LIBRARY) 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DHEGO
 
 THE DRAMA
 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 Addresses by 
 
 HENRY IRVING 
 
 I. The Stage as it is 
 II. The Art of Acting 
 
 III. Four Great Actors 
 
 IV. The Art of Acting 
 
 WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY WHISTLER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 TAIT, SONS & COMPANY 
 Union Square
 
 Copyright, 1892, by 
 UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY 
 
 [All rights reserved}
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Stage as it is 9 
 
 The Art of Acting .... 49 
 
 Four Great Actors .... 107 
 
 The Art of Acting . ... 173
 
 LECTURE 
 
 SESSIONAL OPENING 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 8 NOVEMBER 
 
 1881
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS. 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, 
 
 OU will not be surprised 
 that, on this interesting- oc- 
 casion, I have selected as 
 the subject of the few re- 
 marks I propose to offer you, 
 "The Stage as it is." The 
 stage because to my pro- 
 fession I owe it that I am here, and every 
 dictate of taste and of fidelity impels me to 
 honor it ; the stage as it is because it is 
 very cheap and empty honor that is paid 
 to the drama in the abstract, and withheld 
 from the theatre as a working institution 
 in our midst. Fortunately there is less of 
 this than there used to be. It arose partly 
 from intellectual superciliousness, partly 
 
 9
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 from timidity as to moral contamination. 
 To boast of being able to appreciate 
 Shakespeare more in reading him than in 
 seeing him acted used to be a common 
 method of affecting special intellectuality. 
 I hope this delusion a gross and pitiful 
 one as to most of us has almost abso- 
 lutely died out. It certainly conferred a 
 very cheap badge of superiority on those 
 who entertained it. It seemed to each 
 of them an inexpensive opportunity of 
 worshipping himself on a pedestal. But 
 what did it amount to? It was little 
 more than a conceited and feather-headed 
 assumption that an unprepared reader, 
 whose mind is usually full of far other 
 things, will see on the instant all that 
 has been developed in hundreds of years 
 by the members of a studious and enthu- 
 siastic profession. My own conviction 
 is, that there are few characters or pas- 
 sages of our great dramatists which will 
 not repay original study. But at least 
 10
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 we must recognize the vast advantages 
 with which a practised actor, impregnated 
 by the associations of his life, and by 
 study with all the practical and critical 
 skill of his profession up to the date at 
 which he appears, whether he adopts or 
 rejects tradition addresses himself to the 
 interpretation of any great character, even 
 if he have no originality whatever. There 
 is something still more than this, how- 
 ever, in acting. Every one who has the 
 smallest histrionic gift has a natural dra- 
 matic fertility ; so that as soon as he 
 knows the author's text, and obtains self- 
 possession, and feels at home in a part 
 without being too familiar with it, the 
 mere automatic action of rehearsing and 
 playing it at once begins to place the 
 author in new lights, and to give the per- 
 sonage being played an individuality 
 partly independent of, and yet consistent 
 with, and rendering more powerfully 
 visible, the dramatist's conception. It is
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 the vast power a good actor has in this 
 way which has led the French to speak 
 of creating a part when they mean its 
 being first played ; and French authors 
 are so conscious of the extent and value 
 of this co-operation of actors with them, 
 that they have never objected to the 
 phrase, but, on the contrary, are uni- 
 formly lavish in their homage to the 
 artists who have created on the boards 
 the parts which they themselves have 
 created on paper. 
 
 I must add, as an additional reason for 
 valuing the theatre, that while there is 
 only one Shakespeare, and while there 
 are comparatively few dramatists who 
 are sufficiently classic to be read with 
 close attention, there is a great deal of 
 average dramatic work excellently suited 
 for representation. From this the public 
 derive pleasure. From this they receive 
 as from fiction in literature a great 
 deal of instruction and mental stimulus. 
 12
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 Some may be worldly, some social, some 
 cynical, some merely humorous and 
 witty, but a great deal of it, though its 
 literary merit is secondary, is well quali- 
 fied to bring out all that is most fruitful 
 of good in common sympathies. Now, it 
 is plain that if, because Shakespeare is 
 good reading, people were to give the 
 cold shoulder to the theatre, the world 
 would lose all the vast advantage which 
 conies to it through the dramatic faculty 
 in forms not rising to essentially literary 
 excellence. As respects the other feeling 
 which used to stand more than it does 
 now in the way of the theatre the fear 
 of moral contamination it is due to the 
 theatre of our day, on the one hand, and 
 to the prejudices of our grandfathers on 
 the other, to confess that the theatre of 
 fifty years ago or less did need reforming 
 in the audience part of the house. All 
 who have read the old controversy as to 
 the morality of going to the theatre are 
 
 13
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 familiar with the objection to which I 
 refer. But the theatre of fifty years ago 
 or less was reformed. If there are any, 
 therefore, as I fear there are a few, who 
 still talk on this point in the old vein, let 
 them rub their eyes a bit, and do us the 
 justice to consider not what used to be, 
 but what is. But may there be moral 
 contamination from what is performed 
 on the stage ? Well, there may be. But 
 so there is from books. So there may be 
 at lawn tennis clubs. So there may be 
 at dances. So there may be in connec- 
 tion with everything in civilized life and 
 society. But do we therefore bury our- 
 selves? The anchorites secluded them- 
 selves in hermitages. The Puritans iso- 
 lated themselves in consistent abstinence 
 from everything that anybody else did. 
 And there are people now who think that 
 they can keep their children, and that 
 those children will keep themselves in 
 after life, in cotton wool, so as to avoid 
 14
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 all temptation of body and mind, and be 
 saved nine-tenths of the responsibility of 
 self-control. All this is mere phantasy. 
 You must be in the world, though you 
 need not be of it ; and the best way to 
 make the world a better community to 
 be in, and not so bad a place to be of, is 
 not to shun, but to bring public opinion 
 to bear upon its pursuits and its relaxa- 
 tions. Depend upon two things that 
 the theatre, as a whole, is never below the 
 average moral sense of the time ; and 
 that the inevitable demand for an admix- 
 ture, at least, of wholesome sentiment in 
 every sort of dramatic production brings 
 the ruling tone of the theatre, whatever 
 drawback may exist, up to the highest 
 level at which the general morality of 
 the time can truly be registered. -We 
 may be encouraged by the reflection that 
 this is truer than ever it was before, 
 owing to the greater spread of educa- 
 tion, the increased community of taste 
 
 '5
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 between classes, and the almost absolute 
 divorce of the stage from mere wealth 
 and aristocracy. Wealth and aristocracy 
 come around the stage in abundance, and 
 are welcome, as in the time of Elizabeth ; 
 but the stage is no longer a mere append- 
 age of court -life, no longer a mere mirror 
 of patrician vice hanging at the girdle of 
 fashionable profligacy as it was in the 
 days of Congreve and Wycherley. It is 
 now the property of the educated people. 
 It has to satisfy them or pine in neglect 
 And the better their demands the better 
 will be the supply with which the drama 
 will respond. This being not only so, 
 but seen to be so, the stage is no longer 
 proscribed. It is no longer under a ban. 
 Its members are no longer pariahs in 
 society. They live and bear their social 
 part like others as decorously observant 
 of all that makes the sweet sanctities 
 of life as gracefully cognizant of its 
 amenities as readily recognized and 
 16
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 welcomed as the members of any other 
 profession. Am I not here your grateful 
 guest, opening the session of this philo- 
 sophical and historic institution ? I who 
 am simply an actor, an interpreter, with 
 such gifts as I have, and such thought 
 as I can bestow, of stage plays. And 
 am I not received here with perfect 
 cordiality on an equality, not hungrily 
 bowing and smirking for patronage, but 
 interchanging ideas which I am glad 
 to express, and which you listen to as 
 thoughtfully and as kindly as you would 
 to those of any other student, any other 
 man who had won his way into such 
 prominence as to come under the ken 
 of a distinguished institution such as 
 that which I have the honor to address ? 
 I do not mince the matter as to my 
 personal position here, because I feel 
 it is a representative one, and marks 
 an epoch in the estimation in which 
 the art I love is held by the British
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 world You have had many distin- 
 guished men here, and their themes 
 have often been noble, but with which 
 of those themes has not my art imme- 
 morial and perpetual associations ? Is it 
 not for ever identified with the noblest 
 instincts and occupations of the human 
 mind ? If I think of poetry, must I not 
 remember how to the measure of its 
 lofty music the theatre has in almost all 
 ages set the grandest of dramatic con- 
 ceptions ? If I think of literature, must I 
 not recall that of all the amusements by 
 which men in various states of society 
 have solaced their leisure and refreshed 
 their energies, the acting of plays is the 
 one that has never yet, even for a day, 
 been divorced from literary taste and 
 skill ? If I meditate on patriotism, can I 
 but reflect how grandly the boards have 
 been trod by personifications of heroic 
 love of country? There is no subject 
 of human thought that by common con- 
 18
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 sent is deemed ennobling that has not ere 
 now, and from period to period, been 
 illustrated in the bright vesture, and 
 received expression from the glowing lan- 
 guage of theatrical representation. And 
 surely it is fit that, remembering what the 
 stage has been and must be, I should ac- 
 knowledge eagerly and gladly that, with 
 few exceptions, the public no longer de- 
 bar themselves from the profitable pleas- 
 ures of the theatre, and no longer brand 
 with any social stigma the professors of 
 the histrionic art. Talking to an eminent 
 bishop one day, I said to him, "Now, 
 my Lord, why is it, with your love and 
 knowledge of the drama, with your deep 
 interest in the stage and all its belongings, 
 and your wide sympathy with all that 
 ennobles and refines our natures why 
 is it that you never go to the theatre ? " 
 "Well," said he, "I'll tell you. I'm 
 afraid of the Rock and the Record." I 
 hope soon we shall relieve even the most 
 
 '9
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 timid bishop and my right reverend 
 friend is not the most timid of all fears 
 and tremors whatever that can prevent 
 even ministers of religion from recogniz- 
 ing the wisdom of the change of view 
 which has come over even the most fas- 
 tidious public opinion on this question. 
 Remember, if you please, that the hos- 
 tile public opinion which has lately be- 
 gun so decisively to disappear, has been 
 of comparatively modern growth, or at 
 least revival. The pious and learned of 
 other times gave their countenance and 
 approbation to the stage of their days, 
 as the pioiis and learned of our time 
 give their countenance and approbation 
 to certain performances in this day. 
 Welcome be the return of good sense, 
 good taste, and charity, or rather justice. 
 No apology for the stage. None is 
 needed. It has but to be named to be 
 honored. Too long the world talked 
 with bated breath and whispering hum- 
 
