THE DRAMA
Addresses by
HENRY IRVING
With a Frontispiece By Whistler
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
I. The Stage as it is
II. The Art of Acting
III. Four Great Actors
IV. The Art of Acting
LECTURE
SESSIONAL OPENING
PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION
EDINBURGH
8 NOVEMBER 1881
THE STAGE AS IT IS.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,
You will not be surprised that, on this interesting occasion, I have
selected as the subject of the few remarks I propose to offer you,
"The Stage as it is." The stage--because to my profession I owe it
that I am here, and every dictate of taste and of fidelity impels me
to honor it; the stage as it is--because it is very cheap and empty
honor that is paid to the drama in the abstract, and withheld from the
theatre as a working institution in our midst. Fortunately there is
less of this than there used to be. It arose partly from intellectual
superciliousness, partly from timidity as to moral contamination. To
boast of being able to appreciate Shakespeare more in reading him than
in seeing him acted used to be a common method of affecting special
intellectuality. I hope this delusion--a gross and pitiful one as to
most of us--has almost absolutely died out. It certainly conferred a
very cheap badge of superiority on those who entertained it. It seemed
to each of them an inexpensive opportunity of worshipping himself on
a pedestal. But what did it amount to? It was little more than a
conceited and feather-headed assumption that an unprepared reader,
whose mind is usually full of far other things, will see on the
instant all that has been developed in hundreds of years by the
members of a studious and enthusiastic profession. My own conviction
is, that there are few characters or passages of our great dramatists
which will not repay original study. But at least we must recognize
the vast advantages with which a practised actor, impregnated by the
associations of his life, and by study--with all the practical and
critical skill of his profession up to the date at which he appears,
whether he adopts or rejects tradition--addresses himself to the
interpretation of any great character, even if he have no originality
whatever. There is something still more than this, however, in acting.
Every one who has the smallest histrionic gift has a natural dramatic
fertility; so that as soon as he knows the author's text, and obtains
self-possession, and feels at home in a part without being too
familiar with it, the mere automatic action of rehearsing and playing
it at once begins to place the author in new lights, and to give the
personage being played an individuality partly independent of, and
yet consistent with, and rendering more powerfully visible, the
dramatist's conception. It is the vast power a good actor has in this
way which has led the French to speak of creating a part when they
mean its being first played; and French authors are so conscious of
the extent and value of this co-operation of actors with them, that
they have never objected to the phrase, but, on the contrary, are
uniformly lavish in their homage to the artists who have created on
the boards the parts which they themselves have created on paper.
I must add, as an additional reason for valuing the theatre, that
while there is only one Shakespeare, and while there are comparatively
few dramatists who are sufficiently classic to be read with close
attention, there is a great deal of average dramatic work excellently
suited for representation. From this the public derive pleasure. From
this they receive--as from fiction in literature--a great deal of
instruction and mental stimulus. Some may be worldly, some social,
some cynical, some merely humorous and witty, but a great deal of it,
though its literary merit is secondary, is well qualified to bring
out all that is most fruitful of good in common sympathies. Now, it
is plain that if, because Shakespeare is good reading, people were to
give the cold shoulder to the theatre, the world would lose all the
vast advantage which comes to it through the dramatic faculty in forms
not rising to essentially literary excellence. As respects the other
feeling which used to stand more than it does now in the way of the
theatre--the fear of moral contamination--it is due to the theatre of
our day, on the one hand, and to the prejudices of our grandfathers on
the other, to confess that the theatre of fifty years ago or less did
need reforming in the audience part of the house. All who have read
the old controversy as to the morality of going to the theatre are
familiar with the objection to which I refer. But the theatre of fifty
years ago or less was reformed. If there are any, therefore, as I fear
there are a few, who still talk on this point in the old vein, let
them rub their eyes a bit, and do us the justice to consider not what
used to be, but what is. But may there be moral contamination from
what is performed on the stage? Well, there may be. But so there is
from books. So there may be at lawn tennis clubs. So there may be at
dances. So there may be in connection with everything in civilized
life and society. But do we therefore bury ourselves? The anchorites
secluded themselves in hermitages. The Puritans isolated themselves in
consistent abstinence from everything that anybody else did. And there
are people now who think that they can keep their children, and that
those children will keep themselves in after life, in cotton wool, so
as to avoid all temptation of body and mind, and be saved nine-tenths
of the responsibility of self-control. All this is mere phantasy. You
must be in the world, though you need not be of it; and the best way
to make the world a better community to be in, and not so bad a place
to be of, is not to shun, but to bring public opinion to bear upon
its pursuits and its relaxations. Depend upon two things--that the
theatre, as a whole, is never below the average moral sense of the
time; and that the inevitable demand for an admixture, at least, of
wholesome sentiment in every sort of dramatic production brings the
ruling tone of the theatre, whatever drawback may exist, up to the
highest level at which the general morality of the time can truly be
registered. We may be encouraged by the reflection that this is truer
than ever it was before, owing to the greater spread of education, the
increased community of taste between classes, and the almost absolute
divorce of the stage from mere wealth and aristocracy. Wealth and
aristocracy come around the stage in abundance, and are welcome, as in
the time of Elizabeth; but the stage is no longer a mere appendage of
court-life, no longer a mere mirror of patrician vice hanging at the
girdle of fashionable profligacy as it was in the days of Congreve and
Wycherley. It is now the property of the educated people. It has
to satisfy them or pine in neglect And the better their demands the
better will be the supply with which the drama will respond.
