ACTORS, AND WHAT THEY CALL "ACTING"

The Apparent Uselessness of a Critical Knowledge of It

LOUIS SHERWIN

THE world, we are told, abounds with all sorts of irregularities and exceptions. One hears rumors that it is possible to meet clergymen who are human beings, lady authors who are physically beautiful, chorus girls who do not spring from an old Southern family, waiters who habitually say "Thank you," and even journalists who are cultivated and well informed.

But never, and nowhere, will you meet an actor who does not proclaim that "Nowadays, the dramatic critics know nothing about acting."

Now, if you are expecting me to dispute this statement you are about to be disappointed. I agree with it most heartily; unequivocally; I might almost say, enthusiastically. My only objection to it is the word "nowadays." The axiom should be amended as follows:

"Dramatic critics know nothing about acting, and they never did know anything about it, and it will be a sorry day for their long-suffering readers if they do!"

To this pronunciamento, there is no reservation or exception.

If any of my colleagues are offended by it, I am sorry, not for having offended them, but for their failure to know the limitations of their metier. We critics are, in this respect, divided into two classes; those who know that they know nothing about acting, and those who don't.

James L. Ford one day discovered that listening was an important part of the mummer's craft. He promptly fell so deeply in love with this discovery that he has never since written about anything else and has spent the last ten years trying to persuade America that dramatic art stopped dead in the cultivated heart and head of— Mrs. Gilbert.

Of course Shaw has written more brilliantly and convincingly than all the rest of us put together about Duse and Bernhardt. But can we ever forgive him for encouraging Lillah McCarthy to think that she was an actress!

What a thing to have on your conscience!

SO far, of course, everybody will agree with me. Nobody will deny that my chers confreres and I are ignorant about the art histrionic, for the convincing reason that we are alive.

But, you will say, "How about the critics who are dead and therefore unchallengeable?" Oh, yes, you are about to floor me with Hazlitt and Charles Lamb and George Henry Lewes.

Have you ever read them? Well, I have, and I don't mind telling you in confidence that

they did not know a single, solitary, pedantic atom more about the "art" histrionic, than we critics do today.

They did, however, write a great deal more about it. They had to. The reason is, that the plays fashionable in their period were so abysmally, abjectly, appallingly stupid, that no intelligent man could possibly waste ink or white paper on them, even when white paper was cheap. The drama of Lamb's and Lewes's day was so much worse than even the Broadway hits of today, that in sheer disgust, they simply had to fall back upon the Keans, upon Mrs. Siddons, and—of course—poor old Shakespeare.

We, today, are vastly more fortunate.

We do not have to write articles pretending that Maude Adams is an actress, or that Robert Mantell is a great interpretative genius. I could write, like Lewes, long literary analyses of mediocre mummers, just as long as the editors would permit it.

But, thank the Gods, I don't have to. There are so many plays to write about and so many characters of tremendous human interest. Plays by Shaw, and Synge, and Dunsany, and Andreiev, and Bahr and Schnitzler, and Donnay, to say nothing of the younger men in America who are giving promise of real ability.

Dramatic criticism today occupies itself with plays, and only perfunctorily with the mummers who perform them.

"Read the notices," laments my colleague, Walter Prichard Eaton, who echoes the sentiment of the theatrical profession, "and you find them chiefly concerned with the play. A paragraph or two is tagged on the end, saying that So-and-So was 'adequate.' " What Mr. Eaton says is quite true, but hardly to be deplored. For, to my mind, the fact of the matter is, that acting is the most overrated, inflated, and overadvertised of all our artistic trades. One may properly question if it is an art at all.

"AN actor," says George lx. Moore, in his brilliant essay on Mummer Worship, "is one who repeats a portion of a story invented by another. You can teach a child to act, but you cannot teach a child to paint pictures, to model statues, to write poetry, or to compose music; acting is, therefore, the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all, and makes but slender demands on the intelligence of the individual exercising it."

Now, it is not my purpose here to quarrel with actors. They are what the critics of the passing generation have made them. The French slang term for an actor: a "m'as-tu-vu?" suits him exactly.

But it is not the poor devil's fault.

He has been applauded and flattered and interviewed until he quite naturally mistakes himself for an artist. My quarrel is with the totally obsolete and injurious point of view that helps to maintain the mummer on his grotesque pedestal.

His relation to the cosmos in general—and the pay-roll in particular—is outrageously disproportionate to his brains, his education, his usefulness. Moore also said that "mummers interrupt our path in life: the actor has been lifted out of his place and, in common with all things when out of their places, he is ridiculous and blocks the way."

This is quite true.

With his pretensions and preposterously inflated importance, he constantly blocks the way of the playwright, who is the really important person in the theatre, the only person whose genius can make theatregoing preferable to a game of old maid, or whose dullness can make an evening in the playhouse a worse bore than a visit from a creditor or a relative.

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That the mummer continues to block the way is one of the principal reasons why the general standard of plays remains at such a low level. Until he is put on his proper place the average of achievement in our theatres will never be raised.

Oh ! the tales that could be told of dramas that have been ruined because Miss Aspirant had to have "a sympathetic part," the lines that had to be cut out because the eminent star, Mr. Matinee, could not properly pronounce the words!

THE tradition that actors are of vital importance is rapidly becoming a hollow myth.

People talk a great deal about acting, but nobody—save a few rare actors—really knows anything about it. There is not an actor alive whom the public will pay money to see unless he has a play in which they are likely to be interested. The fact is, that the sensible theatregoer is not really interested in acting at all unless it be very great acting. To my mind, Moore was right when he described it as "the least of all the arts, if indeed it is an art at all." Acting is only theoretically an art. As Shaw said years ago, it only attracts the geniuses and the hysteriques—and hysteriques is merely a euphemism for the overwhelming majority of people who see in a career on the stage, an escape from hard work.

THE reason for this is purely an economic one. Although a few stars make pretty fair incomes, the stage is still a very precarious profession. The $200 a week actor is lucky if his income averages $3500 a year. Only a genius or a chronic loafer will put up with such ridiculous conditions. Theoretically, said Shaw, the actor should be able to approach the manager and say: "Within the limits imposed by my age and sex, I can do all the ordinary work of the stage with perfect certainty. I know my vowels and consonants as a phonetic expert, and can speak so as to arrest the attention of the audience whenever I open my mouth; forcibly, delicately, roughly, smoothly, prettily, harshly, authoritatively, submissively, but always artistically. I can sit, stand, fall, get up, walk, dance, and otherwise use my body with the complete command of it that marks the physical artist." Now, I ask you, can you imagine Maude Adams, and the hosts of our actors and actresses, claiming this much with any seriousness?

Most of our actors are not only ignorant of the rudiments of their craft, but they glory in that very ignorance.