 20
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 bleness of ' ' the poor player. " There are 
 now few poor players. Whatever variety 
 of fortune and merit there may be among 
 them, they have the same degrees of 
 prosperity and respect as come to mem- 
 bers of other avocations. There never 
 was so large a number of theatres or of 
 actors. And their type is vastly im- 
 proved by public recognition. The old 
 days when good-for-nothings passed into 
 the profession are at an end ; and the 
 old Bohemian habits, so far as they were 
 evil and disreputable, have also disap- 
 peared. The ranks of the art are being 
 continually recruited by deeply inter- 
 ested and earnest young men of good edu- 
 cation and belongings. Nor let us, while 
 dissipating the remaining prejudices of 
 outsiders, give quarter to those which 
 linger among players themselves. There 
 are some who acknowledge the value of 
 improved status to themselves and their 
 art, but who lament that there are now 
 
 21
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 no schools for actors. This is a very 
 idle lamentation. Every actor in full 
 employment gets plenty of schooling, 
 for the best schooling is practice, and 
 there is no school so good as a well- 
 conducted playhouse. The truth is, that 
 the cardinal secret of success in acting are 
 found within, while practice is the surest 
 way of fertilizing these germs. To effi- 
 ciency in the art of acting there should 
 come a congregation of fine qualities. 
 There should be considerable, though not 
 necessarily systematic, culture. There 
 should be delicate instincts of taste 
 cultivated, consciously, or unconscious- 
 ly, to a degree of extreme and subtle 
 nicety. There should be a power, at 
 once refined and strong, of both per- 
 ceiving and expressing to others the sig- 
 nificance of language, so that neither 
 shades nor masses of meaning, so to 
 speak, may be either lost or exaggerated. 
 Above all, there should be a sincere and 
 
 22
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 abounding sympathy with all that is good 
 and great and inspiring. That sympathy, 
 most certainly, must be under the control 
 and manipulation of art, but it must be 
 none the lest real and generous, and the 
 artist who is a mere artist will stop short 
 of the highest moral effects of his craft, 
 Little of this can be got in a mere train- 
 ing school, but all of it will come forth 
 more or less fully armed from the actor's 
 brain in the process of learning his art by 
 practice. For the way to learn to do a 
 thing is to do it ; and in learning to act 
 by acting, though there is plenty of inci- 
 dental hard drill and hard work, there is 
 nothing commonplace or unfruitful. 
 
 What is true of the art is true also ot 
 the social life of the artist. No sensa- 
 tional change has been found neces- 
 sary to alter his status though great 
 changes have come. The stage has 
 literally lived down the rebuke and re- 
 proach under which it formerly cowered, 
 
 2 3
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 while its professors have been simul- 
 taneously living down the prejudices 
 which excluded them from society. The 
 stage is now seen to be an elevating in- 
 stead of a lowering influence on national 
 morality, and actors and actresses re- 
 ceive in society, as do the members of 
 other professions, exactly the treatment 
 which is earned by their personal con- 
 duct. And so I would say of what we 
 sometimes hear so much about drama- 
 tic reform. It is not needed ; or, if it is, 
 all the reform that is wanted will be 
 best effected by the operation of public 
 opinion upon the administration of a 
 good theatre. That is the true reforming 
 agency, with this great advantage, that 
 reforms which come by public opinion 
 are sure, while those which come with- 
 out public opinion cannot be relied upon. 
 The dramatic reformers are very well- 
 meaning people. They show great en- 
 thusiasm. They are new converts to 
 24
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 the theatre, most of them, and they have 
 the zeal of converts. But it is scarcely 
 according to knowledge. These ladies 
 and gentlemen have scarcely studied the 
 conditions of theatrical enterprise, which 
 must be carried on as a business or it 
 will fail as an art. It is an unwelcome, 
 if not an unwarrantable intrusion to 
 come among our people with elaborate 
 advice, and endeavor to make them live 
 after different fashions from those which 
 are suitable to them, and it will be quite 
 hopeless to attempt to induce the general 
 body of a purely artistic class to make 
 louder and more fussy professions of 
 virtue and religion than other people. 
 In fact, it is a downright insult to the 
 dramatic profession to exact or to ex- 
 pect any such thing. Equally objec- 
 tionable, and equally impracticable, are 
 the attempts of Quixotic "dramatic re- 
 formers" to exercise a sort of goody- 
 goody censorship over the selection 
 
 25
 
 THE STAGE ASIT IS 
 
 and the text of the plays to be acted. 
 The stage has been serving the world 
 for hundreds, yes, and thousands of years, 
 during which it has contributed in pure 
 dramaturgy to the literature of the world 
 its very greatest master-pieces in near- 
 ly all languages, meanwhile affording 
 to the million an infinity of pleasure, 
 all more or less innocent. Where less 
 innocent, rather than more, the cause 
 has lain, not in the stage, but in the state 
 of society of which it was the mirror. 
 For though the stage is not always oc- 
 cupied with its own period, the new plays 
 produced always reflect in many particu- 
 lars the spirit of the age in which they are 
 played. There is a story of a traveller 
 who put up for the night at a certain inn, 
 on the door of which was the inscription 
 "Good entertainment for man and 
 beast. " His horse was taken to the stable 
 and well cared for, and he sat down to 
 dine. When the covers were removed he 
 26
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 remarked, on seeing his own sorry fare, 
 ' ' Yes, this is very well ; but where 's the 
 entertainment for the man?" If every- 
 thing were banished from the stage ex- 
 cept that which suits a certain taste, what 
 dismal places our theatres would be ! 
 However fond the play-goer may be of 
 tragedy, if you offer him nothing but 
 horrors, he may well ask " Where's 
 the entertainment for the man who 
 wants an evening's amusement ? " The 
 humor of a farce may not seem over- 
 refined to a particular class of intelli- 
 gence ; but there are thousands of people 
 who take an honest pleasure in it. And 
 who, after seeing my old friend J. L. Toole 
 in some of his famous parts, and having 
 laughed till their sides ached, have hot 
 left the theatre more buoyant and light- 
 hearted than they came ? Well, if the 
 stage has been thus useful and successful 
 all these centuries, and still is productive ; 
 if the noble fascination of the theatre 
 
 27
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 draws to it, as we know that it does, an 
 immortal poet such as our Tennyson, 
 whom, I can testify from my own expe- 
 rience, nothing delights more than the 
 success of one of the plays which, in the 
 mellow autumn of his genius, he has con- 
 tributed to the acting theatre ; if a great 
 artist like Tadema is proud to design scenes 
 for stage plays ; if in all departments of 
 stage production we see great talent, and 
 in nearly every instance great good taste 
 and sincere sympathy with the best 
 popular ideals of goodness ; then, I say, 
 the stage is entitled to be let alone that is, 
 it is entitled to make its own bargain with 
 the public without the censorious inter- 
 vention of well-intentioned busybodies. 
 These do not know what to ban or to 
 bless. If they had their way, as of course 
 they cannot, they would license, with 
 many flourishes and much self-laudation, 
 a number of pieces which would be hope- 
 lessly condemned on the first hearing, and 
 28
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 they would lay an embargo for very in- 
 sufficient reasons on many plays well en- 
 titled to success. It is not in this direc- 
 tion that we must look for any improve- 
 ment that is needed in the purveying of 
 material for the stage. Believe me, the 
 right direction is public criticism and pub- 
 lic discrimination. I say so because, be- 
 yond question, the public will have what 
 they want. So far, that managers in their 
 discretion, or at their pleasure, can force 
 on the public either very good or very bad 
 dramatic material is an utter delusion. 
 They have no such power. If they had 
 the will they could only force any par- 
 ticular sort of entertainment just as long 
 as they had capital to expend without any 
 return. But they really have not the will. 
 They follow the public taste with the 
 greatest keenness. If the people want 
 Shakespeare as I am happy to say they 
 do, at least at one theatre in London, and 
 at all the great theatres out of London, 
 
 29
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 to an extent unprecedented in the history 
 of the stage then they get Shakespeare. 
 If they want our modern dramatists Al- 
 bery, Boucicault, Byron, Burnand, Gil- 
 bert, or Wills these they have. If they 
 want Robertson, Robertson is there for 
 them. If they desire opera-bouffe, de- 
 pend upon it they will have it, and 
 have it they do. What then do I infer ? 
 Simply this : that those who prefer the 
 higher drama in the representation of 
 which my heart's best interests are cen- 
 tred instead of querulously animadvert- 
 ing on managers who give them some- 
 thing different, should, as Lord Beacons- 
 field said, " make themselves into a ma- 
 jority." If they do so, the higher drama 
 will be produced. But if we really un- 
 derstand the value of the drama, we shall 
 not be too rigid in our exactions. The 
 drama is the art of human nature in 
 picturesque or characteristic action. Let 
 us be liberal in our enjoyment of it. 
 3
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 Tragedy, comedy, historical-pastoral, pas- 
 toral-comical remember the large-mind- 
 ed list of the greatest-minded poet all 
 are good, if wholesome and will be 
 wholesome if the public continue to take 
 the healthy interest in theatres which 
 they are now taking. The worst times 
 for the stage have been those when play- 
 going was left pretty much to a loose 
 society, such as is sketched in the Res- 
 toration dramatists. If the good people 
 continue to come to the theatre in in- 
 creasing crowds, the stage, without losing 
 any of its brightness, will soon be good 
 enough, if it is not as yet, to satisfy the 
 best of them. This is what I believe all 
 sensible people in these times see. And 
 if, on the one hand, you are ready to 
 laugh at the old prejudices which have 
 been so happily dissipated ; on the other 
 hand, how earnestly must you welcome 
 the great aid to taste and thought and 
 culture which comes to you thus in the
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 guise of amusement. Let me put this 
 to you rather seriously ; let me insist 
 on the intellectual and moral use, alike 
 to the most and least cultivated of us, of 
 this art " most beautiful, most difficult, 
 most rare," which I stand here to-day, 
 not to apologize for, but to establish in 
 the high place to which it is entitled 
 among the arts and among the amelio- 
 rating influences of life. Grant that any 
 of us understand a dramatist better for 
 seeing him acted, and it follows, first, 
 that all of us will be most indebted to the 
 stage at the point where the higher and 
 more ethereal faculties are liable in read- 
 ing to failure and exhaustion, that is, stage- 
 playing will be of most use to us where 
 the mind requires help and inspiration to 
 grasp and revel in lofty moral or imagi- 
 native conceptions, or where it needs aid 
 and sharpening to appreciate and follow 
 the niceties of repartee, or the delicacies 
 of comic fancy. Secondly, it follows 
 32
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 that if this is so with the intellectual few, 
 it must be infinitely more so with the 
 unimaginative many of all ranks. They 
 are not inaccessible to passion and poetry 
 and refinement, but their minds do not 
 go forth, as it were, to seek these joys ; 
 and even if they read works of poetic 
 and dramatic fancy, which they rarely 
 do, they would miss them on the printed 
 page. To them, therefore, with the ex- 
 ception of a few startling incidents of 
 real life, the theatre is the only channel 
 through which are ever brought the great 
 sympathies of the world of thought be- 
 yond their immediate ken. And thirdly, 
 it follows from all this that the stage is, 
 intellectually and morally, to all who 
 have recourse to it, the source of some of 
 the finest and best influences of which 
 they are respectively susceptible. To 
 the thoughtful and reading man it brings 
 the life, the fire, the color, the vivid in- 
 stinct, which are beyond the reach of 
 
