Part 6

And so it is, precisely, with criticism. For criticism is also “creative.” But it does not create images of people or their lives; it creates thought, ideas, concepts. That is, it builds up something new out of the artist’s intuitions and exhibits the relations between them. Here, in the conceptual world, we are in a different region from the intuitional world of the artist. Those who care to enter it, who feel at home in it, are comparatively few; the absence of personal interest, of “people,” makes it seem cold to the average, gregarious man. “People” are a natural, ideas an acquired, taste. But the one set are just as much a “creation” as the other. And in the one set just as in the other the thing created may not be worth creating. Ideas, expositions, illustrations in criticism have a distressing habit of being as poor and conventional and mechanical as many a novelist’s or playwright’s characters and life histories. There is not a pin to choose between them. For as the one thing that matters in art is the artist behind it, so the critic behind it is the one thing that matters in criticism.

These are elementary commonplaces. But they need restating from time to time. For the average man, with all his interest in life fixed on “people,” is always falling into the error that the novelist or playwright makes something, while the critic makes nothing. And your fourteenth-rate author, sharing the temperament of the average man, falls into the same error and seems, indeed, inordinately proud of it. He seems to say: “Why, you, good master critic, couldn’t even begin to do what _I_, the ‘creative’ artist, do”; and he would probably be surprised by the answer that it is the critic’s very critical faculty, his endowment of judgment and taste, which makes the writing of bad plays or novels impossible, because repugnant to him. It is precisely because the critical faculty is so rare a thing that so many bad novels and plays get themselves written.

But enough of these sharp distinctions between the “creation” of images and the “creation” of concepts! Is not a union of the two, like the union of butler and lady’s-maid, as described by Mr. Crichton, “the happiest of all combinations”? Who does not feel how immensely the mere story part of “Tom Jones” gains by the critical chapter introductions? And, on the other hand, how the mere critical part of Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” gains by the little touches of story, from the opening moment when “they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently” to the close at Somerset Stairs, where “they went up through a crowd of French people, who were merrily dancing in the open air”?

ACTING AND CRITICISM

A veteran who has been regaling the readers of _The Times_ with his recollections of the London stage has dropped by the way a remark on modern theatrical criticism. For it, he says, “the play is everything, and the leading actor or actress has often to be content with a few lines.” Dean Gaisford began a sermon, “Saint Paul says, and I partly agree with him.” I partly agree with the veteran. Criticism has occasionally to deal with plays that cannot be “everything” for it. There are new plays that are merely a vehicle for the art of the actor, who must then get more than a few lines. There are old plays revived to show a new actor in a classic part, and the part is then greater than the whole. This, I think, accounts for “the space devoted to the acting in London criticisms at the time Henry Irving rose to fame.” Either he appeared in new plays of little intrinsic merit, like _The Bells_, or else in classic parts of melodrama (made classic by Frédéric Lemaître) or of Shakespeare. In these conditions criticism must always gravitate towards the acting. It did so, long before Irving’s time, with Hazlitt over Edmund Kean. It has done so, since Irving’s time, over Sarah and Duse, and must do so again over every new Shylock or Millamant or Sir Peter.

But these conditions are exceptional, and it is well for the drama that they are. For the vitality of the drama primarily depends not upon the talent of its interpreters but on that of its creators, and a new image or new transposition of life in a form appropriate to the theatre is more important than the perfection of the human instrument by which it is “made flesh.” If criticism, then, has of late years and on the whole been able to devote more attention to the play than to the playing, I suggest to our veteran that the fact is a healthy sign for our drama. It shows that there have been plays to criticise and that criticism has done its duty.

But that, I hasten to add, is its luck rather than its merit. One must not ride the high ethical horse, and I should be sorry to suggest that good criticism is ever written from a sense of duty, any more than a good play or any other piece of good literature. Good criticism is written just because the critic feels like that—and bad, it may be added, generally because the critic has been trying to write something which he supposes other people will feel like. The good critic writes with his temperament—and here is a reason why, in the long run, plays will interest him more than players. For are we not all agreed about the first principle of criticism? Is it not to put yourself in the place of the artist criticized, to adopt his point of view, to recreate his work within yourself? Well, the critic can put himself in the place of the playwright much more readily than into that of the actor. The playwright and he are working in different ways, with much the same material, ideas, and images, or, if you like, concepts and intuitions mainly expressed in words—which is only a long way of saying that they are both authors. And they have in common the literary temperament. Now the literary temperament and the histrionic are two very different things.

