Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

A veteran who has been regaling the readers of The Times with his recollections of the London stage has dropped by the way a remark on modern theatrical criticism. For it, he says, “the play is everything, and the leading actor or actress has often to be content with a few lines.” Dean Gaisford began a sermon, “Saint Paul says, and I partly agree with him.” I partly agree with the veteran. Criticism has occasionally to deal with plays that cannot be “everything” for it. There are new plays that are merely a vehicle for the art of the actor, who must then get more than a few lines. There are old plays revived to show a new actor in a classic part, and the part is then greater than the whole. This, I think, accounts for “the space devoted to the acting in London criticisms at the time Henry Irving rose to fame.” Either he appeared in new plays of little intrinsic merit, like The Bells, or else in classic parts of melodrama (made classic by Frédéric Lemaître) or of Shakespeare. In these conditions criticism must always gravitate towards the acting. It did so, long before Irving’s time, with Hazlitt over Edmund Kean. It has done so, since Irving’s time, over Sarah and Duse, and must do so again over every new Shylock or Millamant or Sir Peter.

But these conditions are exceptional, and it is well for the drama that they are. For the vitality of the drama primarily depends not upon the talent of its interpreters but on that of its creators, and a new image or new transposition of life in a form appropriate to the theatre is more important than the perfection of the human instrument by which it is “made flesh.” If criticism, then, has of late years and on the whole been able to devote more attention to the play than to the playing, I suggest to our veteran that the fact is a healthy sign for our drama. It shows that there have been plays to criticise and that criticism has done its duty.

But that, I hasten to add, is its luck rather than its merit. One must not ride the high ethical horse, and I should be sorry to suggest that good criticism is ever written from a sense of duty, any more than a good play or any other piece of good literature. Good criticism is written just because the critic feels like that—and bad, it may be added, generally because the critic has been trying to write something which he supposes other people will feel like. The good critic writes with his temperament—and here is a reason why, in the long run, plays will interest him more than players. For are we not all agreed about the first principle of criticism? Is it not to put yourself in the place of the artist criticized, to adopt his point of view, to recreate his work within yourself? Well, the critic can put himself in the place of the playwright much more readily than into that of the actor. The playwright and he are working in different ways, with much the same material, ideas, and images, or, if you like, concepts and intuitions mainly expressed in words—which is only a long way of saying that they are both authors. And they have in common the literary temperament. Now the literary temperament and the histrionic are two very different things.

The actor, as his very name imports, is an active man, a man of action. At his quietest, he perambulates the stage. But violent physical exercise is a part of his trade. He fights single combats, jumps into open graves, plunges into lakes, is swallowed down in quicksands, sharpens knives on the sole of his boot, deftly catches jewel caskets thrown from upper windows, wrestles with heavy-weight champions, knouts or is knouted, stabs or is stabbed, rolls headlong down staircases, writhes in the agonies of poison, and is (or at any rate in the good old days was) kicked, pinched, and pummelled out of the limelight by the “star.” And all this under the handicap of grease-paint and a wig! It must be very fatiguing. But then he enjoys the physical advantages of an active life. He has Sir Willoughby Patterne’s leg (under trousers that never bag at the knee, and terminating in boots of the shiniest patent leather), and all the rest to match. As becomes a man of action, he is no reader. I have heard the late Mr. Henry Neville declare that an actor should never be allowed to look at a book. This may seem to the rest of us a sad fate for him, but look at his compensations! He spends much, if not most, of his stage-life making love to pretty women, wives, widows, or ingénues. Frequently he kisses them, or seems to—for he will tell you, the rogue, that stage-kisses are always delivered in the air. Let us say then that he is often within an inch of kissing a pretty woman—which is already a considerable privilege. When he is not kissing her (or the air, as the case may be), he is sentimentally bidding her to a nunnery go or dying in picturesque agonies at her feet. Anyhow he goes through his work in the society and with the active co-operation of pretty women. And note, for it is an enormous advantage to him, that that work is a fixed, settled thing. His words have been invented for him and written out in advance. He has rehearsed his actions. He knows precisely what he is going to do.