 33
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 study. To the common indifferent man, 
 immersed, as a rule, in the business and 
 socialities of daily life, it brings visions of 
 glory and adventure, of emotion and of 
 broad human interest. It gives glimpses 
 of the heights and depths of character 
 and experience, setting him thinking and 
 wondering even in the midst of amuse- 
 ment. To the most torpid and unobserv- 
 ant it exhibits the humorous in life and 
 the sparkle and finesse of language, which 
 in dull ordinary existence is stupidly shut 
 out of knowledge or omitted from partic- 
 ular notice. To all it uncurtains a world, 
 not that in which they live and yet not 
 other than it a world in which interest 
 is heightened whilst the conditions of 
 truth are observed, in which the capa- 
 bilities of men and women are seen devel- 
 oped without losing their consistency to 
 nature, and developed with a curious and 
 wholesome fidelity to simple and uni- 
 versal instincts of clear right and wrong. 
 34
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 Be it observed and I put it most uncom- 
 promisingly I am not speaking or think- 
 ing of any unrealizable ideal, not of any 
 lofty imagination of what might be, but 
 of what is, wherever there are pit and 
 gallery and foot-lights. More or less, 
 and taking one evening with another, 
 you may find support for an enthusiastic 
 theory of stage morality and the high 
 tone of audiences in most theatres in the 
 country ; and if you fancy that it is least 
 so in the theatres frequented by the poor 
 you make a great mistake, for in none is 
 the appreciation of good moral fare more 
 marked than in these. 
 
 In reference to the poorer classes, we 
 all lament the wide prevalence of intem- 
 perate drinking. Well, is it not an obvi- 
 ous reflection that the worst performance 
 seen on any of our stages cannot be so 
 bad as drinking for a corresponding time 
 in a gin-palace? I have pointed this 
 contrast before, and I point it again. 
 
 35
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 The drinking we deplore takes place in 
 company bad company ; it is enlivened 
 by talk bad talk. It is relished by ob- 
 scenity. Where drink and low people 
 come together these things must be. 
 The worst that can come of stage pander- 
 ing to the corrupt tastes of its basest pa- 
 trons cannot be anything like this, and, as 
 a rule, the stage holds out long against 
 the invitation to pander ; and such in- 
 vitations, from the publicity and deco- 
 rum that attend the whole matter, are 
 neither frequent nor eager. A sort of 
 decency sets in upon the coarsest person 
 in entering even the roughest theatre. I 
 have sometimes thought that, consider- 
 ing the liability to descend and the fa- 
 cility of descent, a special Providence 
 watches over the morals and tone of our 
 English stage. I do not desire to over- 
 charge the eulogy. There never was a 
 time when the stage had not conspic- 
 uous faults. There never was a time 
 36
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 when these were not freely admitted 
 by those most concerned for the main- 
 tenance of the stage at its best. In 
 Shakespeare, whenever the subject of 
 the theatre is approached, we perceive 
 signs that that great spirit, though it had 
 a practical and business-like vein, and es- 
 sayed no impossible enterprises, groaned 
 under the necessities, or the demands 
 of a public which desired frivolities and 
 deformities which jarred upon the poet- 
 manager's feelings. As we descend the 
 course of time we find that each genera- 
 tion looked back to a supposed previous 
 period when taste ranged higher, and 
 when the inferior and offensive peculiari- 
 ties of the existing stage were unknown. 
 Yet from most of these generations we 
 inherit works as well as traditions and 
 biographical recollections which the world 
 will never let die. The truth is that the 
 immortal part of the stage is its nobler 
 part. Ignoble accidents and interludes 
 
 37
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 come and go, but this lasts on forever. 
 It lives, like the human soul, in the body 
 of humanity associated with much that 
 is inferior, and hampered by many hin- 
 drances but it never sinks into nothing- 
 ness, and never fails to find new and 
 noble work in creations of permanent 
 and memorable excellence. Heaven for- 
 bid that I should seem to cover, even 
 with a counterpane of courtesy, exhibi- 
 tions of deliberate immorality. Happily 
 this sort of thing is not common, and 
 although it has hardly been practised by 
 any one who, without a strain of mean- 
 ing can be associated with the profession 
 of acting, yet public censure, not active 
 enough to repress the evil, is ever ready 
 to pass a sweeping condemnation on the 
 stage which harbors it. Our cause is a 
 good one. We go forth, armed with 
 the luminous panoply which genius has 
 forged for us, to do battle with dulness, 
 with coarseness, with apathy, with every 
 38
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 form of vice and evil. In every human 
 heart there gleams a bright reflection of 
 this shining armor. The stage has no 
 lights or shadows that are not lights of 
 life and shadows of the heart. To each 
 human consciousness it appeals in alter- 
 nating mirth and sadness, and will not 
 be denied. Err it must, for it is human ; 
 but, being human, it must endure. The 
 love of acting is inherent in our nature. 
 Watch your children play, and you will 
 see that almost their first conscious effort 
 is to act and to imitate. It is an instinct, 
 and you can no more repress it than you 
 can extinguish thought. When this in- 
 stinct of all is developed by cultivation 
 in the few, it becomes a wonderful art, 
 priceless to civilization in the solace it 
 yields, the thought it generates, the re- 
 finement it inspires. Some of its latest 
 achievements are not unworthy of their 
 grandest predecessors. Some of its 
 youngest devotees are at least as proud 
 
 39
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 of its glories and as anxious to preserve 
 them as any who have gone before. 
 Theirs is a glorious heritage ! You honor 
 it. They have a noble but a difficult, 
 and sometimes a disheartening, task. 
 You encourage it. And no word of 
 kindly interest or criticism dropped in 
 the public ear from friendly lips goes un- 
 regarded or is unfertile of good. The 
 universal study of Shakespeare in our 
 public schools is a splendid sign of the 
 departure of prejudice, and all criticism 
 is welcome ; but it is acting chiefly that 
 can open to others, with any spark of 
 Shakespeare's mind, the means of illu- 
 minating the world. Only the theatre 
 can realize to us in a life-like way what 
 Shakespeare was to his own time. And 
 it is, indeed, a noble destiny for the 
 theatre to vindicate in these later days the 
 greatness which sometimes it has seemed 
 to vulgarize. It has been too much the 
 custom to talk of Shakespeare as nature's 
 40
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 child as the lad who held horses for 
 people who came to the play as a sort 
 of chance phenomenon who wrote these 
 plays by accident and unrecognized. 
 How supremely ridiculous ! How utterly 
 irreconcilable with the grand dimensions 
 of the man ! How absurdly dishonor- 
 ing to the great age of which he was, 
 and was known to be, the glory ! The 
 noblest literary man of all time the 
 finest and yet most prolific writer the 
 greatest student of man, and the greatest 
 master of man's highest gift of language 
 surely it is treason to humanity to 
 speak of such an one as in any sense 
 a commonplace being ! Imagine him 
 rather, as he must have been, the most 
 notable courtier of the Court the most 
 perfect gentleman who stood in the Eliz- 
 abethan throng the man in whose pres- 
 ence divines would falter and hesitate 
 lest their knowledge of the Book should 
 seem poor by the side of his, and at
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 whom even queenly royalty would look 
 askance, with an oppressive sense that 
 here was one to whose omnipotent and 
 true imagination the hearts of kings and 
 queens and peoples had always been 
 an open page ! The thought of such 
 a man is an incomparable inheritance 
 for any nation, and such a man was the 
 actor Shakespeare. Such is our birth- 
 right and yours. Such the succession in 
 which it is ours to labor and yours to 
 enjoy. For Shakespeare belongs to the 
 stage for ever, and his glories must al- 
 ways inalienably belong to it. If you 
 uphold the theatre honestly, liberally, 
 frankly, and with wise discrimination, 
 the stage will uphold in future, as it has 
 in the past, the literature, the manners, 
 the morals, the fame, and the genius of 
 our country. There must have been 
 something wrong, as there was something 
 poignant and lacerating, in prejudices 
 which so long partly divorced the con- 
 
 42
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 science of Britain from its noblest pride, 
 and stamped with reproach, or at least 
 depreciation, some of the brightest and 
 world-famous incidents of her history. 
 For myself, it kindles my heart with 
 proud delight to think that I have stood 
 to-day before this audience known for 
 its discrimination throughout all English- 
 speaking lands a welcome and honored 
 guests, because I stand here for justice 
 to the art to which I am devoted be- 
 cause I stand here in thankfulness for the 
 justice which has begun to be so abun- 
 dantly rendered to it. If it is metaphor- 
 ically the destiny of humanity, it is liter- 
 ally the experience of an actor, that one 
 man in his time plays many parts. A 
 player of any standing must at various 
 times have sounded the gamut of human 
 sensibility from the lowest note to the 
 top of its compass. He must have ban- 
 queted often on curious food for thought 
 as he meditated on the subtle relations 
 
 43
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 created between himself and his audi- 
 ences, as they have watched in his im- 
 personations the shifting tariff the ever 
 gliding, delicately graduated sliding-scale 
 of dramatic right and wrong. He may 
 have gloated, if he be a cynic, over the 
 depths of ghastly horror, or the vagaries 
 of moral puddle through which it may 
 have been his duty to plash. But if he 
 be an honest man, he will acknowledge 
 that scarcely ever has either dramatist or 
 management wilfully biassed the effect 
 of stage representation in favor of evil, 
 and of his audiences he will boast that 
 never has their mind been doubtful 
 never has their true perception of the 
 generous and just been known to fail, 
 or even to be slow. How noble the priv- 
 ilege to work upon these finer these 
 finest feelings of universal humanity ! 
 How engrossing the fascination of those 
 thousands of steady eyes, and sound 
 sympathies, and beating hearts which an 
 44
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 actor confronts, with the confidence of 
 friendship and co-operation, as he steps 
 upon the stage to work out in action 
 his long-pent comprehension of a noble 
 master-piece ! How rapturous the satis- 
 faction of abandoning himself, in such a 
 presence and with such sympathizers, to 
 his author's grandest flights of thought 
 and noblest bursts of emotional inspi- 
 ration ! And how perpetually sustain- 
 ing the knowledge that whatever may 
 be the vicissitudes and even the degra- 
 dations of the stage, it must and will de- 
 pend for its constant hold on the affec- 
 tion and attention of mankind upon its 
 loftier work ; upon its more penetrating 
 passion ; upon its themes which most 
 deeply search out the strong affections 
 and high hopes of men and women ; upon 
 its fit and kindling illustration of great 
 and vivid lives which either have been 
 lived in noble fact or have deserved 
 to endure immortally in the popular 
 
 45
 
 THE STAGE AS IT IS 
 
 belief and admiration which they have 
 secured. 
 
