A child doing one thing at a time and doing it completely,
produces to the eye a better impression of mental life than one receives
from--well, from a lecturer.
DONKEY RACES
English acting had for some time past still been making a feint of
running the race that wins. The retort, the interruption, the call, the
reply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt tradition of suddenness and
life. You had, indeed, to wait for an interruption in dialogue--it is
true you had to wait for it; so had the interrupted speaker on the stage.
But when the interruption came, it had still a false air of vivacity; and
the waiting of the interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving an eye
and such an arrest and failure of convention, such a confession of a
blank, as to prove that there remained a kind of reluctant and inexpert
sense of movement. It still seemed as though the actor and the actress
acknowledged some forward tendency.
Not so now. The serious stage is openly the scene of the race that
loses. The donkey race is candidly the model of the talk in every
tragedy that has a chance of popular success.
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