Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885

by Various

Now supposing a young lady at once obtains an engagement at a reputable theatre, and is cast for a good part. What then? Then the atmosphere of the theatre at its best is not a pleasant one. Your daughter will be astonished at the extraordinary variations of manner, from the abjectly servile to the free-and-easy, described in Mr. Namby's case as “Botany Bay gentility.” She will hear everybody “my dearing” one another. At first she will not understand half that is said, and very little that is meant. When they all warm to their work, the veneer of politeness is soon rubbed off, and actor and actress are seen as the real artistes they are. The stage manager comes out strongly too; strange words are used, and whether it be high art or not that is being illustrated, there is pretty sure to be a considerable amount of forcible language employed in the excitement of the moment. Your daughter's ideas of propriety will be rudely shocked at every turn. When she ceases to be even astonished, she will be unconsciously deteriorating.

There is one sort of girl to whom all this does no harm, and that is the girl who comes of a hard-working professional theatrical family, who has been decently brought up in the middle of it all from a child, whose father and mother are in the theatre, thoroughly respectable people, and as careful of their daughter s morals as though she were the niece of a bishop. Such a girl as this, if she remain on the stage, will be a tolerable actress, always sure of an engagement. She will marry a decent, respectable actor, of some one connected with theatricals, will bring up a family excellently, will be really religious without ostentation, will never lose her self-respect, and in her own way be perfectly domesticated, happy and contented. Or she may marry some one in a good social position: if so, she will quit the stage without regret, because she is not of the stuff of which great actresses are made; but she will look back on her theatrical experience with affection for her parents to whom she owed so much. She is neither Esther, nor Polly Eccles, nor is she in the position of the well-brought-up young lady we have been considering. But she is an admirable woman, in whatever station of life her lot may be cast, and not a bit of a snob.

For a young lady, travelling with a company would be simply impossible, unless accompanied by her mother, or by some trustworthy relative. A manageress might undertake the guardianship and execute the trust conscientiously. But this is an exceptional case.

There is another point, and a very important one, to be considered, and that is the artistic temperament. If a young lady of attractive personal appearance possesses histrionic talent, then in proportion to her talent will be her temperament. She will be impulsive, passionate, impressionable, self-willed, impatient of control, simple, confiding, and vain, but artistically vain, and desirous of applause. She will be illogical, inconsistent, full of contradictions, fond of variety, and unable to exist without excitement. It only requires her to be a genius to be duped by the first schemer that throws himself in her way.

So, when the theatrical profession is brought before you, my dear madam, as a calling for your daughter to follow, you see that on the one hand there is mediocrity and deterioration of character, and on the other success, at, probably, a ruinous price. This does not apply, and again I impress it on my readers, to those who are to the manner born. They will lead jog-trot lives, study their parts, make puddings, act mechanically every night, knit socks in the green-room, and be virtuous and happy to the end of their days. Their artistic temperament will not lead them very far astray, unless they have the feu sacré, and then, it is likely, they will make a hasty marriage, repent at leisure, and try to forget they ever bore a husband's name by making one for themselves. In some recent French romance an ex-actress is warning her daughter who has married a prince, against the fascinations of a young painter. The princess turns on her mother with, “Est ce ma faute à moi si j'ai dans les veines du sang d'artiste?” And the ex-comédienne feels the full force of her daughter's retort, which has in it a certain amount of truth. Public life has great dangers for young women of the artistic temperament: mothers cannot be always with them, and sheep-dogs are expensive and untrustworthy. Chance or ill-luck may bring your daughter, madam, to the stage, but you would not choose it for her, that is, the stage, being as it is, and as it is likely to be under the present conditions. When those conditions are altered for the better, it will be time enough for society to change its opinion on the subject.

But, it is urged, the present state of the stage is a vast improvement on the past; that the actor is a person of more consideration than formerly, and not necessarily tabooed from all society, but on the contrary, he is to be met in the very best drawing-rooms. It may be that a few, whom you may count on the fingers of both hands, have the entrée to the best society. It may be so; I am not in a position to deny it. But their genius, or talent, and their unblemished reputation have combined to place them on that pedestal exalted above their fellows. But was it not always so? Have there not always been a privileged few among the actors, as among other citizens of the Great Republic of Art and Letters, who have been admitted to the assemblies of the great, and whose hospitality the great have condescended to accept in return? Go back thirty years and at least a dozen names of prominent actors and actresses will occur to us as having been received in the best society. Now, in their time, the number of West-end theatres was about one-third of what it is at the present day. Therefore, if five actors were received by society then, there should be fifteen received now. If there are not, the stage of to-day is socially on the same level with the stage of thirty years ago, and has not advanced a step; if the number of presentable actors is, nowadays, less, then the stage has retrograded. I cannot make out that there are more received than formerly. There are a few University men on the stage, men of birth and education, entitled to be received in good society. But now we are speaking of only a section of society, and are begging the original question.

