It was not saved.
And the reason is that even the best of actors cannot save a play which insists on defeating them at every turn. Yet, as we may realise any day when Sarah Bernhardt acts before us, there is a certain kind of frankly melodramatic play which can be lifted into at all events a region of excited and gratified nerves. I have lately been to see a melodrama called "The Heel of Achilles," which Miss Julia Neilson has been giving at the Globe Theatre. The play was meant to tear at one"s susceptibilities, much as "La Tosca" tears at them. "La Tosca" is not a fine play in itself, though it is a much better play than "The Heel of Achilles." But it is the vivid, sensational acting of Sarah Bernhardt which gives one all the shudders. "The Heel of Achilles" did not give me a single shudder, not because it was not packed with the raw material of sensation, but because Miss Julia Neilson went through so many trying experiences with nerves of marble.
I cannot help wondering at the curious lack of self-knowledge in actors.
Here is a play, which depends for a great deal of its effect on a scene in which Lady Leslie, a young Englishwoman in Russia, promises to marry a Russian prince whom she hates, in order to save her betrothed lover from being sent to Siberia. The lover is shut in between two doors, unable to get out; he is the bearer of a State secret, and everything depends on his being able to catch the eleven P.M. train for Berlin. The Russian prince stands before the young Englishwoman, offering her the key of the door, the safety of her lover, and his own hand in marriage.
Now, she has to express by her face and her movements all the feelings of astonishment, horror, suspense, love, hatred, distraction, which such a situation would call up in her. If she does not express them the scene goes for nothing. The actress stakes all on this scene. Now, is it possible that Miss Julia Neilson really imagined herself to be capable of rendering this scene as it should be rendered? It is a scene that requires no brains, no subtle emotional quality, none of the more intellectual merits of acting. It requires simply a great pa.s.sivity to feeling, the mere skill of letting horrors sweep over the face and the body like drenching waves. The actress need not know how she does it; she may do it without an effort, or she may obtain her spontaneity by an elaborate calculation. But to do it at all she must be the actress in every fibre of her body; she must be able to vibrate freely. If the emotion does not seize her in its own grasp, and then seize us through her, it will all go for nothing. Well, Miss Neilson sat, and walked, and started, and became rigid, and glanced at the clock, and knelt, and fell against the wall, and cast her eyes about, and threw her arms out, and made her voice husky; and it all went for nothing. Never for an instant did she suggest what she was trying to suggest, and after the first moment of disappointment the mind was left calmly free to watch her attempt as if it were speculating round a problem.
How many English actresses, I wonder, would have been capable of dealing adequately with such a scene as that? I take it, not because it is a good scene, but because it affords so rudimentary a test of the capacity for acting. The test of the capacity for acting begins where words end; it is independent of words; you may take poor words as well as fine words; it is all the same. The embodying power, the power to throw open one"s whole nature to an overcoming sensation, the power to render this sensation in so inevitable a way that others shall feel it: that is the one thing needful. It is not art, it is not even the beginning of art; but it is the foundation on which alone art can be built.
The other day, in "Ulysses," there was only one piece of acting that was quite convincing: the acting of Mr. Brough as the Swineherd. It is a small part and an easy part, but it was perfectly done. Almost any other part would have been more striking and surprising if it had been done as perfectly, but no other part was done as perfectly. Mr. Brough has developed a stage-personality of his own, with only a limited range of emotion, but he has developed it until it has become a second nature with him. He has only to speak, and he may say what he likes; we accept him after the first word, and he remains what that first word has shown him to be. Mr. Tree, with his many gifts, his effective talents, all his taste, ambition, versatility, never produces just that effect: he remains interestingly aside from what he is doing; you see his brain working upon it, you enjoy his by-play; his gait, his studied gestures, absorb you; "How well this is done!" you say, and "How well that is done!" and, indeed, you get a complete picture out of his representation of that part: a picture, not a man.
