Now, the first question my correspondent asks me is this: "Does a
young woman going on the stage need a good education and also to know
languages?" To answer the first part of the question is not, I think,
very difficult. The supremely great actor or actress of natural
genius need have no education or knowledge of languages; it will be
immaterial whether he or she has enjoyed all the advantages of birth
and education or has been picked up in the streets; genius, the
highest talent, will assert itself irrespective of antecedents. But I
should say that any sort of education was of the greatest value to an
actor or actress of average ability, and that the fact that the ranks
of the stage are recruited to-day to a certain extent from our great
schools and universities, from among classes of people who fifty years
ago would never have dreamed of entering our calling, is one on which
we may congratulate ourselves. Though the production of great actors
and actresses will not be affected either one way or the other by
these circumstances, at the same time our calling must benefit in the
general level of its excellence, in its fitness to represent all
grades of society on the stage, if those who follow it are picked from
all classes, if the stage has ceased to be regarded as a calling unfit
for a man or woman of breeding or education,
The second question this lady asks me is this:
"Does she need to have her voice trained, and about what age do people
generally commence to go on the stage?" The first part of this
question as to voice training touches on the value of an Academy of
Acting. Of the value--the practical value--of such an institution
rightly conducted there can be no doubt. That acting cannot be taught
is a well-worn maxim and perhaps a true one; but acting can be
disciplined; the ebullient, sometimes eccentric and disordered
manifestations of budding talent may be modified by the art of the
teacher; those rudiments, which many so often acquire painfully in the
course of rehearsal, the pupils who leave an academy should be masters
of and so save much time and trouble to those whose business it is to
produce plays. The want of any means of training the beginner, of
coping at all with the floods of men and women, fit and unfit, who are
ever clamouring at the doors of the theatre, has been a long-crying
and much-felt grievance. The establishment of this academy should go
far to remove what has been by no means an unjust reproach to our
theatrical system. As to the age at which a person should begin a
theatrical career, I do not think there is any actor or actress who
would not say that it is impossible to begin too early--at least, as
early as a police magistrate will allow. That art is long and life
short applies quite as truthfully to the actor's as to any other art,
and as the years go on there must be many who regret that they did not
sooner decide to follow a calling which seems to carry one all too
quickly through the flight of time.