om she hates, in order to save her betrothed lover
from being sent to Siberia. The lover is shut in between two doors,
unable to get out; he is the bearer of a State secret, and everything
depends on his being able to catch the eleven P.M. train for Berlin. The
Russian prince stands before the young Englishwoman, offering her the
key of the door, the safety of her lover, and his own hand in marriage.
Now, she has to express by her face and her movements all the feelings
of astonishment, horror, suspense, love, hatred, distraction, which such
a situation would call up in her. If she does not express them the scene
goes for nothing. The actress stakes all on this scene. Now, is it
possible that Miss Julia Neilson really imagined herself to be capable
of rendering this scene as it should be rendered? It is a scene that
requires no brains, no subtle emotional quality, none of the more
intellectual merits of acting. It requires simply a great passivity to
feeling, the mere skill of letting horrors sweep over the face and the
body like drenching waves. The actress need not know how she does it;
she may do it without an effort, or she may obtain her spontaneity by an
elaborate calculation. But to do it at all she must be the actress in
every fibre of her body; she must be able to vibrate freely. If the
emotion does not seize her in its own grasp, and then seize us through
her, it will all go for nothing. Well, Miss Neilson sat, and walked, and
started, and became rigid, and glanced at the clock, and knelt, and fell
against the wall, and cast her eyes about, and threw her arms out, and
made her voice husky; and it all went for nothing. Never for an instant
did she suggest what she was trying to suggest, and after the first
moment of disappointment the mind was left calmly free to watch her
attempt as if it were speculating round a problem.

How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been capable of dealing
adequately with such a scene as that? I take it, not because it is a
good scene, but because it affords so rudimentary a test of the capacity
for acting. The test of the capacity for acting begins where words end;
it is independent of words; you may take poor words as well as fine
words; it is all the same. The embodying power, the power to throw open
one's whole nature to an overcoming sensation, the power to render this
sensation in so inevitable a way that others shall feel it: that is the
one thing needful. It is not