It is a curious truth that, whereas in every other art deliberate choice
of method and careful calculation of effect are expected from the
artist, in the greatest and most difficult art of all, the art of life,
this is not so. In literature, painting, or sculpture you first evolve
your conception, and then, after long study of it, as it glows and
shimmers in your imagination, you set about the reverent selection of
that form which shall be its most truthful incarnation, in words, in
paint, in marble. Now life, as has been said many times, is an art too.
Sententious morality from time past has told us that we are each given a
part to play, evidently implying, with involuntary cynicism, that the
art of life is--the art of acting.
As with the actor, we are each given a certain dramatic conception for
the expression of which we have precisely the same artistic
materials--namely, our own bodies, sometimes including heart and brains.
One has often heard the complaint of a certain actor that he acts
himself. On the metaphorical stage of life the complaint and the implied
demand are just the reverse. How much more interesting life would be if
only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of
abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the
stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress
and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the
generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls
him, has given each of us a certain part to play--that part simply
oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part
most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is
it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ranks of
the supers--who, curiously enough, are paid much more handsomely than
the principals. They enter one of the learned or idle professions, join
the army or take to trade, and so speedily rid themselves of the irksome
necessity of being anything more individual than 'the learned counsel,'
'the learned judge,' 'my lord bishop,' or 'the colonel,' names
impersonal in application as the dignity of 'Pharaoh,' whereof the name
and not the man was alone important. Henceforth they are the Church, the
Law, the Army, the City, or that vaguer profession Society. Entering one
of these, they become as lost to the really living world as the monk who
voluntarily surrenders all will and character of his own at the
threshold of his monastery: bricks in a prison wall, privates in the
line, peas in a row. But, as I say, these are the parts that pay. For
playing the others, indeed, you are not paid, but expected to
pay--dearly.
It is full time we turned to those on whom falls the burden of those
real parts. Such, when quite young, if they be conscientious artists,
will carefully consider themselves, their gifts and possibilities, study
to discover their artistic _raison d'être_ and how best to fulfil it.
He or she will say: Here am I, a creature of great gifts and exquisite
sensibilities, drawn by great dreams, and vibrating to great emotions;
yet this potent and exquisite self is as yet, I know, but unwrought
material of the perfect work of art it is intended that I should make of
it--but the marble wherefrom, with patient chisel, I must liberate the
perfect and triumphant ME! As a poet listening with trembling ear to the
voice of his inspiration, so I tremulously ask myself--what is the
divine conception that is to become embodied in me, what is the divine
meaning of ME? How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed,
till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self--till,
in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside
--for others besides myself to see, and know and love?
What is my part, and how am I to play it?
Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one
in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not
allowed to 'look' it, or 'dress' it! What would an actor think, who,
asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it
without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in
a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the
same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you
protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar
nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel
mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan,
Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be
allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you
dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen--and other
critics--it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to
disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look
at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what
everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.
Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself
on this stage of life.
In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem
granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is
taken for granted that the musician is a fool--the British public is so
intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him
a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had
Tennyson--of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it!
Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his
publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so
distinguished-looking as his publisher?
Indeed, curiously enough, among no set of men does the desire to look as
commonplace as the rest of the world seem so strong as among men of
letters. Perhaps it is out of consideration for the rest of the world;
but, whatever the reason, immobility of expression and general
mediocrity of style are more characteristic of them at present than even
the military.
It is surely a strange paradox that we should pride ourselves on
schooling to foolish insensibility, on eliminating from them every mark
of individual character, the faces that were intended subtly and
eloquently to image our moods--to look glad when we are glad, sorry when
we are sorry, angry in anger, and lovely in love.
The impassivity of the modern young man is indeed a weird and wonderful
thing. Is it a mark to hide from us the appalling sins he none the less
openly affects? Is it meant to conceal that once in his life he paid a
wild visit to 'The Empire'--by kind indulgence of the County Council?
that he once chucked a barmaid under the chin, that he once nearly got
drunk, that he once spoke to a young lady he did not know--and then ran
away?
One sighs for the young men of the days of Gautier and Hugo, the young
men with red waistcoats who made asses of themselves at first nights and
on the barricades, young men with romance in their hearts and passion in
their blood, fearlessly sentimental and picturesquely everything.
The lover then was not ashamed that you should catch radiant glimpses of
his love in his eyes--nay! if you smiled kindly on him, he would take
you by the arm and insist on your breaking a bottle with him in honour
of his mistress. Joy and sorrow then wore their appropriate colours,
according, so to say, to the natural sumptuary laws of the emotions--one
of which is that the right place for the heart is the sleeve.
It is the duty of those who are great, or to whom great destinies of joy
or sorrow have been dealt, to wear their distinctions for the world to
see. It is good for the world, which in its crude way indicates the
rudiments of this dramatic art of life, when it decrees that the bride
shall walk radiant in orange blossom, and the mourner sadden our streets
with black--symbols ever passing before us of the moving vicissitudes of
life.
The mourner cannot always be sad, or the bride merry; the bride indeed
sometimes weeps at the altar, and the mourner laughs a savage cynical
laugh at the grave; but for those moments in which they awhile forget
parts more important than themselves, the tailor and the dressmaker have
provided symbolical garments, just as military decorations have been
provided for heroes without the gift of looking heroic, and sacerdotal
vestments for the priest, who, like a policeman, is not always on duty.
In playing his part the conscientious artist in life, like any other
actor, must often seem to feel more than he really feels at a given
moment, say more than he means. In this he is far from being
insincere--though he must make up his mind to be accused daily of
insincerity and affectation. On the contrary, it will be his very
sincerity that necessitates his make-believe. With his great part ever
before him in its inspiring completeness, he must be careful to allow no
merely personal accident of momentary feeling or action to jeopardise
the general effect. There are moments, for example, when a really true
lover, owing to such masterful natural facts as indigestion, a cold, or
extreme sleepiness, is unable to feel all that he knows he really feels.
To 'tell the truth,' as it is called, under such circumstances, would
simply be a most dangerous form of lying. There is no duty we owe to
truth more imperative than that of lying stoutly on occasion--for,
indeed, there is often no other way of conveying the whole truth than
by telling the part-lie.
A watchful sincerity to our great conception of ourselves is the first
and last condition, of our creating that finest work of art--a
personality; for a personality, like a poet, is not only born but made.