little, as is believed of them, but that they prove altogether
too much. If the illusion created by stage externals is in itself
illusory, as Mr. Moore says, the complete deletion of all such stage
externals should be the best means for providing absolute illusion.
Yet the complete absence of illusion where this is the case is all too
familiar to any of us who have looked on such spectacles as “The Bath
of Phryne” and the like in the theatres of Paris. A prodigality of
stage externals does not contribute to disillusion, but to illusion.
These externals have become, through protracted usage, so familiar
that they are, so to speak, scarcely seen: they are taken by the eye
for granted. By way of proof, one need only consider two types of
Shakespearian production, one like that of Mr. Robert Mantell and one
like that lately employed for “Macbeth” by Mr. Arthur Hopkins. Where
the overladen stereotyped first production paradoxically fades out of
the picture for the spectator and leaves the path of illusion clear
for him, the superlatively simple second production, almost wholly
bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes his attention and
makes illusion impossible. It is true, of course, that all this may be
changed in time, when the deletion of externals by the new stagecraft
shall have become a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on of
externals is a convention at present. But, as things are today, these
externals are, negatively, the most positive contributors to illusion.
It is the misfortune of the theatre that critics have almost always
approached it, and entered it, with a defiant and challenging air. I
have, during the eighteen years of my active critical service, met
with and come to know at least fifty professional critics in America,
in England and on the Continent, and among all this number there
have been but four who have approached the theatre enthusiastically
prejudiced in its favour--two of them asses. But between the one large
group that has been critically hostile and the other smaller group
that has been uncritically effervescent, I have encountered no sign
of calm and reasoned compromise, no sign of frank and intelligent
willingness to regard each and every theatre as a unit, and so to be
appraised, instead of lumping together good and bad theatres alike
and labelling the heterogeneous mass “the theatre.” There is no such
thing as “the theatre.” There is this theatre, that theatre, and still
that other theatre. Each is a unit. To talk of “the theatre” is to
talk of the Greek theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the modern
theatre in one breath, or to speak simultaneously of the Grosses
Schauspielhaus of Max Reinhardt and the Eltinge Theatre of Mr. A.
H. Woods. “The theatre,” of course, has certain more or less minor
constant and enduring conventions--at least, so it seems as far as we
now can tell--but so, too, has chirography, yet we do not speak of “the
chirography.” There are some theatres--I use the word in its proper
restricted sense--that glorify drama and enhance its beauty; there are
others that vitiate drama. But so also are there some men who write
fine drama, and others who debase drama to mere fodder for witlings....
The Shakespeare of the theatre of Gordon Craig is vivid and brilliant
beauty. Call it art or not art as you will--what does a label matter?
The Molière of the theatre of Alexander Golovine is suggestive and
exquisite enchantment. Call it art or not art as you will--what does
a label matter? The Wagner of the opera house of Ludwig Sievert is
triumphant and rapturous splendour. Call it anything you like--and
again, what does a label matter? There are too many labels in the
world.
IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING
IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING
I
“When Mr. Nathan says that acting is not an art, of course he is
talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after witnessing a performance
by the great Duse?” So, the estimable actor, Mr. Arnold Daly. Whether
acting is or is not an art, it is not my concern at the moment to
consider, yet I quote the _riposte_ of Mr. Daly as perhaps typical of
those who set themselves as defenders of the yea theory. It seems to
me that if this is a satisfactory _touche_ no less satisfactory should
be some such like rejoinder as: “When Mr. Nathan says that acting _is_
an art, of course he is talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after
witnessing a performance by Mr. Corse Payton.”
If an authentic art is anything which may properly be founded upon an
exceptionally brilliant performance, then, by virtue of the Reverend
Doctor Ernest M. Stires’ brilliant performance in it, is pulpiteering
an art, and, on the strength of Miss Bird Millman’s brilliant
performance in it, is tight-rope walking an art no less. Superficially
a mere dialectic monkey-trick, this is yet perhaps not so absurd as it
may seem, for if Duse’s art lies in the fact that she breathes life and
dynamic effect into the written word of the artist D’Annunzio, Stires’
lies in the more substantial fact that he breathes life and dynamic
effect into the word of the somewhat greater, and more evasive artist,
God. And Miss Millman, too, brings to her quasi-art, movement, colour,
rhythm, beauty and--one may even say--a sense of fantastic character,
since the effect she contrives is less that of a dumpy little woman
in a short white skirt pirouetting on a taut wire than of an unreal
creature, half bird, half woman, out of some forgotten fable.
The circumstance that Duse is an artist who happens to be an actress
does not make acting an art any more than the circumstance that Villon
was an artist who happened to be a burglar or that Paderewski is an
artist who happens to be a politician makes burglary and politics arts.
