This was composed in three parts; one for research professors, another for play-makers, or fairfussers, and the third for students; the first being trained psychologists, the last, young men and women remarkable for beauty, fine feeling and intelligence, as they are in our own day. The notion was for the professors to find out facts, for the fairfussers to apply them, and for the students to carry them out: and if it may occur to the reader that the workers in one side paid small heed to the discoveries of the rest, a little consideration will show that this is all to the good; for slavishly to accept the opinions of others can never lead to clarity of thought, and the warden was anxious to maintain in every inmate that active spirit of self-reliance without which no advance can be made in any of the sciences. I saw many of each division, but to write of them all would be to take up inordinate space in these memorials, since the arts are not of large importance to the state or to the public. I shall, therefore, confine myself to describing one or two of each kind, choosing those which throw most light on the methods of those days, and the great progress we can shortly expect.
My first visit was to a small, active professor, with a tiny clean-shaven chin, and unusually bright weasel eyes, who, speaking very fast, and with vivid gesture, easily convinced me of the usefulness of his discoveries. He had applied his mind for fifteen years to proving that there was no such thing as thought, for, he said, the conversation he had to listen to, or the acts he was able to observe, could be accounted for without supposing such a thing existed. Speech, he explained, was merely a habit, like that of scratching when something causes our skin to itch; and, moreover, all our deeds were like scratching, which we do thoughtlessly, however much we may flatter ourselves that we prepare great things far ahead. He did not go to the lengths of some of his colleagues, who denied the existence of consciousness: for, so as not to be too positive, he preferred to regard ‘awareness of the emotions’ as a fiction convenient to his purpose, or, to put it differently, as words merely to describe a sequence of events. By his system, when impulses are set up, something occurs, such as eating, and we are ‘satisfied,’ as we say: or we are ‘disappointed,’ as when prevented from a kindly action.
I paid close heed to this part of his discourse, because he begged me not to confuse his theory with that of a rival professor, who believed that allusive gestures gave rise to a corresponding emotion. This, he pointed out, was merely the out-of-date heresy that “A dog does not wag his tail because he is happy; but that he is happy because his tail wags.” This rival believed that if he made the gestures which usually go with certain emotions, he would undergo these feelings; and the spectator would, by ‘in-feeling’ or ‘empathy’ (such were his barbarous terms) put their muscles in readiness to go through these movements, and so, in their turn, experience these emotions. For his part, when he had been to see this professor acting woe, far from feeling unhappy, he had barely been able to master his mirth. But, so as to give the theory a fair trial, he had wished with one of his pupils to observe the result of moving the tail of a dog quickly from side to side, but that unluckily, the pupil had been bitten before the experiment had reached a stage from which anything could be learnt.
His own idea, he informed me, was to set up a known order of stresses and strains in the watchers’ nerves, and this could be done by cunning movements performed in front of them. I was not, however, to tax him with inconsistency, for his motto was ‘Not miming but movement,’ and though an actor had to use gestures, they must by no means be after the naif manner of his rival. He himself had spent over four years in the abstract study of the movements proper to the passion of benevolence—abstract, because nothing is more misleading than what people relate of their own feelings: cruelty, for instance, they often describe as a wish to better their neighbours. Indeed, another of his mottoes, he declared chuckling, was ‘No motion, no emotion’; and I could not but agree with him when I considered that after all, to lie in one’s bed all day and simply ‘think,’ as we stupidly call it, is no life at all.
Yet I could not help trying to argue, feebly enough, that the showing of dreadful acts would call forth feelings of horror, as we may judge from the murder of Desdemona, and that fitting words would arouse pity in us, as they do in the same play. But, smiling at the clumsiness of my example, he remarked that just there lay the error; for if we were truly to see a Moor, however splendid, plunging a knife into the body of a beautiful lady, our emotions, if we knew her to be guiltless, would be very different from those we feel in a theatre; and that, instead of sitting still, we should most certainly interpose, or run to fetch the police. Again, while we were children, before our minds are distorted by what we erroneously call thought (but which is only an idle luxury-habit), Mr Punch beating his wife causes us to laugh very loudly. This instance, he said, would also prove how much more useful movements were than words, since for ten who would laugh at a Punch and Judy show, hardly one would smile at the wittiest things in Pascal. It was only on reflection that I could altogether make his views my own, for it is not easy for us to give up opinions we have held ever since we can remember.
