Part 5
“The truth is, we exaggerate the talent of an actor because we judge only from the effect he produces, without inquiring too curiously into the means. But, while the painter has nothing but his canvas and the author has nothing but white paper and printers’ ink with which to produce his effects, the actor has all other arts as handmaids; the poet labours for him, creates his part, gives him his eloquence, his music, his imagery, his tenderness, his pathos, his sublimity; the scene-painter aids him; the costumes, the lights, the music, all the fascination of the stage--all subserve the actor’s effects; these raise him upon a pedestal; remove them, and what is he? He who can make a stage mob bend and sway with his eloquence, what could he do with a real mob, no poet by to prompt him? He who can charm us with the stateliest imagery of a noble mind, when robed in the sables of Hamlet, or in the toga of Coriolanus, what can he do in coat and trousers on the world’s stage? Rub off the paint, and the eyes are no longer brilliant! Reduce the actor to his intrinsic value, and then weigh him with the rivals whom he surpasses in reputation and fortune.... If my estimate of the intrinsic value of acting is lower than seems generally current, it is from no desire to disparage _an art_ I have always loved; but, etc., etc.”
You will find the same dido in most of the essays on acting: a protracted series of cuffs and slaps terminating in a gentle non-sequitur kiss.
Acting at its finest is, however, often a confusing hypnosis; it is not to be wondered at that, fresh from its spell, the critic has mistaken it for a more exalted something than it intrinsically is. The flame and fire of a Duse, the haunt and magic of a Bernhardt, the powerful stage sense of creation of a Moissi--these are not a little befuddling. And, under their serpent-like charm, it is not incomprehensible that the critic should confound effect and cause. Yet acting, even of the highest order, is intrinsically akin to the legerdemain of a Hermann or a Kellar with a Shakespeare or a Molière as an assistant to hand over, as the moment bids, the necessary pack of cards or bowl of goldfish. It is trickery raised to its most exalted level: a combination of experience, intelligence and great charm, not revivifying something cold and dead, but releasing something quick and alive from the prison of the printed page.
The actor who contends in favour of his creative art that he must experience within him the feeling of the dramatist, that he must actually persuade himself to feel his rôle with all its turning smiles and tears, speaks nonsense. So, too, must the auditor, yet who would term the auditor a creative artist? The actor who contends in favour of his creative art the exact opposite, that he is, to wit, a creative artist since he must theatrically create the dramatist’s moods, illusions and emotions without feeling them himself, also speaks nonsense. For so, too, in such a case as “Electra,” or “Ghosts,” or “No More Blondes,” must the auditor, yet who, again, would term the latter a creative artist? The actor who contends in favour of his creative art that two accomplished actors often “create” the same rôle in an entirely different manner, speaks nonsense yet again. For what is not creation in the first place does not become creation merely because it is multiplied by two. The actor who further contends in behalf of his creative art that if effective acting were the mere trickery that some maintain it to be, any person ordinarily gifted should be able, after a little experiment, to give an effective stage performance, speaks truer than he knows. Some of the most remarkable performances on the stage of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin have been given by just such persons. And there are numerous other instances. If acting is an art--and I do not say that it may not be--it at least, as an art, ill bears cross-examination of even the most superficial nature.
III
Acting is perhaps less an art than the deceptive echo of an art. It is drama’s exalted halloo come back to drama from the walls of the surrounding amphitheatre. Criticism of acting too often mistakes the echo for the original voice. Although the analogy wears motley, criticism of this kind operates in much the same manner as if it were to contend that an approximately exact and beautiful Ben Ali Haggin _tableau vivant_ reproduction of, say, Velasquez’s “The Spinners,” was creative art in the sense that the original is creative art. Acting is to the art of the drama much what these so-called living pictures are to the art of painting. If acting is to be termed an art, it is, like the living picture, a freak art, an art with belladonna in its eyes and ever, even at its highest, a bit grotesque.
In his defence of acting as an art equal to that of poetry and literature, Henry Irving has observed, “It has been said that acting is unworthy because it represents feigned emotions, but this censure would apply with equal force to poet or novelist.” But would it? The poet and the novelist may feign emotions, but it is their own active imaginations which feign them. The actor merely feigns passively the emotions which the imagination of the poet has actively feigned; if there is feigning, the actor merely parrots it. If there is feigned emotion in, say, the second stanza of Swinburne’s “Rococo,” and I mount an illuminated platform and recite the stanza very eloquently and impressively, am I precisely feigning the emotion of it or am I merely feigning the emotion that the great imagination of Swinburne has feigned? Feigned or unfeigned, the emotions of the poet come ready-made to the heart and lips of the actor.