 " For our eyes to see ! 
 
 Sons of wisdom, song, and power, 
 Giving earth her richest dower, 
 And making nations free 
 A glorious company ! 
 
 " Call them from the dead 
 For our eyes to see ! 
 Forms of beauty, love, and grace, 
 ' Sunshine in the shady place,' 
 That made it life to be 
 A blessed company 1 " 
 
 46
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 TO THE STUDENTS 
 
 OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 HARVARD 
 
 3<DTH MARCH
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 THE OCCASION. 
 
 AM deeply sensible of the 
 compliment that has been 
 paid, not so much to me 
 personally as to the calling I 
 represent, by the invitation 
 to deliver an address to the 
 students of this University. As an actor, 
 and especially as an English actor, it is a 
 great pleasure to speak for my art in one 
 of the chief centres of American culture ; 
 for in inviting me here to-day you in- 
 tended, I believe, to recognize the drama 
 as an educational influence, to show a 
 
 49
 
 genuine interest in the stage as a factor 
 in life which must be accepted and not 
 ignored by intelligent people. I have 
 thought that the best use I can make of 
 the privilege you have conferred upon 
 me is to offer you, as well as I am able, 
 something like a practical exposition of 
 my art ; for it may chance who knows ? 
 that some of you may at some future 
 time be disposed to adopt it as a voca- 
 tion. Not that I wish to be regarded as 
 a tempter who has come among you to 
 seduce you from your present studies by 
 artful pictures of the fascinations of the 
 footlights. But I naturally supposed that 
 you would like me to choose, as the 
 theme of my address, the subject in 
 which I am most interested, and to which 
 my life has been devoted; and that if 
 any students here should ever determine 
 to become actors, they could not be much 
 the worse for the information and counsel 
 I could gather for them from a tolerably 
 50
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 extensive experience. This subject will, 
 I trust, be welcome to all of you who are 
 interested in the stage as an institution 
 which appeals to the sober-minded and 
 intelligent ; for I take it that you have no 
 lingering prejudice against the theatre, or 
 else I should not be here. Nor are you 
 disposed, like certain good people, to 
 object to the theatre simply as a name. 
 These sticklers for principle would never 
 enter a playhouse for worlds ; and I have 
 heard that in a famous city of Massachu- 
 setts, not a hundred miles from here, 
 there are persons to whom the theatre is 
 unknown, but who have no objection to 
 see a play in a building which is called a 
 museum, especially if the vestibule lead- 
 ing to the theatre should be decorated 
 with sound moral principles in the shape 
 of statues, pictures, and stuffed objects in 
 glass cases. 
 
 When I began to think about my sub- 
 ject for the purpose of this address, I was 
 
 S 1
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 rather staggered by its vastness. It is 
 really a matter for a course of lectures ; 
 but as President Eliot has not proposed 
 that I should occupy a chair of dramatic 
 literature in this University, and as time 
 and opportunity are limited, I can only 
 undertake to put before you, in the sim- 
 plest way, a few leading ideas about 
 dramatic art which may be worthy of 
 reflection. And in doing this I have the 
 great satisfaction of appearing in a model 
 theatre, before a model audience, and of 
 being the only actor in my own play. 
 Moreover, I am stimulated by the atmos- 
 phere of the Greek drama, for I know 
 that on this stage you have enacted a 
 Greek play with remarkable success. So, 
 after all, it is not a body of mere tyros 
 that I am addressing, but actors who 
 have worn the sock and buskin, and de- 
 claimed the speeches which delighted 
 audiences two thousand years ago. 
 
 Now, this address, like discourses in a 
 5 2
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 more solemn place, falls naturally into 
 divisions. I propose to speak first of the 
 Art of Acting ; secondly, of its Require- 
 ments and Practice ; and lastly of its 
 Rewards. And, at the outset, let me say 
 that I want you to judge the stage at its 
 best. I do not intend to suggest that 
 only the plays of Shakespeare are toler- 
 able in the theatre to people of taste 
 and intelligence. The drama has many 
 forms tragedy, comedy, historical-pas- 
 toral, pastoral-comical and all are good 
 when their aim is honestly artistic. 
 
 S3
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 II 
 
 THE ART OF ACTING. 
 
 Now, what is the art of acting? I 
 speak of it in its highest sense, as the art 
 to which Roscius, Betterton, and Garrick 
 owed their fame. It is the art of em- 
 bodying the poet's creations, of giving 
 them flesh and blood, of making the 
 figures which appeal to your mind's eye 
 in the printed drama live before you on 
 the stage. ' ' To fathom the depths of 
 character, to trace its latent motives, to 
 feel its finest quiverings of emotion, to 
 comprehend the thoughts that are hidden 
 under words, and thus possess one's-self 
 of the actual mind of the individual man " 
 such was Macready's definition of the 
 player's art ; and to this we may add 
 the testimony of Talma. He describes 
 tragic acting as "the union of grandeur 
 54
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 without pomp and nature without trivi- 
 ality." It demands, he says, the endow- 
 ment of high sensibility and intelligence. 
 "The actor who possesses this double 
 gift adopts a course of study peculiar to 
 himself. In the first place, by repeated 
 exercises, he enters deeply into the emo- 
 tions, and his speech acquires the accent 
 proper to the situation of the personage 
 he has to represent. This done, he goes 
 to the theatre not only to give theatrical 
 effect to his studies, but also to yield 
 himself to the spontaneous flashes of his 
 sensibility and all the emotions which it 
 involuntarily produces in him. What 
 does he then do ? In order that his in- 
 spirations may not be lost, his memory, 
 in the silence of repose, recalls the accent 
 of his voice, the expression of his feat- 
 ures, his action in a word, the sponta- 
 neous workings of his mind, which he 
 had suffered to have free course, and, in 
 effect, everything which in the moments 
 
 55
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 of his exaltation contributed to the effects 
 he had produced. His intelligence then 
 passes all these means in review, con- 
 necting them and fixing them in his 
 memory to re-employ them at pleasure 
 in succeeding representations. These 
 impressions are often so evanescent that 
 on retiring behind the scenes he must 
 repeat to himself what he had been play- 
 ing rather than what he had to play. 
 By this kind of labor the intelligence 
 accumulates and preserves all the crea- 
 tions of sensibility. It is by this means 
 that at the end of twenty years (it re- 
 quires at least this length of time) a per- 
 son destined to display fine talent may 
 at length present to the public a series of 
 characters acted almost to perfection. " 
 
 You will readily understand from this 
 that to the actor the well-worn maxim 
 that art is long and life is short has a 
 constant significance. The older we 
 grow the more acutely alive we are to the 
 56
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 difficulties of our craft. I cannot give 
 you a better illustration of this fact than 
 a story which is told of Macready. A 
 friend of mine, once a dear friend of his, 
 was with him when he played Hamlet 
 for the last time. The curtain had fallen, 
 and the great actor was sadly thinking 
 that the part he loved so much would 
 never be his again. And as he took off 
 his velvet mantle and laid it aside, he 
 muttered almost unconsciously the words 
 of Horatio, "Good-night, sweet Prince ; " 
 then turning to his friend, "Ah," said he, 
 "I am just beginning to realize the sweet- 
 ness, the tenderness, the gentleness of 
 this dear Hamlet ! " Believe me, the 
 true artist never lingers fondly upon 
 what he has done. He is ever thinking 
 of what remains undone : ever striving 
 toward an ideal it may never be his 
 fortune to attain. 
 
 We are sometimes told that to read the 
 best dramatic poetry is more educating 
 
 57
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 than to see it acted. I do not think this 
 theory is very widely held, for it is in 
 conflict with the dramatic instinct, which 
 everybody possesses in a greater or less 
 degree. You never met a playwright 
 who could conceive himself willing 
 even if endowed with the highest literary 
 gifts to prefer a reading to a playgoing 
 public. He thinks his work deserving of 
 all the rewards of print and publisher, 
 but he will be much more elated if it 
 should appeal to the world in the theatre 
 as a skilful representation of human pas- 
 sions. In one of her letters George Eliot 
 says : "In opposition to most people who 
 love to read Shakespeare, I like to see 
 his plays acted better than any others ; 
 his great tragedies thrill me, let them be 
 acted how they may." All this is so sim- 
 ple and intelligible, that it seems scarcely 
 worth while to argue that in proportion 
 to the readiness with which the reader of 
 Shakespeare imagines the attributes of 
 58
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 the various characters, and is interested 
 in their personality, he will, as a rule, be 
 eager to see their tragedy or comedy in 
 action. He will then find that very 
 much which he could not imagine with 
 any definiteness presents new images 
 every moment the eloquence of look 
 and gesture, the by-play, the inexhaust- 
 ible significance of the human voice. 
 There are people who fancy they have 
 more music in their souls than was ever 
 translated into harmony by Beethoven 
 or Mozart. There are others who 
 think they could paint pictures, write 
 poetry in short, do anything, if they 
 only made the effort. To them what 
 is accomplished by the practised actor 
 seems easy and simple. But as it needs 
 the skill of the musician to draw the full 
 volume of eloquence from the written 
 score, so it needs the skill of the dramat- 
 ic artist to develop the subtle harmonies 
 of the poetic play. In fact, to do and not 
 