I am not sure that melodrama is not the hardest test of the actor: it is, at least, the surest. All the human emotions throng noisily together in the making of melodrama: they are left there, in their naked muddle, and they come to no good end; but there they are. To represent any primary emotion, and to be ineffective, is to fail in the fundamental thing. All actors should be sent to school in melodrama, as all dramatic authors should learn their trade there.
THE PRICE OF REALISM
Modern staging, which has been carried in England to its highest point of excellence, professes to aim at beauty, and is, indeed, often beautiful in detail. But its real aim is not at the creation of beautiful pictures, in subordination to the words and actions of the play, but at supplementing words and actions by an exact imitation of real surroundings. Imitation, not creation, is its end, and in its attempt to imitate the general aspect of things it leads the way to the subst.i.tution of things themselves for perfectly satisfactory indications of them. "Real water" we have all heard of, and we know its place in the theatre; but this is only the simplest form of this anti-artistic endeavour to be real. Sir Henry Irving will use, for a piece of decoration meant to be seen only from a distance, a garland of imitation flowers, exceedingly well done, costing perhaps two pounds, where two or three brushes of paint would have supplied its place more effectively. When d"Annunzio"s "Francesca da Rimini" was put on the stage in Rome, a pot of basil was brought daily from Naples in order that it might be laid on the window-sill of the room in which Francesca and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere. In an interview published in one of the English papers, d"Annunzio declared that he had all his stage decorations made in precious metal by fine craftsmen, and that he had done this for an artistic purpose, and not only for the beauty of the things themselves. The gesture, he said, of the actor who lifts to his lips a cup of finely-wrought gold will be finer, more sincere, than that of the actor who uses a gilded "property."
If so, I can but answer, the actor is no actor, but an amateur. The true actor walks in a world as real in its unreality as that which surrounds the poet or the enthusiast. The bare boards, chairs, and T-light, in the midst of which he rehea.r.s.es, are as significantly palaces or meadows to him, while he speaks his lines and lives himself into his character, as all the real gra.s.s and real woodwork with which the manager will c.u.mber the stage on the first night. As little will he need to distinguish between the gilt and the gold cup as between the imaginary characters who surround him, and his mere friends and acquaintances who are speaking for them.
This costly and inartistic aim at reality, then, is the vice of the modern stage, and, at its best or worst, can it be said that it is really even what it pretends to be: a perfectly deceptive imitation of the real thing? I said once, to clinch an argument against it, by giving it its full possible credit, that the modern staging can give you the hour of the day and the corner of the country with precise accuracy. But can it? Has the most gradual of stage-moons ever caught the miraculous lunar trick to the life? Has the real hedgerow ever brought a breath of the country upon the stage? I do not think so, and meanwhile, we have been trying our hardest to persuade ourselves that it is so, instead of abandoning ourselves to a new, strange atmosphere, to the magic of the play itself.
What Mr. Craig does is to provide a plain, conventional, or darkened background for life, as life works out its own ordered lines on the stage; he gives us suggestion instead of reality, a symbol instead of an imitation; and he relies, for his effects, on a new system of lighting from above, not from below, and on a quite new kind of drill, as I may call it, by which he uses his characters as ma.s.ses and patterns, teaching them to move all together, with identical gestures. The eye is carried right through or beyond these horizons of canvas, and the imagination with it; instead of stopping entangled among real stalks and painted gables.
I have seen nothing so imaginative, so restful, so expressive, on the English stage as these simple and elaborately woven designs, in patterns of light and drapery and movement, which in "The Masque of Love" had a new quality of charm, a completeness of invention, for which I would have given all d"Annunzio"s golden cups and Mr. Tree"s boats on real Thames water.