Continues Irving further: “It is the actor who gives body to the ideas of the highest dramatic literature--fire, force, and sensibility, without which they would remain for most people mere airy abstractions.” What one engages here is the peculiar logic that acting is an art since it popularizes dramatic literature and makes it intelligible to a majority of dunderheads!
One more quotation from this actor’s defence, and we may pass on. “The actor’s work is absolutely concrete,” he challenges. “He is brought in every phase of his work into direct comparison with existing things.... Not only must his dress be suitable to the part which he assumes, but his bearing must not be in any way antagonistic to the spirit of the time in which the play is fixed. The free bearing of the sixteenth century is distinct from the artificial one of the seventeenth, the mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless one of the nineteenth.... The voice must be modulated to the vogue of the time. The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age is different from that of a mail-clad one--nay, the armour of a period ruled in real life the poise and bearing of the body; and all this must be reproduced on the stage.... _It cannot therefore be seriously put forward in the face of such manifold requirements that no Art is required for the representation of suitable action!_” The italics are those of one who experiences some difficulty in persuading himself that if Art is required for such things as these--dress, carriage, modulation of voice and carrying a sword--Art, strictly speaking, is no less required in the matter of going to a Quat’-z-Arts costume ball.
Acting is perhaps best to be criticized not as art but as colourful and impressive artifice. Miss Margaret Anglin’s Joan of Arc is a more or less admirable example of acting not because it is art but because it is a shrewd, vivid and beguiling synthesis of various intrinsically spurious dodges: black tights to make stout Anglo-Saxon limbs appear Gallicly slender, a telescoping of words containing the sound of _s_ to conceal a personal defect in the structure of the upper lip, a manœuvring of the central action up stage to emphasize, through a familiar trick of the theatre, the sympathetic frailty of the character which the actress herself physically lacks, two intakes of breath before a shout of defiance that the effect of the ring of the directly antecedent shout on the part of one of the inquisitors may be diminished.... An effective acting performance is like a great explosion; and as T N T is made from nitric acid, which is in turn made from such nitrates as potassium nitrate or saltpeter, which are in turn derived from the salts of decomposed guano, so is a great explosion of histrionism similarly made and derived from numerous--and not infrequently ludicrous and even vulgar--basic elements.
The ill-balanced species of criticism which appraises an histrionic performance as art on the sole ground of the hypnotic effect it produces, with no inquiry into the means whereby that effect is produced, might analogously, were it to pursue this logic, appraise similarly as art the performance of an adept literal hypnotist. And with logic perhaps much more sound. For if acting as an art is to be appraised in the degree of the effect it imparts to, and induces in, the auditor-spectator, surely--if there is any sense at all in such a method of estimate--may certain other such performances as I have suggested be similarly appraised. Criticism rests upon a foundation of logic; whatever it may deal with--æsthetics, emotions, what not--it cannot remove itself entirely from that foundation. Thus, if Mr. John Barrymore is an artist because, by identifying the heart and mind of his auditor-spectator with some such character as Fedya and by suggesting directly that character’s tragic dégringolade, he can make the auditor-spectator pity and cry, so too an artist--by the rigid canon of æsthetic criticism--was Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who is said to have been able to do the same thing.
What I attempt here is no facile paradox, but a _reductio ad absurdum_ designed to show up the fallacy of the prevailing method of actor criticism. In criticism of the established arts, there is no such antic deportment. The critic never confuses the stimulations of jazz music with those of sound music, nor the stimulations of open melodrama with those of more profound drama. From each of these he receives stimulations of a kind: some superficial, some deep. But he inquires, in each instance, into the means whereby the various stimulations were vouchsafed to him. While he recognizes the fact that the sudden and unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Secret Service” produces in him a sensation of shock as great as the sudden and unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Hedda Gabler,” he does not therefore promptly, and with no further reasoning, conclude that the two sensations are of an æsthetic piece. Nor does he assume that, since the nervous effect of the fall to death in “The Green Goddess” and of the fall to death in “The Master Builder” affect him immediately in much the same way, both sensations are accordingly produced by sound artistic means. Nor, yet again, does he confuse the quality--nor the springs of that quality--of the mood of wistful pathos with which “Poor Butterfly” and “Porgi, Amor” inspire him. But this confusion persists as part and parcel of the bulk of the criticism of acting. For one Hazlitt, or Lamb, or Lewes, or Anatole France who retains, or has retained, his clear discernment before the acted drama, there are, and have been, a number tenfold who have confounded the wonders of the phonograph with the wonders of Josef Haydn.