 59
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 to dream, is the mainspring of success in 
 life. The actor's art is to act, and the 
 true acting of any character is one of the 
 most difficult accomplishments. I chal- 
 lenge the acute student to ponder over 
 Hamlet's renunciation of Ophelia one of 
 the most complex scenes in all the drama 
 and say that he has learned more from 
 his meditations than he could be taught 
 by players whose intelligence is equal to 
 his own. To present the man thinking 
 aloud is the most difficult achievement 
 of our art. Here the actor who has no 
 real grip of the character, but simply 
 recites the speeches with a certain grace 
 and intelligence, will be untrue. The 
 more intent he is upon the words, and 
 the less on the ideas that dictated them, 
 the more likely he is to lay himself open 
 to the charge of mechanical interpre- 
 tation. It is perfectly possible to express 
 to an audience all the involutions of 
 thought, the speculation, doubt, waver- 
 60
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 ing, which reveal the meditative but ir- 
 resolute mind. As the varying shades of 
 fancy pass and repass the mirror of the 
 face, they may yield more material to 
 the studious playgoer than he is likely 
 to get by a diligent poring over the text. 
 In short, as we understand the people 
 around us much better by personal 
 intercourse than by all the revelations 
 of written words for words, as Ten- 
 nyson says, "half reveal and half con- 
 ceal the soul within, " so the drama has, 
 on the whole, infinitely more sugges- 
 tions when it is well acted than when 
 it is interpreted by the unaided judg- 
 ment of the student. It has been said 
 that acting is an unworthy occupation 
 because it represents feigned emotions, 
 but this censure would apply with equal 
 force to poet or novelist. Do not im- 
 agine that I am claiming for the actor 
 sole and undivided authority. He 
 should himself be a student, and it is 
 
 61
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 his business to put into practice the best 
 ideas he can gather from the general 
 current of thought with regard to the 
 highest dramatic literature. But it is 
 he who gives body to those ideas fire, 
 force, and sensibility, without which they 
 would remain for most people mere airy 
 abstractions. 
 
 It is often supposed that great actors 
 trust to the inspiration of the moment. 
 Nothing can be more erroneous. There 
 will, of course, be such moments, when 
 an actor at a white heat illumines some 
 passage with a flash of imagination (and 
 this mental condition, by the way, is 
 impossible to the student sitting in his 
 arm-chair) ; but the great actor's surprises 
 are generally well weighed, studied, and 
 balanced. We know that Edmund Kean 
 constantly practised before a mirror ef- 
 fects which startled his audience by their 
 apparent spontaneity. It is the accu- 
 mulation of such effects which enables 
 62
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 an actor, after many years, to present 
 many great characters with remarkable 
 completeness. 
 
 I do not want to overstate the case, or 
 to appeal to anything that is not within 
 common experience, so I can confidently 
 ask you whether a scene in a great play 
 has not been at some time vividly im- 
 pressed on your minds by the delivery 
 of a single line, or even of one forcible 
 word. Has not this made the passage 
 far more real and human to you than 
 all the thought you have devoted to it ? 
 An accomplished critic has said that 
 Shakespeare himself might have been 
 surprised had he heard the "Fool, fool, 
 fool ! " of Edmund Kean. And though 
 all actors are not Keans, they have in 
 varying degree this power of making a 
 dramatic character step out of the page, 
 and come nearer to our hearts and our 
 understandings. 
 
 After all, the best and most convincing 
 
 63
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 exposition of the whole art of acting is 
 given by Shakespeare himself : "To hold, 
 as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to 
 show virtue her own feature, scorn her 
 own image, and the very age and body 
 of the time his form and pressure." Thus 
 the poet recognized the actor's art as a 
 most potent ally in the representation of 
 human life. He believed that to hold 
 the mirror up to nature was one of the 
 worthiest functions in the sphere of 
 labor, and actors are content to point 
 to his definition of their work as the 
 charter of their privileges. 
 64
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 III. 
 
 PRACTICE OF THE ART. 
 
 THE practice of the art of acting is a 
 subject difficult to treat with the neces- 
 sary brevity. Beginners are naturally 
 anxious to know what course they should 
 pursue. In common with other actors, 
 I receive letters from young people many 
 of whom are very earnest in their am- 
 bition to adopt the dramatic calling, but 
 not sufficiently alive to the fact that 
 success does not depend on a few les- 
 sons in declamation. When I was a boy 
 I had a habit which I think would be 
 useful to all young students. Before 
 going to see a play of Shakespeare's I 
 used to form in a very juvenile way 
 a theory as to the working out of the 
 whole drama, so as to correct my con- 
 ceptions by those of the actors ; and 
 
 65
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 though I was, as a rule, absurdly wrong, 
 there can be no doubt that any method 
 of independent study is of enormous 
 importance, not only to youngsters, but 
 also to students of a larger growth. 
 Without it the mind is apt to take its 
 stamp from the first forcible impression 
 it receives, and to fall into a servile de- 
 pendence upon traditions, which, robbed 
 of the spirit that created them, are apt 
 to be purely mischievous. What was 
 natural to the creator is often unnatural 
 and lifeless in the imitator. No two 
 people form the same conceptions of 
 character, and therefore it is always 
 advantageous to see an independent 
 and courageous exposition of an original 
 ideal. There can be no objection to the 
 kind of training that imparts a knowledge 
 of manners and customs, and the teach- 
 ing which pertains to simple deportment 
 on the stage is necessary and most 
 useful ; but you cannot possibly be 
 66
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 taught any tradition of character, for that 
 has no permanence. Nothing is more 
 fleeting than any traditional method 01 
 impersonation. You may learn where a 
 particular personage used to stand on the 
 stage, or down which trap the ghost of 
 Hamlet's father vanished ; but the soul 
 of interpretation is lost, and it is this 
 soul which the actor has to re-create for 
 himself. It is not mere attitude or tone 
 that has to be studied ; you must be 
 moved by the impulse of being ; you 
 must impersonate and not recite. 
 
 There has always been a controversy 
 as to the province of naturalism in dra- 
 matic art. In England it has been too 
 much the custom, I believe, while de- 
 manding naturalism in comedy, to ex- 
 pect a false inflation in tragedy. But 
 there is no reason why an actor should 
 be less natural in tragic than in lighter 
 moods. Passions vary in expression 
 according to moulds of character and 
 
 67
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 manners, but their reality should not be 
 lost even when they are expressed in the 
 heroic forms of the drama. A very sim- 
 ple test is a reference to the records of 
 old actors. What was it in their per- 
 formances that chiefly impressed their 
 contemporaries ? Very rarely the meas- 
 ured recitation of this or that speech, but 
 very often a simple exclamation that 
 deeply moved their auditors, because it 
 was a gleam of nature in the midst of 
 declamation. The "Prithee, undo this 
 button ! " of Garrick, was remembered 
 when many stately utterances were 
 forgotten. In our day the contrast 
 between artificial declamation and the 
 accents of nature is less marked, because 
 its delivery is more uniformly simple, 
 and an actor who lapses from a natural 
 into a false tone is sure to find that his 
 hold upon his audience is proportion- 
 ately weakened. But the revolution 
 which Garrick accomplished may be im- 
 68
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 agined from the story told by Boswell. 
 Dr. Johnson was discussing plays and 
 players with Mrs. Siddons, and he said : 
 "Garrick, madam, was no declaimer ; 
 there was not one of his own scene- 
 shifters who could not have spoken ' To 
 be or not to be ' better than he did ; yet 
 he was the only actor I ever saw whom 
 I could call a master, both in tragedy 
 and comedy, though I liked him best in 
 comedy. A true conception of charac- 
 ter and natural expression of it were his 
 distinguished excellences." 
 
 To be natural on the stage is most dif- 
 ficult, and yet a grain of nature is worth 
 a bushel of artifice. But you may say 
 what is nature? I quoted just now 
 Shakespeare's definition of the actor's art. 
 After the exhortation to hold the mirror 
 up to nature, he adds the pregnant warn- 
 ing : "This overdone or come tardy off, 
 though it make the unskilful laugh, can- 
 not but make the judicious grieve, the 
 
 69
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 censure of which one must in your al- 
 lowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of 
 others." Nature may be overdone by 
 triviality in conditions that demand ex- 
 altation ; for instance, Hamlet's first 
 address to the Ghost lifts his disposition 
 to an altitude far beyond the ordinary 
 reaches of our souls, and his manner of 
 speech should be adapted to this senti- 
 ment. But such exaltation of utterance 
 is wholly out of place in the purely 
 colloquial scene with the Gravedigger. 
 When Macbeth says, "Go, bid thy mis- 
 tress, when my drink is ready, she strike 
 upon the bell," he would not use the 
 tone of 
 
 " Pity, like a naked new-born babe, 
 
 Striding the blast, or Heaven's cherubim, horsed 
 Upon the sightless couriers of the air, 
 Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, 
 That tears shall drown the wind." 
 
 Like the practised orator, the actor 
 rises and descends with his sentiment, 
 70
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 and cannot always be in a fine phrenzy. 
 This variety is especially necessary in 
 Shakespeare, whose work is essentially 
 different from the classic drama, because 
 it presents every mood of mind and 
 form of speech, commonplace or ex- 
 alted, as character and situation dictate : 
 whereas in such a play as Addison's Cato, 
 everybody is consistently eloquent about 
 everything. 
 
 There are many causes for the growth 
 of naturalism in dramatic art, and 
 amongst them we should remember the 
 improvement in the mechanism of the 
 stage. For instance, there has been a 
 remarkable development in stage-light- 
 ing. In old pictures you will observe 
 the actors constantly standing in a line, 
 because the oil-lamps of those days gave 
 such an indifferent illumination that 
 everybody tried to get into what was 
 called the focus the "blaze of publi- 
 city " furnished by the "float" or foot-
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 lights. The importance of this is illus- 
 trated by an amusing story of Edmund 
 Kean, who one night played Othello with 
 more than his usual intensity. An ad- 
 mirer who met him in the street next 
 day was loud in his congratulations : "I 
 really thought you would have choked 
 lago, Mr. Kean you seemed so tremen- 
 dously in earnest." " In earnest ! " said 
 the tragedian, " I should think so ! 
 Hang the fellow, he was trying to keep 
 me out of the focus." 
 