Here, for once, we see the stage treated in the proper spirit, as material for art, not as a collection of real objects, or the imitation of real objects. Why should not the visible world be treated in the same spirit as the invisible world of character and temperament? A fine play is not the copy of an incident or the stenography of a character. A poetical play, to limit myself to that, requires to be put on the stage in such a way as to suggest that atmosphere which, if it is a true poem, will envelop its mental outlines. That atmosphere, which is of its essence, is the first thing to be lost, in the staging of most poetical plays. It is precisely what the stage-manager, if he happens to have the secret of his own art, will endeavour most persistently to suggest. He will make it his business to compete with the poet, and not, after the manner of Drury Lane, with the accidents of life and the vulgarities of nature.
ON CROSSING STAGE TO RIGHT
If you look into the actors" prompt-books, the most frequent direction which you will find is this: "Cross stage to right." It is not a mere direction, it is a formula; it is not a formula only, but a universal remedy. Whenever the action seems to flag, or the dialogue to become weak or wordy, you must "cross stage to right"; no matter what is wrong with the play, this will set it right. We have heard so much of the "action" of a play, that the stage-manager in England seems to imagine that dramatic action is literally a movement of people across the stage, even if for no other reason than for movement"s sake. Is the play weak?
He tries to strengthen it, poor thing, by sending it out walking for its health.
If we take drama with any seriousness, as an art as well as an improvisation, we shall realise that one of its main requirements is that it should make pictures. That is the lesson of Bayreuth, and when one comes away, the impression which remains, almost longer than the impression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the actors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. But here, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does not aim at the realistic representation of modern life. Maeterlinck should be acted in this solemn way, in a kind of convention; but I admit that you cannot act Ibsen in quite the same way.
The other day, when Mme. Jeanne Granier"s company came over here to give us some lessons in acting, I watched a little scene in "La Veine," which was one of the telling scenes of the play: Guitry and Bra.s.seur standing face to face for some minutes, looking at their watches, and then waiting, each with a single, fixed expression on his face, in which the whole temperament of each is summed up. One is inclined to say: No English actor could have done it. Perhaps; but then, no English stage-manager would have let them do it. They would have been told to move, to find "business," to indulge in gesture which would not come naturally to them. Again, in "Tartuffe," when, at the end, the hypocrite is exposed and led off to prison, Coquelin simply turns his back on the audience, and stands, with head sullenly down, making no movement; then, at the end, he turns half-round and walks straight off, on the nearer side of the stage, giving you no more than a momentary glimpse of a convulsed face, fixed into a definite, gross, raging mood. It would have taken Mr. Tree five minutes to get off the stage, and he would have walked to and fro with a very multiplication of gesture, trying on one face, so to speak, after another. Would it have been so effective, that is to say, so real?
A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when and how not to do things. Their blood helps them, for there is movement in their blood, and they have something to restrain. But they have realised the art there is in being quite still, in speaking naturally, as people do when they are really talking, in fixing attention on the words they are saying and not on their antics while saying them. The other day, in the first act of "The Bishop"s Move" at the Garrick, there is a d.u.c.h.ess talking to a young novice in the refectory of a French abbey. After standing talking to him for a few minutes, with only such movements as would be quite natural under the circ.u.mstances, she takes his arm, not once only but twice, and walks him up and down in front of the footlights, for no reason in the world except to "cross stage to right."
The stage trick was so obvious that it deprived the scene at once of any pretence to reality.
The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the difference between what is dramatic and what is merely theatrical. Drama is made to be acted, and the finest "literary" play in the world, if it wholly fails to interest people on the stage, will have wholly failed in its first and most essential aim. But the finer part of drama is implicit in the words and in the development of the play, and not in its separate small details of literal "action." Two people should be able to sit quietly in a room, without ever leaving their chairs, and to hold our attention breathless for as long as the playwright likes. Given a good play, French actors are able to do that. Given a good play, English actors are not allowed to do it.