This being not only so, but seen to be so, the stage is no longer
proscribed. It is no longer under a ban. Its members are no longer
pariahs in society. They live and bear their social part like
others--as decorously observant of all that makes the sweet sanctities
of life--as gracefully cognizant of its amenities--as readily
recognized and welcomed as the members of any other profession. Am
I not here your grateful guest, opening the session of this
philosophical and historic institution? I who am simply an actor,
an interpreter, with such gifts as I have, and such thought as I
can bestow, of stage plays. And am I not received here with perfect
cordiality on an equality, not hungrily bowing and smirking for
patronage, but interchanging ideas which I am glad to express, and
which you listen to as thoughtfully and as kindly as you would to
those of any other student, any other man who had won his way
into such prominence as to come under the ken of a distinguished
institution such as that which I have the honor to address? I do not
mince the matter as to my personal position here, because I feel it
is a representative one, and marks an epoch in the estimation in
which the art I love is held by the British world. You have had many
distinguished men here, and their themes have often been noble, but
with which of those themes has not my art immemorial and perpetual
associations? Is it not for ever identified with the noblest instincts
and occupations of the human mind? If I think of poetry, must I not
remember how to the measure of its lofty music the theatre has in
almost all ages set the grandest of dramatic conceptions? If I think
of literature, must I not recall that of all the amusements by which
men in various states of society have solaced their leisure and
refreshed their energies, the acting of plays is the one that has
never yet, even for a day, been divorced from literary taste and
skill? If I meditate on patriotism, can I but reflect how grandly the
boards have been trod by personifications of heroic love of country?
There is no subject of human thought that by common consent is deemed
ennobling that has not ere now, and from period to period, been
illustrated in the bright vesture, and received expression from the
glowing language of theatrical representation. And surely it is
fit that, remembering what the stage has been and must be, I should
acknowledge eagerly and gladly that, with few exceptions, the public
no longer debar themselves from the profitable pleasures of the
theatre, and no longer brand with any social stigma the professors of
the histrionic art. Talking to an eminent bishop one day, I said to
him, "Now, my Lord, why is it, with your love and knowledge of the
drama, with your deep interest in the stage and all its belongings,
and your wide sympathy with all that ennobles and refines our
natures--why is it that you never go to the theatre?" "Well," said
he, "I'll tell you. I'm afraid of the _Rock_ and the _Record_." I
hope soon we shall relieve even the most timid bishop--and my right
reverend friend is not the most timid--of all fears and tremors
whatever that can prevent even ministers of religion from recognizing
the wisdom of the change of view which has come over even the most
fastidious public opinion on this question. Remember, if you please,
that the hostile public opinion which has lately begun so decisively
to disappear, has been of comparatively modern growth, or at least
revival. The pious and learned of other times gave their countenance
and approbation to the stage of their days, as the pious and learned
of our time give their countenance and approbation to certain
performances in this day. Welcome be the return of good sense, good
taste, and charity, or rather justice. No apology for the stage. None
is needed. It has but to be named to be honored. Too long the world
talked with bated breath and whispering humbleness of "the poor
player." There are now few poor players. Whatever variety of fortune
and merit there may be among them, they have the same degrees of
prosperity and respect as come to members of other avocations. There
never was so large a number of theatres or of actors. And their
type is vastly improved by public recognition. The old days when
good-for-nothings passed into the profession are at an end; and the
old Bohemian habits, so far as they were evil and disreputable, have
also disappeared. The ranks of the art are being continually recruited
by deeply interested and earnest young men of good education and
belongings. Nor let us, while dissipating the remaining prejudices
of outsiders, give quarter to those which linger among players
themselves. There are some who acknowledge the value of improved
status to themselves and their art, but who lament that there are now
no schools for actors. This is a very idle lamentation. Every actor
in full employment gets plenty of schooling, for the best schooling
is practice, and there is no school so good as a well-conducted
playhouse. The truth is, that the cardinal secret of success in acting
are found within, while practice is the surest way of fertilizing
these germs. To efficiency in the art of acting there should come a
congregation of fine qualities. There should be considerable,
though not necessarily systematic, culture. There should be delicate
instincts of taste cultivated, consciously, or unconsciously, to a
degree of extreme and subtle nicety. There should be a power, at once
refined and strong, of both perceiving and expressing to others
the significance of language, so that neither shades nor masses of
meaning, so to speak, may be either lost or exaggerated. Above all,
there should be a sincere and abounding sympathy with all that is good
and great and inspiring. That sympathy, most certainly, must be under
the control and manipulation of art, but it must be none the lest real
and generous, and the artist who is a mere artist will stop short of
the highest moral effects of his craft. Little of this can be got in a
mere training school, but all of it will come forth more or less fully
armed from the actor's brain in the process of learning his art by
practice. For the way to learn to do a thing is to do it; and in
learning to act by acting, though there is plenty of incidental hard
drill and hard work, there is nothing commonplace or unfruitful.
