ilant eye or the most sensitive ear could detect, had
their full and original significance.

With all respect for Miss O'Neil's emotion, and for that candidly
confessed to by Mrs. Butler, as having been occasionally evidenced by
herself, the true art, we should have said, subsists in the indication
and the repression, far rather than in the actual exhibition or
manifestation of the emotions that are to be represented. Better by far
than the familiar _si vis me flere_ axiom of Horace, who there tells
us, "If you would have me weep, you must first weep yourself," is the
sagacious comment on it in the _Tatler_, where (No. 68) the essayist
remarks, with subtle discrimination: "The true art seems to be when you
would have the person you represent pitied, you must show him at
once, in the highest grief, and struggling to bear it with decency and
patience. In this case," adds the writer, "we sigh for him, and give him
every groan he suppresses." As for the extravagant idea of any artist,
however great, identifying himself for the time being with the part he
is enacting, who is there that can wonder at the snort of indignation
with which Doctor Johnson, talking one day about acting, asked Mr.
Kemble, "Are you, sir, one of those enthusiasts who believe yourself
transformed into the very character you represent?" Kemble answering,
according to Boswell, that he had never himself felt so strong
a persuasion--"To be sure not, sir," says Johnson, "the thing is
impossible." Adding, with one of his dryly comical extravagances: "And
if Garrick really believed himself to be that monster Richard the Third,
he deserved to be hanged every time he performed it." What Dickens
himself really thought of these wilder affectations of intensity among
impersonators, is, with delicious humour, plainly enough indicated
through that preposterous reminiscence of Mr. Crummies, "We had a
first-tragedy man in our company once, who, when he played Othello, used
to black himself all over! But that's feeling a part, and going into it
as if you meant it; it isn't usual--more's the pity." Thoroughly
giving himself up to the representation of whatever character he was
endeavouring at the moment to portray, or rather to impersonate, Charles
Dickens so completely held his judgment the while in equipoise,
as master of his twofold craft--that is, both as creator and as
elocutionist, as author and as reader--that, as an invariable rule,
he betrayed neither of those