A veteran who has been regaling the readers of _The Times_ with his
recollections of the London stage has dropped by the way a remark on
modern theatrical criticism. For it, he says, “the play is everything,
and the leading actor or actress has often to be content with a few
lines.” Dean Gaisford began a sermon, “Saint Paul says, and I partly
agree with him.” I partly agree with the veteran. Criticism has
occasionally to deal with plays that cannot be “everything” for it.
There are new plays that are merely a vehicle for the art of the actor,
who must then get more than a few lines. There are old plays revived to
show a new actor in a classic part, and the part is then greater than
the whole. This, I think, accounts for “the space devoted to the acting
in London criticisms at the time Henry Irving rose to fame.” Either he
appeared in new plays of little intrinsic merit, like _The Bells_, or
else in classic parts of melodrama (made classic by Frédéric Lemaître)
or of Shakespeare. In these conditions criticism must always gravitate
towards the acting. It did so, long before Irving’s time, with Hazlitt
over Edmund Kean. It has done so, since Irving’s time, over Sarah and
Duse, and must do so again over every new Shylock or Millamant or Sir
Peter.
But these conditions are exceptional, and it is well for the drama that
they are. For the vitality of the drama primarily depends not upon the
talent of its interpreters but on that of its creators, and a new image
or new transposition of life in a form appropriate to the theatre is more
important than the perfection of the human instrument by which it is
“made flesh.” If criticism, then, has of late years and on the whole been
able to devote more attention to the play than to the playing, I suggest
to our veteran that the fact is a healthy sign for our drama. It shows
that there have been plays to criticise and that criticism has done its
duty.
But that, I hasten to add, is its luck rather than its merit. One must
not ride the high ethical horse, and I should be sorry to suggest that
good criticism is ever written from a sense of duty, any more than a
good play or any other piece of good literature. Good criticism is
written just because the critic feels like that—and bad, it may be
added, generally because the critic has been trying to write something
which he supposes other people will feel like. The good critic writes
with his temperament—and here is a reason why, in the long run, plays
will interest him more than players. For are we not all agreed about the
first principle of criticism? Is it not to put yourself in the place of
the artist criticized, to adopt his point of view, to recreate his work
within yourself? Well, the critic can put himself in the place of the
playwright much more readily than into that of the actor. The playwright
and he are working in different ways, with much the same material, ideas,
and images, or, if you like, concepts and intuitions mainly expressed
in words—which is only a long way of saying that they are both authors.
And they have in common the literary temperament. Now the literary
temperament and the histrionic are two very different things.
The actor, as his very name imports, is an active man, a man of action.
At his quietest, he perambulates the stage. But violent physical exercise
is a part of his trade. He fights single combats, jumps into open graves,
plunges into lakes, is swallowed down in quicksands, sharpens knives on
the sole of his boot, deftly catches jewel caskets thrown from upper
windows, wrestles with heavy-weight champions, knouts or is knouted,
stabs or is stabbed, rolls headlong down staircases, writhes in the
agonies of poison, and is (or at any rate in the good old days was)
kicked, pinched, and pummelled out of the limelight by the “star.” And
all this under the handicap of grease-paint and a wig! It must be very
fatiguing. But then he enjoys the physical advantages of an active life.
He has Sir Willoughby Patterne’s leg (under trousers that never bag at
the knee, and terminating in boots of the shiniest patent leather), and
all the rest to match. As becomes a man of action, he is no reader. I
have heard the late Mr. Henry Neville declare that an actor should never
be allowed to look at a book. This may seem to the rest of us a sad fate
for him, but look at his compensations! He spends much, if not most, of
his stage-life making love to pretty women, wives, widows, or _ingénues_.
Frequently he kisses them, or seems to—for he will tell you, the rogue,
that stage-kisses are always delivered in the air. Let us say then that
he is often within an inch of kissing a pretty woman—which is already a
considerable privilege. When he is not kissing her (or the air, as the
case may be), he is sentimentally bidding her to a nunnery go or dying in
picturesque agonies at her feet. Anyhow he goes through his work in the
society and with the active co-operation of pretty women. And note, for
it is an enormous advantage to him, that that work is a fixed, settled
thing. His words have been invented for him and written out in advance.
He has rehearsed his actions. He knows precisely what he is going to do.
Contrast with this alluring picture the temperament and working habits
of the critic. He is a man, not of action, but of contemplation. His
pursuit is sedentary, and with his life of forced inaction he risks
becoming as fat as Mr. Gibbon, without the alleviation of the Gibbonian
style. Personal advantages are not aids to composition, and he may be
the ugliest man in London, like G. H. Lewes, whose dramatic criticisms,
nevertheless, may still be read with pleasure. His fingers are inky. His
face is not “made up,” but sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
No pretty women help him to write his criticisms. Indeed, if Helen of
Troy herself, or Aphrodite new-risen from the sea came into his study he
would cry out with writer’s petulance (a far more prevalent and insidious
disease than writer’s cramp), “Oh, do please go away! Can’t you see I’m
not yet through my second slip?” (She will return when he is out, and
“tidy up” his desk for him—a really fiendish revenge). Books, forbidden
to the actor, are the critic’s solace—and also his despair, because they
have said all the good things and taken the bread out of his mouth. And,
unlike the actor, he is working in the unknown. His head is filled with
a chaos of half-formed ideas and the transient embarrassed phantoms of
logical developments. Will he ever be able to sort them out and to give
them at any rate a specious appearance of continuity? Nay, can he foresee
the beginning of his next sentence, or even finish this one? Thus he is
perpetually on the rack. “Luke’s iron crown and Damien’s bed of steel”
are nothing to it. It is true that his criticism does, mysteriously, get
itself completed—mysteriously, because he seems to have been no active
agent in it, but a mere looker-on while it somehow wrote itself.
Is it surprising that it should generally write itself about the play
(which, I daresay, writes itself, too, and with the same tormenting
anxiety) rather than about the playing, which proceeds from so different
a temperament from the critic’s and operates in conditions so alien from
his? But, let me add for the comfort of our veteran, there are critics
and critics. If some of us displease him by too often sparing only a few
lines for the leading actor or actress, there will always be plenty of
others who are more interested in persons than in ideas and images, who
care less for transpositions of life than for Sarah’s golden voice and
Duse’s limp, and “Quin’s high plume and Oldfield’s petticoat.” These will
redress the balance.