What is true of the art is true also of the social life of the artist.
No sensational change has been found necessary to alter his status
though great changes have come. The stage has literally lived down
the rebuke and reproach under which it formerly cowered, while its
professors have been simultaneously living down the prejudices which
excluded them from society. The stage is now seen to be an elevating
instead of a lowering influence on national morality, and actors and
actresses receive in society, as do the members of other professions,
exactly the treatment which is earned by their personal conduct.
And so I would say of what we sometimes hear so much about--dramatic
reform. It is not needed; or, if it is, all the reform that is wanted
will be best effected by the operation of public opinion upon the
administration of a good theatre. That is the true reforming agency,
with this great advantage, that reforms which come by public opinion
are sure, while those which come without public opinion cannot be
relied upon. The dramatic reformers are very well-meaning people. They
show great enthusiasm. They are new converts to the theatre, most of
them, and they have the zeal of converts. But it is scarcely according
to knowledge. These ladies and gentlemen have scarcely studied the
conditions of theatrical enterprise, which must be carried on as a
business or it will fail as an art. It is an unwelcome, if not an
unwarrantable intrusion to come among our people with elaborate
advice, and endeavor to make them live after different fashions from
those which are suitable to them, and it will be quite hopeless to
attempt to induce the general body of a purely artistic class to make
louder and more fussy professions of virtue and religion than other
people. In fact, it is a downright insult to the dramatic profession
to exact or to expect any such thing. Equally objectionable, and
equally impracticable, are the attempts of Quixotic "dramatic
reformers" to exercise a sort of goody-goody censorship over the
selection and the text of the plays to be acted. The stage has been
serving the world for hundreds, yes, and thousands of years, during
which it has contributed in pure dramaturgy to the literature of
the world its very greatest master-pieces in nearly all languages,
meanwhile affording to the million an infinity of pleasure, all more
or less innocent. Where less innocent, rather than more, the cause has
lain, not in the stage, but in the state of society of which it was
the mirror. For though the stage is not always occupied with its own
period, the new plays produced always reflect in many particulars
the spirit of the age in which they are played. There is a story of
a traveller who put up for the night at a certain inn, on the door of
which was the inscription--"Good entertainment for man and beast." His
horse was taken to the stable and well cared for, and he sat down
to dine. When the covers were removed he remarked, on seeing his own
sorry fare, "Yes, this is very well; but where's the entertainment for
the man?" If everything were banished from the stage except that
which suits a certain taste, what dismal places our theatres would be!
