young person without previous experience or training can make an
immediate (and sometimes lasting) effect upon the stage, whereas in
the preparation for any other art (even the interpretative arts) years
of training are necessary. This premise is full of holes; nevertheless
George Moore, and Messrs. Nathan and Sherwin all cling to it. It is
true that almost any young girl, moderately gifted with charm or
comeliness, may make an instantaneous impression on our stage,
especially in the namby-pamby roles which our playwrights usually give
her to play. But she is soon found out. She may still attract
audiences (as George Barr McCutcheon and Alma Tadema still attract
audiences) but the discerning part of the public will take no joy in
seeing her. Charles Frohman said (and he ought to know) that the
average life of a female star on the American stage was ten years; in
other words, her career continued as long as her youth and physical
charms remained potent.
We have easily accounted for the unimportant actors, the rank and
file, but what about those who immediately claim positions which they
hold in spite of their lack of previous training? These are rarer. At
the moment, indeed, I cannot think of any. For while genius often
manifests itself early in a career, the great actors, as a rule, have
struggled for many years to learn the rudiments of their art before
they have given indisputable proof of their greatness, or before they
have been recognized. "Real acting," according to Percy Fitzgerald,
"is a science, to be studied and mastered, as other sciences are
studied and mastered, by long years of training." They may not have
had the strenuous Conservatoire and Theatre Francais training of Sarah
Bernhardt. As a matter of fact, indeed, the actor may far better learn
to handle his tools by manipulating them before an audience, than by
practicing with them for too long a time in the closet. The technique
of violin playing can best be acquired before the _virtuoso_ appears
in public, although no amount of training in itself will make a great
violinist, but the basic elements of acting, grace, diction, etc., can
just as well be acquired behind the footlights and so many great
actors have acquired them, as many of the greatest have ignored them.
There can be no hard and fast rules laid down for this sort of thing.
Can we thank nine months with Mme. Marchesi for the instantaneous
success and subsequent brilliant career of Mme. Melba? Against this
training offset the years and years of road playing and the more years
of study at home in retirement to account for the career of Mrs.
Fiske. The Australian soprano was born with a naturally-placed and
flexible voice. Her shake is said to have been perfection when she was
a child; her scale was even; her intonation impeccable. She had very
little to learn except the roles in the operas she was to sing and her
future was very clearly marked from the night she made her debut as
Gilda in _Rigoletto_. Mme. Patti was equally gifted. Mme. Pasta and
Mme. Fremstad, on the other hand, toiled very slowly towards fame. The
former singer was an absolute failure when she first appeared in
London and it took several years of hard work to make her the greatest
lyric artist of her day. The great Jenny Lind retired from the stage
completely defeated, only to return as the most popular singer of her
time. Mischa Elman has told me he never practices; Leo Ornstein, on
the other hand, spends hours every day at the piano. Mozart sprang,
full-armed with genius, into the world. He began composing at the age
of four. No training was necessary for him, but Beethoven and Wagner
developed slowly. In the field of writers there are even more happy
examples. Hundreds of boys have spent years in theme and literature
courses in college preparing in vain for a future which was never to
be theirs, while other youths with no educations have taken to writing
as a cat takes to cat-nip. Should we assume that the annual output of
Professor Baker's class at Harvard produces better playwrights than
Moliere or Shakespeare, neither of whom enjoyed Professor Baker's
lectures, nor, I think I am safe in conjecturing, anything like them?
What, after all, constitutes training? For a creative or
interpretative genius mere existence seems to be sufficient. Joseph
Conrad, Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov, and Patrick MacGill all were sailors
for many years before they began to write. We owe "Youth" and the
first section of _Scheherazade_ to this accident. MacGill also had the
privilege of digging potatoes; he writes about it in "The Rat-pit."
