of esteem. I must also add this tribute to his ability: when I did visit him again, very fast, on my backward journey through time, even when all the motions were reversed, I once more felt very deeply the compassion his gestures had provoked. I next went to see a fairfusser, though not one in the service of the government, and was much impressed by his freedom from doubt as to the way in which the best result was to be reached. He said, with justice, that the artist’s desire was to communicate with his fellow creatures, and that the object of an actor was to place his soul in touch with that of others. Man, being in each case a unique individual, was fitted for work more noble than that of a mere interpreter, or conduit pipe from an author to an audience, and the contrary view had been the grand error of all producers from the time of Shakespeare almost to his own day. The aim of an actor was to express himself (as a part of universal nature) and reveal a cup overbrimming with passions. Any ideas introduced by an author were to be deprecated, for his business was strictly to provide the raw material; and so the teacher’s main efforts were to be directed towards training his pupils to rid the author’s words of any meaning they might contain, simply by the manner of speaking them. In this way nothing was allowed to come between the actor and the audience. This he claimed to be the especial discovery of his age, and one which he could not help regarding with more than a little pride. I made bold to tell him that his notion was not so new as he imagined, and that we too had actors who disbelieved that words had any plausible meaning apart from the emotion the actor could register through them: men (as a rule well set up, or even bulky, since these are always the most passionate) who by a clever alteration in stress, or an abrupt cleavage of a sentence in the middle, could effectively cancel any extraneous idea the words of an author might interpose between the feelings of the player and the minds of the audience. This constructor was good enough to say that he was quite sure our age had not been so dark as was commonly supposed, but that, at least in our classical plays, which had been in verse, a form which compels a certain manner of speech, he thought the ‘pure’ actor must have met with difficulties hardly to be overcome. I was able to assure him that this was not so, and that, indeed, it was just in these very plays many of our actors had shown their highest genius; that one might know _Hamlet_, for example, quite well by the book, and yet go to two or three versions of the play and hardly recognise any of the speeches, so much were they heightened and made subtle in the speaking of them.