I
Perhaps the clothes question is exhausted, philosophically. I cannot
but regret that the Poet of the Breakfast-Table, who appears to have
an uncontrollable penchant for saying the things you would like to
say yourself, has alluded to the anachronism of "Sir Coeur de Lion
Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain gray suit."
A great many scribblers have felt the disadvantage of writing after
Montaigne; and it is impossible to tell how much originality in others
Dr. Holmes has destroyed in this country. In whist there are some men
you always prefer to have on your left hand, and I take it that
this intuitive essayist, who is so alert to seize the few remaining
unappropriated ideas and analogies in the world, is one of them.
No doubt if the Plantagenets of this day were required to dress in a
suit of chain-armor and wear iron pots on their heads, they would be as
ridiculous as most tragedy actors on the stage. The pit which recognizes
Snooks in his tin breastplate and helmet laughs at him, and Snooks
himself feels like a sheep; and when the great tragedian comes
on, shining in mail, dragging a two-handed sword, and mouths the
grandiloquence which poets have put into the speech of heroes, the
dress-circle requires all its good-breeding and its feigned love of the
traditionary drama not to titter.
If this sort of acting, which is supposed to have come down to us from
the Elizabethan age, and which culminated in the school of the Keans,
Kembles, and Siddonses, ever had any fidelity to life, it must have
been in a society as artificial as the prose of Sir Philip Sidney. That
anybody ever believed in it is difficult to think, especially when we
read what privileges the fine beaux and gallants of the town took behind
the scenes and on the stage in the golden days of the drama. When a part
of the audience sat on the stage, and gentlemen lounged or reeled across
it in the midst of a play, to speak to acquaintances in the audience,
the illusion could not have been very strong.
Now and then a genius, like Rachel as Horatia, or Hackett as
Falstaff, may actually seem to be the character assumed by virtue of a
transforming imagination, but I suppose the fact to be that getting
into a costume, absurdly antiquated and remote from all the habits and
associations of the actor, largely accounts for the incongruity and
ridiculousness of most of our modern acting. Whether what is called the
"legitimate drama" ever was legitimate we do not know, but the advocates
of it appear to think that the theatre was some time cast in a
mould, once for all, and is good for all times and peoples, like the
propositions of Euclid. To our eyes the legitimate drama of to-day is
the one in which the day is reflected, both in costume and speech, and
which touches the affections, the passions, the humor, of the present
time. The brilliant success of the few good plays that have been written
out of the rich life which we now live--the most varied, fruitful, and
dramatically suggestive--ought to rid us forever of the buskin-fustian,
except as a pantomimic or spectacular curiosity.
We have no objection to Julius Caesar or Richard III. stalking about in
impossible clothes, and stepping four feet at a stride, if they want to,
but let them not claim to be more "legitimate" than "Ours" or "Rip Van
Winkle." There will probably be some orator for years and years to come,
at every Fourth of July, who will go on asking, Where is Thebes? but
he does not care anything about it, and he does not really expect an
answer. I have sometimes wished I knew the exact site of Thebes, so that
I could rise in the audience, and stop that question, at any rate. It is
legitimate, but it is tiresome.
If we went to the bottom of this subject, I think we should find that
the putting upon actors clothes to which they are unaccustomed makes
them act and talk artificially, and often in a manner intolerable.
An actor who has not the habits or instincts of a gentleman cannot be
made to appear like one on the stage by dress; he only caricatures and
discredits what he tries to represent; and the unaccustomed clothes and
situation make him much more unnatural and insufferable than he would
otherwise be. Dressed appropriately for parts for which he is fitted,
he will act well enough, probably. What I mean is, that the clothes
inappropriate to the man make the incongruity of him and his part more
apparent. Vulgarity is never so conspicuous as in fine apparel, on or
off the stage, and never so self-conscious. Shall we have, then, no
refined characters on the stage? Yes; but let them be taken by men
and women of taste and refinement and let us have done with this
masquerading in false raiment, ancient and modern, which makes nearly
every stage a travesty of nature and the whole theatre a painful
pretension. We do not expect the modern theatre to be a place of
instruction (that business is now turned over to the telegraphic
operator, who is making a new language), but it may give amusement
instead of torture, and do a little in satirizing folly and kindling
love of home and country by the way.