Is it not partly the energy, the restless energy, of the English character which prevents our actors from ever sitting or standing still on the stage? We are a nation of travellers, of sailors, of business people; and all these have to keep for ever moving. Our dances are the most vigorous and athletic of dances, they carry us all over the stage, with all kinds of leaping and kicking movements. Our music-hall performers have invented a kind of clowning peculiar to this country, in which kicking and leaping are also a part of the business. Our melodramas are constructed on more movable planes, with more formidable collapses and collisions, than those of any other country. Is not, then, the persistent English habit of "crossing stage to right" a national characteristic, ingrained in us, and not only a matter of training? It is this reflection which hinders me from hoping, with much confidence, that a reform in stage-management will lead to a really quieter and simpler way of acting. But might not the experiment be tried? Might not some stage-manager come forward and say: "For heaven"s sake stand still, my dear ladies and gentlemen, and see if you cannot interest your audience without moving more than twice the length of your own feet?"
THE SPEAKING OF VERSE
Was there ever at any time an art, an acquired method, of speaking verse, as definite as the art and method of singing it? The Greeks, it has often been thought, had such a method, but we are still puzzling in vain over their choruses, and wondering how far they were sung, how far they were spoken. Wagner pointed out the probability that these choruses were written to fixed tunes, perhaps themselves the accompaniment to dances, because it can hardly be believed that poems of so meditative a kind could have themselves given rise to such elaborate and not apparently expressive rhythms. In later times there have been stage traditions, probably developed from the practice of some particular actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly contorted species of prose.
An attempt has lately been made by Mr. Yeats, with the practical a.s.sistance of Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr, to revive or invent an art of speaking verse to a pitch sounded by a musical instrument. Mr.
Dolmetsch has made instruments which he calls psalteries, and Miss Farr has herself learnt and has taught others, to chant verse, in a manner between speaking and singing, to the accompaniment of the psaltery. Mr.
Yeats has written and talked and lectured on the subject; and the experiment has been tried in the performances of Mr. Gilbert Murray"s translation of the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Here, then, is the only definite attempt which has been made in our time to regulate the speech of actors in their speaking of verse. No problem of the theatre is more important, for it is only by the quality of the verse, and by the clearness, beauty, and expressiveness of its rendering, that a play of Shakespeare is to be distinguished, when we see it on the stage, from any other melodrama. "I see no reason," says Lamb, in the profoundest essay which has ever been written on the acting of drama, "to think that if the play of Hamlet were written over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the process of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine features of Shakespeare, his stupendous intellect; and only taking care to give us enough of pa.s.sionate dialogue, which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to furnish; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakespeare to us differently from his representation of Banks or Lillo." It is precisely by his speaking of that poetry, which one is accustomed to hear hurried over or turned into mere oratory, that the actor might, if he were conscious of the necessity of doing it, and properly trained to do it, bring before the audience what is essential in Shakespeare. Here, in the rendering of words, is the actor"s first duty to his author, if he is to remember that a play is acted, not for the exhibition of the actor, but for the realisation of the play. We should think little of the "dramatic effect" of a symphony, in which every individual note had not been given its precise value by every instrument in the orchestra.
When do we ever, on the stage, see the slightest attempt, on the part of even the "solo" players, to give its precise value to every word of that poetry which is itself a not less elaborate piece of concerted music?
The two great dangers in the speaking of verse are the danger of over-emphasising the meaning and the danger of over-emphasising the sound. I was never more conscious of the former danger than when I heard a lecture given in London by M. Silvain, of the Comedie Francaise, on the art of speaking on the stage.
The method of M. Silvain (who, besides being an actor, is Professor of Declamation at the Conservatoire) is the method of the elocutionist, but of the elocutionist at his best. He has a large, round, vibrating voice, over which he has perfect command. "M. Silvain," says M. Catulle Mendes, "est de ceux, bien rares au Theatre Francais, qu"on entend meme lorsqu"ils par lent bas." He has trained his voice to do everything that he wants it to do; his whole body is full of life, energy, sensitiveness to the emotion of every word; his gestures seem to be at once spontaneous and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt for prose, as an inferior form. In all his renderings of verse, he never forgot that it was at the same time speech, the direct expression of character, and also poetry, a thing with its own reasons for existence.
