I

“WHEN Mr. Nathan says that acting is not an art, of course he is talking arrant rot—who could doubt it, after witnessing a performance by the great Duse?” So, the estimable actor, Mr. Arnold Daly. Whether acting is or is not an art, it is not my concern at the moment to consider, yet I quote the riposte of Mr. Daly as perhaps typical of those who set themselves as defenders of the yea theory. It seems to me that if this is a satisfactory touche no less satisfactory should be some such like rejoinder as: “When Mr. Nathan says that acting is an art, of course he is talking arrant rot—who could doubt it, after witnessing a performance by Mr. Corse Payton.”

If an authentic art is anything which may properly be founded upon an exceptionally brilliant performance, then, by virtue of the Reverend Doctor Ernest M. Stires’ brilliant performance in it, is pulpiteering an art, and, on the strength of Miss Bird Millman’s brilliant performance in it, is tight-rope walking an art no less. Superficially a mere dialectic monkey-trick, this is yet perhaps not so absurd as it may seem, for if Duse’s art lies in the fact that she breathes life and dynamic effect into the written word of the artist D’Annunzio, Stires’ lies in the more substantial fact that he breathes life and dynamic effect into the word of the somewhat greater, and more evasive artist, God. And Miss Millman, too, brings to her quasi-art, movement, colour, rhythm, beauty and—one may even say—a sense of fantastic character, since the effect she contrives is less that of a dumpy little woman in a short white skirt pirouetting on a taut wire than of an unreal creature, half bird, half woman, out of some forgotten fable.

The circumstance that Duse is an artist who happens to be an actress does not make acting an art any more than the circumstance that Villon was an artist who happened to be a burglar or that Paderewski is an artist who happens to be a politician makes burglary and politics arts. Duse is an artist first, and an actress second: one need only look into her very great share in the creation of the dramas bearing the name of D’Annunzio to reconcile one’s self—if not too stubborn, at least in part—to this point of view. So, also, were Clairon, Rachel and Jane Hading artists apart from histrionism, and so too, is Sarah Bernhardt: who can fail to detect the creative artist in the “MÉmoires” of the first named, for instance, or, in the case of the last named, in the fertile impulses of her essays in sculpture, painting and dramatic literature? It is a curious thing that, in all the pronouncements of acting as an art, the names chosen by the advocates as representative carriers of the Æsthetic banner are those of actors and actresses who have most often offered evidence of artistic passion in fields separate and apart from their histrionic endeavours. LemaÎtre, Salvini, Rachel, Talma, Coquelin, Betterton, Garrick, Fanny Kemble, the Bancrofts, Irving, Tree, and on down—far down—the line to Ditrichstein, Sothern, Marie Tempest, Guitry, Gemier and the brothers Barrymore—all give testimony, in writing, painting, musicianship, poetry and dramatic authorship to Æsthetic impulses other than acting. Since acting itself as an art is open to question, the merit or demerit of the performances produced from the Æsthetic impulses in point is not an issue: the fact seems to be that it has been the artist who has become the actor rather than the actor who has become the artist.

The actor, as I have on another occasion hazarded, is the child of the miscegenation of an art and a trade: of the drama and the theatre. Since acting must appeal to the many—this is obviously its only reason for being, for acting is primarily a filter through which drama may be lucidly distilled for heterogeneous theatre-goers—it must, logically, be popular or perish. Surely no authentic art can rest or thrive upon such a premise. The great actors and actresses, unlike great fashioners in other arts, have invariably been favourites of the crowd, and it is doubtless a too charitable hypothesis to assume that this crowd has ever been gifted with critical insight beyond cavil. If, therefore, the actor or actress who can sway great crowds is strictly to be termed an artist, why may we not also, by strict definition, similarly term as exponents of an authentic art others who can likewise sway the same crowds: a great politician like Roosevelt, say, or a great lecturer like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out these paradox shock-troops to clear the way for the more sober infantry.)

I have said that I have no intention to argue for or against acting as an art yet, for all the circumstance that the case for the prosecution has long seemed the soundest and the most eloquent, there are still sporadic instances of imaginative histrionism that give one reason to ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently come to the more penetrating critic that what has on such occasions passed for an art has in reality been merely a reflected art: the art of drama interpreted not with the imagination of the actor but, more precisely, with the imagination of the dramatist. In other words, that actor or actress is the most competent and effective whose imagination is successful in meeting literally, and translating, the imagination of the dramatist which has created the rÔle played by the particular actor or actress. To name the actor’s imagination in such a case a creative imagination is a rather wistful procedure, for it does not create but merely duplicates. Surely no advocate of acting as a creative art would be so bold as to contend that any actor, however great, has ever brought creative imagination to the already full and superb creative imagination of Shakespeare. This would be, on an actor’s part, the sheerest impudence. The greatest actor is simply he who is best fitted by figure, voice, training and intelligence not to invade and annul the power of the rÔle which a great dramatist has imagined and created. Duse and D’Annunzio were, so to speak, spiritually and physically one: hence the unmatched perfection of the former’s histrionism in the latter’s rÔles. To see Duse is, save one admit one’s self critically to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical art doubts and the convictions of such as Mr. Daly.

