AN ACTOR'S DIFFICULTY.
THE writer came away from the Prince of Wales Theatre one night this week with a thought in his head which, in justice to a much abused profession, may be worth putting down. As it chanced, he had heard a good deal of Mr. Robertson's play Caste, without having seen it while it was the rage, and going to see it as revived, came away a little disappointed. The play is exceed- ingly good, at once amusing and wise, and about two-thirds of the acting is good too, as good as anything we are likely to get in London. Miss Blanche Wilton, in her saucy-soubrette part, de- serves, perhaps, even higher praise—her imitation of the march of a mounted soldier would, purely farcical as it is, make her fortune at the Varlet& ;—and Mr. Honey, as the drunken father, with his snatches of song and bits of stump oratory, would be perfect, if he were not so well aware that the gallery like accentuated acting. Whenever the scene is an ordinary one, or slightly comic, or has in it any touch of farce, there is little left to desire ; and pathos of the domestic kind is given naturally, without strain, except after an occasional sob, and every now and then with genuine artistic feeling. It is only when the emotion rises to blood heat., when it becomes tragic in its intensity, that the actors break down, and either turn wooden, as if conscious that they did not know what to do, or become blatant and absurd. It is very disappointing, particularly when the acting is so natural, and therefore so good, through- out about two-thirds of the play ; and yet when one reflects on it, how can they help it, poor things! An actor or actress of
original genius may possibly so represent a strong emotion, by the light of his or her own soul, as to kindle responsive emotion in
the audience ; but the ordinary artist must be dependent mainly upon his memory, upon something he has seen ; and who has seen strong emotion of the tragic kind in persons of the class which habitually restrains all expression of strong emotion ? A great genius may act remorse without having felt or seen it, just as a very great painter might paint a face without having the model before him ; but an ordinary painter will forget half the lines even when he thinks he most accurately remembers them. So would an actor forget, even if he had ever seen, the emotion he wishes to represent, and nine times in ten he has never seen it at all, and is compelled either to represent himself as he would be under that emotion, or to arrange features and attitude by a mental effort. In the former case he might succeed, for every man has in him the potentiality of every passion ; but few men not geniuses ever quite sec that their own emotion is not tame, and the majority therefore seek for the effect they cannot otherwise perceive in loud- ness, rant, strain, and caricature generally. They would, unless utter sticks, put aside those vices if they ever saw the emotion they want ; but how should they see it ? Who ever saw remorse in a civilized man or woman in a strong form, so strong that he could at once be certain that it was remorse he saw ? No emotion is worse represented on the stage, because no emotion among re- strained people—and actors are usually representing restrained peo- ple—is so carefully concealed. People who have seen a good deal of convicts say that when remorse exists among them it betrays itself much more in the shoulders and the fingers than in the face, though it may make the eyes haggard ; but how many actors ever watched the guilty with full knowledge of their guilt ? and not studying them, or the undeveloped germ within themselves, what are they to do ? They can but imagine how remorse would betray itself, and so stoop their heads and shuffle their toes and start and roll their eyes in a fashion into which no remorseful man was ever yet betrayed. Forced laughter would be much nearer the truth, or constant silence ; but where is the proof of that, proof patent to the audience ; which knows quite well the exaggeration is all wrong, but does not know definitely and precisely what would be right? Take deep indignation, again, indignation rising to the tragic height. Miss Foote, in one scene of Caste, has to portray that, to ask her own father how he " dare " steal her child's coral, and a nice mess she makes of it. She acts very fairly through all the lighter scenes, and there is little to complain of in her rendering of the affectionate pathos of which her part is full ; but in this outburst she breaks down altogether, roars as no woman ever roared with a baby beside her to be frightened, declaims, stamps her foot, and becomes altogether stagey. Yet how can she help it? She never saw moral indignation at that height under those circumstances, and how draw without a model ? People are often enough morally indignant, at least they often enough have cause ; but their indignation rarely carries them utterly away, never when tempered, as it ought to be in Caste, by the relationship and by the baby. If Miss Foote would look into herself instead of her book, she would probably see that were she really Esther Eccles her indignation would be deeply whispered, would have something of pleading in it, something also of more natural because more restrained rage. She would not blaze and stamp as if she would feel good hearty swearing a relief ; and why should Esther Eccles ? Still it is only for not looking into herself that she is as artist to blame, for she can have no model except among the un- restrained classes to whom Esther in the play did not belong, and who may by possibility make that desperate row which seems to the audience in the stalls so forced. As a matter of fact, we doubt if they do ; but if they do, copying them is none the less a mistake, just as great a mistake as it would be for Captain Hawtree to copy the superciliousness of an omnibus- driver, perfect as that no doubt is of its kind.
