VII
If it was difficult for Booth fifty years ago and for Irving thirty years ago to find well-graced and well-trained actors to sustain the secondary characters in Shakspere’s comedies and tragedies, it is far more difficult to-day, when our dramatists, even when they are poets, are rarely tempted to write plays in five acts and in blank verse. Our modern drama is composed in pedestrian prose; and the men and women of our theaters have little or no occasion to speak the language of the gods. They are used to a dialog which aims at an apparent reproduction of the speech of everyday life; and therefore they have not been called upon to acquire the art of delivering the rhythmic utterance of tragic heroes and heroines. They are all striving to be “natural,” as befits a stage whereon the scenery and the furnishings are as far as may be those of real life. They are likely to have a distaste for blank verse, which cannot but seem to them artificial, stilted, “unnatural.”
Of course, no stage-dialog can be natural, strictly speaking. It must be compact and significant; it must flow unbroken in the shortest distance between two points. But to-day actors and audiences alike are so accustomed to the picked and polished prose of Barrie and Pinero, of Clyde Fitch and Augustus Thomas, that this appears “natural” to them, because they do not note its divergence from the average talk that falls on their ears outside the theater, whereas they cannot help feeling that the steady march of ten-syllabled iambics is a violent departure from our habitual manner of communicating information and of expressing emotion. In other words, even if our stage-dialog to-day is “unnatural,” as stage-dialog always has been and always will be, it is far less obviously “unnatural” than blank verse. A long and severe self-training is necessary before a performer can feel at home in blank verse, and before he can impart colloquial ease to it.
Yet it is a fact that we who speak English have a tendency toward the iambic rhythm when we seek to move an audience. This rhythm may be unconscious and it may be irregular; but it is unmistakable in the death-bed scenes of Dickens, for example, where he was insisting on the pathetic, and in the orations of Ingersoll, where he was making his most powerful appeal. The Kembles were so subdued to what they worked in on the stage that they were prone to drop into blank verse on occasions when it was not appropriate. Mrs. Siddons is said to have startled the salesman who was showing her a piece of goods by asking, “And will it wash?” The first time she met Washington Irving after he had published the ‘Sketch-Book,’ she said to him, “Young man, you’ve made me weep”; and when she next met him after he had published another book, she said “Young man, you’ve made me weep again!”
Her brother, John Philip Kemble, was a great friend of Sir Walter Scott; and once when they were crossing a field together, they were chased by a bull. “Sheriff,” said the actor to the author, “methinks I’ll get me up into a tree.” Fanny Kemble, whose reading of Shakspere’s plays Longfellow commemorated in a noble sonnet, was the daughter of Charles, another brother of Mrs. Siddons. Once when she went on the platform to read, she found that a cane-bottomed chair had been provided for her. She turned majestically to the gentleman who was escorting her and inquired, “And would you give my velvet gown the small-pox?” When her remote kinswoman, the fragile amateur, who called herself Mrs. Scott-Siddons, came to Fanny Kemble for professional guidance, she begged for advice about making points; and she was not a little frightened by the force of the swift retort: “Points, girl? I never was a point actress!”
This, all this, was long, long ago; and a great deal of water has gone under the bridge since those distant days. I have to confess that I never caught Edwin Booth or Henry Irving lapsing into blank verse off the stage.
(1920)
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant preference was found in the original book.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
[Pg 46]: ‘were also accusaable’ replaced by ‘were also accusable’.
[Pg 59]: ‘Racine, immitagably’ replaced by ‘Racine, immitigably’.
[Pg 78]: ‘had helpt to’ replaced by ‘had helped to’.
[Pg 133]: ‘two diferent tongues’ replaced by ‘two different tongues’.
[Pg 141]: ‘first apparance as’ replaced by ‘first appearance as’.
[Pg 142]: “Flore et Zephyr” replaced by ‘Flore et Zephyr’.
[Pg 144]: ‘qualties of the’ replaced by ‘qualities of the’.
[Pg 152]: ‘if may be recorded’ replaced by ‘it may be recorded’.
[Pg 217]: ‘unpublisht, and I’ replaced by ‘unpublished, and I’.
[Pg 269]: ‘or less Shakespere’ replaced by ‘or less Shakspere’.