This is a sort of summary of what we all said, and no one in particular
is responsible for it; and in this it is like public opinion. The
Parson, however, whose only experience of the theatre was the endurance
of an oratorio once, was very cordial in his denunciation of the stage
altogether.
MANDEVILLE. Yet, acting itself is delightful; nothing so entertains
us as mimicry, the personation of character. We enjoy it in private.
I confess that I am always pleased with the Parson in the character of
grumbler. He would be an immense success on the stage. I don't know but
the theatre will have to go back into the hands of the priests, who once
controlled it.
THE PARSON. Scoffer!
MANDEVILLE. I can imagine how enjoyable the stage might be, cleared of
all its traditionary nonsense, stilted language, stilted behavior, all
the rubbish of false sentiment, false dress, and the manners of
times that were both artificial and immoral, and filled with living
characters, who speak the thought of to-day, with the wit and culture
that are current to-day. I've seen private theatricals, where all the
performers were persons of cultivation, that....
OUR NEXT DOOR. So have I. For something particularly cheerful, commend
me to amateur theatricals. I have passed some melancholy hours at them.
MANDEVILLE. That's because the performers acted the worn stage plays,
and attempted to do them in the manner they had seen on the stage. It is
not always so.
THE FIRE-TENDER. I suppose Mandeville would say that acting has got into
a mannerism which is well described as stagey, and is supposed to
be natural to the stage; just as half the modern poets write in a
recognized form of literary manufacture, without the least impulse from
within, and not with the purpose of saying anything, but of turning out
a piece of literary work. That's the reason we have so much poetry
that impresses one like sets of faultless cabinet-furniture made by
machinery.
THE PARSON. But you need n't talk of nature or naturalness in acting or
in anything. I tell you nature is poor stuff. It can't go alone. Amateur
acting--they get it up at church sociables nowadays--is apt to be as
near nature as a school-boy's declamation. Acting is the Devil's art.
THE MISTRESS. Do you object to such innocent amusement?
MANDEVILLE. What the Parson objects to is, that he isn't amused.
THE PARSON. What's the use of objecting? It's the fashion of the day to
amuse people into the kingdom of heaven.
HERBERT. The Parson has got us off the track. My notion about the stage
is, that it keeps along pretty evenly with the rest of the world; the
stage is usually quite up to the level of the audience. Assumed dress
on the stage, since you were speaking of that, makes people no more
constrained and self-conscious than it does off the stage.
THE MISTRESS. What sarcasm is coming now?
HERBERT. Well, you may laugh, but the world has n't got used to good
clothes yet. The majority do not wear them with ease. People who only
put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an artificial
feeling.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder if that's the reason the Parson finds it so
difficult to get hold of his congregation.
HERBERT. I don't know how else to account for the formality and vapidity
of a set "party," where all the guests are clothed in a manner to
which they are unaccustomed, dressed into a condition of vivid
self-consciousness. The same people, who know each other perfectly
well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in their ordinary
apparel. But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of
people together who rarely "dress up." It seems impossible to make the
conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it dies in a kind of inane
helplessness. Especially is this true in the country, where people have
not obtained the mastery of their clothes that those who live in the
city have. It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization, that
we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident as dress.
Perhaps Mandeville can tell us whether this clothes panic prevails in
the older societies.
THE PARSON. Don't. We've heard it; about its being one of the
Englishman's thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit down to dinner
without a dress-coat, and all that.
THE MISTRESS. I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to eat
a dinner would dress for that, the principal event of the day, and do
respectful and leisurely justice to it.
THE YOUNG LADY. It has always seemed singular to me that men who work
so hard to build elegant houses, and have good dinners, should take so
little leisure to enjoy either.
MANDEVILLE. If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the chief
clothes question abroad just now is, how to get any; and it is the same
with the dinners.