THE REFLEX EFFECT OF ACTING.
THE death of Charles Mathews—a most regrettable event, for within a limited range he was an admirable artist—reminds us of a curious lacuna in the history of the Stage. There does not exist, so far as we know, certainly there does not exist in English, anything like a good autobiography by an actor, a life describing the intellectual and moral effect of the profession upon the actor's self. There are plenty of actors' biographies, some of them amusing, some of them dull, but all of them tainted with a kind of inherent trashiness, which makes reading them something of a task. They are full of anecdotes often scandalous, and of criticisms often conventional, and of accounts of the impressions made by the actor on the public ; but they are always empty of the thing one wants to know, namely, of the effect produced by the profession on the artist's mind. This effect should be great. The world believes much, and we think justly, in the effect of books, and swallows greedily stories of groups of boys made bandits by Schiller's "Robbers," and every now and then proposes to prohibit "penny dreadfuls ;" and the effect of reading must be slight compared with that of acting. It is simply impossible that a man gifted with the sympathies essential to an actor should be able to realise many characters so completely to himself that he can represent them to others, and make them laugh or weep with his temporary second- self, without those characters exercising some effect upon his mind ; and we want to know both its kind and its degree. Was Charles Mathews or was be not more of an agreeable rattle because he incessantly studied how agreeable rattles should be depicted ? His biographers say that his cool, laughing insouciance lasted all his long, life, and sustained him under all difficulties, and it is at least possible that it may have been deepened by his professional assumption of the quality. The effect must be increased by the process of natural selection, which induces an actor to choose those parts which he can represent best, and with which therefore he must have a certain nearness of sympathy that one would think must greatly deepen the impact of their impression upon himself. One catches qualities from friends who are similar. Elliston, for instance, perhaps the best known of all actors of the second rank, had about him a certain liking at once for graciousness and for pomp which made him inclined to represent kings ; and he studied so many parts of that kind, and acted theta so well, that his friends all believed in their influence on his character. He became, as life went on, more and more the kind of benignant but over-stately and ceremonious grandee that he loved to repre- sent, regarded all about him from a certain height, as his subjects, and met the endless difficulties of his career with a feeling which kept him al ways cheerful, and wh ich could not be distinguished from benign condescension towards the creditors, supers, patrons, and other stupid people with a right to exist who kept trying to ruffle his serenity. In the number of Temple Bar published to-day there is a still more illustrative story told of Mrs. Porter, the successor to Mrs. Oldfield :—" She was especially fine in regal characters, in Queen Catherine, Queen Elizabeth (The Unhappy Favourite). One night when she was playing the latter, Queen Anne, who was seated in a stage box, dropped her fan upon the stage. Thoroughly possessed by the part she was representing, Mrs. Porter pointed to it., and addressing one of her attendants in a tone of imperial dignity, said, Take up our sister's fan!' Her Majesty smiled good-humouredly, and there was a loud burst of applause from the audience ; while the actress, aroused by these sounds to the reality of the situation, stood overwhelmed with con- fusion at her temerity." It has now and then happened to an actor to play a part so well that the public never ceases to demand it, and he himself has begun to confess to an influence arising from the repetition which perplexed and worried his mind. We do not know if the saying attributed to Mrs. Dion Boucicault is true or not, but it exactly represents our point. Her representa- tion of the dark " colleen " in the Colleen Baum so charmed all London, that the piece, perhaps the best melodrama ever written, to have no genius in it, went on for hundreds of nights, till at last the actress declared that she must stop, that her brain was growing confused, and that "she began to be uncertain whether she was acting the Colleen Bawn, or the Colleen Bawn was acting Mrs. Boucicault." We have heard Americans say that they believed that most perfect of actors, Mr. Jefferson, was distinctly modified in character, and for the better, by his endless repetitions of Rip van Winkle ; and certainly it is difficult to conceive how a man could create that character, and then pass his life in representing it, without im- bibing in some degree its essential qualities, the spirit of humor- ous tolerance and sense of the puzzle of daily life. But one wants direct evidence of that. Does Mr. Irving, for example, find that when he has been acting Hamlet for fifty nights the tone of IliESOWII inner mind has become more or less Handetian ? We say less because, of course, the chance of an influence of repulsion must always exist, and we can imagine an actor hating ambition more because he was every night a Richard III., or growing graver because, for part of every day, he was Mercutio. Liston's incessant playing of fools helped, in all human probability, to make of him the de- pressed Evangelical he was ; and we could hardly imagine Mr. Irving less alive to the uselessness of religious formalism because he had played for forty nights as Louis XI. Could a man set Prospero every day for a year and not acquire something, how- ever little, of dignified serenity of mind, of the sense of the
power possessed by the immaterial to rule material circumstances? Or could he be Jaques for a year, and not tend to melancholy re- flectiveness? It has often been remarked that men to whom life seems unreal, who have a sense of the histrionic element in it, are the least dependable of mankind ; and of all foibles, absence of dependableness is the one most frequent with an actor. May not that be increased by his half-dubiety whether he is himself or that other man whom every night he seems, to a watching audience, to be? Can Mr. Charles Mathews have separated him- self entirely from the Sir Charles Coldstream, of whom the little girl said that she did not admire that Mr. Mathews, he was so lazy, and all through the play was only himself. Is Mr. Jefferson ever quite sure, as he walks about, that Schneider is not at his heels? That the long repetition of a dramatic character will make certain physical mannerisms cling to an actor for months, and even years after be has discontinued the performance, is quite certain—just watch Mr. Sothern as Garrick—and why not mental mannerisms too? Was there no trace of Lady Macbeth's nature, no iron of resolve in Mrs. Siddons, even though she had acted tragedy, and especially that tragedy, so long that she could not get rid of her grandeur in private life, and appalled an unhappy waiter with,— " You've brought ma water, boy ! I asked for beer."
The speculation, though it may seem of little importance, is of rare interest to students of the human mind, and solid evidence about it might greatly affect education, more particularly by de- termining tutors as to the Jesuits' contention, the utility of an enforced attitude of mind in moulding the inner character ; but solid evidence can only be obtained when some considerable actor, himself a man able enough and conscious enough to trace the workings of his own mind, shall delight the world and keep his memory fresh by giving us his autobiography, with accounts in it of other things than his triumphs over audi- ences, his difficulties with managers, or his disputes with rivals or assistants. Such a book would be a treasure, and we should con- ceive that some actor might write it, if only to bring before the world the intellectual effect of a profession which day by day declines in intellectual estimation. There is no particular neces- sity for him to wait for his own death, for mental analysis will raise no enemies, and egoism is always pardoned in the public service.
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