It is, of course, the common habit of the prejudiced critic to overlook, in the estimate of acting as an art, the few admirable exponents of acting and to take into convenient consideration only the enormous majority of incompetents. But to argue that acting is not an art simply because a thousand Edmund Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give no evidence that it is an art is to argue that sculpture is not an art simply because a thousand fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding give no evidence in a like direction. Yet the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent actors as well as bad actors establishes acting as an art no more than the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes the playing of the cuckoo-whistle as an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison to what appears to be an absurdity, it is because by such absurdities, or elementals, is the status of acting in the field of the arts most sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt’s ever-haunting cry of the heart in “Izeyl” is a peg, however slight, upon which may be hung a strand of the theory that maintains acting as an art, so too, by the strict canon of dialectics, is Mr. Ruben Katz’s ever-haunting cry of the cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

If acting is an art, the proofs thus far offered are not only unconvincing but fundamentally, on the score of logic, not a little droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If criticism is an art (thus a familiar contention), why is not acting also an art, since both are concerned with re-creating works of art? But the artist’s work offered up to the critic is a challenge, whereas the dramatist’s work offered up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism is war, whether in behalf of Æsthetic friend or against Æsthetic foe; acting is agreement, peace. The critic re-creates, in terms of his own personality, the work of another and often emphatically different and antagonistic personality. The actor re-creates, in terms of a dramatist’s concordantly imagined personality, his own personality: the result is less re-creation than non-re-creation. In other words, the less the actor creates or re-creates and the more he remains simply an adaptable tool in the hands of the dramatist, the better actor he is. The actor’s state is thus what may be termed one of active impassivity. Originality and independence, save within the narrowest of limits, are denied him. He is a literal translator of a work of art, not an independently imaginative and speculative interpreter, as the critic is. The dramatist’s work of art does not say to him, as to the critic, “Here I am! What do you, out of all your experience, taste and training, think of me?” It says to him, instead and peremptorily, “Here I am! Think of me exactly as I am, and adapt all of your experience, taste and training to the interpretation of me exactly as I am!”

Brushing aside the theory that the true artist is the actor who can transform his voice, his manner, his character; who will disappear behind his part instead of imposing himself on it and adding himself to it—a simple feat, since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli and Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean actors, are true histrionic artists—Mr. Walkley, in his essay on “The English Actor of Today,” bravely takes up the defence from what he regards as a more difficult approach. “In the art of acting as in any other art,” he says, “the first requisite is life. The actor’s part is a series of speeches and stage directions, mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead. If the actor disappears behind it, there is nothing left but a Golgotha.” Here is indeed gay news! Hamlet, Iago, Romeo, Shylock—mere “cold print,” inert Shakespearian masses that, in order to live, have to be raised somehow from the dead by members of the Lambs’ Club! It is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly takes to cover after launching this torpedo, and devotes the balance of his interesting comments to a prudent and circumspect pas seul on the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter. For no sooner has he described the majestic drama of Shakespeare as “mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead,” than he seems suddenly, and not without a touch of horror, to realize that he has ridiculously made of Shakespeare a mere blank canvas and pot of paint for the use of this or that actor whom he has named, by implication and with magnificent liberalness, a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble for the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined MerciÉ.

II

Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable art takes its key from RÉmond de Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman whose pragmatic critical credo was, “If it makes me feel, it is art.” While it may be reasonable that a purely emotional art may aptly be criticized according to the degree of emotional reaction which it induces, it is the quality of emotion resident in the critic that offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion. A perfectly attuned and sound emotional equipment—an emotional equipment of absolute pitch, so to speak—is a rare thing, even among critics of brilliant intelligence, taste, imagination and experience. Goethe, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention only five, were physio-psychological units of dubious emotional structure, if we may trust the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of their critical dramatic writing may be accepted without qualm, a distinct measure of distrust would attach itself to any critical estimate of acting which they might have written or actually did write.

There are, obviously, more or less definite standards whereby we may estimate critical writings of such men as these so far as those criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe as the cerebral or semi-cerebral arts, but there are no standards, even remotely determinable or exact, whereby we may appraise such of their criticisms as deal with the directly and wholly emotional art of acting. It is perhaps not too far a cry to assume that had Mr. William Archer’s father been murdered shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr. Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Mr. Archer would have been moved to believe Mr. Forbes-Robertson on even greater actor-artist than he believed him under the existing circumstances, or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius, the Danish journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a victim of syphilis when he reviewed August Lindberg’s “Oswald,” he would have looked on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive exponent of histrionism. Nothing is more Æsthetically and artistically dubious and insecure than the appraisal of acting; for it is based upon the quicksands of varying human emotionalism, and of aural and visual prejudice. Were I, for example, one hundred times more proficient a critic of drama and life than I am, my criticism of acting would none the less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I would remain constitutionally anÆsthetic to a Juliet, however otherwise talented, who had piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all his histrionic power, presented to the vision a pair of knock-knees. This, I well appreciate, is the kind of critical writing that is promptly set down as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as I am concerned and I daresay that it is, in one direction or another, the truth so far as the majority of critics are concerned.