 I do not recommend actors to allow 
 their feelings to carry them away like 
 this ; but it is necessary to warn you 
 against the theory expounded with bril- 
 liant ingenuity by Diderot, that the actor 
 never feels. When Macready played 
 Virginius, after burying his beloved 
 daughter, he confessed that his real ex- 
 perience gave a new force to his acting 
 in the most pathetic situations of the 
 play. Are we to suppose that this was 
 72
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 a delusion, or that the sensibility of the 
 man was a genuine aid to the actor? 
 Bannister said of John Kemble that he 
 was never pathetic because he had no 
 children. Talma says that when deeply 
 moved he found himself making- a rapid 
 and fugitive observation on the alterna- 
 tion of his voice, and on a certain spas- 
 modic vibration which it contracted in 
 tears. Has not the actor who can thus 
 make his feelings a part of his art an ad- 
 vantage over the actor who never feels, 
 but who makes his observations solely 
 from the feelings of others ? It is neces- 
 sary to this art that the mind should 
 have, as it were, a double consciousness, 
 in which all the emotions proper to the 
 occasion may have full swing, while the 
 actor is all the time on the alert for every 
 detail of his method. It may be that 
 his playing will be more spirited one 
 night than another. But the actor who 
 combines the electric force of a strong 
 
 73
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 personality with a mastery of the re- 
 sources of his art must have a greater 
 power over his audiences than the pas- 
 sionless actor who gives a most artistic 
 simulation of the emotions he never 
 experiences. 
 
 Now, in the practice of acting, a most 
 important point is the study of elocu- 
 tion ; and in elocution one great diffi- 
 culty is the use of sufficient force to be 
 generally heard without being unnaturally 
 loud, and without acquiring a stilted de- 
 livery. The advice of the old actors was 
 that you should always pitch your voice 
 so as to be heard by the back row of 
 the gallery no easy task to accomplish 
 without offending the ears of the front of 
 the orchestra. And I should tell you that 
 this exaggeration applies to everything 
 on the stage. To appear to be natural, 
 you must in reality be much broader 
 than nature. To act on the stage as one 
 really would in a room, would be ineffec- 
 74
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 tive and colorless. I never knew an 
 actor who brought the art of elocution to 
 greater perfection than the late Charles 
 Mathews, whose utterance on the stage 
 appeared so natural that one was sur- 
 prised to find when near him that he 
 was really speaking in a very loud key. 
 There is a great actor in your own coun- 
 try to whose elocution one always listens 
 with the utmost enjoyment I mean 
 Edwin Booth. He has inherited this 
 gift, I believe, from his famous father, 
 of whom I have heard it said, that he 
 always insisted on a thorough use of the 
 "instruments" by which he meant the 
 teeth in the formation of words. 
 
 An imperfect elocution is apt to degen- 
 erate into a monotonous uniformity of 
 tone. Some wholesome advice on this 
 point we find in the Life of Betterton. 
 
 "This stiff uniformity of voice is not 
 only displeasing to the ear, but dis- 
 appoints the effect of the discourse on 
 
 75
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 the hearers ; first, by an equal way of 
 speaking, when the pronunciation has 
 everywhere, in every word and every syl- 
 lable, the same sound, it must inevitably 
 render all parts of speech equal, and so 
 put them on a very unjust level. So that 
 the power of the reasoning part, the lustre 
 and ornament of the figures, the heart, 
 warmth, and vigor of the passionate part 
 being expressed all in the same tone, is 
 flat and insipid, and lost in a supine, or 
 at least unmusical pronunciation. So 
 that, in short, that which ought to strike 
 and stir up the affections, because it is 
 spoken all alike, without any distinction 
 or variety, moves them not at all. " 
 
 Now, on the question of pronunciation 
 there is something to be said, which, I 
 think, in ordinary teaching is not suffi- 
 ciently considered. Pronunciation on 
 the stage should be simple and un- 
 affected, but not always fashioned rigidly 
 according to a dictionary standard. No 
 76
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 less an authority than Cicero points out 
 that pronunciation must vary widely ac- 
 cording to the emotions to be expressed ; 
 that it may be broken or cut, with a vary- 
 ing or direct sound, and that it serves for 
 the actor the purpose of color to the 
 painter, from which to draw his varia- 
 tions. Take the simplest illustration, the 
 formal pronunciation of "A-h" is "Ah," 
 of "O-h" " Oh ;" but you cannot stereo- 
 type the expression of emotion like this. 
 These exclamations are words of one 
 syllable, but the speaker who is sounding 
 the gamut of human feeling will not be 
 restricted in his pronunciation by the 
 dictionary rule. It is said of Edmund 
 Kean that he never spoke such ejacula- 
 tions, but always sighed or groaned 
 them. Fancy an actor saying thus, "My 
 Desdemona ! Oh, oh, oh ! " Words are 
 intended to express feelings and ideas, 
 not to bind them in rigid fetters. The 
 accents of pleasure are different from the 
 
 77
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 accents of pain, and if a feeling is more 
 accurately expressed, as in nature, by a 
 variation of sound not provided for by 
 the laws of pronunciation, then such im- 
 perfect laws must be disregarded and 
 nature vindicated. The word should be 
 the echo of the sense. 
 
 The force of an actor depends, of 
 course, upon his physique ; and it is nec- 
 essary, therefore, that a good deal of 
 attention should be given to bodily train- 
 ing. Everything that develops supple- 
 ness, elasticity, and grace that most 
 subtle charm should be carefully culti- 
 vated, and in this regard your admirable 
 gymnasium is worth volumes of advice. 
 Sometimes there is a tendency to train 
 the body at the expense of the mind, and 
 the young actor with striking physical 
 advantages must beware of regarding 
 this fortunate endowment as his entire 
 stock-in-trade. That way folly lies, and 
 the result may be too dearly purchased 
 78
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 by the fame of a photographer's window. 
 It is clear that the physique of actors 
 must vary ; there can be no military 
 standard of proportions on the stage. 
 Some great actors have had to struggle 
 against physical disabilities of a serious 
 nature. Betterton had an unprepossess- 
 ing face ; so had Le Kain. John Kemble 
 was troubled with a weak, asthmatic 
 voice, and yet by his dignity, and the 
 force of his personality, he was able to 
 achieve the greatest effects. In some 
 cases a super-abundant physique has in- 
 capacitated actors from playing many 
 parts. The combination in one frame of 
 all the gifts of mind and all the advan- 
 tages in person is very rare on the stage ; 
 but talent will conquer many natural de- 
 fects when it is sustained by energy and 
 perseverance. 
 
 With regard to gesture, Shakespeare's 
 advice is all-embracing. "Suit the action 
 to the word, the word to the action, with 
 
 79
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 this special observance that you over-step 
 not the modesty of nature." And here 
 comes the consideration of a very mate- 
 rial part of the actor's business by-play. 
 This is of the very essence of true art. 
 It is more than anything else significant 
 of the extent to which the actor has iden- 
 tified himself with the character he repre- 
 sents. Recall the scenes between lago 
 and Othello, and consider how the whole 
 interest of the situation depends on the 
 skill with which the gradual effect of the 
 poisonous suspicion instilled into the 
 Moor's mind is depicted in look and tone, 
 slight of themselves, but all contributing 
 to the intensity of the situation. One of 
 the greatest tests of an actor is his capa- 
 city for listening. By-play must be un- 
 obtrusive ; the student should remember 
 that the most minute expression attracts 
 attention : that nothing is lost, that by- 
 play is as mischievous when it is injudi- 
 cious as it is effective when rightly con- 
 So
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 ceived, and that while trifles make per- 
 fection, perfection is no trifle. This 
 lesson was enjoined on me when I was 
 a very young man by that remarkable 
 actress, Charlotte Cushman. I remember 
 that when she played Meg Merrilies I was 
 cast for Henry Bertram, on the principle, 
 seemingly, that an actor with no singing 
 voice is admirably fitted for a singing 
 part. It was my duty to give Meg Mer- 
 rilies a piece of money, and I did it after 
 the traditional fashion by handing her a 
 large purse full of coin of the realm, in 
 the shape of broken crockery, which was 
 generally used in financial transactions 
 on the stage, because when the virtuous 
 maiden rejected with scorn the advances 
 of the lordly libertine, and threw his per- 
 nicious bribe upon the ground, the clatter 
 of the broken crockery suggested fabu- 
 lous wealth. But after the play Miss 
 Cushman, in the course of some kindly 
 advice, said to me : "Instead of giving 
 
 81
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 me that purse don't you think it would 
 have been much more natural if you had 
 taken a number of coins from your pock- 
 et, and given me the smallest ? That is 
 the way one gives alms to a beggar, and 
 it would have added to the realism of the 
 scene." I have never forgotten that les- 
 son, for simple as it was, it contained 
 many elements of dramatic truth. It is 
 most important that an actor should learn 
 that he is a figure in a picture, and that 
 the least exaggeration destroys the har- 
 mony of the composition. All the mem- 
 bers of the company should work 
 towards a common end, with the nicest 
 subordination of their individuality to the 
 general purpose. Without this method a 
 play when acted is at best a disjointed 
 and incoherent piece of work, instead of 
 being a harmonious whole like the fine 
 performance of an orchestral symphony. 
 The root of the matter is that the actor 
 must before all things form a definite con- 
 82
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 ception of what he wishes to convey. It 
 is better to be wrong and be consistent, 
 than to be right, yet hesitating and un- 
 certain. This is why great actors are 
 sometimes very bad or very good. They 
 will do the wrong thing with a courage 
 and thoroughness which makes the error 
 all the more striking; although when 
 they are right they may often be superb. 
 It is necessary that the actor should learn 
 to think before he speaks ; a practice 
 which, I believe, is very useful off the 
 stage. Let him remember, first, that 
 every sentence expresses a new thought 
 and, therefore, frequently demands a 
 change of intonation ; secondly, that the 
 thought precedes the word. Of course 
 there are passages in which thought and 
 language are borne along by the streams 
 of emotion and completely intermingled. 
 But more often it will be found that the 
 most natural, the most seemingly acciden- 
 tal effects are obtained when the working 
 
 83
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 of the mind is seen before the tongue 
 gives it words. 
 
 You will see that the limits of an ac- 
 tor's studies are very wide. To master 
 the technicalities of his craft, to famil- 
 iarize his mind with the structure, rhythm, 
 and the soul of poetry, to be constantly 
 cultivating his perceptions of life around 
 him and of all the arts painting, nrmsic, 
 sculpture for the actor who is devoted 
 to his profession is susceptible to every 
 harmony of color, sound, and form to 
 do this is to labor in a large field of in- 
 dustry. But all your training, bodily and 
 mental, is subservient to the two great 
 principles in tragedy and comedy pas- 
 sion and geniality. Geniality in comedy 
 is one of the rarest gifts. Think of the 
 rich unction of Falstaff, the mercurial 
 fancy of Mercutio, the witty vivacity and 
 manly humor of Benedick think of the 
 qualities, natural and acquired, that are 
 needed for the complete portrayal of such 
 84
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 characters, and you will understand how 
 difficult it is for a comedian to rise to 
 such a sphere. In tragedy, passion or 
 intensity sweeps all before it, and when 
 I say passion, I mean the passion of 
 pathos as well as wrath or revenge. 
 These are the supreme elements of the 
 actor's art, which cannot be taught by 
 any system, however just, and to which 
 all education is but tributary. 
 