The actor, as his very name imports, is an active man, a man of action. At his quietest, he perambulates the stage. But violent physical exercise is a part of his trade. He fights single combats, jumps into open graves, plunges into lakes, is swallowed down in quicksands, sharpens knives on the sole of his boot, deftly catches jewel caskets thrown from upper windows, wrestles with heavy-weight champions, knouts or is knouted, stabs or is stabbed, rolls headlong down staircases, writhes in the agonies of poison, and is (or at any rate in the good old days was) kicked, pinched, and pummelled out of the limelight by the “star.” And all this under the handicap of grease-paint and a wig! It must be very fatiguing. But then he enjoys the physical advantages of an active life. He has Sir Willoughby Patterne’s leg (under trousers that never bag at the knee, and terminating in boots of the shiniest patent leather), and all the rest to match. As becomes a man of action, he is no reader. I have heard the late Mr. Henry Neville declare that an actor should never be allowed to look at a book. This may seem to the rest of us a sad fate for him, but look at his compensations! He spends much, if not most, of his stage-life making love to pretty women, wives, widows, or _ingénues_. Frequently he kisses them, or seems to—for he will tell you, the rogue, that stage-kisses are always delivered in the air. Let us say then that he is often within an inch of kissing a pretty woman—which is already a considerable privilege. When he is not kissing her (or the air, as the case may be), he is sentimentally bidding her to a nunnery go or dying in picturesque agonies at her feet. Anyhow he goes through his work in the society and with the active co-operation of pretty women. And note, for it is an enormous advantage to him, that that work is a fixed, settled thing. His words have been invented for him and written out in advance. He has rehearsed his actions. He knows precisely what he is going to do.

Contrast with this alluring picture the temperament and working habits of the critic. He is a man, not of action, but of contemplation. His pursuit is sedentary, and with his life of forced inaction he risks becoming as fat as Mr. Gibbon, without the alleviation of the Gibbonian style. Personal advantages are not aids to composition, and he may be the ugliest man in London, like G. H. Lewes, whose dramatic criticisms, nevertheless, may still be read with pleasure. His fingers are inky. His face is not “made up,” but sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. No pretty women help him to write his criticisms. Indeed, if Helen of Troy herself, or Aphrodite new-risen from the sea came into his study he would cry out with writer’s petulance (a far more prevalent and insidious disease than writer’s cramp), “Oh, do please go away! Can’t you see I’m not yet through my second slip?” (She will return when he is out, and “tidy up” his desk for him—a really fiendish revenge). Books, forbidden to the actor, are the critic’s solace—and also his despair, because they have said all the good things and taken the bread out of his mouth. And, unlike the actor, he is working in the unknown. His head is filled with a chaos of half-formed ideas and the transient embarrassed phantoms of logical developments. Will he ever be able to sort them out and to give them at any rate a specious appearance of continuity? Nay, can he foresee the beginning of his next sentence, or even finish this one? Thus he is perpetually on the rack. “Luke’s iron crown and Damien’s bed of steel” are nothing to it. It is true that his criticism does, mysteriously, get itself completed—mysteriously, because he seems to have been no active agent in it, but a mere looker-on while it somehow wrote itself.

Is it surprising that it should generally write itself about the play (which, I daresay, writes itself, too, and with the same tormenting anxiety) rather than about the playing, which proceeds from so different a temperament from the critic’s and operates in conditions so alien from his? But, let me add for the comfort of our veteran, there are critics and critics. If some of us displease him by too often sparing only a few lines for the leading actor or actress, there will always be plenty of others who are more interested in persons than in ideas and images, who care less for transpositions of life than for Sarah’s golden voice and Duse’s limp, and “Quin’s high plume and Oldfield’s petticoat.” These will redress the balance.

ACTING AS ART

Nothing could be more characteristically English than the circumstances which gave rise the other day to the singular question, “Is acting an art?” There was a practical issue, whether the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art was or was not entitled to exemption under an Act of 1843 from the payment of rates. Sir John Simon argued it, of course, as a practical question. He dealt with custom and precedent and authority, dictionary definitions and judicial decisions. He had to keep one eye on æsthetics and the other on the rates. This is our traditional English way. We “drive at practice.” Nevertheless, this question whether acting is an art is really one of pure æsthetics, and is in no way affected by any decision of the Appeal Committee of the London County Council.