Mrs. Patrick Campbell learned enough about how to move about and how
to speak in the country houses she frequented before she began her
professional career to enable her immediately to take a position of
importance on the stage. It does not seem necessary, indeed, that the
training for any career should be prescribed or systematic. Some men
get their training one way and some another. A school of acting may be
of the greatest benefit to A, while B will not profit by it. Some
actors are ruined by stock companies; others are improved by them. The
geniuses in this interpretative art as in all the other interpretative
and creative arts, seem to rise above obstructions, and to make
themselves felt, whatever difficulties are put in their way.
Some great actors, like some great musicians and authors, create out
of their fulness. They cannot explain; they do not need to study;
they create by instinct. Others, like Beethoven and Olive Fremstad,
work and rework their material in the closet until it approaches
perfection, when they expose it. To say that there are bad actors
following in the footsteps of both these types of geniuses is to be
axiomatic and trite. It would be a foregone conclusion. Just as there
are musicians who write as easily as Mozart but who have nothing to
say, so there are other musicians who write and rewrite, work and
rework, study and restudy, and yet what they finally offer the public
has not the quality or the force or the inspiration of a common
gutter-ballad.
It has also been urged in print that as naturalness is the goal of the
actor he should never have to strive for it. The names of Frank
Reicher and John Drew are often mentioned as those of men who "play
themselves" on the stage. A most difficult thing to do! Also an
unfortunate choice of names. Each of these artists has undergone a
long and arduous apprenticeship in order to achieve the natural method
which has given him eminence in his career. Indeed, of all the
qualities of the actor this is the least easy to acquire.
Actors are often condemned because they are not versatile. Versatility
is undoubtedly an admirable quality in an actor, valuable, especially
to his manager, but hardly an essential one. An artist is not
required to do more than one thing well. Vladimir de Pachmann
specializes in Chopin playing, but Arthur Symons once wrote that "he
is the greatest living pianist, because he can play certain things
better than any other pianist can play anything." Should we not allot
similar approval to the actor or actress who makes a fine effect in
one part or in one kind of part? I should not call Ellen Terry a
versatile actress, but I should call her a great artist. Marie Tempest
is not versatile, unless she should be so designated for having made
equal successes on the lyric and dramatic stages, but she is one of
the most satisfying artists at present appearing before our public.
Mallarme was not versatile; Cezanne was not versatile; nor was Thomas
Love Peacock. Mascagni, assuredly, is not versatile. The da Vincis and
Wagners are rare figures in the history of creative art just as the
Nijinskys and Rachels are rare in the history of interpretative art.
Someone may say that the great actor dies while the play goes
thundering on through the ages on the stage and in everyman's library.
This very point, indeed, is made by Mr. Lewes. But this, alas, is the
reverse of the truth. We have competent and immensely absorbing
records of the lives and art of David Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Ristori,
Clairon, Rachel, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth, and other prominent
players, while most of the plays in which they appeared are not only
no longer actable, but also no longer readable. The brothers de
Goncourt, for example, wrote an account of Clairon which is a book of
the first interest, while I defy any one to get through two pages of
most of the fustian she was compelled to act! The reason for this is
very easily formulated. Great acting is human and universal. It is
eternal in its appeal and its memory is easily kept alive while
playwrighting is largely a matter of fashion, and appeals to the mob
of men and women who never read and who are more interested in police
news than they are in poetry. George Broadhurst or Henry Bernstein or
Arthur Wing Pinero, or others like them, have always been the popular
playwrights; a few names like Sophocles, Terence, Moliere,
Shakespeare, and Ibsen come rolling down to us, but they are precious
and few.