V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM
V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM
I
Arthur Bingham Walkley begins one of the best books ever written on the subject thus: “It is not to be gainsaid that the word criticism has gradually acquired a certain connotation of contempt.... Every one who expresses opinions, however imbecile, in print calls himself a ‘critic.’ The greater the ignoramus, the greater the likelihood of his posing as a ‘critic.’” An excellent book, as I have said, with a wealth of sharp talk in it, but Mr. Walkley seems to me to err somewhat in his preliminary assumption. Criticism has acquired a connotation of contempt less because it is practised by a majority of ignoramuses than because it is accepted at full face value by an infinitely greater majority of ignoramuses. It is not the mob that curls a lip--the mob accepts the lesser ignoramus at his own estimate of himself; it is the lonely and negligible minority man who, pausing musefully in the field that is the world, contemplates the jackasses eating the daisies.
No man is so contemptuous of criticism as the well-stocked critic, just as there is no man so contemptuous of clothes as the man with the well-stocked wardrobe. It is as impossible to imagine a critic like Shaw not chuckling derisively at criticism as it is to imagine a regular subscriber to the _Weekly Review_ not swallowing it whole. The experienced critic, being on the inside, is in a position to look into the heads of the less experienced, and to see the wheels go round. He is privy to all their monkeyshines, since he is privy to his own. Having graduated from quackery, he now smilingly regards others still at the trade of seriously advancing sure cures for æsthetic baldness, cancer, acne and trifacial neuralgia. And while the yokels rub in the lotions and swallow the pills, he permits himself a small, but eminently sardonic, hiccup.
It is commonly believed that the first virtue of a critic is honesty. As a matter of fact, in four cases out of five, honesty is the last virtue of a critic. As criticism is practised in America, honesty presents itself as the leading fault. There is altogether too much honesty. The greater the blockhead, the more honest he is. And as a consequence the criticism of these blockheads, founded upon their honest convictions, is worthless. There is some hope for an imbecile if he is dishonest, but none if he is resolute in sticking to his idiocies. If the average American critic were to cease writing what he honestly believes and dishonestly set down what he doesn’t believe, the bulk of the native criticism would gain some common sense and take on much of the sound value that it presently lacks. Honesty is a toy for first-rate men; when lesser men seek to play with it and lick off the paint, they come down with colic.
It is further maintained that enthusiasm is a supplementary desideratum in a critic, that unless he is possessed of enthusiasm he cannot impart a warm love for fine things to his reader. Surely this, too, is nonsense. Enthusiasm is a virtue not in the critic, but in the critic’s reader. And such desired enthusiasm can be directly generated by enthusiasm no more than a glyceryl nitrate explosion can be generated by sulfuric acid. Enthusiasm may be made so contagious as to elect a man president of the United States or to raise an army large enough to win a world war, but it has never yet been made sufficiently contagious to persuade one American out of a hundred thousand that Michelangelo’s David of the Signoria is a better piece of work than the Barnard statue of Lincoln. Enthusiasm is an attribute of the uncritical, the defectively educated: stump speakers, clergymen, young girls, opera-goers, Socialists, Italians, such like. And not only an attribute, but a weapon. But the cultivated and experienced man has as little use for enthusiasm as for indignation. He appreciates that while it may convert a pack of ignoble doodles, it can’t convert any one worth converting. The latter must be persuaded, not inflamed. He realizes that where a double brass band playing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” may leave a civilized Englishman cold to the virtues of the United States, proof that the United States has the best bathroom plumbing in the world may warm him up a bit. The sound critic is not a cheer leader, but a referee. Art is hot, criticism cold. Aristotle’s criticism of Euripides is as placid and reserved as Mr. William Archer’s criticism of the latest drama at the St. James’s Theatre; Brunetière is as calm over his likes as Mr. H. T. Parker of the Boston _Transcript_. There is no more enthusiasm in Lessing than there is indignation in Walkley. Hazlitt, at a hundred degrees emotional Fahrenheit, remains critically cool as a cucumber. To find enthusiasm, you will have to read the New York _Times_.
Enthusiasm, in short, is the endowment of immaturity. The greater the critic, the greater his disinclination to communicate æsthetic heat. Such communication savours of propaganda and, however worthy that propaganda, he will have naught to do with its trafficking. If the ability to possess and communicate enthusiasm is the mark of the true critic, then the theatrical page of the New York _Journal_ is the greatest critical literature in America.