He gave La Fontaine in one way, Moliere in another, Victor Hugo in another, some poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was the same attempt: to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In a tirade from Corneille"s "Cinna," he followed the angry reasoning of the lines by counting on his fingers: one, two, three, as if he were underlining the important words of each clause. The danger of this method is that it is apt to turn poetry into a kind of bad logic. There, precisely, is the danger of the French conception of poetry, and M. Silvain"s method brings out the worst faults of that conception.
Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats would have us do, we are at least safe from this danger. Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knows that verse is first of all song. In purely lyrical verse, with which he is at present chiefly concerned, the verse itself has a melody which demands expression by the voice, not only when it is "set to music," but when it is said aloud. Every poet, when he reads his own verse, reads it with certain inflections of the voice, in what is often called a "sing-song" way, quite different from the way in which he would read prose. Most poets aim rather at giving the musical effect, and the atmosphere, the vocal atmosphere, of the poem, than at emphasising individual meanings. They give, in the musician"s sense, a "reading" of the poem, an interpretation of the poem as a composition. Mr. Yeats thinks that this kind of reading can be stereotyped, so to speak, the pitch noted down in musical notes, and reproduced with the help of a simple stringed instrument. By way of proof, Miss Farr repeated one of Mr. Yeats" lyrics, as nearly as possible in the way in which Mr. Yeats himself is accustomed to say it. She took the pitch from certain notes which she had written down, and which she struck on Mr. Dolmetsch"s psaltery. Now Miss Farr has a beautiful voice, and a genuine feeling for the beauty of verse. She said the lines better than most people would have said them, but, to be quite frank, did she say them so as to produce the effect Mr. Yeats himself produces whenever he repeats those lines? The difference was fundamental. The one was a spontaneous thing, profoundly felt; the other, a deliberate imitation in which the fixing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good or bad, impossible.
I admit that the way in which most actors speak verse is so deplorable that there is much to be said for a purely mechanical method, even if it should turn actors into little more than human phonographs. Many actors treat verse as a slightly more stilted kind of prose, and their main aim in saying it is to conceal from the audience the fact that it is not prose. They think of nothing but what they take to be the expression, and when they come to a pa.s.sage of purely lyric quality they give it as if it were a quotation, having nothing to do with the rest of the speech. Anything is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things, either M. Silvain"s oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats" method would almost certainly drift. But I cannot feel that it is possible to do much good by a ready-made method of any kind. Let the actor be taught how to breathe, how to articulate, let his voice be trained to express what he wants to express, and then let him be made to feel something of what verse means by being verse. Let him, by all means, study one of Mr.
Yeats" readings, interpreted to him by means of notes; it will teach him to unlearn something and to learn something more. But then let him forget his notes and Mr. Yeats" method, if he is to make verse live on the stage.
GREAT ACTING IN ENGLISH
Why is it that we have at the present moment no great acting in England?
We can remember it in our own time, in Irving, who was a man of individual genius. In him it was the expression of a romantic temperament, really Cornish, that is, Celtic, which had been cultivated like a rare plant, in a hothouse. Irving was an incomparable orchid, a thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. We have one actress now living, an exception to every rule, in whom a rare and wandering genius comes and goes: I mean, of course, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She enchants us, from time to time, with divine or magical improvisations. We have actresses who have many kinds of charm, actors who have many kinds of useful talent; but have we in our whole island two actors capable of giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of Shakespeare, or, indeed, of rendering any form of poetic drama on the stage, as the Englishman and Englishwoman who came to us in 1907 from America, in the guise of Americans: Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern?
