III
Acting is perhaps less an art than the deceptive echo of an art. It is drama’s exalted halloo come back to drama from the walls of the surrounding amphitheatre. Criticism of acting too often mistakes the echo for the original voice. Although the analogy wears motley, criticism of this kind operates in much the same manner as if it were to contend that an approximately exact and beautiful Ben Ali Haggin tableau vivant reproduction of, say, Velasquez’s “The Spinners,” was creative art in the sense that the original is creative art. Acting is to the art of the drama much what these so-called living pictures are to the art of painting. If acting is to be termed an art, it is, like the living picture, a freak art, an art with belladonna in its eyes and ever, even at its highest, a bit grotesque.
In his defence of acting as an art equal to that of poetry and literature, Henry Irving has observed, “It has been said that acting is unworthy because it represents feigned emotions, but this censure would apply with equal force to poet or novelist.” But would it? The poet and the novelist may feign emotions, but it is their own active imaginations which feign them. The actor merely feigns passively the emotions which the imagination of the poet has actively feigned; if there is feigning, the actor merely parrots it. If there is feigned emotion in, say, the second stanza of Swinburne’s “Rococo,” and I mount an illuminated platform and recite the stanza very eloquently and impressively, am I precisely feigning the emotion of it or am I merely feigning the emotion that the great imagination of Swinburne has feigned? Feigned or unfeigned, the emotions of the poet come ready-made to the heart and lips of the actor.
Continues Irving further: “It is the actor who gives body to the ideas of the highest dramatic literature—fire, force, and sensibility, without which they would remain for most people mere airy abstractions.” What one engages here is the peculiar logic that acting is an art since it popularizes dramatic literature and makes it intelligible to a majority of dunderheads!
One more quotation from this actor’s defence, and we may pass on. “The actor’s work is absolutely concrete,” he challenges. “He is brought in every phase of his work into direct comparison with existing things.... Not only must his dress be suitable to the part which he assumes, but his bearing must not be in any way antagonistic to the spirit of the time in which the play is fixed. The free bearing of the sixteenth century is distinct from the artificial one of the seventeenth, the mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless one of the nineteenth.... The voice must be modulated to the vogue of the time. The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age is different from that of a mail-clad one—nay, the armour of a period ruled in real life the poise and bearing of the body; and all this must be reproduced on the stage.... It cannot therefore be seriously put forward in the face of such manifold requirements that no Art is required for the representation of suitable action!” The italics are those of one who experiences some difficulty in persuading himself that if Art is required for such things as these—dress, carriage, modulation of voice and carrying a sword—Art, strictly speaking, is no less required in the matter of going to a Quat’-z-Arts costume ball.
Acting is perhaps best to be criticized not as art but as colourful and impressive artifice. Miss Margaret Anglin’s Joan of Arc is a more or less admirable example of acting not because it is art but because it is a shrewd, vivid and beguiling synthesis of various intrinsically spurious dodges: black tights to make stout Anglo-Saxon limbs appear Gallicly slender, a telescoping of words containing the sound of s to conceal a personal defect in the structure of the upper lip, a manœuvring of the central action up stage to emphasize, through a familiar trick of the theatre, the sympathetic frailty of the character which the actress herself physically lacks, two intakes of breath before a shout of defiance that the effect of the ring of the directly antecedent shout on the part of one of the inquisitors may be diminished.... An effective acting performance is like a great explosion; and as T N T is made from nitric acid, which is in turn made from such nitrates as potassium nitrate or saltpeter, which are in turn derived from the salts of decomposed guano, so is a great explosion of histrionism similarly made and derived from numerous—and not infrequently ludicrous and even vulgar—basic elements.
The ill-balanced species of criticism which appraises an histrionic performance as art on the sole ground of the hypnotic effect it produces, with no inquiry into the means whereby that effect is produced, might analogously, were it to pursue this logic, appraise similarly as art the performance of an adept literal hypnotist. And with logic perhaps much more sound. For if acting as an art is to be appraised in the degree of the effect it imparts to, and induces in, the auditor-spectator, surely—if there is any sense at all in such a method of estimate—may certain other such performances as I have suggested be similarly appraised. Criticism rests upon a foundation of logic; whatever it may deal with—æsthetics, emotions, what not—it cannot remove itself entirely from that foundation. Thus, if Mr. John Barrymore is an artist because, by identifying the heart and mind of his auditor-spectator with some such character as Fedya and by suggesting directly that character’s tragic dégringolade, he can make the auditor-spectator pity and cry, so too an artist—by the rigid canon of æsthetic criticism—was Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who is said to have been able to do the same thing.
What I attempt here is no facile paradox, but a reductio ad absurdum designed to show up the fallacy of the prevailing method of actor criticism. In criticism of the established arts, there is no such antic deportment. The critic never confuses the stimulations of jazz music with those of sound music, nor the stimulations of open melodrama with those of more profound drama. From each of these he receives stimulations of a kind: some superficial, some deep. But he inquires, in each instance, into the means whereby the various stimulations were vouchsafed to him. While he recognizes the fact that the sudden and unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Secret Service” produces in him a sensation of shock as great as the sudden and unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Hedda Gabler,” he does not therefore promptly, and with no further reasoning, conclude that the two sensations are of an æsthetic piece. Nor does he assume that, since the nervous effect of the fall to death in “The Green Goddess” and of the fall to death in “The Master Builder” affect him immediately in much the same way, both sensations are accordingly produced by sound artistic means. Nor, yet again, does he confuse the quality—nor the springs of that quality—of the mood of wistful pathos with which “Poor Butterfly” and “Porgi, Amor” inspire him. But this confusion persists as part and parcel of the bulk of the criticism of acting. For one Hazlitt, or Lamb, or Lewes, or Anatole France who retains, or has retained, his clear discernment before the acted drama, there are, and have been, a number tenfold who have confounded the wonders of the phonograph with the wonders of Josef Haydn.
V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM