Waxworks May Deceive for a Moment,
But They Do Not Leave the Lasting
Impression of Michelangelo's Moses.
Otis Skinner, the actor, recently made a plea for the teaching of dramatic
art in our public schools and colleges. In that way, he urged, public
taste can be improved to the point where a better quality of plays and
acting will be required to fill the theaters. He was speaking before the
Ethical Culture Society, in New York. In beginning he explained at some
length what he considered art, drawing his distinctions very carefully:
The purpose of the play is to hold a mirror up to nature,
although such things as horror, meanness, lust, or crime
must not be shown for their sake alone, merely to display
accurate dramatic photographs. They must be utilized toward
a definite end. The stage has many detractors, and among
them are the ones that say the stage does not represent real
life always. Nor should it. I will give you a definition of
art which I got from Dr. Adler. It explains what I mean:
"Art is the pattern, and not so many ells cut from the
fabric of life."
Some years ago in London I went to Mme. Tussaud's waxworks.
Curious to identify the figures, I turned to a lady and
asked her where I might obtain a program. There was no
answer. I became embarrassed and a little angry when I saw I
was the subject of amusement for the crowd. I looked closer.
The lady was made of wax. Well, I don't remember how she
looked, but I do remember every line of the beauties of the
Venus of Milo, which I saw in the Louvre, and of
Michelangelo's Moses. I did not consider them figures or
real persons, yet they live with me.
The charge that the theater gives too much attention to vice was discussed
by Mr. Skinner. When used on the stage to heighten the dramatic effect,
the simulation of drunkenness, he said, is ethically right. "Mrs. Warren's
Profession," he declared flatly, was quite properly suppressed, since
there was no reason for it except the exhibition of vice. False and
namby-pamby melodrama, on the other hand, is fully as detrimental to
dramatic art.
He outlined the plot of a play in which a poor young man, after rescuing
the daughter of a multimillionaire by a feat of virtually impossible
agility and strength, is promptly provided for by the thankful parent, and
marries the girl.
The story, as he told it, was glaringly untrue to life--wherefore he
denounced it as immoral. It represented the extreme of romantic falsity,
just as "Mrs. Warren's Profession" represented the extreme of disgustingly
literal reality.
In art no extreme is acceptable--a lesson which the Greeks, with their
supreme intuition of artistic fitness, taught the world once and for all.