e is no representative material; where, that is, the man is his
own material, and there is nothing between. With the actor the style is
the man, in another, a more immediate, and a more obvious sense than was
ever intended by that saying. Therefore we may allow the critic--and not
accuse him of reaction--to speak of the division between art and Nature
in the painting of a landscape, but we cannot let him say the same things
of acting. Acting has a technique, but no convention.

Once for all, then, to say that acting reaches the point of Nature, and
touches it quick, is to say all. In other arts imitation is more or less
fatuous, illusion more or less vulgar. But acting is, at its less good,
imitation; at its best, illusion; at its worst, and when it ceases to be
an art, convention.

But the idea that acting is conventional has inevitably come about in
England. For it is, in fact, obliged, with us, to defeat and destroy
itself by taking a very full, entire, tedious, and impotent convention; a
complete body of convention; a convention of demonstrativeness--of voice
and manners intended to be expressive, and, in particular, a whole weak
and unimpulsive convention of gesture. The English manners of real life
are so negative and still as to present no visible or audible drama; and
drama is for hearing and for vision. Therefore our acting (granting that
we have any acting, which is granting much) has to create its little
different and complementary world, and to make the division of "art" from
Nature--the division which, in this one art, is fatal.

This is one simple and sufficient reason why we have no considerable
acting; though we may have more or less interesting and energetic or
graceful conventions that pass for art. But any student of international
character knows well enough that there are also supplementary reasons of
weight. For example, it is bad to make a conventional world of the
stage, but it is doubly bad to make it badly--which, it must be granted,
we do. When we are anything of the kind, we are intellectual rather than
intelligent; whereas outward-streaming intelligence makes the actor. We
are pre-occupied, and therefore never single, never wholly possessed by
the one thing at a time; and so forth.

On the other hand, Italians are expressive. They are so possessed by the
one thing at a time as never to be habitual in any lifeless sense. They
have no habits to overcome by something arbitrary an