recite the stanza very eloquently and impressively, am I precisely feigning the emotion of it or am I merely feigning the emotion that the great imagination of Swinburne has feigned? Feigned or unfeigned, the emotions of the poet come ready-made to the heart and lips of the actor. Continues Irving further: “It is the actor who gives body to the ideas of the highest dramatic literature--fire, force, and sensibility, without which they would remain for most people mere airy abstractions.” What one engages here is the peculiar logic that acting is an art since it popularizes dramatic literature and makes it intelligible to a majority of dunderheads! One more quotation from this actor’s defence, and we may pass on. “The actor’s work is absolutely concrete,” he challenges. “He is brought in every phase of his work into direct comparison with existing things.... Not only must his dress be suitable to the part which he assumes, but his bearing must not be in any way antagonistic to the spirit of the time in which the play is fixed. The free bearing of the sixteenth century is distinct from the artificial one of the seventeenth, the mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless one of the nineteenth.... The voice must be modulated to the vogue of the time. The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age is different from that of a mail-clad one--nay, the armour of a period ruled in real life the poise and bearing of the body; and all this must be reproduced on the stage.... _It cannot therefore be seriously put forward in the face of such manifold requirements that no Art is required for the representation of suitable action!_” The italics are those of one who experiences some difficulty in persuading himself that if Art is required for such things as these--dress, carriage, modulation of voice and carrying a sword--Art, strictly speaking, is no less required in the matter of going to a Quat’-z-Arts costume ball.