There was one handsome young actor who seemed by his vehemence and assurance to be more talented than the rest, and to him I asked to be introduced, that I might learn his views from him. He led me aside, and with great earnestness explained to me how experience had shown that one could not take for granted the least intelligence in an audience. Words, he said, conveyed nothing to them unless accompanied with appropriate action: and this he ascribed to the fact that an audience was a crowd, and therefore followed the normal law of mass psychology in being much stupider and more primitive than a single person. The actor, therefore, had to deal with the simplest objects or ideas, indicating them by a kind of airy drawing. The connection between them, the grammar or the syntax as it were (so he was kind enough to phrase it for my understanding) was portrayed by the actors’ emotion as expressed in gesture or tone. That was why plays with few words were better than plays with many words, as in the latter case the number of gestures became very tiring both to the eyes of the audience and the muscles of the actors. He had a noble, yet reasoned, scorn for any player who stood still and with hardly a movement allowed sentences merely to trundle out of his mouth, and he considered his place could very well be taken by a gramophone. To illustrate the stages of his art, he took me to a room to see a young actress practice an easy passage, and I was much gratified by the manner in which she expressed by gesture the meaning of the words she was uttering; and I could not but admire the subtle difference she made in pointing to the floor when she said in one case ‘down’ meaning merely downstairs, in another the infernal regions. The same variation was introduced in her rendering of ‘up,’ and I did not fail to note that each gesture emphasised a new beauty in her arms. She also practised some ‘tone-work’ as they call it, and for my benefit declaimed an old-fashioned line “To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,” and it is hard to imagine, as it is impossible to describe, the frigidity she put into the word ‘cold,’ or the horror and loathing with which she vivified the word ‘rot,’ so making their meaning quite clear to any audience. My actor friend afterwards told me that she had sadly bungled the word ‘obstruction,’ because she had not yet reached the year in which abstract terms were studied; and being himself nearly at the conclusion of that period, he gave me a finished version of the line “The quality of mercy is not strained,” which quite transported me, and which I should not know how to praise sufficiently. The gesture for ‘quality,’ initially too simple, was raised to a high state of complexity by the young man’s genius, and I should no doubt have understood it perfectly had I been more used to the method.