hich eye,
and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of
passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more
hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons
talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner
talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular
upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this war
of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round
such 'intellectual prize-fighters'. Talking is the direct object of
the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare
above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_, whether it
be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly
artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession of
that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a
character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at _in that
form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do here as we
do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
in _Clarissa_ and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
form upon the whole gives us.

But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a
controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
play the orator. The love-dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night; the more intimate and
sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a Posthumus
with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so delightful
in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in
Paradise

As beseem'd
Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league
Alone:

by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things
sullied and turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large
assembly; when such speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come
drawling out of the mouth of a hired actress, whose courtship, though
nominally addressed to the personated Posthumus, is manifestly aimed
at the spectators, who