However fond the play-goer may be of tragedy, if you offer him nothing
but horrors, he may well ask--"Where's the entertainment for the man
who wants an evening's amusement?" The humor of a farce may not seem
over-refined to a particular class of intelligence; but there are
thousands of people who take an honest pleasure in it. And who, after
seeing my old friend J.L. Toole in some of his famous parts, and
having laughed till their sides ached, have not left the theatre more
buoyant and light-hearted than they came? Well, if the stage has
been thus useful and successful all these centuries, and still is
productive; if the noble fascination of the theatre draws to it, as we
know that it does, an immortal poet such as our Tennyson, whom, I can
testify from my own experience, nothing delights more than the success
of one of the plays which, in the mellow autumn of his genius, he has
contributed to the acting theatre; if a great artist like Tadema is
proud to design scenes for stage plays; if in all departments of stage
production we see great talent, and in nearly every instance great
good taste and sincere sympathy with the best popular ideals of
goodness; then, I say, the stage is entitled to be let alone--that
is, it is entitled to make its own bargain with the public without the
censorious intervention of well-intentioned busybodies. These do not
know what to ban or to bless. If they had their way, as of course
they cannot, they would license, with many flourishes and much
self-laudation, a number of pieces which would be hopelessly
condemned on the first hearing, and they would lay an embargo for very
insufficient reasons on many plays well entitled to success. It is not
in this direction that we must look for any improvement that is needed
in the purveying of material for the stage. Believe me, the right
direction is public criticism and public discrimination. I say so
because, beyond question, the public will have what they want. So far,
that managers in their discretion, or at their pleasure, can force on
the public either very good or very bad dramatic material is an utter
delusion. They have no such power. If they had the will they could
only force any particular sort of entertainment just as long as they
had capital to expend without any return. But they really have not the
will. They follow the public taste with the greatest keenness. If the
people want Shakespeare--as I am happy to say they do, at least at one
theatre in London, and at all the great theatres out of London, to
an extent unprecedented in the history of the stage--then they get
Shakespeare. If they want our modern dramatists--Albery, Boucicault,
Byron, Burnand, Gilbert, or Wills--these they have. If they want
Robertson, Robertson is there for them. If they desire opera-bouffe,
depend upon it they will have it, and have it they do. What then do
I infer? Simply this: that those who prefer the higher drama--in the
representation of which my heart's best interests are centred--instead
of querulously animadverting on managers who give them something
different, should, as Lord Beaconsfield said, "make themselves into a
majority." If they do so, the higher drama will be produced. But if we
really understand the value of the drama, we shall not be too rigid in
our exactions. The drama is the art of human nature in picturesque
or characteristic action. Let us be liberal in our enjoyment of it.
Tragedy, comedy, historical-pastoral, pastoral-comical--remember
the large-minded list of the greatest-minded poet--all are good, if
wholesome--and will be wholesome if the public continue to take the
healthy interest in theatres which they are now taking. The worst
times for the stage have been those when play-going was left pretty
much to a loose society, such as is sketched in the Restoration
dramatists. If the good people continue to come to the theatre in
increasing crowds, the stage, without losing any of its brightness,
will soon be good enough, if it is not as yet, to satisfy the best of
them. This is what I believe all sensible people in these times see.
And if, on the one hand, you are ready to laugh at the old prejudices
which have been so happily dissipated; on the other hand, how
earnestly must you welcome the great aid to taste and thought and
culture which comes to you thus in the guise of amusement. Let me put
this to you rather seriously; let me insist on the intellectual and
moral use, alike to the most and least cultivated of us, of this
art "most beautiful, most difficult, most rare," which I stand here
to-day, not to apologize for, but to establish in the high place
to which it is entitled among the arts and among the ameliorating
influences of life. Grant that any of us understand a dramatist better
for seeing him acted, and it follows, first, that all of us will be
most indebted to the stage at the point where the higher and more
ethereal faculties are liable in reading to failure and exhaustion,
that is, stage-playing will be of most use to us where the mind
requires help and inspiration to grasp and revel in lofty moral or
imaginative conceptions, or where it needs aid and sharpening to
appreciate and follow the niceties of repartee, or the delicacies
of comic fancy. Secondly, it follows that if this is so with the
intellectual few, it must be infinitely more so with the unimaginative
many of all ranks. They are not inaccessible to passion and poetry and
refinement, but their minds do not go forth, as it were, to seek these
joys; and even if they read works of poetic and dramatic fancy, which
they rarely do, they would miss them on the printed page. To them,
therefore, with the exception of a few startling incidents of real
life, the theatre is the only channel through which are ever brought
the great sympathies of the world of thought beyond their immediate
ken. And thirdly, it follows from all this that the stage is,
intellectually and morally, to all who have recourse to it, the
source of some of the finest and best influences of which they are
respectively susceptible. To the thoughtful and reading man it brings
the life, the fire, the color, the vivid instinct, which are beyond
the reach of study. To the common indifferent man, immersed, as a
rule, in the business and socialities of daily life, it brings visions
of glory and adventure, of emotion and of broad human interest. It
gives glimpses of the heights and depths of character and experience,
setting him thinking and wondering even in the midst of amusement. To
the most torpid and unobservant it exhibits the humorous in life and
the sparkle and finesse of language, which in dull ordinary existence
is stupidly shut out of knowledge or omitted from particular notice.