A great actor, indeed, can put life into perfectly wooden material. In
the case of Sarah Bernhardt, who was the creator, the actress or
Sardou? In the case of Henry Irving, who was the creator, the actor or
the authors of _The Bells_ and _Faust_ (not, in this instance,
Goethe)? Is Langdon Mitchell's version of "Vanity Fair" sufficiently
a work of art to exist without the co-operation of Mrs. Fiske? When
Duse electrified her audiences in such plays as _The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray_ and _Fedora_, were the dramatists responsible for the
effect? Arthur Symons says of her in the latter play, "A great
actress, who is also a great intelligence, is seen accepting it, for
its purpose, with contempt, as a thing to exercise her technical skill
upon." One reads of Mrs. Siddone that she could move a roomful of
people to tears merely by repeating the word "hippopotamus" with
varying stress. Should we thank the behemoth for this miracle?
Any one who understands, great acting knows that it is illumination.
There are those who are born to throw light on the creations of the
poets, just as there are others born to be poets. These interpreters
give a new life to the works of the masters, AEschylus, Congreve,
Tchekhov. When, as more frequently happens, they are called upon to
play mediocre parts it is with their own personal force, their
atmospheric aura that they create something more than the author
himself ever intended or dreamed of. How could Joseph Jefferson play
_Rip Van Winkle_ for thirty years (or longer) with scenery in tatters
and a company of mummers which Corse Payton would have scorned? Was
it because of the greatness of the play? If that were true, why is not
some one else performing this drama today to large audiences? Has any
one read the Joseph Jefferson acting version of _Rip Van Winkle_? Who
wrote it? Don't you think it rather extraordinary that a play which
apparently has given so much pleasure, and in which Jefferson was
hailed as a great actor by every contemporary critic of note, as is in
itself so little known? It is not extraordinary. It was Jefferson's
performance of the title role which gave vitality to the play.
Of course, there are few actors who have this power, few great actors.
What else could you expect? A critic might prove that playwriting was
not an art on the majority of the evidence. Almost all the music
composed in America could be piled up to prove that music was not an
art. Should we say that there is no art of painting because the
Germans have no great painters?
At present, however, it is quite possible for any one in New York with
car or taxi-cab fare to see one of the greatest of living actresses.
She is not playing on Broadway. This actress has never been to
dramatic school; she has not had the advantages of Alla Nazimova, who
has worked with at least one fine stage director. She was simply born
a genius, that is all; she has perfected her art by appearing in a
great variety of parts, the method of Edwin Booth. Most of these parts
happen to be in masterpieces of the drama. She is not unaccustomed to
playing _Zaza_ one evening and d'Annunzio's _Francesca da Rimini_ the
next. Her repertory further includes _La Dame aux Camelias_, _Hamlet_,
_Romeo and Juliet_, _La Figlia di Iorio_, Giuseppe Giacosa's _Come le
Foglie_, Sicilian folk-plays, and plays by Arturo Giovannitti. When I
first saw Mimi Aguglia she was little more than a crude force, a great
struggling light, that sometimes illuminated, nay often blinded, but
which shone in unequal flashes. Experience has made of her an actress
who is almost unfailing in her effect. If you asked her about the
technique of her art she would probably smile (as Mozart and Schubert
might have done before her); if you asked her about her method she
would not understand you ... but she understands the art of acting.
Watch her, for instance, in the second act of _Zaza_, in the scene in
which the music hall singer discovers that her lover has a wife and
child. No heroics, no shrieks, no conventional posturings and
shruggings and sobbing ... something far worse she exposes to us, a
nameless terror. She stands with her back against a table, nonchalant
and smilingly defiant, unwilling to return to the music hall with her
former partner, but pleasantly jocular in her refusal. Stung into
anger, he hurls his last bomb. Zaza is smoking. As she listens to the
cruel words the corner of her mouth twitches, the cigarette almost
falls. That is all. There is a moment's silence unbroken save by the
heartbeats of her spectators. Even the babies which mothers bring in
abundance to the Italian theatre are quiet. With that esoteric
magnetism with which great artists are possessed she holds the
audience captive by this simple gesture. I could continue to point out
other astounding details in this impersonation, but not one of them,
perhaps, would illustrate Aguglia's art as does this one. If no
training is necessary to produce effects of this kind, I would
pronounce acting the most holy of the arts, for then, surely, it is a
direct gift from God.
_September 5, 1917._
III
The New Isadora
_"We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,
Thou art noble and nude and antique;"_
Swinburne's "Dolores."
I have a fine memory of a chance description flung off by some one at
a dinner in Paris; a picture of the youthful Isadora Duncan in her
studio in New York developing her ideals through sheer will and
preserving the contour of her feet by wearing carpet slippers. The
latter detail stuck in my memory. It may or may not be true, but it
could have been, _should_ have been true. The incipient dancer keeping
her feet pure for her coming marriage with her art is a subject for
philosophic dissertation or for poetry. There are many poets who would
have seized on this idea for an ode or even a sonnet, had it occurred
to them. Oscar Wilde would have liked this excuse for a poem ... even
Robert Browning, who would have woven many moral strophes from this
text.... It would have furnished Mr. George Moore with material for
another story for the volume called "Celibates." Walter Pater might
have dived into some very beautiful, but very conscious, prose with
this theme as a spring-board. Huysmans would have found this
suggestion sufficient inspiration for a romance the length of
"Clarissa Harlowe." You will remember that the author of "En Route"
meditated writing a novel about a man who left his house to go to his
office. Perceiving that his shoes have not been polished he stops at a
boot-black's and during the operation he reviews his affairs. The
problem was to make 300 pages of this!... Lombroso would have added
the detail to his long catalogue in "The Man of Genius" as another
proof of the insanity of artists. Georges Feydeau would have found
therein enough matter for a three-act farce and d'Annunzio for a
poetic drama which he might have dedicated to "Isadora of the
beautiful feet." Sermons might be preached from the text and many
painters would touch the subject with reverence. Manet might have
painted Isadora with one of the carpet slippers half depending from a
bare, rosy-white foot.
There are many fables concerning the beginning of Isadora's career.
One has it that the original dance in bare feet was an accident....
Isadora was laving her feet in an upper chamber when her hostess
begged her to dance for her other guests. Just as she was she
descended and met with such approval that thenceforth her feet
remained bare. This is a pretty tale, but it has not the fine ring of
truth of the story of the carpet slippers. There had been bare-foot
dancers before Isadora; there had been, I venture to say, discinct
"Greek dancers." Isadora's contribution to her art is spiritual; it is
her feeling for the idea of the dance which isolates her from her
contemporaries. Many have overlooked this essential fact in attempting
to account for her obvious importance. Her imitators (and has any
other interpretative artist ever had so many?) have purloined her
costumes, her gestures, her steps; they have put the music of
Beethoven and Schubert to new uses as she had done before them; they
have unbound their hair and freed their feet; but the essence of her
art, the _spirit_, they have left in her keeping; they could not well
do otherwise.
Inspired perhaps by Greek phrases, by the superb collection of Greek
vases in the old Pinakotheck in Munich, Isadora cast the knowledge she
had gleaned of the dancer's training from her. At least she forced it
to be subservient to her new wishes. She flung aside her memory of the
entrechat and the pirouette, the studied technique of the ballet; but
in so doing she unveiled her own soul. She called her art the
renaissance of the Greek ideal but there was something modern about
it, pagan though it might be in quality. Always it was pure and
sexless ... always abstract emotion has guided her interpretations.
In the beginning she danced to the piano music of Chopin and Schubert.
Eleven years ago I saw her in Munich in a program of Schubert
_impromptus_ and Chopin _preludes_ and _mazurkas_. A year or two later
she was dancing in Paris to the accompaniment of the Colonne
Orchestra, a good deal of the music of Gluck's _Orfeo_ and the very
lovely dances from _Iphigenie en Aulide_. In these she remained
faithful to her original ideal, the beauty of abstract movement, the
rhythm of exquisite gesture. This was not sense echoing sound but
rather a very delightful confusion of her own mood with that of the
music.
