Part 4
The detractors of the theatre are often expert in persuasive half-truths and masters of dialectic sleight-of-hand. Their performances are often so adroit that the spectator is quick to believe that the trunk is really empty, yet the false bottom is there for all its cunning concealment. Take, for example, George Moore, in the preface to his last play, “The Coming of Gabrielle.” “The illusion created by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting and short sentences is in itself illusory,” he professes to believe, though why he numbers the dramatist’s short sentences among the externals of the stage is not quite clear. “The best performances of plays and operas are witnessed at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was never so like Tristan at night as he was in the afternoon when he sang the part in a short jacket, a bowler hat and an umbrella in his hand. The chain armour and the plumes that he wore at night were but a distraction, setting our thoughts on periods, on the short swords in use in the ninth century in Ireland or in Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of the ships in which the lovers were voyaging, on the absurd night-dress which is the convention that Isolde should appear in, a garment she never wore and which we know to be make-believe. But the hat and feathers that Isolde appears in when she rehearses the part are forgotten the moment she sings; and if I had to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play Hamlet or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate for a moment. The moment he speaks he ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose the illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince of Denmark and remember the mummer.” Years ago, in a volume of critical essays given the title “Another Book on the Theatre,” I took a boyish delight in setting off precisely the same noisy firework just to hear the folks in the piazza rocking-chairs let out a yell. These half-truths serve criticism as sauce serves asparagus: they give tang to what is otherwise often tasteless food. This is particularly true with criticism at its most geometrical and profound, since such criticism, save in rare instances, is not especially lively reading. But, nevertheless, the sauce is not the asparagus. And when Mr. Moore (doubtless with his tongue in his cheek) observes that he can much more readily imagine the lusty Frau Tillie Pfirsich-Melba as Isolde in a pink and green ostrich feather hat confected in some Friedrichstrasse atelier than in the customary stage trappings, he allows, by implication, that he might even more readily imagine the elephantine lady as the seductive Carmen if she had no clothes on at all.
This is the trouble with paradoxes. It is not that they prove too little, as is believed of them, but that they prove altogether too much. If the illusion created by stage externals is in itself illusory, as Mr. Moore says, the complete deletion of all such stage externals should be the best means for providing absolute illusion. Yet the complete absence of illusion where this is the case is all too familiar to any of us who have looked on such spectacles as “The Bath of Phryne” and the like in the theatres of Paris. A prodigality of stage externals does not contribute to disillusion, but to illusion. These externals have become, through protracted usage, so familiar that they are, so to speak, scarcely seen: they are taken by the eye for granted. By way of proof, one need only consider two types of Shakespearian production, one like that of Mr. Robert Mantell and one like that lately employed for “Macbeth” by Mr. Arthur Hopkins. Where the overladen stereotyped first production paradoxically fades out of the picture for the spectator and leaves the path of illusion clear for him, the superlatively simple second production, almost wholly bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes his attention and makes illusion impossible. It is true, of course, that all this may be changed in time, when the deletion of externals by the new stagecraft shall have become a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on of externals is a convention at present. But, as things are today, these externals are, negatively, the most positive contributors to illusion.
It is the misfortune of the theatre that critics have almost always approached it, and entered it, with a defiant and challenging air. I have, during the eighteen years of my active critical service, met with and come to know at least fifty professional critics in America, in England and on the Continent, and among all this number there have been but four who have approached the theatre enthusiastically prejudiced in its favour--two of them asses. But between the one large group that has been critically hostile and the other smaller group that has been uncritically effervescent, I have encountered no sign of calm and reasoned compromise, no sign of frank and intelligent willingness to regard each and every theatre as a unit, and so to be appraised, instead of lumping together good and bad theatres alike and labelling the heterogeneous mass “the theatre.” There is no such thing as “the theatre.” There is this theatre, that theatre, and still that other theatre. Each is a unit. To talk of “the theatre” is to talk of the Greek theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the modern theatre in one breath, or to speak simultaneously of the Grosses Schauspielhaus of Max Reinhardt and the Eltinge Theatre of Mr. A. H. Woods. “The theatre,” of course, has certain more or less minor constant and enduring conventions--at least, so it seems as far as we now can tell--but so, too, has chirography, yet we do not speak of “the chirography.” There are some theatres--I use the word in its proper restricted sense--that glorify drama and enhance its beauty; there are others that vitiate drama. But so also are there some men who write fine drama, and others who debase drama to mere fodder for witlings.... The Shakespeare of the theatre of Gordon Craig is vivid and brilliant beauty. Call it art or not art as you will--what does a label matter? The Molière of the theatre of Alexander Golovine is suggestive and exquisite enchantment. Call it art or not art as you will--what does a label matter? The Wagner of the opera house of Ludwig Sievert is triumphant and rapturous splendour. Call it anything you like--and again, what does a label matter? There are too many labels in the world.
IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING
IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING
I
“When Mr. Nathan says that acting is not an art, of course he is talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after witnessing a performance by the great Duse?” So, the estimable actor, Mr. Arnold Daly. Whether acting is or is not an art, it is not my concern at the moment to consider, yet I quote the _riposte_ of Mr. Daly as perhaps typical of those who set themselves as defenders of the yea theory. It seems to me that if this is a satisfactory _touche_ no less satisfactory should be some such like rejoinder as: “When Mr. Nathan says that acting _is_ an art, of course he is talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after witnessing a performance by Mr. Corse Payton.”
If an authentic art is anything which may properly be founded upon an exceptionally brilliant performance, then, by virtue of the Reverend Doctor Ernest M. Stires’ brilliant performance in it, is pulpiteering an art, and, on the strength of Miss Bird Millman’s brilliant performance in it, is tight-rope walking an art no less. Superficially a mere dialectic monkey-trick, this is yet perhaps not so absurd as it may seem, for if Duse’s art lies in the fact that she breathes life and dynamic effect into the written word of the artist D’Annunzio, Stires’ lies in the more substantial fact that he breathes life and dynamic effect into the word of the somewhat greater, and more evasive artist, God. And Miss Millman, too, brings to her quasi-art, movement, colour, rhythm, beauty and--one may even say--a sense of fantastic character, since the effect she contrives is less that of a dumpy little woman in a short white skirt pirouetting on a taut wire than of an unreal creature, half bird, half woman, out of some forgotten fable.
The circumstance that Duse is an artist who happens to be an actress does not make acting an art any more than the circumstance that Villon was an artist who happened to be a burglar or that Paderewski is an artist who happens to be a politician makes burglary and politics arts. Duse is an artist first, and an actress second: one need only look into her very great share in the creation of the dramas bearing the name of D’Annunzio to reconcile one’s self--if not too stubborn, at least in part--to this point of view. So, also, were Clairon, Rachel and Jane Hading artists apart from histrionism, and so too, is Sarah Bernhardt: who can fail to detect the creative artist in the “Mémoires” of the first named, for instance, or, in the case of the last named, in the fertile impulses of her essays in sculpture, painting and dramatic literature? It is a curious thing that, in all the pronouncements of acting as an art, the names chosen by the advocates as representative carriers of the æsthetic banner are those of actors and actresses who have most often offered evidence of artistic passion in fields separate and apart from their histrionic endeavours. Lemaître, Salvini, Rachel, Talma, Coquelin, Betterton, Garrick, Fanny Kemble, the Bancrofts, Irving, Tree, and on down--far down--the line to Ditrichstein, Sothern, Marie Tempest, Guitry, Gemier and the brothers Barrymore--all give testimony, in writing, painting, musicianship, poetry and dramatic authorship to æsthetic impulses other than acting. Since acting itself as an art is open to question, the merit or demerit of the performances produced from the æsthetic impulses in point is not an issue: the fact seems to be that it has been the artist who has become the actor rather than the actor who has become the artist.
The actor, as I have on another occasion hazarded, is the child of the miscegenation of an art and a trade: of the drama and the theatre. Since acting must appeal to the many--this is obviously its only reason for being, for acting is primarily a filter through which drama may be lucidly distilled for heterogeneous theatre-goers--it must, logically, be popular or perish. Surely no authentic art can rest or thrive upon such a premise. The great actors and actresses, unlike great fashioners in other arts, have invariably been favourites of the crowd, and it is doubtless a too charitable hypothesis to assume that this crowd has ever been gifted with critical insight beyond cavil. If, therefore, the actor or actress who can sway great crowds is strictly to be termed an artist, why may we not also, by strict definition, similarly term as exponents of an authentic art others who can likewise sway the same crowds: a great politician like Roosevelt, say, or a great lecturer like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out these paradox shock-troops to clear the way for the more sober infantry.)