Duse is an artist first, and an actress second: one need only look into
her very great share in the creation of the dramas bearing the name of
D’Annunzio to reconcile one’s self--if not too stubborn, at least in
part--to this point of view. So, also, were Clairon, Rachel and Jane
Hading artists apart from histrionism, and so too, is Sarah Bernhardt:
who can fail to detect the creative artist in the “Mémoires” of the
first named, for instance, or, in the case of the last named, in the
fertile impulses of her essays in sculpture, painting and dramatic
literature? It is a curious thing that, in all the pronouncements of
acting as an art, the names chosen by the advocates as representative
carriers of the æsthetic banner are those of actors and actresses who
have most often offered evidence of artistic passion in fields separate
and apart from their histrionic endeavours. Lemaître, Salvini, Rachel,
Talma, Coquelin, Betterton, Garrick, Fanny Kemble, the Bancrofts,
Irving, Tree, and on down--far down--the line to Ditrichstein, Sothern,
Marie Tempest, Guitry, Gemier and the brothers Barrymore--all give
testimony, in writing, painting, musicianship, poetry and dramatic
authorship to æsthetic impulses other than acting. Since acting itself
as an art is open to question, the merit or demerit of the performances
produced from the æsthetic impulses in point is not an issue: the fact
seems to be that it has been the artist who has become the actor rather
than the actor who has become the artist.
The actor, as I have on another occasion hazarded, is the child of the
miscegenation of an art and a trade: of the drama and the theatre.
Since acting must appeal to the many--this is obviously its only
reason for being, for acting is primarily a filter through which drama
may be lucidly distilled for heterogeneous theatre-goers--it must,
logically, be popular or perish. Surely no authentic art can rest or
thrive upon such a premise. The great actors and actresses, unlike
great fashioners in other arts, have invariably been favourites of the
crowd, and it is doubtless a too charitable hypothesis to assume that
this crowd has ever been gifted with critical insight beyond cavil. If,
therefore, the actor or actress who can sway great crowds is strictly
to be termed an artist, why may we not also, by strict definition,
similarly term as exponents of an authentic art others who can likewise
sway the same crowds: a great politician like Roosevelt, say, or a
great lecturer like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian
like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out these paradox shock-troops to clear
the way for the more sober infantry.)
I have said that I have no intention to argue for or against acting as
an art yet, for all the circumstance that the case for the prosecution
has long seemed the soundest and the most eloquent, there are still
sporadic instances of imaginative histrionism that give one reason
to ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently come to the more
penetrating critic that what has on such occasions passed for an
art has in reality been merely a reflected art: the art of drama
interpreted not with the imagination of the actor but, more precisely,
_with the imagination of the dramatist_. In other words, that actor
or actress is the most competent and effective whose imagination is
successful in meeting literally, and translating, the imagination of
the dramatist which has created the rôle played by the particular actor
or actress. To name the actor’s imagination in such a case a creative
imagination is a rather wistful procedure, for it does not create but
merely duplicates. Surely no advocate of acting as a creative art
would be so bold as to contend that any actor, however great, has ever
brought creative imagination to the already full and superb creative
imagination of Shakespeare. This would be, on an actor’s part, the
sheerest impudence. The greatest actor is simply he who is best fitted
by figure, voice, training and intelligence not to invade and annul the
power of the rôle which a great dramatist has imagined and created.
Duse and D’Annunzio were, so to speak, spiritually and physically
one: hence the unmatched perfection of the former’s histrionism in the
latter’s rôles. To see Duse is, save one admit one’s self critically
to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical art doubts and the
convictions of such as Mr. Daly.
It is, of course, the common habit of the prejudiced critic to
overlook, in the estimate of acting as an art, the few admirable
exponents of acting and to take into convenient consideration only the
enormous majority of incompetents. But to argue that acting is not an
art simply because a thousand Edmund Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give
no evidence that it is an art is to argue that sculpture is not an art
simply because a thousand fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris
busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding give no evidence in a like
direction. Yet the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent
actors as well as bad actors establishes acting as an art no more than
the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers
as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes the playing of the
cuckoo-whistle as an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison to what
appears to be an absurdity, it is because by such absurdities, or
elementals, is the status of acting in the field of the arts most
sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt’s ever-haunting cry of the
heart in “Izeyl” is a peg, however slight, upon which may be hung a
strand of the theory that maintains acting as an art, so too, by the
strict canon of dialectics, is Mr. Ruben Katz’s ever-haunting cry of
the cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral
Symphony.
