A personal experience may help you to realize this ideal of the interpreter's art.
With a sense of protest, I had presented a play I loved to an audience with which I felt little sympathy. By chance there was in that audience one of our best teachers and critics. After my recital I sought his criticism. Beginning, as the true critic always should, with a noting of some point of power, he said, "I congratulate you upon your illumined moments, but—they are too infrequent. You must multiply them." "What do you mean by my illumined moments?" I asked. "The moments when you do not get between your audience and the thought you are uttering—the moments when you become a revealer of life to them. Your attitude toward your audience is not sustained in the simplicity and clearness of some of its moments. You suddenly ring down the curtain in the middle of the scene. That spoils the scene, you know. You seem to feel a revolt against the giving of your confidence to the audience, and thereupon you immediately shut them away. You become conscious of yourself, and we, the audience, lose the vision and become conscious of you and the way you are reading or reciting or acting." Then he added, "Adelaide Neilson, at first, had illumined moments in her playing of Juliet, but finally her impersonation became one piece of illumination." That delightful teacher, reader, and critic, the late Mr. Howard Ticknor, suggested the same ideal in comparing a Juliet of to-day with Miss Neilson's Juliet. "When Miss —— is on the balcony," he said, "you hear all around you: 'How lovely she looks!' 'Isn't that robe dear?' 'How beautiful her voice is!' When Miss Neilson lived that little minute, a breathless people prayed with Juliet, 'I would not for the world they found thee here,' and sighed with Romeo—'O blessed, blessed night! I am afeard, being in night, all this is but a dream.'" Miss Neilson was Juliet. They, the audience, lived with these lovers one hour of lyric rapture, and could never again be quite so commonplace in their attitude toward the "deathless passion." They may not now remember Adelaide Neilson, but they remember that story, and forever carry a new vision of life and love, because the actress lost herself in the life of the play. She did not exploit her personality and let it stand between the audience and the drama. When some one says to you—the reader or actress, "I shall never forget the way you raised your eyebrow at that point," don't stop to reply, but fly to your study and read the lines "at that point" over and over, with level brows, until you understand the meaning, and can express the thought so effectively by a lift of your voice that you no longer need the help of your eyebrow. Every gesture, every tone, must call attention, not to itself, but to the hidden meaning of the author. It must illumine the text of the character portrayed. That is it: if we would be artists (and there is not one among us who would not be an artist) we must cease to put our little selves in front of our messages. In the home, in the office, in the houses of our friends, in the school-room, on the platform, on the stage, let us be simple, natural, sincere. Let us lay aside our mannerisms. Let us seek to know and reveal life. Then shall we be remembered—not, for a queer way of combing our hair, or lifting our eyes, or using our hands, or shrugging our shoulders, but for some revelation of truth or of beauty which we have brought to a community.