So a new grace, a new freedom were added to the dance; in her later
representations she has added a third quality, strength. Too, her
immediate interpretations often suggest concrete images.... A
passionate patriotism for one of her adopted countries is at the root
of her fiery miming of the _Marseillaise_, a patriotism apparently as
deep-rooted, certainly as inflaming, as that which inspired Rachel in
her recitation of this hymn during the Paris revolution of 1848. In
times of civil or international conflagration the dancer, the actress
often play important roles in world politics. Malvina Cavalazzi, the
Italian _ballerina_ who appeared at the Academy of Music during the
Eighties and who married Charles Mapleson, son of the impressario,
once told me of a part she had played in the making of United Italy.
During the Austrian invasion the Italian flag was _verboten_. One
night, however, during a representation of opera in a town the name of
which I have forgotten, Mme. Cavalazzi wore a costume of green and
white, while her male companion wore red, so that in the _pas de deux_
which concluded the ballet they formed automatically a semblance of
the Italian banner. The audience was raised to a hysterical pitch of
enthusiasm and rushed from the theatre in a violent mood, which
resulted in an immediate encounter with the Austrians and their
eventual expulsion from the city.
Isadora's pantomimic interpretation of the _Marseillaise_, given in
New York before the United States had entered the world war, aroused
as vehement and excited an expression of enthusiasm as it would be
possible for an artist to awaken in our theatre today. The audiences
stood up and scarcely restrained their impatience to cheer. At the
previous performances in Paris, I am told, the effect approached the
incredible.... In a robe the colour of blood she stands enfolded; she
sees the enemy advance; she feels the enemy as it grasps her by the
throat; she kisses her flag; she tastes blood; she is all but crushed
under the weight of the attack; and then she rises, triumphant, with
the terrible cry, _Aux armes, citoyens!_ Part of her effect is gained
by gesture, part by the massing of her body, but the greater part by
facial expression. In the anguished appeal she does not make a sound,
beyond that made by the orchestra, but the hideous din of a hundred
raucous voices seems to ring in our ears. We see Felicien Rops's
_Vengeance_ come to life; we see the _sans-culottes_ following the
carts of the aristocrats on the way to execution ... and finally we
see the superb calm, the majestic flowing strength of the Victory of
Samothrace.... At times, legs, arms, a leg or an arm, the throat, or
the exposed breast assume an importance above that of the rest of the
mass, suggesting the unfinished sculpture of Michael Angelo, an
aposiopesis which, of course, served as Rodin's inspiration.
In the _Marche Slav_ of Tschaikovsky Isadora symbolizes her conception
of the Russian moujik rising from slavery to freedom. With her hands
bound behind her back, groping, stumbling, head-bowed, knees bent, she
struggles forward, clad only in a short red garment that barely covers
her thighs. With furtive glances of extreme despair she peers above
and ahead. When the strains of _God Save the Czar_ are first heard in
the orchestra she falls to her knees and you see the peasant
shuddering under the blows of the knout. The picture is a tragic one,
cumulative in its horrific details. Finally comes the moment of
release and here Isadora makes one of her great effects. She does not
spread her arms apart with a wide gesture. She brings them forward
slowly and we observe with horror that they have practically forgotten
how to move at all! They are crushed, these hands, crushed and
bleeding after their long serfdom; they are not hands at all but
claws, broken, twisted piteous claws! The expression of frightened,
almost uncomprehending, joy with which Isadora concludes the march is
another stroke of her vivid imaginative genius.
In her third number inspired by the Great War, the _Marche Lorraine_
of Louis Ganne, in which is incorporated the celebrated _Chanson
Lorraine_, Isadora with her pupils, symbolizes the gaiety of the
martial spirit. It is the spirit of the cavalry riding gaily with
banners waving in the wind; the infantry marching to an inspired
tune. There is nothing of the horror of war or revolution in this
picture ... only the brilliancy and dash of war ... the power and the
glory!