To all it uncurtains a world, not that in which they live and yet
not other than it--a world in which interest is heightened whilst the
conditions of truth are observed, in which the capabilities of men and
women are seen developed without losing their consistency to nature,
and developed with a curious and wholesome fidelity to simple and
universal instincts of clear right and wrong. Be it observed--and I
put it most uncompromisingly--I am not speaking or thinking of any
unrealizable ideal, not of any lofty imagination of what might be, but
of what is, wherever there are pit and gallery and foot-lights. More
or less, and taking one evening with another, you may find support
for an enthusiastic theory of stage morality and the high tone of
audiences in most theatres in the country; and if you fancy that it
is least so in the theatres frequented by the poor you make a great
mistake, for in none is the appreciation of good moral fare more
marked than in these.
In reference to the poorer classes, we all lament the wide prevalence
of intemperate drinking. Well, is it not an obvious reflection that
the worst performance seen on any of our stages cannot be so bad as
drinking for a corresponding time in a gin-palace? I have pointed this
contrast before, and I point it again. The drinking we deplore takes
place in company--bad company; it is enlivened by talk--bad talk. It
is relished by obscenity. Where drink and low people come together
these things must be. The worst that can come of stage pandering to
the corrupt tastes of its basest patrons cannot be anything like this,
and, as a rule, the stage holds out long against the invitation to
pander; and such invitations, from the publicity and decorum that
attend the whole matter, are neither frequent nor eager. A sort of
decency sets in upon the coarsest person in entering even the roughest
theatre. I have sometimes thought that, considering the liability to
descend and the facility of descent, a special Providence watches
over the morals and tone of our English stage. I do not desire to
overcharge the eulogy. There never was a time when the stage had not
conspicuous faults. There never was a time when these were not freely
admitted by those most concerned for the maintenance of the stage
at its best. In Shakespeare, whenever the subject of the theatre is
approached, we perceive signs that that great spirit, though it had
a practical and business-like vein, and essayed no impossible
enterprises, groaned under the necessities, or the demands of a
public which desired frivolities and deformities which jarred upon the
poet-manager's feelings. As we descend the course of time we find that
each generation looked back to a supposed previous period when taste
ranged higher, and when the inferior and offensive peculiarities of
the existing stage were unknown. Yet from most of these generations
we inherit works as well as traditions and biographical recollections
which the world will never let die. The truth is that the immortal
part of the stage is its nobler part. Ignoble accidents and interludes
come and go, but this lasts on forever. It lives, like the human soul,
in the body of humanity--associated with much that is inferior, and
hampered by many hindrances--but it never sinks into nothingness, and
never fails to find new and noble work in creations of permanent and
memorable excellence. Heaven forbid that I should seem to cover, even
with a counterpane of courtesy, exhibitions of deliberate immorality.
Happily this sort of thing is not common, and although it has hardly
been practised by any one who, without a strain of meaning can be
associated with the profession of acting, yet public censure, not
active enough to repress the evil, is ever ready to pass a sweeping
condemnation on the stage which harbors it. Our cause is a good one.
We go forth, armed with the luminous panoply which genius has forged
for us, to do battle with dulness, with coarseness, with apathy,
with every form of vice and evil. In every human heart there gleams
a bright reflection of this shining armor. The stage has no lights or
shadows that are not lights of life and shadows of the heart. To each
human consciousness it appeals in alternating mirth and sadness, and
will not be denied. Err it must, for it is human; but, being human, it
must endure. The love of acting is inherent in our nature. Watch your
children play, and you will see that almost their first conscious
effort is to act and to imitate. It is an instinct, and you can no
more repress it than you can extinguish thought. When this instinct
of all is developed by cultivation in the few, it becomes a wonderful
art, priceless to civilization in the solace it yields, the thought it
generates, the refinement it inspires. Some of its latest achievements
are not unworthy of their grandest predecessors. Some of its youngest
devotees are at least as proud of its glories and as anxious to
preserve them as any who have gone before. Theirs is a glorious
heritage! You honor it. They have a noble but a difficult, and
sometimes a disheartening, task. You encourage it. And no word of
kindly interest or criticism dropped in the public ear from friendly
lips goes unregarded or is unfertile of good. The universal study of
Shakespeare in our public schools is a splendid sign of the departure
of prejudice, and all criticism is welcome; but it is acting chiefly
that can open to others, with any spark of Shakespeare's mind, the
means of illuminating the world. Only the theatre can realize to us
in a life-like way what Shakespeare was to his own time. And it is,
indeed, a noble destiny for the theatre to vindicate in these later
days the greatness which sometimes it has seemed to vulgarize. It has
been too much the custom to talk of Shakespeare as nature's child--as
the lad who held horses for people who came to the play--as a sort of
chance phenomenon who wrote these plays by accident and unrecognized.