I have said that I have no intention to argue for or against acting as an art yet, for all the circumstance that the case for the prosecution has long seemed the soundest and the most eloquent, there are still sporadic instances of imaginative histrionism that give one reason to ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently come to the more penetrating critic that what has on such occasions passed for an art has in reality been merely a reflected art: the art of drama interpreted not with the imagination of the actor but, more precisely, _with the imagination of the dramatist_. In other words, that actor or actress is the most competent and effective whose imagination is successful in meeting literally, and translating, the imagination of the dramatist which has created the rôle played by the particular actor or actress. To name the actor’s imagination in such a case a creative imagination is a rather wistful procedure, for it does not create but merely duplicates. Surely no advocate of acting as a creative art would be so bold as to contend that any actor, however great, has ever brought creative imagination to the already full and superb creative imagination of Shakespeare. This would be, on an actor’s part, the sheerest impudence. The greatest actor is simply he who is best fitted by figure, voice, training and intelligence not to invade and annul the power of the rôle which a great dramatist has imagined and created. Duse and D’Annunzio were, so to speak, spiritually and physically one: hence the unmatched perfection of the former’s histrionism in the latter’s rôles. To see Duse is, save one admit one’s self critically to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical art doubts and the convictions of such as Mr. Daly.
It is, of course, the common habit of the prejudiced critic to overlook, in the estimate of acting as an art, the few admirable exponents of acting and to take into convenient consideration only the enormous majority of incompetents. But to argue that acting is not an art simply because a thousand Edmund Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give no evidence that it is an art is to argue that sculpture is not an art simply because a thousand fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding give no evidence in a like direction. Yet the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent actors as well as bad actors establishes acting as an art no more than the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes the playing of the cuckoo-whistle as an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison to what appears to be an absurdity, it is because by such absurdities, or elementals, is the status of acting in the field of the arts most sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt’s ever-haunting cry of the heart in “Izeyl” is a peg, however slight, upon which may be hung a strand of the theory that maintains acting as an art, so too, by the strict canon of dialectics, is Mr. Ruben Katz’s ever-haunting cry of the cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
If acting is an art, the proofs thus far offered are not only unconvincing but fundamentally, on the score of logic, not a little droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If criticism is an art (thus a familiar contention), why is not acting also an art, since both are concerned with re-creating works of art? But the artist’s work offered up to the critic is a challenge, whereas the dramatist’s work offered up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism is war, whether in behalf of æsthetic friend or against æsthetic foe; acting is agreement, peace. The critic re-creates, in terms of his own personality, the work of another and often emphatically different and antagonistic personality. The actor re-creates, in terms of a dramatist’s concordantly imagined personality, his own personality: the result is less re-creation than non-re-creation. In other words, the less the actor creates or re-creates and the more he remains simply an adaptable tool in the hands of the dramatist, the better actor he is. The actor’s state is thus what may be termed one of active impassivity. Originality and independence, save within the narrowest of limits, are denied him. He is a literal translator of a work of art, not an independently imaginative and speculative interpreter, as the critic is. The dramatist’s work of art does not say to him, as to the critic, “Here I am! What do you, out of all your experience, taste and training, think of me?” It says to him, instead and peremptorily, “Here I am! Think of me exactly as I am, and adapt all of your experience, taste and training to the interpretation of me exactly as I am!”
Brushing aside the theory that the true artist is the actor who can transform his voice, his manner, his character; who will disappear behind his part instead of imposing himself on it and adding himself to it--a simple feat, since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli and Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean actors, are true histrionic artists--Mr. Walkley, in his essay on “The English Actor of Today,” bravely takes up the defence from what he regards as a more difficult approach. “In the art of acting as in any other art,” he says, “the first requisite is life. The actor’s part is a series of speeches and stage directions, mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead. If the actor disappears behind it, there is nothing left but a Golgotha.” Here is indeed gay news! Hamlet, Iago, Romeo, Shylock--mere “cold print,” inert Shakespearian masses that, in order to live, have to be raised somehow from the dead by members of the Lambs’ Club! It is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly takes to cover after launching this torpedo, and devotes the balance of his interesting comments to a prudent and circumspect _pas seul_ on the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter. For no sooner has he described the majestic drama of Shakespeare as “mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead,” than he seems suddenly, and not without a touch of horror, to realize that he has ridiculously made of Shakespeare a mere blank canvas and pot of paint for the use of this or that actor whom he has named, by implication and with magnificent liberalness, a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble for the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined Mercié.