 Now all that can be said of the neces- 
 sity of a close regard for nature in acting 
 applies with equal or greater force to the 
 presentation of plays. You want, above 
 all things, to have a truthful picture which 
 shall appeal to the eye without distracting 
 the imagination from the purpose of the 
 drama. It is a mistake to suppose that 
 this enterprise is comparatively new to 
 the stage. Since Shakespeare's time 
 there has been a steady progress in this 
 direction. Even in the poet's day every 
 conceivable property was forced into 
 
 85
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 requisition, and his own sense of short- 
 comings in this respect is shown in 
 Henry V. when he exclaims : 
 
 " Where O for pity ! we shall much disgrace 
 With four or five most vile and ragged foils 
 The name of Agincourt." 
 
 There have always been critics who 
 regarded care and elaboration in the 
 mounting of plays as destructive of the 
 real spirit of the actor's art. Betterton 
 had to meet this reproach when he intro- 
 duced scenery in lieu of linsey-woolsey 
 curtains ; but he replied, sensibly enough, 
 that his scenery was better than the tap- 
 estry with hideous figures worked upon it 
 which had so long distracted the senses 
 of play-goers. He might have asked his 
 critics whether they wished to see Ophelia 
 played by a boy of sixteen, as in the time 
 of Shakespeare, instead of a beautiful and 
 gifted woman. Garrick did his utmost to 
 improve the mechanical arts of the stage 
 86
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 so much so, indeed, that he paid his 
 scene-painter, Loutherbourg, ^"500 a year, 
 a pretty considerable sum in those days 
 though in Garrick's time the importance 
 of realism in costume was not sufficiently 
 appreciated to prevent him from playing 
 Macbeth in a bagwig. To-day we are 
 employing all our resources to heighten 
 the picturesque effects of the drama, and 
 we are still told that this is a gross error. 
 It may be admitted that nothing is 
 more objectionable than certain kinds of 
 realism, which are simply vulgar ; but 
 harmony of color and grace of outline 
 have a legitimate sphere in the theatre, 
 and the method which uses them as ad- 
 juncts may claim to be "as wholesome 
 as sweet, and by very much more hand- 
 some than fine." For the abuse of scenic 
 decoration, the overloading of the stage 
 with ornament, the subordination of the 
 play to a pageant, I have nothing to say. 
 That is all foreign to the artistic purpose 
 
 87
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 which should dominate dramatic work. 
 Nor do I think that servility to archaeo- 
 logy on the stage is an unmixed good. 
 Correctness of costume is admirable and 
 necessary up to a certain point, but when 
 it ceases to be " as wholesome as sweet, " it 
 should, I think, be sacrificed. You per- 
 ceive that the nicest discretion is needed 
 in the use of the materials which are now- 
 adays at the disposal of the manager. 
 Music, painting, architecture, the end- 
 less variations of costume, have all to be 
 employed with a strict regard to the pro- 
 duction of an artistic whole, in which no 
 element shall be unduly obtrusive. We 
 are open to microscopic criticism at 
 every point. When Much Ado about 
 Nothing was produced at the Lyceum, 
 I received a letter complaining of the 
 gross violation of accuracy in a scene 
 which was called a cedar-walk. "Ce- 
 dars ! " said my correspondent, " why, 
 cedars were not introduced into Messina 
 88
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 for fifty years after the date of Shake- 
 speare's story ! " Well, this was a tre- 
 mendous indictment, but unfortunately 
 the cedar-walk had been painted. Ab- 
 solute realism on the stage is not al- 
 ways desirable, any more than the photo- 
 graphic reproduction of Nature can claim 
 to rank with the highest art. 
 
 89
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 IV. 
 
 THE REWARDS OF THE ART. 
 
 To what position in the world of in- 
 telligence does the actor's art entitle him, 
 and what is his contribution to the gen- 
 eral sum of instruction ? We are often 
 told that the art is ephemeral ; that it 
 creates nothing ; that when the actor's 
 personality is withdrawn from the public 
 eye he leaves no trace behind. Granted 
 that his art creates nothing ; but does it 
 not often restore ? It is true that he 
 leaves nothing like the canvas of the 
 painter and the marble of the sculptor, 
 but has he done nought to increase the 
 general stock of ideas ? The astrono- 
 mer and naturalist create nothing, but 
 they contribute much to the enlighten- 
 ment of the world. I am taking the 
 highest standard of my art, for I main- 
 90
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 tain that in judging any calling you 
 should consider its noblest and not its 
 most ignoble products. All the work 
 that is done on the stage cannot stand 
 upon the same level, any more than all 
 the work that is done in literature. You 
 do not demand that your poets and 
 novelists shall all be of the same calibre. 
 An immense amount of good writing 
 does no more than increase the gayety 
 of mankind ; but when Johnson said that 
 the gayety of nations was eclipsed by 
 the death of Garrick, he did not mean 
 that a mere barren amusement had lost 
 one of its professors. When Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds painted Mrs. Siddons as the 
 Tragic Muse, and said he had achieved 
 immortality by putting his name on the 
 hem of her garment, he meant some- 
 thing more than a pretty compliment, 
 for her name can never die. To give 
 genuine and wholesome entertainment 
 is a very large function of the stage, and 
 
 9 1
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 without that entertainment very many 
 lives would lose a stimulus of the high- 
 est value. If recreation of every legiti- 
 mate kind is invaluable to the worker, 
 especially so is the recreation of the 
 drama, which brightens his faculties, en- 
 larges his vision of the picturesque, and 
 by taking him for a time out of this 
 work-a-day world, braces his sensibili- 
 ties for the labors of life. The art which 
 does this may surely claim to exercise 
 more than a fleeting influence upon the 
 world's intelligence. But in its highest 
 developments it does more ; it acts as 
 a constant medium for the diffusion of 
 great ideas, and by throwing new lights 
 upon the best dramatic literature, it large- 
 ly helps the growth of education. It is 
 not too much to say that the interpret- 
 ers of Shakespeare on the stage have 
 had much to do with the widespread 
 appreciation of his works. Some of the 
 most thoughtful students of the poet 
 92
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 have recognized their indebtedness to 
 actors, while for multitudes the stage has 
 performed the office of discovery. Thou- 
 sands who flock to-day to see a represen- 
 tation of Shakespeare, which is the pro- 
 duct of much reverent study of the poet, 
 are not content to regard it as a mere 
 scenic exhibition. Without it Shake- 
 speare might have been for many of 
 them a sealed book ; but many more 
 have been impelled by the vivid realism 
 of the stage to renew studies which 
 other occupations or lack of leisure have 
 arrested. Am I presumptuous, then, in 
 asserting that the stage is not only an 
 instrument of amusement, but a very 
 active agent in the spread of knowledge 
 and taste ? Some forms of stage work, 
 you may say, are not particularly elevat- 
 ing. True ; and there are countless fic- 
 tions coming daily from the hands of 
 printer and publisher which nobody is 
 the better for reading. You cannot have 
 
 93
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 a fixed standard of value in my art; 
 and though there are masses of people 
 who will prefer an unintelligent exhibi- 
 tion to a really artistic production, that 
 is no reason for decrying the theatre, in 
 which all the arts blend with the knowl- 
 edge of history, manners, and customs 
 of all people, and scenes of all climes, to 
 afford a varied entertainment to the most 
 exacting intellect. I have no sympathy 
 with people who are constantly anxious 
 to define the actor's position, for, as a 
 rule, they are not animated by a desire 
 to promote his interests. "'Tis in our- 
 selves that we are thus and thus ; " and 
 whatever actors deserve, socially or 
 artistically, they are sure to receive as 
 their right. I found the other day in a 
 well-circulated little volume a sugges- 
 tion that the actor was a degraded being 
 because he has a closely-shaven face. 
 This is, indeed, humiliating, and I won- 
 der how it strikes the Roman Catholic 
 94
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 clergy. However, there are actors who 
 do not shave closely, and though, alas ! 
 I am not one of them, I wish them joy 
 of the spiritual grace which I cannot 
 claim. 
 
 It is admittedly unfortunate for the 
 stage that it has a certain equivocal 
 element, which, in the eyes of some 
 judges, is sufficient for its condemna- 
 tion. The art is open to all, and it has 
 to bear the sins of many. You may 
 open your newspaper, and see a para- 
 graph headed ' ' Assault by an Actress. " 
 Some poor creature is dignified by that 
 title who has not the slightest claim to 
 it. You look into a shop-window and 
 see photographs of certain people who 
 are indiscriminately described as actors 
 and actresses though their business has 
 no pretence to be art of any kind. 
 
 I was told in Baltimore of a man in that 
 city who was so diverted by the perform- 
 ance of Tyrone Powar, the popular Irish 
 
 95
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 comedian, that he laughed uproariously 
 till the audience was convulsed with mer- 
 riment at the spectacle. As soon as he 
 could speak, he called out, "Do be quiet, 
 Mr. Showman ; do'ee hold your tongue, 
 or I shall die of laughter ! " This idea 
 that the actor is a showman still lingers ; 
 but no one with any real appreciation of 
 the best elements of the drama applies 
 this vulgar standard to a great body of 
 artists. The fierce light of publicity that 
 beats upon us makes us liable, from time 
 to time, to dissertations upon our public 
 and private lives, our manners, our mor- 
 als, and our money. Our whims and 
 caprices are discanted on with apparent 
 earnestness of truth, and seeming sin- 
 cerity of conviction. There is always 
 some lively controversy concerning the 
 influence of the stage. The battle be- 
 tween old methods and new in art is 
 waged everywhere. If an actor were to 
 take to heart everything that is written 
 96
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 and said about him, his life would be an 
 intolerable burden. And one piece of ad- 
 vice I should give to young actors is this : 
 Do not be too sensitive ; receive praise 
 or censure with modesty and patience. 
 Good honest criticism is, of course, most 
 advantageous to an actor ; but he should 
 save himself from the indiscriminate 
 reading of a multitude of comments, 
 which may only confuse instead of stim- 
 ulating. And here let me say to young 
 actors in all earnestness : Beware of the 
 loungers of our calling, the camp fol- 
 lowers who hang on the skirts of the 
 army, and who inveigle the young into 
 habits that degrade their character, and 
 paralyze their ambition. Let your ambi- 
 tion be ever precious to you, and, next 
 to your good name, the jewel of your 
 souls. I care nothing for the actor who 
 is not always anxious to rise to the high- 
 est position in his particular walk ; but 
 this ideal cannot be cherished by the 
 
 97
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 young man who is induced to fritter away 
 his time and his mind in thoughtless 
 company. 
 
