CCLXXX. The conversation of players is either dull or bad. They are tempted to say gay or fine things from the habit of uttering them with applause on the stage, and unable to do it from the habit of repeating what is set down for them by rote. A good comic actor, if he is a sensible man, will generally be silent in company. It is not his profession to invent bon mots, but to deliver them; and he will scorn to produce a theatrical effect by grimace and mere vivacity. A great tragic actress should be a mute, except on the stage. She cannot raise the tone of common conversation to that of tragedy, and any other must be quite insipid to her. Repose is necessary to her. She who died the night before in Cleopatra, ought not to revive till she appears again as Cassandra or Aspasia. In the intervals of her great characters, her own should be a blank, or an unforced, unstudied part.
CCLXXXI. To marry an actress for the admiration she excites on the stage, is to imitate the man who bought Punch.
CCLXXXII. To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did, you would find fault with him as a pedant. We should read authors, and not converse with them.
CCLXXXIII. Extremes meet. Excessive refinement is often combined with equal grossness. They act as a relief to each other, and please by contrast.
CCLXXXIV. The seeds of many of our vices are sown in our blood: others we owe to the bile or a fit of indigestion. A sane mind is generally the effect of a sane body.
CCLXXXV. Health and good temper are the two greatest blessings in life. In all the rest, men are equal, or find an equivalent.
CCLXXXVI. Poverty, labour, and calamity are not without their luxuries; which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate, in vain seek for.
CCLXXXVII. Good and ill seem as necessary to human life as light and shade are to a picture. We grow weary of uniform success, and pleasure soon surfeits. Pain makes ease delightful; hunger relishes the homeliest food, fatigue turns the hardest bed to down; and the difficulty and uncertainty of pursuit in all cases enhance the value of possession. The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearnings after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy. If the schemes of Utopians could be realised, the tone of society would be changed from what it is, into a sort of insipid high life. There could be no fine tragedies written; nor would there be any pleasure in seeing them. We tend to this conclusion already with the progress of civilisation.
CCLXXXVIII. The pleasure derived from tragedy is to be accounted for in this way, that, by painting the extremes of human calamity, it by contrast kindles the affections, and raises the most intense imagination and desire of the contrary good.
CCLXXXIX. The question respecting dramatic illusion has not been fairly stated. There are different degrees and kinds of belief. The point is not whether we do or do not believe what we see to be a positive reality, but how far and in what manner we believe in it. We do not say every moment to ourselves, ‘This is real:’ but neither do we say every moment, ‘This is not real.’ The involuntary impression steals upon us till we recollect ourselves. The appearance of reality, in fact, is the reality, so long and in as far as we are not conscious of the contradictory circumstances that disprove it. The belief in a well-acted tragedy never amounts to what the witnessing the actual scene would prove, and never sinks into a mere phantasmagoria. Its power of affecting us is not, however, taken away, even if we abstract the feeling of identity; for it still suggests a stronger idea of what the reality would be, just as a picture reminds us more powerfully of the person for whom it is intended, though we are conscious it is not the same.