I am really disposed to believe that the illusion of the scene is very little helped by the most elaborate and realistic works of scene-painter, carpenter, and upholsterer. I have seen the house drowned in tears over that lugubrious and hollow 'East Lynne' when the stage has been enclosed in green baize and there has not been a stick of respectable furniture on the boards. 'East Lynne,' by the way, is one of my puzzles. Except that it has once or twice wearied me to the point of exasperation, it has never moved me in any way; and countless thousands have cried over it. In the New Zealand back blocks people used to weep like watering-carts over its tawdry pathos; and when that awful, awful child, whose business it was to die and who would not do his business, talked to his mother about his mamma, the handkerchiefs waved everywhere, and a chorus of sympathetic sniffings and throat clearings almost drowned the fustian rubbish of the dialogue. I played Lord Somebody in the piece one night. I forget the unreal wretch's name; but he will be remembered as taking money to Isabel. He appears in one scene only and has some twenty or thirty lines to speak; but he contrives to go further and oftener away from nature than any stage person whose acquaintance I have practically made. Nothing but the good old-fashioned 'moo-cow' style could possibly have suited him. I believe I can boast a tolerable imitation of that antiquated elocutionary method, and I certainly spared no effort.
'And you, Isabel, the daughter of an earl! how have you fallen!'
That is one of the gems of the old humbug's speech, and I mouthed it as it was made to be mouthed. The house took the burlesque with perfect seriousness and good faith—chiefly, I suppose, because it was impossible to make the vulgar rant too clap-trappy and stagy. But as I was leaving, and as the house was already in a roar of applause, I came to grief. There was a dreadful draught at the back of the stage, and one of the ladies had been so careful against it as to pin the green-baize linings of the stage together so as to leave no place for an exit; and I was compelled to grope about for a minute or two in search of a way of escape whilst the applause changed to boisterous laughter.
And the memory of that little incident helps me to a reflection on one detail of the actor's art which is more effective when fitly used, and more disastrous when neglected, than any other of the multitudinous things he has to know and to bear in mind. An exit is half the business of the most important scene ever written. You may play like an angel, you may hold the stage for half an hour and thrill your audience; but, after all, you may kill your supremest efforts by getting off clumsily. I write, of course, for the ignorant. The actor knows these things, and more than I can teach him into the bargain. But I had a singular instance of the fact in my own experience. It came early and gave me a lesson to be laid to heart. I never played before a more friendly audience. Good reports had gone ahead, and the house was willing, and I think was even eager, to be pleased. I had settled to that bright and happy confidence which is the actor's most blissful experience in comedy.
I think I never played so well in my life as in that first act of 'Jim the Penman;' but the stage was vast in comparison with any on which I had until then appeared, and my customary business brought me only within half a dozen paces of the door-way by which I should have vanished. A sudden sense of strangeness and constraint came down upon me like a cloud. The happy feeling of confidence vanished in a whiff of chill spiritual wind. The last line was spoken before that unhappy half-dozen of paces was achieved; and I left the stage in a dead silence, which was as eloquent of failure as it had been one brief minute earlier of success. I played half as well next night, but disappeared with aplomb, with an effect as encouraging as the most exigent artist could demand. So painful a thing is it to learn a new trade! 'So much to learn, so much to do!'
I am ready to propound a novel theory, and I am insolent enough to believe that I illustrate it in my own person. The time of full middle-age is that at which a man most readily adapts himself to a new art. It is at that time most assuredly necessary to accept certain physical limitations. I advise no hitherto unpractised person to seek excellence as a ground and lofty tumbler after five-and-forty. No sensible person who has attained that respectable altitude of years will try to make a début as Romeo. But supposing that a lad of fifteen and a man of five-and-forty begin on the same day to study landscape-painting, which of the two do you think will get nearer Nature's secret in five years' time? Personally I shall back—coteris paribus—the man of middle age. Or if it come to acting, who is likely (physical limitations on both sides duly considered, of course) to offer you the better study of a bit of human nature—the matured observer or the unpractised un-regarding youth? I back the middle-aged man once more.
My friendly critics of the London press told me that a middle-aged man had taken to the stage as a duck takes to water. It was a bit of kindly nonsense. I had worked like a galley-slave for nine months, and the nine months of a man of the world is worth the nine years of a boy. And do I profess to be an actor now? Not a bit of it, my friendly critic—not a bit of it, in all honesty. But I mean to be. There is no art so difficult—granted; but there is none so enchanting, so inspiring. Night after night for a whole week, bar Saturday, when Nature took a late revenge, I left a sick-room at Newcastle-on-Tyne; and every ache and pain fell away, and the sick treble changed to a healthy baritone, and manly strength came to pluck the halting pace of the invalid to marching time, and a feebly intermittent pulse grew full and calm at the splendid all-compelling influence of the stage. Had it been a cold lecture, now, or a speech on politics—and no man loves that kind of exercise more than I—the armchair and the warm fireside had not reached to me and beamed on me in vain. But the stage? That was another matter altogether. It is a better stimulant than the society of old friends. It is a finer anodyne than tobacco. It is a quicker and more constant pick-me-up than champagne. Sternest duty and purest pleasure wear one smiling face. And to think that I was well into the forties before I guessed this splendid truth!
But Nature is compensatory in everything, and her balance works in this accessible fairyland as elsewhere. The stage is the natural home of petty contretemps. When a man has dared to play in a piece of his own writing in a city like London it would be absurd to affect modesty or a want of belief in his own power to please. If under such conditions a man had no such faith, he would be an ass beyond the reach of satire. What else but faith in himself should bring him there? 'Que diable faisait-il dans cette galère?' Yet the bold amateur intruding is conscious of a resemblance in himself to the demons mentioned in Holy Writ He believes (in himself), but he trembles.
The night of the tentative production of 'Ned's Chum' at the Globe Theatre was the brightest in my earthly calendar. Yet as I waited for my first cue an irresistible, horrible cold nausea got hold of me, and I had to fly back to my dressing-room and to endure on dry land all the agonies of mal de mer. The call-boy's warning cry slew one keen anguish with another, and the wretch who had been physically sick with fear a minute before was, under fire, as cool as a cucumber. But there came one moment more of heroic trial before the play was over. I keep religiously the notices of that first night, and I have laughed more than once at the gentle trouncing I got at the hands of Mr. William Archer in the columns of the World. My critic complained, tenderly enough, that at one point I took the stage with an obvious effort, as if determined to show that thus and thus should a man behave under sudden news of irreparable ruin. I cannot quite tell, said Mr. Archer in effect, why it was not admirable acting, and yet it was not If he could have told, he went on to say, he might himself have been an excellent actor, and not a critic. But he wanted something—something was missing.
The miserable fact was this. I had never worn a wig in the part until that night, and I had forgotten for a mere instant that I wore one then. It was a part of the stage business to dash my wideawake hat to the ground, and—the wig came with it. For two or three dreadful seconds I stood frozen, expectant of the howl of laughter which generally follows such an accident. But the fates were kind, and the thing passed unnoticed save by two or three. My natural hair was much of the length and colour of the wig, and no derisive roar sounded in my ears. But I shall never forget the horror of those few waiting seconds; and I should like to ask Mr. Archer how far in his judgment such an occurrence might excuse an actor's momentary absence from pure nature.