Very strong passion of any sort is with two exceptions very rarely to be witnessed in civilized society. Grief, in its higher and so to speak louder forms, most of us have, we fear, witnessed, even that dreadful hysteric grief of the strong man which seems as if it would shake him in pieces, and which perhaps of all forms of emotion for the moment melts conventionality most completely, and this not only in the sufferer, but in those who witness it. Consequently actors usually repre- sent grief well,—we have seen Alfred Wigan do it wonderfully,— better, strange to say, than actresses, who have seen it too, but who, for the most part, sob with their shoulders, under an idea, we suppose, that that gesture is more visible than the real sob of a woman's half mad grief, which,—we write with all reverence, but there is no other realistic illustration,—is a sob from the waist upwards, like an exaggerated hiccup. Rage, too, is almost always
well represented. True rage of the highest kind, which transforms a man, the rage during which cowardice and bravery are equal, and subtlety and coarseness the same thing, the rage which the old Italian called brief madness, is very rare indeed in Western Europe, and among the people por- trayed upon the stage ; but the next phase of the disease, the fury faintly restrained by conventionalism, is common enough, and quite sufficiently effective. Eccles's half comic but still real rage, because deprived of drink by his daughter's pride, is, for example, admirably done, and brings down the gallery in a noisy cor- diality of response. But, on the other hand, hatred, unrestrained hatred in its tragic form, is in real life the rarest of emotions, and is invariably badly expressed upon the stage. Half of us, actors included, irritabile genus as they are, never felt genuine hatred for anybody or anything, and never saw anybody who was undergoing the emotion. The Saturday Review somewhere goes the length of calling it the extinct passion, and though that state- ment wants the explanation that it alludes only to persistent hatred, still there is no doubt that hate will always be a difficulty to the tragic actor. If a man of decent temper, he will probably be unable to follow the true rule, and call up the passion in him- self, for he will not know it enough to recognize it when it is called up. The stage idea seems to be that a man who really hated another would scowl at him ; and the profession may, for aught a critic can say, be right. The writer, however, once saw a flash of real hate, the hate that can kill, the hate of a life, pass over an elderly woman's face, and has repeatedly watched the genuine emotion in Oriental faces. They are bad guides, but the woman was English, and in all the expression was the same, and was the reverse of that adopted -on the stage ; was a grin, not a scowl, the lips lengthening, the cheeks setting downwards, the eyes half closing, while the brow remained perfectly calm. Still in twenty years of active life he has seen it but once, and what is an actor who never felt it and never saw it to do, but trust to his moral consciousness, which is secretly debauched by the wish for an effect the gallery can see ? Then there is jealousy. Well, there is no knowing, and the best actors may have the best reason for believing that jealousy rolls its eyes, unnatural as that expression seems to quieter people, and we are perhaps deceived by poets when we fancy that jealousy is hungry, avid, thirsty, any adjective which expresses an inward craving that must be satisfied ; so we may let that be, and pass on to the commonest of all passions on the stage, and least common of all off it, Revenge. Did any actor or actress now in London ever see revenge in any trauscen- -dental or even tragic form? He may, if he has been in a battle -and caught the expression of the younger men, as their comrades begin to fall, but in ordinary artist life we question it very greatly. It is an emotion few feel except for seconds, and fewer still display. Vindictiveness we have all seen, sometimes in strong forms, but vindictiveness intensified is not revenge, but only malignity, a very different thing. The best actors usually con- found them, and grin like ghouls, which is effective, but not true ; while the meaner sort confound revenge with rage, and shout out, " Villa-a-a-in! I will be revengeddd !" as if somebody had just throttled them. The Todmorden murderer, we suspect, did not talk like that when he attacked the housemaid,—but we know no more, in any true sense of knowledge, than the gallery does, which is always puzzled about this particular emotion, and being British, in its bewilderment thirsts for noise.
The actors can hardly be blamed for not knowing when the audience does not know, and yet that sentence suggests the greatest puzzle of all. Why should the audience, who have no ocular -experience of a particular emotion, know when the actor, who has no experience either, is doing it wrongly? They do know it very often indeed, and we suppose the answer is this. The instincts -are always true, and the audience being a crowd, and not liable to -be governed by mere thoughts, as the individual actor is, obey their instincts, which teach them what they would teach the actor, only he keeps them under a pernicious control. Individually they would act worse than he does, but collectively a crowd always responds to genuine acting, however high the key-note of the -emotion may be pitched. They may be corrupted, of course, till they mistake rant for passion, and their distance from the stage renders exaggeration almost inevitable ; but real nature, the acting we feel to be nature, always makes them quiver, and their collective judgment, which when favourable is so often wrong, never condemns without a cause.
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