To test the movements appropriate to various emotions, this professor had invented a machine, which, by reason of the changes in electrical resistance a body undergoes under the action of the passions, recorded the feelings of any person subjected to it. This machine he had just brought to perfection, and to give me a demonstration, he sat me in a chair made of some amalgam unknown to me, and fitted with sockets into which my head, hands and feet were clamped. A piece of wireless apparatus, supplied with a diaphragm such as make a part of our telephone receivers, was placed over my heart, and, my loins being bared, my lumbar vertebrae were played upon by a peculiar ray. Above my head, where I could not see it, was placed a marker, much like our telegraph morse-code dials, but corrugated and rayed after the manner of a fan. The professor could watch this while evolving before me the strange movements I could connect with nothing I had ever seen, and so could vary his gestures according to the results shown. After about a quarter of an hour of erudite passes, the professor, wiping the sweat from his brow, triumphantly announced the successful issue of his experiment, and asked me what emotion I felt. At that moment, having overcome my awe, I was filled with a profound sense of pity, and on my confessing this, the professor danced with glee. Crying “Typical! Typical!” he pointed at the dial; but as the needle showed ‘Lust tempered with Sentimentality’ I could not but feel that his wonderful invention needed alteration in a few details to perfect it. Nevertheless, while doing up my braces, I framed a few remarks to make known my pleasure at seeing the drama make such strides in his hands; and promising to meet at a later day we parted with many expressions of esteem. I must also add this tribute to his ability: when I did visit him again, very fast, on my backward journey through time, even when all the motions were reversed, I once more felt very deeply the compassion his gestures had provoked.
I next went to see a fairfusser, though not one in the service of the government, and was much impressed by his freedom from doubt as to the way in which the best result was to be reached. He said, with justice, that the artist’s desire was to communicate with his fellow creatures, and that the object of an actor was to place his soul in touch with that of others. Man, being in each case a unique individual, was fitted for work more noble than that of a mere interpreter, or conduit pipe from an author to an audience, and the contrary view had been the grand error of all producers from the time of Shakespeare almost to his own day. The aim of an actor was to express himself (as a part of universal nature) and reveal a cup overbrimming with passions. Any ideas introduced by an author were to be deprecated, for his business was strictly to provide the raw material; and so the teacher’s main efforts were to be directed towards training his pupils to rid the author’s words of any meaning they might contain, simply by the manner of speaking them. In this way nothing was allowed to come between the actor and the audience. This he claimed to be the especial discovery of his age, and one which he could not help regarding with more than a little pride.
I made bold to tell him that his notion was not so new as he imagined, and that we too had actors who disbelieved that words had any plausible meaning apart from the emotion the actor could register through them: men (as a rule well set up, or even bulky, since these are always the most passionate) who by a clever alteration in stress, or an abrupt cleavage of a sentence in the middle, could effectively cancel any extraneous idea the words of an author might interpose between the feelings of the player and the minds of the audience. This constructor was good enough to say that he was quite sure our age had not been so dark as was commonly supposed, but that, at least in our classical plays, which had been in verse, a form which compels a certain manner of speech, he thought the ‘pure’ actor must have met with difficulties hardly to be overcome. I was able to assure him that this was not so, and that, indeed, it was just in these very plays many of our actors had shown their highest genius; that one might know Hamlet, for example, quite well by the book, and yet go to two or three versions of the play and hardly recognise any of the speeches, so much were they heightened and made subtle in the speaking of them.
I was also much taken by an investigator who had made a highly diverting play simply with scenery, and a few mutes who now and again varied their place. It was his view that we had always been astray in making people the centre of our dramas: it was their surroundings that mattered—for who, he said, given the choice of seeing Brown eat his dinner, or a thunderstorm on Mount Everest, would not prefer to look at Mount Everest? A modern producer could not help laughing at the remark of Aristotle, if he ever read it, that ‘the spectacle was the least artistic part of a drama.’ A comely staircase, he averred, or even a rickety ladder, if it was tall enough, had more significance than a tale of hopeless love; and he was about to design a series of scenes in a logical order of forms and colours, green following pink, which would make a spectator sadder than even a play by Sophocles. This I could well believe: but I found it hard to understand how it was right to allude to pink as though it were a premiss, for after all, nobody dreams of calling a rainbow a syllogism, any more than they do of saying ‘paradox’ when they mean a hill.