You cannot answer it until you have made up your mind what you mean by art. Sir John Simon seems to have suggested that art was something “primarily directed to the satisfaction of the æsthetic sense.” But is there any such thing as a special “æsthetic sense”? Is it anything more than a name for our spiritual reaction to a work of art, our response to it in mind and feeling? And are we not arguing in a circle when we say that art is what provokes the response to art? Perhaps it might amuse, perhaps it might irritate, perhaps it might simply bewilder the Appeal Committee of the London County Council to tell them that art is the expression of intuitions. They might reply that they cannot find intuitions in the rate-book, and that the Act of 1843 is silent about them. Yet this is what art is, and you have to bear it in mind when you ask, “Is the actor an artist?” Art is a spiritual activity, and the artist’s expression of his intuitions (the painter’s “vision,” the actor’s “conception” of his part) is internal; when he wishes to externalize his expression, to communicate it to others, he has to use certain media—paint and canvas, marble and brick, musical notes, words and gestures. But it is the spiritual activity, the intuition-expression, that makes the artist. The medium is no part of his definition.

And yet, I suggest, it is the peculiarity of the actor’s medium that has often withheld from him, at any rate with unthinking people, his title to rank as an artist. He is his own medium, his own paint and canvas, his own brick and marble. The works of other artists, the picture, the poem, the sonata, have an independent life, they survive their authors; the actor’s works are inseparable from his actual presence, and die with him. Hence a certain difficulty for the unsophisticated in distinguishing the artist from what the philosophers call the empirical man; the Edmund Kean whose genius is illuminating and revitalizing Shylock from the Edmund Kean who is notoriously fond of the bottle and who has lately got into trouble with an alderman’s wife. The physique, the temperament, of the empirical man furnish the medium for the artist. He arrives at the theatre in a taxi, or his own Rolls-Royce, smoking a big cigar, every inch of him a man of to-day; the next moment he is pretending to be an old mad King of Britain. This confusion is behind Johnson’s “fellow who claps a hump on his back and calls himself Richard the Third.” It leaves out of account the imaginative side of him, the artist. Johnson might just as well have dismissed Shakespeare as a “fellow who supposed a hump clapped on the back of one of his fancies, which he calls Richard the Third.” Lamb raised another objection, that the bodily presence of the actor materialized, coarsened, the finer elements of the part—hid from sight “the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity, the profound, the witty, accomplished Richard.” The medium, in other words, is a hindrance to the art, not so much a medium as a nuisance.

These are the objections of ignorance or of whim. Certainly the peculiarity of his medium imposes peculiar restrictions on the actor. If the painter lacks a certain pigment he can get it at the colour-man’s. If the composer needs a certain _timbre_ he can add the necessary instrument to his orchestra. All the quarries are open to the architect. But no “make up” box will furnish a resonant voice to a shrill-piped actor or make Garrick six feet high. An actress may be at the height of her powers, and yet too old to play Juliet. Sir Henry Irving’s physical oddities went far to ruin some of his impersonations. But these limitations of the medium do not affect the actor’s status as an artist. They only restrict the range in which he may exercise his art.

And can it be gainsaid that what he exercises is true art, a spiritual activity, the expression of his intuitions? People, comparing his work with the “creations” of the playwright, are apt to speak of him as a mere “interpreter.” He has his words given him, they say, and his significant acts prescribed for him in advance. The truth is, “creation” and “interpretation” are figurative terms; it would be quite reasonable to interchange them. Shakespeare “interprets” life by giving form to it, by piecing together, say, certain scraps of actual observation along with the image of his fancy into the character of Falstaff. With the printed words and stage-directions as data, the actor re-imagines Falstaff, brings his own temperament and feelings and sympathetic vision to the service of Shakespeare’s indications, and “creates” the living, moving man. True, the processes are at different stages, and may be of different importance. Shakespeare has intuited and expressed life, the actor has intuited and expressed Shakespeare. But both expressions are art.

And note that while Shakespeare “created” Falstaff, no playgoer has ever seen or ever will see Shakespeare’s Falstaff. For the image formed in Shakespeare’s mind has always on the stage to be translated for us in terms of other minds which can never be identical with his—is, in fact, “re-created” by each actor in turn. It is the actor who converts the “cold print” of the text into vivid, concrete life. Life! that is the secret of the actor’s “following,” a much more notable fact in the world of the theatre than the “following” of this or that playwright. The actor, like all who, in Buffon’s phrase, “_parlent au corps par le corps_,” expresses a temperament, a personality, himself; imposes himself on his part and on us. People “follow” a favourite actor in all his impersonations because his art gives them more pleasure than the playwright’s, or because his art must be added to the playwright’s before they will care about that.

When I say “people” I don’t mean “littery gents.” The typical playgoer prefers life to literature. He is as a rule no great reader. Nor are the actors. There has always been a certain coolness between the men of letters and the actors—their temperaments are so opposed. I have quoted from Lamb. Anatole France said much the same thing of the Comédie Française— “_Leur personne efface l’œuvre qu’ils représentent._” Views like these merely express a preference for one art over another. They do not contest the actor’s right to rank as an artist. That, to speak rigorously, is a rank held by many people “for the duration”—_i.e._, while and whenever they express their intuitions. But it would be impolitic to insist on this strict view. The rate-payers’ list might be seriously affected and much uneasiness occasioned to the Appeal Committee of the London County Council.

