The Psychology of Acting

Is an Actor Really "Moved" by the Rôle He Is Enacting on the Stage?

A. B. WALKLEY

IT IS a pity that actors arc so inarticulate. I don't mean, on the stage—that is another story. I mean, about their artistic selves, their mental and emotional experiences in acting. Ask them if and how much they feel their part, whether they merge themselves in it or remain outside it, conscious all the time that they are acting, and you will get only confused and contradictory answers. Hence the psychology of the actor is very imperfectly understood. The reason is obvious. Both the temperament and the training of the actor are alien to the practice of self-analysis, which would not help, indeed, would probably hinder him in his artistic work. He belongs to the active, not to the contemplative division of humanity. Pure excogitation has no charms for him; his face is only "sicklicd o'er with the pale cast of thought" when he is playing Hamlet, even then there is no thinker under the grease-paint. Even when the actor does think about the principles of his art, you cannot be sure that he is thinking right. Take the question of "real" tears on the stage. The great Jefferson is said to have told a novice, "You mustn't cry on the stage. Make your audience do that. If you do not control yourself how can you expect to control your audience?" This is specious, but debatable. If tears necessarily unnerve the actor: if his loss of control is so complete as to affect his art, he certainly cannot expect to control his audience. But the novice might have replied: "How can I excite my audience to a pitch of emotion from which I deliberately hold back myself?" There is the contrary maxim of the old Roman; "If you want me to weep, weep you first." And, as a matter of fact, Ellen Terry used to weep copiously and yet make her audiences weep with her.

NOW I have selected this question of the "real" tear with a purpose for real tears imply real emotion (of pity or grief), of which they are the physical accompaniment. And so we come to the larger question: Ought the actor to feel his part? This question has been endlessly discussed since Diderot raised it (and answered it in the negative) in his Paradoxe stifle Comédien. Many players have given evidence, some for, some against; but I propose to neglect the whole of it, as of little or no value. Few men, and, as I began by pointing out, actors least of all, are to be trusted to report with anything like scientific accuracy on their own emotional states. But I have myself no hesitation in answering the question. I say that actors not only ought to feel the emotions of their parts but, as a matter of fact, invariably do, whether they realize it or not. I go further, and say that, under the influence of these fell emotions, as well as of their speaking and behaving as their parts, they do, for the time being, identify themselves with the character they are representing. Indeed, what Coleridge says about stage-illusion in the audience is equally true of the actor: That it is not belief but a suspension of disbelief. If the spectator is illudcd, quasi-hypnotized by the action of the stage, how shall the participants in that action escape its influence? No doubt, in the actor there is really a double consciousness. One side of him is acting, the other side is watching himself act, regulating and noting his effects, in short, controlling his art. I am here speaking of the acting side of him, and I say he imagines himself to be his personage in the same degree of illusion as possesses the audience. If he docs not succeed himself and identify himself with his part, then he is simply a bad actor, and that's all there is to it.

I REST my case upon an elementary and thoroughly familiar psychological fact. This fact, which is known to psychologists as the James-Lange Law, is that the simulation of the outward physical signs of an emotion actually arouses that emotion. Knit your brows, clench your teeth and your fists, look fiercely around you, and you will feel angry. Smile and look pleasant, and you will feel cheerful. Bend your head low, look despondent, and despondent you will become.

Thoroughly familiar, I have called this fact, though to the average unthinking man it will seem, in the strict sense of the epithet, a preposterous paradox^ or putting the cart before the horse. Listen, however,* to an old author who was aware of it long before the American Revolution. "I have often observed that on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion whose appearance I endeavored to imitate; Nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it, though one strove to separate the passion from its correspondent gestures." (Edmund Burke On the Sublime and Beautiful, Part IV, Section IV.)

What is more, the thing must have been known to a much older writer, who has been described as the author of a clever brochure on Dramatic Principles, no other, in fact, than Aristotle. He is advising (in the Poetics) the dramatic poet how to set about his work, how he should visualize the action of his play, and so forth. Then comes this significant passage: "Again the poet should work out his play, to the best of his power, with appropriate gestures" (Professor Butcher's translation, 1898) or according to the earlier version (1815) of Thomas Twining: "In composing, the poet should also, as much as possible, be an actor."