If acting is an art, the proofs thus far offered are not only
unconvincing but fundamentally, on the score of logic, not a little
droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If criticism is an art (thus
a familiar contention), why is not acting also an art, since both are
concerned with re-creating works of art? But the artist’s work offered
up to the critic is a challenge, whereas the dramatist’s work offered
up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism is war, whether in behalf of
æsthetic friend or against æsthetic foe; acting is agreement, peace.
The critic re-creates, in terms of his own personality, the work of
another and often emphatically different and antagonistic personality.
The actor re-creates, in terms of a dramatist’s concordantly imagined
personality, his own personality: the result is less re-creation
than non-re-creation. In other words, the less the actor creates or
re-creates and the more he remains simply an adaptable tool in the
hands of the dramatist, the better actor he is. The actor’s state is
thus what may be termed one of active impassivity. Originality and
independence, save within the narrowest of limits, are denied him.
He is a literal translator of a work of art, not an independently
imaginative and speculative interpreter, as the critic is. The
dramatist’s work of art does not say to him, as to the critic, “Here I
am! What do you, out of all your experience, taste and training, think
of me?” It says to him, instead and peremptorily, “Here I am! Think
of me exactly as I am, and adapt all of your experience, taste and
training to the interpretation of me exactly as I am!”
Brushing aside the theory that the true artist is the actor who can
transform his voice, his manner, his character; who will disappear
behind his part instead of imposing himself on it and adding himself to
it--a simple feat, since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli and
Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean actors, are true histrionic
artists--Mr. Walkley, in his essay on “The English Actor of Today,”
bravely takes up the defence from what he regards as a more difficult
approach. “In the art of acting as in any other art,” he says, “the
first requisite is life. The actor’s part is a series of speeches and
stage directions, mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised
somehow from the dead. If the actor disappears behind it, there is
nothing left but a Golgotha.” Here is indeed gay news! Hamlet, Iago,
Romeo, Shylock--mere “cold print,” inert Shakespearian masses that,
in order to live, have to be raised somehow from the dead by members
of the Lambs’ Club! It is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly
takes to cover after launching this torpedo, and devotes the balance
of his interesting comments to a prudent and circumspect _pas seul_ on
the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter. For no sooner has
he described the majestic drama of Shakespeare as “mere cold print, an
inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead,” than he seems
suddenly, and not without a touch of horror, to realize that he has
ridiculously made of Shakespeare a mere blank canvas and pot of paint
for the use of this or that actor whom he has named, by implication and
with magnificent liberalness, a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble
for the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined Mercié.
II
Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable art takes its key
from Rémond de Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman whose
pragmatic critical credo was, “If it makes me feel, it is art.”
While it may be reasonable that a purely emotional art may aptly be
criticized according to the degree of emotional reaction which it
induces, it is the quality of emotion resident in the critic that
offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion. A perfectly
attuned and sound emotional equipment--an emotional equipment of
absolute pitch, so to speak--is a rare thing, even among critics of
brilliant intelligence, taste, imagination and experience. Goethe,
Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention only five, were
physio-psychological units of dubious emotional structure, if we may
trust the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of their critical
dramatic writing may be accepted without qualm, a distinct measure of
distrust would attach itself to any critical estimate of acting which
they might have written or actually did write.
There are, obviously, more or less definite standards whereby we
may estimate critical writings of such men as these so far as those
criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe as the cerebral
or semi-cerebral arts, but there are no standards, even remotely
determinable or exact, whereby we may appraise such of their
criticisms as deal with the directly and wholly emotional art of
acting. It is perhaps not too far a cry to assume that had Mr. William
Archer’s father been murdered shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr.
Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Mr. Archer would have been moved to believe
Mr. Forbes-Robertson on even greater actor-artist than he believed him
under the existing circumstances, or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius,
the Danish journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a victim of
syphilis when he reviewed August Lindberg’s “Oswald,” he would have
looked on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive exponent of
histrionism. Nothing is more æsthetically and artistically dubious
and insecure than the appraisal of acting; for it is based upon the
quicksands of varying human emotionalism, and of aural and visual
prejudice. Were I, for example, one hundred times more proficient
a critic of drama and life than I am, my criticism of acting would
none the less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I would remain
constitutionally anæsthetic to a Juliet, however otherwise talented,
who had piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all his histrionic
power, presented to the vision a pair of knock-knees. This, I well
appreciate, is the kind of critical writing that is promptly set down
as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as I am concerned and I daresay
that it is, in one direction or another, the truth so far as the
majority of critics are concerned.