The business of the manager, who in most cases is also the chief actor, is to produce a concerted action between his separate players, as the conductor does between the instruments in his orchestra. If he does not bring them entirely under his influence, if he (because, like the conductor of a pot-house band, he himself is the first fiddle) does not subordinate himself as carefully to the requirements of the composition, the result will be worthless as a whole, no matter what individual talents may glitter out of it. What should we say if the first fiddle insisted on having a cadenza to himself in the course of every dozen bars of the music? What should we say if he cut the best parts of the "cellos, in order that they might not add a mellowness which would slightly veil the acuteness of his own notes? What should we say if he rearranged the composer"s score for the convenience of his own orchestra? What should we say if he left out a beautiful pa.s.sage on the horn because he had not got one of the two or three perfectly accomplished horn-players in Europe? What should we say if he altered the time of one movement in order to make room for another, in which he would himself be more prominent? What should we say if the conductor of an orchestra committed a single one of these criminal absurdities? The musical public would rise against him as one man, the pedantic critics and the young men who smoke as they stand on promenade floors. And yet this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is presented with any sort of public appeal.
In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids: the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy. In England a serious play, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small, unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any sort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and conditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama. Personal vanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves to account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with show, poetry with the box-office. Or is there in our actor-managers a lack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering of imaginative work on the stage?
It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management, of such typical plays of Shakespeare as "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet,"
and "Twelfth Night" that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the whole extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most needed. The mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have lost on our stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare. And first of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they give to each play as a whole by their way of setting it in action. I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should give one the same kind of impression as when one is a.s.sisting at "a solemn music." The rhythm of Shakespeare"s art is not fundamentally different from that of Beethoven, and "Romeo and Juliet" is a suite, "Hamlet" a symphony. To act either of these plays with whatever qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation. Here the music was unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice to the actor. This astonishing thing occurred: that a play was presented for its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for Shakespeare"s sake, not for the actor-manager"s.
And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare there come to us, naturally, many lessons. Until I saw this performance of "Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well as the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to be acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the rhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And this is because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so beautiful a fidelity, all that is pa.s.sionate and desperate and an ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet.
The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the _ingenue_, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragic child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to us outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern"s Romeo has an exquisite pa.s.sion, young and extravagant as a lover"s, and is alive. But Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet. I would not say that Mr. Sothern"s Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet"s soul unseized by the Germans yet." Yet what a Hamlet! How majestical, how simple, how much a poet and a gentleman! To what depth he suffers! How magnificently he interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the universe! In "Hamlet," too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen in the play when it was acted. Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore. I have seen romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of "Fortune"s fool." But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life.
And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before one"s eyes like a religious service. How is it that we get from the acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in England has ever been able to get? Well, in the first place, as I have said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves; the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best chance of doing great things themselves. Nothing is accidental, everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never uncontrolled. Intention without the power of achievement is almost as lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention. Now here are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point.
There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as these two American actors can. It is on this preliminary technique, this power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument, that all possibility of great acting depends. Who is there that can give us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful and subtle pa.s.sage in Shakespeare? One of our actors will give it sonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as pa.s.sionate speech, but no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts, which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts his loveliest poetry into their mouths. Look at Mr. Sothern when he gives the soliloquy "To be or not to be," which we are accustomed to hear spoken to the public in one or another of many rhetorical manners. Mr.
Sothern"s Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitive reflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortable before setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear his thoughts. Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, and just so casually. To render this on the stage requires, first, an understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producing by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of those words and cadences. Who is there on our stage who has completely mastered those two first requirements of acting? No one now acting in English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.
What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we get when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we get from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking merely the language of their own hearts. They give us every character in the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles. Look, for contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern. It is an elaborate travesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy"s head of Disraeli.
He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is motionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous gestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio"s troubles upon him. It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with rare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in the immense gaiety of the piece. The play is great and wild, a mockery and a happiness; and it is all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery of it deepened, in the clown"s song at the end, which, for once, has been allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.