AUDIENCES

Audiences may be divided into first-nighters, second-nighters, and general playgoers. All audiences are important, but first-nighters most of all. Without them the acted drama would not begin to exist. For obvious reasons, I have nothing but good to say of them. I wish to live at peace with my neighbours. And I do not believe the malicious story told about a manager, now dead, that he liked to fill the second row of his stalls on first-nights with his superannuated sweethearts. Nobody is fat or old in Ba-ath, and there are no superannuitants among first-nighters.

I find, from Mr. Max Beerbohm’s entirely delightful book “Seven Men,” that it is possible to get tired of first-nighters. I should never have guessed it myself. But this is what he says:—“I was dramatic critic for the _Saturday Review_, and, weary of meeting the same lot of people over and over again at first nights, had recently sent a circular to the managers, asking that I might have seats for second nights instead.” But mark what follows:—“I found that there existed as distinct and invariable a lot of second-nighters as of first-nighters. The second-nighters were less ‘showy’; but then, they came more to see than to be seen, and there was an air that I liked of earnestness and hopefulness about them. I used to write a good deal about the future of the British drama, and they, for their part, used to think and talk a great deal about it. Though second-nighters do come to see, they remain rather to hope and pray.” Because I have quoted I must not be understood as accepting Mr. Beerbohm’s implied aspersion on first-nighters. It is all very well for him. He has retired (the more’s the pity) from dramatic criticism. But I take his account of second-nighters on trust, because the exigencies of a daily newspaper prevent me from observing them for myself. Evidently they, no more than first-nighters, are average playgoers.

Not that I would disparage the general playgoer. Indeed, I am not sure that he is not, in another sense than Labiche’s, _le plus heureux des trois_. I can speak for myself. Mind, I am saying nothing against first-nighters. They are entirely admirable persons—I could never bring myself, like Mr. Beerbohm, to call them a lot. But oh! the joy of being, on holiday occasions, a general playgoer, of throwing one’s considering cap over the mills, of garnering no impressions for future “copy,” of blithely ignoring one’s better judgment, of going comfortably home from the play, like everybody else, instead of dashing madly into a taxi for the newspaper office! The play will be well on in its run, the comedian will have polished up his jokes, the superfluities will have been cut out, the programme girls will long since have given up leading the applause, you won’t know a soul, and you won’t even bother to look at the author’s name. You surrender your individuality and drift with the crowd, or, in more pretentious language, merge yourself in the collective consciousness.

Which reminds me. The general playgoer just because he is general, is what Henry James called George Sand: remarkably accessible. Everybody knows him. He is a public theme. Theorists won’t leave him alone. In particular, the collective psychologists have marked him for their prey. For them he typifies the theatrical “crowd,” with the peculiar crowd characteristics these theorists profess to have scientifically classified. Sarcey began it. Lemaître followed. And comparatively obscure scribes have devoted attention to the general playgoer. They have said that he is no philosopher; he cannot adopt a detached, impersonal, disinterested view of life; he must take sides. Hence the convention of the “sympathetic personage.” He has not the judicial faculty, is not accustomed to sift evidence or to estimate probabilities. Hence the convention of the “long arm of coincidence” and the convention that the wildest improbability may be taken as the starting-point of a play. The general playgoer, as such, is virtuous and generous; for we are all on our best behaviour in public. And he insists upon a strict separation of virtue and vice. He wants his personages all of a piece. The composite characters, blends of good and evil, he refuses to recognize. Hence the conventions of “hero” and “villain,” of “poetic justice” and of “living happy ever afterwards.” Further, it has been suggested that a crowd of general playgoers, having an individuality of its own, cannot but be interested in that individuality, apart from all reference to the cause which brought it together. Once assembled, it becomes self-conscious, self-assertive. It finds itself an interesting spectacle. And the general playgoer is not of the cloistered but of the gregarious type of mankind; he must have bustle, the sense of human kinship brought home to him by sitting elbow by elbow with his neighbours. The faculty of intellectual attention is seldom high in such a temperament as this. Hence the playwright has to _force_ the attention of a temperamentally inattentive audience. Mark, once more, that I am not speaking of first-nighters. Their individuality is too strong to be crowd-immersed. I would not for worlds speak of them as a crowd at all. They are an assemblage, a constellation, a galaxy. Admirable persons!