The most that may be said of the soundness of this or that laudatory
criticism of an actor’s performance is that the performance in point
has met exactly--or very nearly--the particular critic’s personal
notion of how he, as a human being, would have cried, laughed and
otherwise comported himself were he an actor and were he in the actor’s
rôle. The opposite, or denunciatory, phase of such criticism holds a
similar truth. If this is not true, by what standards _can_ the critic
estimate the actor’s performance? By the standards of the actors who
have preceded this actor in the playing of the rôle, you say? What if
the rôle is a new one, a peculiar and novel one, that has not been
played before? Again, you say that the rôle may be in an alien drama
and that the actor may be an alien, both rôle and performance being
foreign to the emotional equipment of the critic. But basic emotions,
the foundation of drama, are universal. Still again, what of such
dramas as “Œdipus Rex,” what of such rôles--this with a triumphant
chuckle on your part? I return the chuckle, and bid you read the
criticisms that have been written of the actors who have played in
these rôles! Invariably the actors have been treated in precisely the
same terms and by the same standards as if they were playing, not in
the drama of the fifth century before Christ, but in “Fedora,” “The
Face in the Moonlight” or “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
One cannot imagine sound criticism applying to any authentic art the
standard of actor criticism that I have noted. Criticism, true enough,
is always more or less personal, but, in its operation upon the
authentic arts, its personality is ever like a new bottle into which
the vintage wine of art has been poured. Criticism of the authentic
arts is the result of the impact of a particular art upon a particular
critical personality. Criticism of the dubious art of acting is the
result of the impact of a particular critical personality upon this
or that instance of acting. But if this is even remotely true, you
inquire ironically, what of such an excellent instance of acting as
Mimi Aguglia’s “Salome”; how in God’s name may the critic appraise that
performance in the manner set down, i. e., in terms of himself were he
a stage performer? Well, for all the surface humours of the question,
that is actually more or less the way in which he does appraise it.
The actor or actress, unlike the artist in more authentic fields,
may never interpret emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the critic:
the interpretation must be a reflection, more or less stereotyped,
of the critic’s repertoire of emotions. Thus, where art is original
expression, acting is merely the audible expression of a silent
expression. In another phrase, expression in acting is predicated upon,
and limited by, the expression of the critic. It is, therefore, a
mere duplication of expression. And what holds true in the case of the
critic so far as acting is concerned obviously holds doubly true in the
case of the uncritical public.
Re-reading the celebrated critiques of acting, I come to the conclusion
that the word “art” has almost uniformly been applied to acting by
critics who, thinking that they had perhaps belaboured the subject a
trifle too severely, were disposed graciously to throw it a sop. As
good an illustration as any may be had from Lewes, certainly a friend
of acting if ever there was one. Thus Lewes:
“The truth is, we exaggerate the talent of an actor because we judge
only from the effect he produces, without inquiring too curiously
into the means. But, while the painter has nothing but his canvas and
the author has nothing but white paper and printers’ ink with which
to produce his effects, the actor has all other arts as handmaids;
the poet labours for him, creates his part, gives him his eloquence,
his music, his imagery, his tenderness, his pathos, his sublimity;
the scene-painter aids him; the costumes, the lights, the music, all
the fascination of the stage--all subserve the actor’s effects;
these raise him upon a pedestal; remove them, and what is he? He who
can make a stage mob bend and sway with his eloquence, what could he
do with a real mob, no poet by to prompt him? He who can charm us
with the stateliest imagery of a noble mind, when robed in the sables
of Hamlet, or in the toga of Coriolanus, what can he do in coat and
trousers on the world’s stage? Rub off the paint, and the eyes are
no longer brilliant! Reduce the actor to his intrinsic value, and
then weigh him with the rivals whom he surpasses in reputation and
fortune.... If my estimate of the intrinsic value of acting is lower
than seems generally current, it is from no desire to disparage _an
art_ I have always loved; but, etc., etc.”
You will find the same dido in most of the essays on acting: a
protracted series of cuffs and slaps terminating in a gentle
non-sequitur kiss.
Acting at its finest is, however, often a confusing hypnosis; it is not
to be wondered at that, fresh from its spell, the critic has mistaken
it for a more exalted something than it intrinsically is. The flame
and fire of a Duse, the haunt and magic of a Bernhardt, the powerful
stage sense of creation of a Moissi--these are not a little befuddling.
And, under their serpent-like charm, it is not incomprehensible that
the critic should confound effect and cause. Yet acting, even of the
highest order, is intrinsically akin to the legerdemain of a Hermann or
a Kellar with a Shakespeare or a Molière as an assistant to hand over,
as the moment bids, the necessary pack of cards or bowl of goldfish.
It is trickery raised to its most exalted level: a combination of
experience, intelligence and great charm, not revivifying something
cold and dead, but releasing something quick and alive from the prison
of the printed page.