How supremely ridiculous! How utterly irreconcilable with the grand
dimensions of the man! How absurdly dishonoring to the great age of
which he was, and was known to be, the glory! The noblest literary
man of all time--the finest and yet most prolific writer--the greatest
student of man, and the greatest master of man's highest gift of
language--surely it is treason to humanity to speak of such an one as
in any sense a commonplace being! Imagine him rather, as he must
have been, the most notable courtier of the Court--the most perfect
gentleman who stood in the Elizabethan throng--the man in whose
presence divines would falter and hesitate lest their knowledge of
the Book should seem poor by the side of his, and at whom even queenly
royalty would look askance, with an oppressive sense that here was
one to whose omnipotent and true imagination the hearts of kings and
queens and peoples had always been an open page! The thought of such a
man is an incomparable inheritance for any nation, and such a man was
the actor--Shakespeare. Such is our birthright and yours. Such the
succession in which it is ours to labor and yours to enjoy. For
Shakespeare belongs to the stage for ever, and his glories must
always inalienably belong to it. If you uphold the theatre honestly,
liberally, frankly, and with wise discrimination, the stage will
uphold in future, as it has in the past, the literature, the manners,
the morals, the fame, and the genius of our country. There must have
been something wrong, as there was something poignant and lacerating,
in prejudices which so long partly divorced the conscience of Britain
from its noblest pride, and stamped with reproach, or at least
depreciation, some of the brightest and world-famous incidents of her
history. For myself, it kindles my heart with proud delight to
think that I have stood to-day before this audience--known for its
discrimination throughout all English-speaking lands--a welcome and
honored guest, because I stand here for justice to the art to which I
am devoted--because I stand here in thankfulness for the justice which
has begun to be so abundantly rendered to it. If it is metaphorically
the destiny of humanity, it is literally the experience of an actor,
that one man in his time plays many parts. A player of any standing
must at various times have sounded the gamut of human sensibility
from the lowest note to the top of its compass. He must have banqueted
often on curious food for thought as he meditated on the subtle
relations created between himself and his audiences, as they have
watched in his impersonations the shifting tariff--the ever gliding,
delicately graduated sliding-scale of dramatic right and wrong. He may
have gloated, if he be a cynic, over the depths of ghastly horror, or
the vagaries of moral puddle through which it may have been his
duty to plash. But if he be an honest man, he will acknowledge that
scarcely ever has either dramatist or management wilfully biassed the
effect of stage representation in favor of evil, and of his audiences
he will boast that never has their mind been doubtful--never has their
true perception of the generous and just been known to fail, or even
to be slow. How noble the privilege to work upon these finer--these
finest--feelings of universal humanity! How engrossing the fascination
of those thousands of steady eyes, and sound sympathies, and beating
hearts which an actor confronts, with the confidence of friendship
and co-operation, as he steps upon the stage to work out in action
his long-pent comprehension of a noble master-piece! How rapturous the
satisfaction of abandoning himself, in such a presence and with such
sympathizers, to his author's grandest flights of thought and noblest
bursts of emotional inspiration! And how perpetually sustaining
the knowledge that whatever may be the vicissitudes and even the
degradations of the stage, it must and will depend for its constant
hold on the affection and attention of mankind upon its loftier work;
upon its more penetrating passion; upon its themes which most deeply
search out the strong affections and high hopes of men and women;
upon its fit and kindling illustration of great and vivid lives
which either have been lived in noble fact or have deserved to endure
immortally in the popular belief and admiration which they have
secured.
"For our eyes to see!
Sons of wisdom, song, and power,
Giving earth her richest dower,
And making nations free--
A glorious company!
"Call them from the dead
For our eyes to see!
Forms of beauty, love, and grace,
'Sunshine in the shady place,'
That made it life to be--
A blessed company!"
ADDRESS
TO THE STUDENTS
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HARVARD
30TH MARCH 1885
THE ART OF ACTING
I.
THE OCCASION.
I am deeply sensible of the compliment that has been paid, not so much
to me personally as to the calling I represent, by the invitation to
deliver an address to the students of this University. As an actor,
and especially as an English actor, it is a great pleasure to speak
for my art in one of the chief centres of American culture; for in
inviting me here to-day you intended, I believe, to recognize the
drama as an educational influence, to show a genuine interest in the
stage as a factor in life which must be accepted and not ignored by
intelligent people. I have thought that the best use I can make of the
privilege you have conferred upon me is to offer you, as well as I
am able, something like a practical exposition of my art; for it
may chance--who knows?--that some of you may at some future time be
disposed to adopt it as a vocation. Not that I wish to be regarded
as a tempter who has come among you to seduce you from your present
studies by artful pictures of the fascinations of the footlights. But
I naturally supposed that you would like me to choose, as the theme of
my address, the subject in which I am most interested, and to which
my life has been devoted; and that if any students here should ever
determine to become actors, they could not be much the worse for
the information and counsel I could gather for them from a tolerably
extensive experience. This subject will, I trust, be welcome to all of
you who are interested in the stage as an institution which appeals
to the sober-minded and intelligent; for I take it that you have no
lingering prejudice against the theatre, or else I should not be
here. Nor are you disposed, like certain good people, to object to the
theatre simply as a name. These sticklers for principle would never
enter a playhouse for worlds; and I have heard that in a famous city
of Massachusetts, not a hundred miles from here, there are persons to
whom the theatre is unknown, but who have no objection to see a play
in a building which is called a museum, especially if the vestibule
leading to the theatre should be decorated with sound moral principles
in the shape of statues, pictures, and stuffed objects in glass cases.