THE conclusion is obvious. The actor, in acting his part, that is to say, in adopting its behaviour, will ifso facto experience the emotion appropriate to that behaviour; in other words will feel his part. Yes, I should perhaps be told, but not with equal intensity. For there is this difference between emotions normally aroused and those artificially induced, between the fear experienced by a man trying to escape from a bear and that of a man who is only mimicking the other, with no bear present. The genuine emotion manifests itself not merely in gestures and movements visible to the naked eye but in a number of functional changes affecting the whole system. The heart, the glands, and the viscera: in short, to use William James' phrase, the emotion is attended by a "bodily reverberation." The actor can adopt the outward visible behaviour but not the internal functional changes, the "bodily reverberation." The answer to this, I think, is, first, that the actor's "part" is not a real flcsh-and-blood person, but only a projection of the author's imagination. An actor playing Julius Caesar is not imitating the behaviour of a real Caesar but only of an image of Caesar in Shakespeare's mind. The bear-hunter, then, to be imitated is one not only without a hunting bear but without a man hunted. The dramatist is not offering us "nature" itself, but only "holding the mirror up" to it. Second, the actor is not disinterestedly conducting experiments "in the air" to illustrate the James-Lange Law. His behaviour is not merely an exhibition of the emotions of his part; it is controlled and directed by his mental image of the part. He speaks its words, and speech, of course, is also a series of gestures, intimately connected with "bodily reverberation" of emotion. 'And the "whole" of which he is playing a "part" the action of the play itself, the behaviour of his fellow-actors who treat him as though he were, not his real self, but his part, everything around him, helps him to identify himself with the part. To be sure, there is that other fellow, the watcher, who knows that he, the watch, is not his part, but his very different self—not Shakespeare's Julius Caesar being stabbed in the capitol but John Brown, who drove up to the theatre in his Packard and threw away his Corona-Corona, half-smoked lest he should be late—but is now onlv serving a useful purpose of reminding himself that he is an artist, who must keep his art in balance—"in the very whirlwind of his passion, to beget a certain temperance."

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I do not see why the actor, in these conditions, with the aid of his image of the part, of the speech assigned to it, of the illusion of the story, of all the favourable surroundings, should not get beyond mere actions and gestures and attain to the emotional "reverberation" of his part. And the "great" actor, I suggest, is the one who does so attain. By this criterion, I think Eleonora Duse was a greater actress than Sarah Bernhardt. Sarah was wonderful, beautiful in the external, visible expressions of emotion; Duse shook you, for she was herself vibrating with emotion, though she stood stock-still. The well drilled artists of the Comedie-Franpaise are too consciously artists to be called, any of them, "great" actors. The "other fellow" I have spoken of is too intrusive for them ever to reach the emotional "reverberation" of a role.

And just here is to be found the main reason why the play acted on the stage is so different a thing from the play read in the study. The author imagines his characters behaving in a certain way, but does not (unless, indeed, he has followed Aristotle's advice, which is generally, I believe, taken as a counsel of perfection) behave in that way himself and therefore does not experience the appropriate emotions but only images of the emotions, pale, faint, cerebral-cognitions, rather than emotions. The reader follows suit. But when the characters are actually played on the stage, with behaviour arousing the appropriate emotion, then for the first time they come alive, and the spectator, with the aid of the sympathetic imagination, feels the life in them and shares their emotions. Thus the play book is to the play performed as water unto wine. And this will be so, even though there is no external action or gesture on the actor's part. For to every moment of our behaviour there corresponds their own emotional state, and the great actor is he who can note minutely and faithfully reproduce within himself those emotional states, however tenuous and fugitive, in all their infinite variety. They may be so microscopically minute that we speak of the actor as "in repose." He is not. The internal "reverberation" is still at work, and the actor of genius imparts the sense of it to his audience.

I well remember an incident in an otherwise forgotten play VEscalade which I fancy never left Paris, wherein Lucien Guitry, always so remarkable in this so-called "repose," sat relating to a companion his recollections of childhood. He described the cottage on the hillside, the vine on the porch, the babbling stream below, speaking in an absent tone as of one in a revery. He could see the cottage and you felt that he could see it. The emotion was internal, yet there were a few outward signs, the restful attitude, the pensive face, the "dreamy" look in the eyes. I can recall nothing else in the play, but that fragment of it still haunts my memory. It was a thing of sheer beauty.

Beyond all cavil, Lucien Guitry was the greatest actor of his day. And whyr Precisely because of the delicacy and sense of nuance with which he could vibrate and set you vibrating with the gentle throb of his quieter, more placid, emotions.