A third contention has it that aloofness and detachment are no less valuable to the dramatic critic than honesty and enthusiasm. Unless I am seriously mistaken, also bosh. Dramatic criticism is fundamentally the critic’s art of appraising himself in terms of various forms of drama. Or, as I some time ago put it, the only sound dramatic critic is the one who reports less the impression that this or that play makes upon him than the impression he makes upon this or that play. Of all the forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is essentially, and perhaps correctly, the most personal. Tell me what a dramatic critic eats and drinks, how far north of Ninetieth Street he lives, what he considers a pleasant evening when he is not in the theatre, and what kind of lingerie his wife wears, and I’ll tell you with very few misses what kind of critic he is. I’ll tell you whether he is fit to appreciate Schnitzler, or whether he is fit only for Augustus Thomas. I’ll tell you in advance what he will think about, and how he will react to, Hauptmann, Sacha Guitry or George V. Hobart. I’ll tell you whether he is the sort that makes a great to-do when his eagle eye spots Sir Nigel Waterhouse, M.P., in Act II fingering a copy of the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_ instead of the London _Times_, and whether he is the sort that writes “Mr. John Cort has staged the play in his customary lavish manner” when the rise of the curtain discloses to him a room elaborately decorated in the latest Macy mode. To talk about the value of detachment in a dramatic critic is to talk about the value of detachment in a Swiss mountain guide. The criticism is the man; the man the criticism.
Of all forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is the most purely biological. Were the genii to put the mind of Max Beerbohm into the head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse, and vice versa, their criticisms would still remain exactly as they are. But, on the contrary, were the head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse to be placed on the body of Max Beerbohm, and vice versa, their criticisms would take on points of view diametrically opposed to their present. Max would begin admiring the Rev. Dr. Charles Rann Kennedy and Towse would promptly proceed to put on his glasses to get a better view of the girl on the end. Every book of dramatic criticism--every single piece of dramatic criticism--is a searching, illuminating autobiography. The dramatic critic performs a clinic upon himself every time he takes his pen in his hand. He may try, as Walkley puts it, to substitute for the capital I’s “nouns of multitude signifying many,” or some of those well-worn stereotypes--“It is thought,” “one may be pardoned for hinting,” “will any one deny?” etc., etc.--by which criticism keeps up the pretence that it is not a man but a corporation, but he fools no one.
To ask the dramatic critic to keep himself out of his criticism, to detach himself, is thus a trifle like asking an actor to keep himself out of his rôle. Dramatic critics and actors are much alike. The only essential difference is that the actor does his acting on a platform. But, platform or no platform, the actor and the dramatic critic best serve their rôles when they filter them through their own personalities. A dramatic critic who is told to keep his personality out of his criticism is in the position of an actor who, being physically and temperamentally like Mr. John Barrymore, is peremptorily directed by a producer to stick a sofa pillow under his belt, put on six extra heel-lifts, acquire a whiskey voice and play Falstaff like the late Sir Herbert Tree. The best dramatic critics from the time of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (_vide_ the “Epistola”) have sunk their vivid personalities into their work right up to the knees. Not only have they described the adventures of their souls among masterpieces, but the adventures of their kidneys, spleens and _cæca_ as well. Each has held the mirror of drama up to his own nature, with all its idiosyncrasies. And in it have been sharply reflected not the cut and dried features of the professor, but the vital features of a red-alive man. The other critics have merely held up the mirror to these red-alive men, and have reflected not themselves but the latter. Then, in their vainglory, they have looked again into the hand-glass and have mistaken the reflection of the parrot for an eagle.
A third rubber-stamp: the critic must have sympathy. As properly contend that a surgeon must have sympathy. The word is misused. What the critic must have is not sympathy, which in its common usage bespeaks a measure of sentimental concern, but interest. If a dramatic critic, for example, has sympathy for an actress he can no more criticize her with poise than a surgeon can operate on his own wife. The critic may on occasion have sympathy as the judge in a court of law may on occasion have it, but if he is a fair critic, or a fair judge, he can’t do anything about it, however much he would like to. Between the fair defendant in the lace baby collar and a soft heart, Article X, Section 123, Page 416, absurdly interposes itself. (In example, being a human being with a human being’s weaknesses before a critic, I would often rather praise a lovely one when she is bad than an unlovely one when she is good--and, alas, I fear that I sometimes do--but in the general run I try to remember my business and behave myself. It isn’t always easy. But I do my best, and angels and Lewes could do no more.) The word sympathy is further mishandled, as in the similar case of the word enthusiasm. What a critic should have is not, as is common, sympathy and enthusiasm _before_ the fact, but _after_ it. The critic who enters a theatre bubblingly certain that he is going to have a good time is no critic. The critic is he who leaves a theatre cheerfully certain that he _has_ had a good time. Sympathy and enthusiasm, unless they are _ex post facto_, are precisely like prevenient prejudice and hostility. Sympathy has no more preliminary place in the equipment of a critic than in the equipment of an ambulance driver or a manufacturer of bird cages. It is the caboose of criticism, not the engine.