Contrast with this alluring picture the temperament and working habits of the critic. He is a man, not of action, but of contemplation. His pursuit is sedentary, and with his life of forced inaction he risks becoming as fat as Mr. Gibbon, without the alleviation of the Gibbonian style. Personal advantages are not aids to composition, and he may be the ugliest man in London, like G. H. Lewes, whose dramatic criticisms, nevertheless, may still be read with pleasure. His fingers are inky. His face is not “made up,” but sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. No pretty women help him to write his criticisms. Indeed, if Helen of Troy herself, or Aphrodite new-risen from the sea came into his study he would cry out with writer’s petulance (a far more prevalent and insidious disease than writer’s cramp), “Oh, do please go away! Can’t you see I’m not yet through my second slip?” (She will return when he is out, and “tidy up” his desk for him—a really fiendish revenge). Books, forbidden to the actor, are the critic’s solace—and also his despair, because they have said all the good things and taken the bread out of his mouth. And, unlike the actor, he is working in the unknown. His head is filled with a chaos of half-formed ideas and the transient embarrassed phantoms of logical developments. Will he ever be able to sort them out and to give them at any rate a specious appearance of continuity? Nay, can he foresee the beginning of his next sentence, or even finish this one? Thus he is perpetually on the rack. “Luke’s iron crown and Damien’s bed of steel” are nothing to it. It is true that his criticism does, mysteriously, get itself completed—mysteriously, because he seems to have been no active agent in it, but a mere looker-on while it somehow wrote itself.

Is it surprising that it should generally write itself about the play (which, I daresay, writes itself, too, and with the same tormenting anxiety) rather than about the playing, which proceeds from so different a temperament from the critic’s and operates in conditions so alien from his? But, let me add for the comfort of our veteran, there are critics and critics. If some of us displease him by too often sparing only a few lines for the leading actor or actress, there will always be plenty of others who are more interested in persons than in ideas and images, who care less for transpositions of life than for Sarah’s golden voice and Duse’s limp, and “Quin’s high plume and Oldfield’s petticoat.” These will redress the balance.

ACTING AS ART

Nothing could be more characteristically English than the circumstances which gave rise the other day to the singular question, “Is acting an art?” There was a practical issue, whether the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art was or was not entitled to exemption under an Act of 1843 from the payment of rates. Sir John Simon argued it, of course, as a practical question. He dealt with custom and precedent and authority, dictionary definitions and judicial decisions. He had to keep one eye on æsthetics and the other on the rates. This is our traditional English way. We “drive at practice.” Nevertheless, this question whether acting is an art is really one of pure æsthetics, and is in no way affected by any decision of the Appeal Committee of the London County Council.

You cannot answer it until you have made up your mind what you mean by art. Sir John Simon seems to have suggested that art was something “primarily directed to the satisfaction of the æsthetic sense.” But is there any such thing as a special “æsthetic sense”? Is it anything more than a name for our spiritual reaction to a work of art, our response to it in mind and feeling? And are we not arguing in a circle when we say that art is what provokes the response to art? Perhaps it might amuse, perhaps it might irritate, perhaps it might simply bewilder the Appeal Committee of the London County Council to tell them that art is the expression of intuitions. They might reply that they cannot find intuitions in the rate-book, and that the Act of 1843 is silent about them. Yet this is what art is, and you have to bear it in mind when you ask, “Is the actor an artist?” Art is a spiritual activity, and the artist’s expression of his intuitions (the painter’s “vision,” the actor’s “conception” of his part) is internal; when he wishes to externalize his expression, to communicate it to others, he has to use certain media—paint and canvas, marble and brick, musical notes, words and gestures. But it is the spiritual activity, the intuition-expression, that makes the artist. The medium is no part of his definition.