M
Compton Mackenzie
IF it were worth arguing with those irrational creatures who believe that Bacon or anybody else except Shakespeare wrote the plays of Shakespeare there is one piece of unanswerable internal evidence which could be adduced and that is the allusions to actors and acting which occur in the course of his pages. No other writer of verse or prose or drama in the English language has written one really memorable line about actors; it required an actor himself with the genius of poetry burning in his soul. Prospero's speech in The Tempest seems the epilogue to Shakespeare's own life; the last simile of all is like the fall of a curtain at the play's end.
Those our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
The fugacity of the actor's art inspired Shakespeare as the fugacity of life itself inspired Horace or Herrick. The gramo- phone record and the film have been able to some extent to avert oblivion, but only to some extent. In the case of the record vox et preterea nihil is not enough. Nobody listening to an early record of Caruso will have the least difficulty in recognising a glorious tenor voice, for the vitality of the singer overcame the handicap cif recording into the mouth of a horn. I have heard people argue that Gigli is as great a tenor as Caruso, but nobody who has heard the two singers upon the stage would allow such parity. I remember once going to a performance of La Traviata at Covent Garden with John McCormack before the last war, when Gjgli was playing Alfredo. John McCormack, Whose admirati8n-'of.Caruso was immense began to sing at the back of the box sotto voce as Caruso would have sung the part. Presently, not surprisingly, the occupants of the boxes on either side began to rap on the partitions in protest, and then one of the attendants came along to say that unless there was absolute quiet in our box we should be invited to leave it. I managed to keep John McCormack quiet, but he sat through the rest of the performance with an expression of melancholy, indeed almost of despair. The personality of McCormack himself has been more successfully preserved on records that that of Caruso because the majority of them are records of McCormack as a singer of the concert hall rather than the opera house, and there is no tenor alive today who can challenge his supremacy there when he was in his golden prime. I wonder whether the fame of any film-star except Charlie Chaplin, will endure. It seems improbable. Most film-stars are by any standards of the stage mediocre actors and actresses, how mediocre is only too sadly obvious when they attempt to take the stage with experience only of the films. There are some really good actors and actresses on the films, but all of such have learnt their job on the stage. No film-star without that experience is capable of sustaining a part because the medium in which they chose to perform does not demand this ability. Posterity may marvel when they are shown the films we admire today at the naivety of what we believe to be our sophisticated present. On the other hand acting or, the films may progressively deteriorate and same of the stars of today, whom we that have seen great acting on the stage consider so ridiculous, may appear really worthy of having been preserved. I have been led into these reflections by an experience I enjoyed during the last week of the Edinburgh Festival. This was an evocation of Sarah Bernhardt by Esmd Percy in the great hall of Borthwick Castle which was one of the most remarkable tours de force I have been privileged to witness.
Some readers will have heard these memories of the divine Sarash broadcast in the Third Programme. I had heard them myself and knew that I was going to enjoy the performance, but from the moment that I saw Esmd Percy upon the small dais I realised how comparatively inadequate a substitute the microphone is for the presence of the human form. The recital was given in the sombre hall with walls twelve-feet thick which muted the gale shrieking round that Castle built in,1430. It was from here that Mary Queen of Scots in man's attire, booted and spurred, rode with Bothwell to Dunbar in that fateful year of 1567. One would have expected the acoustics to be bad, but in fact everybody in the audience, which filled the hall, could hear perfectly. Esme Percy began with himself as a schoolboy of fifteen sending a note to the great actress to tell her that if she would not give him an interview he intended to throw himself into the Seine. He parted with a five-franc piece, a large sum in the Paris of fifty years ago, to the stagedoor keeper who was brought back to life so vividly by the actor that I could fancy I was smelling the chestnut-blossom in the Bois de Boulogne as we went back to find out if the great actress was going to receive the anxious schoolboy. She did receive him and was so much relieved to hear he was not wanting to go on the stage that she gave him a signed photograph which he still possesses. Esme Percy went on to give the most astonishing impressions of Sarah Bernhardt in some of her parts, together with an acute critical estimate of her as an actress and a woman, and finished with an occasion in Brussels, in 1917, when waving a tricolour she recited the Marseillaise.
It was my privilege to say a few words at the end to an audience that was genuinely spellbound, and I told them how fortunate they were to hear this evocation of a great actress forty years later with the secure assurance of being _able to understand why she was so great and why she held the stage so long in that old Europe now vanished. I hesitate to suggest that this performance should be repeated on Television because it is still so uncertain a medium, but it offers a challenge to the wise men of Lime Grove and if it could be worthily presented it would be a magnificent lesson to the present of what really good acting is. We are so much at the mercy of the third-rate today that the second-rate wins eulogies from critics and applause from the multitude because neither critics nor audiences have any standards for informed com- parison. One rejoices that the public should enjoy operas and ballets and symphony concerts but one sighs sometimes for a hint of discrimination. I hear the second-rate performance of some concerto cheered by the audience of a promenade concert at Albert Hall as if it were . . . but no matter. We must realise that the audience is applauding itself for listening to a concerto and the soloist for so pluckily standing tip to an orchestra so very much larger than himself.
I saw Sarah Bernhardt act ten years before Esme Pero( saw her first, but I never had the fortune to be presented to her. I was, however, sometime in the mid-nineties, presented to Eleanora Duse after a performance of Fedora, and though Esmd Percy says with his French prejudice that her voice was too nasally Italian I hear it from the past chiming in my ears still like a distant bell. I never saw Bernhardt as Tosca, but in that sombre hall of Borthwick Castle when Esmd Percy gave an impression of the scene where she stabs Scarpia, telling of how her eyes seemed to change from forget-me-not blue to steely grey as she took the knife and of how after her exit the audience remained wrapt in silence for a full minute gazing at the dead man until a bugle call sounded and the curtain fell in a great storm of applause, the actor was able to bewitch me into the belief that I had actually seen Sarah Bernhardt as Tosca, and if that is not the very magic of acting then I do not know what acting is.
But the 'experience was touched with sadness. I thought again of what Shakespeare had written about the fugacity of the poor player and I thought of Walter de la Mare's exquisite epitaph :
• But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However, rare—rare it be, And when I crumble, who will remember. This lady of the West country ?
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