II
Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable art takes its key from Rémond de Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman whose pragmatic critical credo was, “If it makes me feel, it is art.” While it may be reasonable that a purely emotional art may aptly be criticized according to the degree of emotional reaction which it induces, it is the quality of emotion resident in the critic that offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion. A perfectly attuned and sound emotional equipment--an emotional equipment of absolute pitch, so to speak--is a rare thing, even among critics of brilliant intelligence, taste, imagination and experience. Goethe, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention only five, were physio-psychological units of dubious emotional structure, if we may trust the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of their critical dramatic writing may be accepted without qualm, a distinct measure of distrust would attach itself to any critical estimate of acting which they might have written or actually did write.
There are, obviously, more or less definite standards whereby we may estimate critical writings of such men as these so far as those criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe as the cerebral or semi-cerebral arts, but there are no standards, even remotely determinable or exact, whereby we may appraise such of their criticisms as deal with the directly and wholly emotional art of acting. It is perhaps not too far a cry to assume that had Mr. William Archer’s father been murdered shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr. Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Mr. Archer would have been moved to believe Mr. Forbes-Robertson on even greater actor-artist than he believed him under the existing circumstances, or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius, the Danish journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a victim of syphilis when he reviewed August Lindberg’s “Oswald,” he would have looked on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive exponent of histrionism. Nothing is more æsthetically and artistically dubious and insecure than the appraisal of acting; for it is based upon the quicksands of varying human emotionalism, and of aural and visual prejudice. Were I, for example, one hundred times more proficient a critic of drama and life than I am, my criticism of acting would none the less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I would remain constitutionally anæsthetic to a Juliet, however otherwise talented, who had piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all his histrionic power, presented to the vision a pair of knock-knees. This, I well appreciate, is the kind of critical writing that is promptly set down as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as I am concerned and I daresay that it is, in one direction or another, the truth so far as the majority of critics are concerned.
The most that may be said of the soundness of this or that laudatory criticism of an actor’s performance is that the performance in point has met exactly--or very nearly--the particular critic’s personal notion of how he, as a human being, would have cried, laughed and otherwise comported himself were he an actor and were he in the actor’s rôle. The opposite, or denunciatory, phase of such criticism holds a similar truth. If this is not true, by what standards _can_ the critic estimate the actor’s performance? By the standards of the actors who have preceded this actor in the playing of the rôle, you say? What if the rôle is a new one, a peculiar and novel one, that has not been played before? Again, you say that the rôle may be in an alien drama and that the actor may be an alien, both rôle and performance being foreign to the emotional equipment of the critic. But basic emotions, the foundation of drama, are universal. Still again, what of such dramas as “Œdipus Rex,” what of such rôles--this with a triumphant chuckle on your part? I return the chuckle, and bid you read the criticisms that have been written of the actors who have played in these rôles! Invariably the actors have been treated in precisely the same terms and by the same standards as if they were playing, not in the drama of the fifth century before Christ, but in “Fedora,” “The Face in the Moonlight” or “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
One cannot imagine sound criticism applying to any authentic art the standard of actor criticism that I have noted. Criticism, true enough, is always more or less personal, but, in its operation upon the authentic arts, its personality is ever like a new bottle into which the vintage wine of art has been poured. Criticism of the authentic arts is the result of the impact of a particular art upon a particular critical personality. Criticism of the dubious art of acting is the result of the impact of a particular critical personality upon this or that instance of acting. But if this is even remotely true, you inquire ironically, what of such an excellent instance of acting as Mimi Aguglia’s “Salome”; how in God’s name may the critic appraise that performance in the manner set down, i. e., in terms of himself were he a stage performer? Well, for all the surface humours of the question, that is actually more or less the way in which he does appraise it. The actor or actress, unlike the artist in more authentic fields, may never interpret emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the critic: the interpretation must be a reflection, more or less stereotyped, of the critic’s repertoire of emotions. Thus, where art is original expression, acting is merely the audible expression of a silent expression. In another phrase, expression in acting is predicated upon, and limited by, the expression of the critic. It is, therefore, a mere duplication of expression. And what holds true in the case of the critic so far as acting is concerned obviously holds doubly true in the case of the uncritical public.
Re-reading the celebrated critiques of acting, I come to the conclusion that the word “art” has almost uniformly been applied to acting by critics who, thinking that they had perhaps belaboured the subject a trifle too severely, were disposed graciously to throw it a sop. As good an illustration as any may be had from Lewes, certainly a friend of acting if ever there was one. Thus Lewes: