ll. The actor's aim is, or should
be, to convert his own accidental personality into the real and essential
personality of the character he is called upon to personate, whatever
that character may be; or perhaps I should say that there are two schools
of action--the school of those who attain their effect by exaggeration of
personality, and the school of those who attain it by suppression. It
would be too long to discuss these schools, or to decide which of them
the dramatist loves best. Let me note the danger of personality, and
pass to my puppets.

There are many advantages in puppets. They never argue. They have no
crude views about art. They have no private lives. We are never
bothered by accounts of their virtues, or bored by recitals of their
vices; and when they are out of an engagement they never do good in
public or save people from drowning, nor do they speak more than is set
down for them. They recognise the presiding intellect of the dramatist,
and have never been known to ask for their parts to be written up. They
are admirably docile, and have no personalities at all. I saw lately, in
Paris, a performance by certain puppets of Shakespeare's Tempest, in M.
Maurice Boucher's translation. Miranda was the mirage of Miranda,
because an artist has so fashioned her; and Ariel was true Ariel, because
so had she been made. Their gestures were quite sufficient, and the
words that seemed to come from their little lips were spoken by poets who
had beautiful voices. It was a delightful performance, and I remember it
still with delight, though Miranda took no notice of the flowers I sent
her after the curtain fell. For modern plays, however, perhaps we had
better have living players, for in modern plays actuality is everything.
The charm--the ineffable charm--of the unreal is here denied us, and
rightly.

Suffer me one more correction. Your writer describes the author of the
brilliant fantastic lecture on 'The Modern Actor' as a protege of mine.
Allow me to state that my acquaintance with Mr. John Gray is, I regret to
say, extremely recent, and that I sought it because he had already a
perfected mode of expression both in prose and verse. All artists in
this vulgar age need protection certainly. Perhaps they have always
needed it. But the nineteenth-century artist finds it not in Prince, or
Pope, or Patron, but in high indifference of temper, in the pleasure of
the creation of beautiful things, and th