The most that may be said of the soundness of this or that laudatory criticism of an actor’s performance is that the performance in point has met exactly—or very nearly—the particular critic’s personal notion of how he, as a human being, would have cried, laughed and otherwise comported himself were he an actor and were he in the actor’s rÔle. The opposite, or denunciatory, phase of such criticism holds a similar truth. If this is not true, by what standards can the critic estimate the actor’s performance? By the standards of the actors who have preceded this actor in the playing of the rÔle, you say? What if the rÔle is a new one, a peculiar and novel one, that has not been played before? Again, you say that the rÔle may be in an alien drama and that the actor may be an alien, both rÔle and performance being foreign to the emotional equipment of the critic. But basic emotions, the foundation of drama, are universal. Still again, what of such dramas as “Œdipus Rex,” what of such rÔles—this with a triumphant chuckle on your part? I return the chuckle, and bid you read the criticisms that have been written of the actors who have played in these rÔles! Invariably the actors have been treated in precisely the same terms and by the same standards as if they were playing, not in the drama of the fifth century before Christ, but in “Fedora,” “The Face in the Moonlight” or “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

One cannot imagine sound criticism applying to any authentic art the standard of actor criticism that I have noted. Criticism, true enough, is always more or less personal, but, in its operation upon the authentic arts, its personality is ever like a new bottle into which the vintage wine of art has been poured. Criticism of the authentic arts is the result of the impact of a particular art upon a particular critical personality. Criticism of the dubious art of acting is the result of the impact of a particular critical personality upon this or that instance of acting. But if this is even remotely true, you inquire ironically, what of such an excellent instance of acting as Mimi Aguglia’s “Salome”; how in God’s name may the critic appraise that performance in the manner set down, i. e., in terms of himself were he a stage performer? Well, for all the surface humours of the question, that is actually more or less the way in which he does appraise it. The actor or actress, unlike the artist in more authentic fields, may never interpret emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the critic: the interpretation must be a reflection, more or less stereotyped, of the critic’s repertoire of emotions. Thus, where art is original expression, acting is merely the audible expression of a silent expression. In another phrase, expression in acting is predicated upon, and limited by, the expression of the critic. It is, therefore, a mere duplication of expression. And what holds true in the case of the critic so far as acting is concerned obviously holds doubly true in the case of the uncritical public.

Re-reading the celebrated critiques of acting, I come to the conclusion that the word “art” has almost uniformly been applied to acting by critics who, thinking that they had perhaps belaboured the subject a trifle too severely, were disposed graciously to throw it a sop. As good an illustration as any may be had from Lewes, certainly a friend of acting if ever there was one. Thus Lewes:

You will find the same dido in most of the essays on acting: a protracted series of cuffs and slaps terminating in a gentle non-sequitur kiss.

Acting at its finest is, however, often a confusing hypnosis; it is not to be wondered at that, fresh from its spell, the critic has mistaken it for a more exalted something than it intrinsically is. The flame and fire of a Duse, the haunt and magic of a Bernhardt, the powerful stage sense of creation of a Moissi—these are not a little befuddling. And, under their serpent-like charm, it is not incomprehensible that the critic should confound effect and cause. Yet acting, even of the highest order, is intrinsically akin to the legerdemain of a Hermann or a Kellar with a Shakespeare or a MoliÈre as an assistant to hand over, as the moment bids, the necessary pack of cards or bowl of goldfish. It is trickery raised to its most exalted level: a combination of experience, intelligence and great charm, not revivifying something cold and dead, but releasing something quick and alive from the prison of the printed page.

The actor who contends in favour of his creative art that he must experience within him the feeling of the dramatist, that he must actually persuade himself to feel his rÔle with all its turning smiles and tears, speaks nonsense. So, too, must the auditor, yet who would term the auditor a creative artist? The actor who contends in favour of his creative art the exact opposite, that he is, to wit, a creative artist since he must theatrically create the dramatist’s moods, illusions and emotions without feeling them himself, also speaks nonsense. For so, too, in such a case as “Electra,” or “Ghosts,” or “No More Blondes,” must the auditor, yet who, again, would term the latter a creative artist? The actor who contends in favour of his creative art that two accomplished actors often “create” the same rÔle in an entirely different manner, speaks nonsense yet again. For what is not creation in the first place does not become creation merely because it is multiplied by two. The actor who further contends in behalf of his creative art that if effective acting were the mere trickery that some maintain it to be, any person ordinarily gifted should be able, after a little experiment, to give an effective stage performance, speaks truer than he knows. Some of the most remarkable performances on the stage of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin have been given by just such persons. And there are numerous other instances. If acting is an art—and I do not say that it may not be—it at least, as an art, ill bears cross-examination of even the most superficial nature.

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 manoeuvring 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