text: " But when I first became initiated into the mysteries of amateur performances and saw how entirely destitute some men were of any notion of natural acting and how they made a point of repeating two lines of familiar dialogue with the tone and manner but without the correctness of a schoolboy going through a task--then it ceased to be any matter of wonder that those to whom acting was no joke but an unhappily earnest mode of getting bread should so often make their performance appear the uneasy effort which it is