And why, from the nature of the case, cannot the stage ever rank with the recognised professions? Because, as a means of earning a livelihood, that is as a mere employment, the stage is open to all the world. Unlike painting, literature, and music, it requires no special knowledge of any sort; it can be practised as well by the unlearned as, though not with the same facility, by the learned. It is a self-educating profession. Physical gifts, up to a certain point, will make up for deficiency in talent: but given talent, and with perseverance and application even for the most illiterate, success is certain. Given genius, then “reading and writing” seem to “come by nature,” and though there may always be a little difficulty with the spelling, yet triumph is sure and swift. The stage requires no matriculation; but for an actor of talent, who loves his art, there is no limit to his studies,—one helps another, one leads to another. As far as society is concerned, there should be no one more thoroughly qualified to play a leading part in the very highest, the most intellectual, and most cultivated society, than the actor or actress, who is rising in or who has reached the summit of “the profession.” Scarcely a subject can be named that is not, in its degree, almost essential—a strong word, but on consideration used correctly—to the perfection of the actor's art. A first-rate actor should be an admirable Crichton. The best preparation for the stage is, as I have elsewhere insisted, a thorough education. True, that it is so for every calling, but especially for the stage. To belong to the bar of England is an honor in itself, even though the barrister never gets a brief and could do nothing with it if he did. To belong to the stage of England is not an honor in itself. To the genius, the talents, and the private worth of our eminent actors in the past and in the present, our stage owes its lustre. They owed nothing to the stage, the stage everything to them.

The desire to raise the social status of the actor so that the term actor shall be “synonymous with gentleman,” is worthy of all praise. To make it possible for young ladies of education to take to acting as a means of earning a livelihood, would be a great social benefit.

When a youth, well brought up, takes to the stage, he should not be immediately treated as a pariah. On the contrary, if ever there be a time in a young man's career when more than ever he stands in need of good home traditions, the companionship of his equals, and the encouragement of his superiors, it is when he has honestly chosen, as a means of earning his living, the stage as a profession. That, for evident reasons, it has been usually selected by the dissolute, the idle, and those to whom any restraint is distasteful, accounts to a great extent for the disrepute in which the stage has been held. Of course the statute-book and the puritanism of the seventeenth century have much to answer for in the popular estimate of the players. There is a strong leaven of Puritanism amongst us, and, in some respects, so much the better; but also among very excellent people of various religious opinions, there has been, and it exists now, a sort of vague idea that the stage has always been under the positive ban of the Church. In the temporary laws and regulations of different countries, enforced by narrow-minded men, civil or ecclesiastical, may be found the origin of this mistaken notion. The Church has never pronounced the stage the anathema. On the contrary, she has patronised the stage, and the first mimes who entered France from Italy rather resembled members of a religious order in their pious fervor, than actors of a later date in their laxity. If players were refused Christian burial, it was when they had neither lived nor died as even nominal Christians, and in such cases even “maimed rites” would savor of hypocrisy. In France the actors themselves were under this hallucination. M. Regnier tells us how in 1848 a deputation of comedians went to Monseigneur Affre to ask him to get the sentence of excommunication removed from the theatrical profession. “L'illustre prélat leur répondit qu'il n'y avait pas à la lever, parcequ'elle n'avait jamais été formulée, et que les comédiens français, comme les comédiens de tous les autres pays catholiques, pouvaient participer aux sacraments.”

It would be a comparatively easy task to trace the origin of this floating but perfectly false tradition, but I have already overrun the limit of this article. In the time of Louis XIII. the actors were excellent church-goers, had their children baptised, frequented the sacraments, and were on the best terms with curés of Paris; and it will be a consolation to those actors among us who, like the doll in the song, “pine for higher society” to be reminded, that the grand monarch himself did not disdain to stand god-father at the font to the first-born of Molière, and to do the like office to the third child of Domenico Biancolelli, the Italian harlequin.