George Iles

“ Invariably the man who has added to the resources of architecture, engineering, machine design, has begun as a boy in repeating the rabbit-hutches, windmills, and whittled sailing craft of bigger boys. This means that he soon acquires a mastery of chisel, plane, and drill, that the lathe becomes as obedient to him as his own hand. Watt, Maudslay, Stephenson, and every peer they ever had, could go to the bench and make a valve, a mitre-wheel, a link-motion just as imaged in their mind’s eye. Lacking this dexterity other men, occasionally fertile in good ideas, never bring them to the birth. ”

“ No study of human history would be valuable or just which did not recognize as a prime fact the profound religious instincts of our race. The awe inspired by the sublimity of the starry heavens, and the terrible and resistless forces of Nature—those of the volcano, the tempest, the pestilence so mysterious in its origin and spread, and the famines so devastating in the childhood of races—all these, not less than the kindly succession of the seasons, and the enjoyments of health and home, have suggested an infinite Power, the immanent sustaining spirit of universal life. ”

“ Ability to observe is an unfailing mark of an inventor or discoverer: it is quite as much a matter of the mind as of the eye. A botanist, keenly alive to varieties of hue, of form in leaves, tendrils, and petals may not give a second glance to stratifications which rivet the gaze of a geologist for hours together. Each sees what he knows about, what he is interested in, what he brings the power and desire to see. When Faraday was asked to witness an experiment he always said: “What is it that I am to look for?” ”

“ THE CREATION OF A CHARACTER It is very evident that any man, be he an actor or no actor, can, with money and with good taste, make what is technically termed a production. There is, as an absolute matter of fact, no particular credit to be attached to the making of a production. The real work of the stage, of the actor, does not lie there. It is easy for us to busy ourselves, to pass pleasantly our time, designing lovely scenes, charming costumes, and all the paraphernalia and pomp of mimic grandeur, whether of landscape or of architecture, the panoply of war, or the luxury of royal courts. ”

“ Not only are human instincts at times noble and heroic, but also, unfortunately more often, cruel and destructive. When a war breaks out, or any great public dissension arises, how speedily can the thin plating of civilization be abraded away, exposing the old barbarism of the under-nature! The sanguinary and destructive instincts of a people, once thoroughly let loose, can overturn in a few days a social fabric painfully wrought by generations. ”

“ But at this moment it cannot be denied that the ship of the stage is drifting somewhat hither and thither, Every breath of air and every current of public opinion impels it first in one direction and then in another, At one moment we may be said to be in the doldrums of the English society drama, or we are sluggishly rolling along in a heavy ground swell, propelled by a passing cat's paw of revivals of old melodramas. ”

“ Every wind that stirs these roots but promotes their thrift and strengthens their anchorage. A wealth of sustenance floats in the swamp water. In seizing it and being thereby fed, the roots develop “knees”; these brace the tree so firmly against tempests as to win admiration from the engineer. When the progeny of this cypress grow on well-drained land, the knees do not appear, while the roots within a narrowed area strike deep. Thus simply in doing what its surroundings incite it to do, the tree acts as if it had intelligence, as if it consciously saw and chose what would do it most good. ”

“ I think a mother who devotes herself to her child, in watching its culture and keeping it from baleful influences, is educating and cultivating herself at the same time. No artist work is so high, so noble, so grand, so enduring, so important for all time, as the making of character in a child, You have your own work to do, the largest possible expression. No statue, no painting, no acting, can reach it, and it embodies each and all the arts, Clay of God's fashioning is given into your hands to mould to perfectness. ”

“ To those hardy adventurers swiftness and seaworthiness meant nothing less than life and victory, their eyes perforce were keen to note what craft sped fastest through the water, what new curves kept waves from coming aboard. Perchance as they refined upon keel and rib they took golden hints from the shapes of gulls and fish. To be sure, long before science was dreamt of, they had to work by rule-of-thumb, but the thumb was joined to brains that did honor to human nature. ”

“ Imagine for one moment Shakespeare and Garrick contemplating at the present moment from the heights the spectacle of their fame. Who would grudge the actor the few years of fervid admiration he was privileged to enjoy, some one hundred and fifty years ago, as compared with the centuries of living glory that have fallen to the great poet?
Sometimes you may hear your calling sneered at by those who pursue it. There are few professions that are not similarly girded at by some of their own members, either from disappointment or some ingrained discontent. ”

“ The records of science show us the common case where men of extraordinary genius have risen so high above their fellows as to excite reverence for their results, rather than emulation of their methods. The price paid by mankind for towering ability has often been the production of generations of mere quoters and commentators, who revered the work of a master as too sacred to require addition or improvement. Ptolemy's system of the universe was so great an advance on the explanations which preceded it, that for sixteen dreary centuries it was imposed upon students of the heavens. ”

“ When an arrowmaker in striking flint against flint kindled flame, and repeated the feat at will, he opened at once a new world for humankind, incomparably higher and broader than if he had simply acquired a nicer touch, a steadier aim, a quicker ear for the rustle of leaf or wing. It is the like maturing of old resources into new, of infinitely greater scope, that has brought man to the supremacy of Nature, while his next of kin remain beasts of the glade. ”

“ And when the child is born it must grow in a few hours to completion, and be exhibited and coldly criticised. How often, how often, have those long months of infinite toil been in vain! How often has the actor led the child of his imagination to the footlights, only to realise that he has brought into the world a weakling or a deformity which may not live! And how often he has sat through the long night brooding over the corpse of this dear figment of his fancy! It has lately become customary with many actor-managers to avoid these pangs of childbirth. ”

“ Our conception, then, of knowledge leads us back to the early similitude which likened it to a tree. Knowledge does not increase, like a honey-comb, cell simply added to cell, but, like an oak, whose every year of growth implies not addition merely, but vital transformation of structure. Nothing is fixed but the axis from which the branches and boughs spread out, as if they felt they had all the universe for their expansion. ”

“ Light may have great brilliancy and yet be undesirable from its color; we are all familiar with the havoc that gas light may play with hues of blossom and leaf that in sunshine are beautiful. Through ages untold the human eye has been seeing by rays from the sun, and from immemorial habit is best served by light of similar quality. A simple instrument, the spectrometer, casts upon a screen the spectrum from a mercury tube, a Nernst lamp, a Welsbach mantle, or other illuminant, and enables us to compare it with the spectrum of sunshine. ”

“ For lack of that decent hesitation, statute-books are filled with laws which are evaded, or work results opposed to those expected from them, all tending to establish in the popular mind an injurious contradiction between law and common sense. And what supreme diffidence should there be when we are endeavoring to arrive at, not some knowledge in a special science, not the best policy in a matter of law or state, but when we approach the highest questions: How best can we interpret Nature so as to form a conception of its informing spirit? If a man die, shall he live again? ”

“ The audience was his. Another crown had fallen! By what? A trick of the stage! Was he willing to die then? to be shot by his old guard? Not he! Did he doubt for one moment his ability as an actor. Not he! If he had, he would have been lost. And that power to control, that power to command, once it is possessed by a man, means that that man can play his part anywhere, and under all circumstances and conditions. Unconsciously or consciously, every great man, every man who has played a great part, has been an actor. ”