When I began to think about my subject for the purpose of this
address, I was rather staggered by its vastness. It is really a matter
for a course of lectures; but as President Eliot has not proposed that
I should occupy a chair of dramatic literature in this University,
and as time and opportunity are limited, I can only undertake to put
before you, in the simplest way, a few leading ideas about dramatic
art which may be worthy of reflection. And in doing this I have the
great satisfaction of appearing in a model theatre, before a model
audience, and of being the only actor in my own play. Moreover, I am
stimulated by the atmosphere of the Greek drama, for I know that on
this stage you have enacted a Greek play with remarkable success. So,
after all, it is not a body of mere tyros that I am addressing, but
actors who have worn the sock and buskin, and declaimed the speeches
which delighted audiences two thousand years ago.
Now, this address, like discourses in a more solemn place, falls
naturally into divisions. I propose to speak first of the Art of
Acting; secondly, of its Requirements and Practice; and lastly of its
Rewards. And, at the outset, let me say that I want you to judge the
stage at its best. I do not intend to suggest that only the plays
of Shakespeare are tolerable in the theatre to people of taste
and intelligence. The drama has many forms--tragedy, comedy,
historical-pastoral, pastoral-comical--and all are good when their aim
is honestly artistic.
II.
THE ART OF ACTING.
Now, what is the art of acting? I speak of it in its highest sense, as
the art to which Roscius, Betterton, and Garrick owed their fame. It
is the art of embodying the poet's creations, of giving them flesh and
blood, of making the figures which appeal to your mind's eye in the
printed drama live before you on the stage. "To fathom the depths of
character, to trace its latent motives, to feel its finest quiverings
of emotion, to comprehend the thoughts that are hidden under words,
and thus possess one's-self of the actual mind of the individual
man"--such was Macready's definition of the player's art; and to this
we may add the testimony of Talma. He describes tragic acting as "the
union of grandeur without pomp and nature without triviality." It
demands, he says, the endowment of high sensibility and intelligence.
"The actor who possesses this double gift adopts a course of study
peculiar to himself. In the first place, by repeated exercises, he
enters deeply into the emotions, and his speech acquires the accent
proper to the situation of the personage he has to represent. This
done, he goes to the theatre not only to give theatrical effect to his
studies, but also to yield himself to the spontaneous flashes of his
sensibility and all the emotions which it involuntarily produces in
him. What does he then do? In order that his inspirations may not be
lost, his memory, in the silence of repose, recalls the accent of
his voice, the expression of his features, his action--in a word, the
spontaneous workings of his mind, which he had suffered to have
free course, and, in effect, everything which in the moments of
his exaltation contributed to the effects he had produced. His
intelligence then passes all these means in review, connecting
them and fixing them in his memory to re-employ them at pleasure in
succeeding representations. These impressions are often so evanescent
that on retiring behind the scenes he must repeat to himself what
he had been playing rather than what he had to play. By this kind of
labor the intelligence accumulates and preserves all the creations of
sensibility. It is by this means that at the end of twenty years (it
requires at least this length of time) a person destined to display
fine talent may at length present to the public a series of characters
acted almost to perfection."
You will readily understand from this that to the actor the well-worn
maxim that art is long and life is short has a constant significance.
The older we grow the more acutely alive we are to the difficulties of
our craft. I cannot give you a better illustration of this fact than a
story which is told of Macready. A friend of mine, once a dear friend
of his, was with him when he played Hamlet for the last time. The
curtain had fallen, and the great actor was sadly thinking that the
part he loved so much would never be his again. And as he took off his
velvet mantle and laid it aside, he muttered almost unconsciously
the words of Horatio, "Good-night, sweet Prince;" then turning to his
friend, "Ah," said he, "I am just beginning to realize the sweetness,
the tenderness, the gentleness of this dear Hamlet!" Believe me, the
true artist never lingers fondly upon what he has done. He is ever
thinking of what remains undone: ever striving toward an ideal it may
never be his fortune to attain.
