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me; and it is only by having braved misery and death that I have completed the twenty years requisite to constitute an actor.—In addition to what I have said, the most arduous task is to be enumerated; it is, the indispensable necessity of having one’s mind continually impressed with events the most dreadful and terrible, and with images of the most horrid nature. The actor who does not identify himself with the character he represents is like a scholar who repeats his lesson; but he who does so identify himself with the personage, he is pourtraying—whose tears seem the effect of Nature, who absorbs the idea of his own existence in the miseries of an assumed character;—such a person must be wretched: and