We are sometimes told that to read the best dramatic poetry is more
educating than to see it acted. I do not think this theory is very
widely held, for it is in conflict with the dramatic instinct, which
everybody possesses in a greater or less degree. You never met a
playwright who could conceive himself willing--even if endowed with
the highest literary gifts--to prefer a reading to a playgoing
public. He thinks his work deserving of all the rewards of print and
publisher, but he will be much more elated if it should appeal to the
world in the theatre as a skilful representation of human passions.
In one of her letters George Eliot says: "In opposition to most people
who love to _read_ Shakespeare, I like to see his plays acted better
than any others; his great tragedies thrill me, let them be acted
how they may." All this is so simple and intelligible, that it seems
scarcely worth while to argue that in proportion to the readiness with
which the reader of Shakespeare imagines the attributes of the various
characters, and is interested in their personality, he will, as a
rule, be eager to see their tragedy or comedy in action. He will then
find that very much which he could not imagine with any definiteness
presents new images every moment--the eloquence of look and gesture,
the by-play, the inexhaustible significance of the human voice. There
are people who fancy they have more music in their souls than was ever
translated into harmony by Beethoven or Mozart. There are others who
think they could paint pictures, write poetry--in short, do anything,
if they only made the effort. To them what is accomplished by the
practised actor seems easy and simple. But as it needs the skill of
the musician to draw the full volume of eloquence from the written
score, so it needs the skill of the dramatic artist to develop the
subtle harmonies of the poetic play. In fact, to _do_ and not to
_dream_, is the mainspring of success in life. The actor's art is to
act, and the true acting of any character is one of the most difficult
accomplishments. I challenge the acute student to ponder over Hamlet's
renunciation of Ophelia--one of the most complex scenes in all the
drama--and say that he has learned more from his meditations than he
could be taught by players whose intelligence is equal to his own. To
present the man thinking aloud is the most difficult achievement of
our art. Here the actor who has no real grip of the character, but
simply recites the speeches with a certain grace and intelligence,
will be untrue. The more intent he is upon the words, and the less
on the ideas that dictated them, the more likely he is to lay himself
open to the charge of mechanical interpretation. It is perfectly
possible to express to an audience all the involutions of thought,
the speculation, doubt, wavering, which reveal the meditative but
irresolute mind. As the varying shades of fancy pass and repass the
mirror of the face, they may yield more material to the studious
playgoer than he is likely to get by a diligent poring over the
text. In short, as we understand the people around us much better by
personal intercourse than by all the revelations of written words--for
words, as Tennyson says, "half reveal and half conceal the soul
within," so the drama has, on the whole, infinitely more suggestions
when it is well acted than when it is interpreted by the unaided
judgment of the student. It has been said that acting is an unworthy
occupation because it represents feigned emotions, but this censure
would apply with equal force to poet or novelist. Do not imagine that
I am claiming for the actor sole and undivided authority. He should
himself be a student, and it is his business to put into practice
the best ideas he can gather from the general current of thought with
regard to the highest dramatic literature. But it is he who gives body
to those ideas--fire, force, and sensibility, without which they would
remain for most people mere airy abstractions.
It is often supposed that great actors trust to the inspiration of the
moment. Nothing can be more erroneous. There will, of course, be such
moments, when an actor at a white heat illumines some passage with
a flash of imagination (and this mental condition, by the way, is
impossible to the student sitting in his arm-chair); but the great
actor's surprises are generally well weighed, studied, and balanced.
We know that Edmund Kean constantly practised before a mirror effects
which startled his audience by their apparent spontaneity. It is the
accumulation of such effects which enables an actor, after many years,
to present many great characters with remarkable completeness.
I do not want to overstate the case, or to appeal to anything that is
not within common experience, so I can confidently ask you whether a
scene in a great play has not been at some time vividly impressed on
your minds by the delivery of a single line, or even of one forcible
word. Has not this made the passage far more real and human to you
than all the thought you have devoted to it? An accomplished critic
has said that Shakespeare himself might have been surprised had he
heard the "Fool, fool, fool!" of Edmund Kean. And though all actors
are not Keans, they have in varying degree this power of making a
dramatic character step out of the page, and come nearer to our hearts
and our understandings.
After all, the best and most convincing exposition of the whole art
of acting is given by Shakespeare himself: "To hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."
Thus the poet recognized the actor's art as a most potent ally in the
representation of human life. He believed that to hold the mirror up
to nature was one of the worthiest functions in the sphere of labor,
and actors are content to point to his definition of their work as the
charter of their privileges.
III.
PRACTICE OF THE ART.