 But in the midst of all this turmoil about 
 the stage, one fact stands out clearly : 
 the dramatic art is steadily growing in 
 credit with the educated classes. It is 
 drawing more recruits from those classes. 
 The enthusiasm for our calling has never 
 reached a higher pitch. There is quite 
 an extraordinary number of ladies who 
 want to become actresses, and the cardinal 
 difficulty in the way is not the social 
 deterioration which some people think 
 they would incur, but simply their in- 
 ability to act. Men of education who 
 become actors do not find that their 
 education is useless. If they have the 
 necessary aptitude the inborn instinct 
 for the stage all their mental training 
 will be of great value to them. It is true 
 that there must always be grades in the 
 theatre, that an educated man who is an 
 98
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 indifferent actor can never expect to reach 
 the front rank. If he do no more than 
 figure in the army at Bosworth Field, or 
 look imposing in a doorway ; if he never 
 play any but the smallest parts ; if in 
 these respects he be no better than men 
 who could not pass an examination in any 
 branch of knowledge he has no more 
 reason to complain than the highly-edu- 
 cated man who longs to write poetry, 
 and possesses every qualification save 
 the poetic faculty. There are people 
 who seem to think that only irresistible 
 genius justifies any one in adopting the 
 stage as a vocation. They make it an ar- 
 gument against the profession that many 
 enter it from a low sphere of life, with- 
 out any particular fitness for acting, but 
 simply to earn a livelihood by doing 
 the subordinate and mechanical work 
 which is necessary in every theatre. And 
 so men and women of refinement es- 
 pecially women are warned that they 
 
 99
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 must do themselves injury by passing 
 through the rank and file during their 
 term of probation in the actors' craft. 
 Now, I need not remind you that on the 
 stage everybody cannot be great, any 
 more than students of music can all be- 
 come great musicians ; but very many 
 will do sound artistic work which is of 
 great value. As for any question of con- 
 duct, Heaven forbid that I should be dog- 
 matic ; but it does not seem to me logi- 
 cal that while genius is its own law in the 
 pursuit of a noble art, all inferior merit 
 or ambition is to be deterred from the 
 same path by appalling pictures of its 
 temptations. 
 
 If our art is worth anything at all, it 
 is worth the honest, conscientious self- 
 devotion of men and women who, while 
 they may not achieve fame, may have 
 the satisfaction of being workers in a call- 
 ing which does credit to many degrees of 
 talent. We do not claim to be any better 
 100
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 than our fellows in other walks of life. 
 We do not ask the jester in journalism 
 whether his quips and epigrams are al- 
 ways dictated by the loftiest morality ; 
 nor do we insist on knowing that the 
 odor of sanctity surrounds the private 
 lives of lawyers and military men before 
 we send our sons into law and the army. 
 It is impossible to point out any vocation 
 which is not attended by temptations 
 that prove fatal to many ; but you have 
 simply to consider whether a profession 
 has in itself any title to honor, and then 
 if you are confident of your capacity 
 to enter it with a resolve to do all that 
 energy and perseverance can accomplish. 
 The immortal part of the stage is its 
 nobler part. Ignoble accidents and in- 
 terludes come and go, but this lasts on 
 forever. It lives, like the human soul, 
 in the body of humanity associated with 
 much that is inferior, and hampered by 
 many hindrances ; but it never sinks into 
 
 101
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 nothingness, and never fails to find new 
 and noble work in creations of permanent 
 and memorable excellence. And I would 
 say, as a last word, to the young men in 
 this assembly who may at any time re- 
 solve to enter the dramatic profession, 
 that they ought always to fix their minds 
 upon the highest examples ; that in study- 
 ing acting they should beware of prej- 
 udiced comparisons between this method 
 and that, but learn as much as possible 
 from all ; that they should remember that 
 art is as varied as nature, and as little 
 suited to the shackles of a school ; and, 
 above all, that they should never forget 
 that excellence in any art is attained only 
 by arduous labor, unswerving purpose, 
 and unfailing discipline. This discipline 
 is, perhaps, the most difficult of all tests, 
 for it involves the subordination of the 
 actor's personality in every work which 
 is designed to be a complete and harmo- 
 nious picture. Dramatic art nowadays 
 1 02
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 is more coherent, systematic, and com- 
 prehensive than it has sometimes been. 
 And to the student who proposes to fill 
 the place in this system to which his in- 
 dividuality and experience entitle him, 
 and to do his duty faithfully and well, 
 ever striving after greater excellence, and 
 never yielding to the indolence that 
 is often born of popularity to him I 
 say, with every confidence, that he will 
 choose a career in which, if it does 
 not lead him to fame, he will be sus- 
 tained by the honorable exercise of 
 some of the best faculties of the human 
 mind. 
 
 And now I can only thank you for the 
 patience with which you have listened 
 while, in a slight and imperfect way, I 
 have dwelt with some of the most im- 
 portant of the actor's responsibilities. I 
 have been an actor for nearly thirty years, 
 and what I have told you is the fruit of 
 my experience, and of an earnest and 
 
 103
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 conscientious belief that the calling to 
 which I am proud to belong is 
 worthy of the sympathy and 
 support of all intelli- 
 gent people. 
 104
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 OXFORD 
 
 26 JUNE 
 1886
 
 ADDRESS AT THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 
 
 w 
 
 HEN I was honored by 
 the request of your dis- 
 tinguished Vice-Chancel- 
 lor to deliver an address 
 before the members of 
 this great University, I 
 told him I could only say something 
 about my own calling, for that I knew 
 little or nothing about anything else. I 
 trust, however, that this confession of the 
 limitations of my knowledge will not 
 prejudice me in your eyes, members as 
 you are privileged members I may say 
 of this seat of learning. In an age 
 when so many persons think they know 
 everything, it may afford a not unpleas- 
 
 107
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 ing variety to meet with some who know 
 that they know nothing. 
 
 I cannot discourse to you, even if you 
 wished me to do so, of the respective 
 merits of vEschylus, Sophocles, and Eu- 
 ripides ; for if I did, I should not be able to 
 tell you anything that you do not know 
 already. I have not had the advantage 
 one that very few of the members of 
 my profession in past, or even in present 
 times have enjoyed of an University 
 education. The only Alma Mater I ever 
 knew was the hard stage of a country 
 theatre. 
 
 In the course of my training, long be- 
 fore I had taken, what I may call, my 
 degree in London, I came to act in your 
 city. I have a very pleasant recollection 
 of the time I passed here, though I am 
 sorry to say that, owing to the regulation 
 which forbade theatrical performances 
 during term time, I saw Oxford only in 
 vacation, which is rather like to use the 
 1 08
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 old illustration seeing Hamlet with the 
 part of Hamlet left out. There was then 
 no other building available for dramatic 
 representations than the Town Hall. I 
 may, perhaps, be allowed to congratulate 
 you on the excellent theatre which you 
 now possess I do not mean the Sheldon- 
 ian and at the same time to express a 
 hope that, as a more liberal, and might I 
 say a wiser, regime allows the members 
 of the University to go to the play, they 
 will not receive any greater moral injury, 
 or be distracted any more from their 
 studies, than when they were only al- 
 lowed the occasional relaxation of hearing 
 comic songs. Macready once said that 
 ' ' a theatre ought to be a place of recrea- 
 tion for the sober-minded and intelligent. " 
 I trust that, under whatsoever manage- 
 ment the theatre in Oxford may be, it 
 will always deserve this character. 
 
 You must not expect any learned dis- 
 quisition from me ; nor even in the modi- 
 log
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 fied sense in which the word is used 
 among you will I venture to style what I 
 am going to say to you a lecture. You 
 may, by the way, have seen a report 
 that I was cast tor four lectures ; but I as- 
 sure you there was no ground for such 
 an alarming rumor ; a rumor quite as 
 alarming to me as it could have been to 
 you. What I do propose is, to say to 
 you something about four of our greatest 
 actors in the past, each of whom may be 
 termed the representative of an impor- 
 tant period in the Annals of our National 
 Drama. In turning over the leaves of a 
 history of the life of Edmund Kean, I 
 came across the following sentence (the 
 writer is speaking of Edmund Kean as 
 having restored Nature to the stage) : 
 "There seems always to have been 
 this alternation between the Schools of 
 Nature and Art (if we may so term them) 
 in the annals of the English Theatre." 
 Now if for Art I may be allowed to 
 no
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 substitute Artificiality, which is what the 
 author really meant, I think that his sen- 
 tence is an epitome of the history of our 
 stage ; and it struck me at once that I 
 could not select anything more appro- 
 priate I will not say as a text, for that 
 sounds as if I were going to deliver a 
 sermon but as the motif, or theme of the 
 remarks I am about to address to you. 
 The four actors of whom I shall attempt 
 to tell you something Burbage, Better- 
 ton, Garrick, and Kean were the four 
 greatest champions, in their respective 
 times, on the stage of Nature in contra- 
 distinction to Artificiality. 
 
 When we consider the original of the 
 Drama, or perhaps I should say of the 
 higher class of Drama, we see that the 
 style of acting must necessarily have 
 been artificial rather than natural. Take 
 the Greek Tragedy, for instance : the 
 actors, as you know, wore masks, and 
 had to speak, or rather intone, in a thea- 
 
 iii
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 tre more than half open to the air, and 
 therefore it was impossible they could 
 employ facial expression, or much variety 
 of intonation. We have not time now to 
 trace at length the many vicissitudes in 
 the career of the Drama, but I may say 
 that Shakespeare was the first dramatist 
 who dared to rob Tragedy of her stilts ; 
 and who successfully introduced an ele- 
 ment of comedy which was not dragged 
 in by the neck and heels, but which nat- 
 urally evolved itself from the treatment 
 of the tragic story, and did not violate 
 the consistency of any character. 
 
 It was not only with regard to the 
 writing of his plays that Shakespeare 
 sought to fight the battle of Nature 
 against Artificiality. However naturally 
 he might write, the affected or monoto- 
 nous delivery of his verse by the actors 
 would neutralize all his efforts. The old 
 rhyming ten-syllable lines could not but 
 lead to a monotonous style of elocution, 
 112
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 nor was the early blank verse much im- 
 provement in this respect ; but Shake- 
 speare fitted his blank verse to the natu- 
 ral expression of his ideas, and not his 
 ideas to the trammels of blank verse. 
 
 In order to carry out these reforms, in 
 order to dethrone Artifice and Affectation, 
 he needed the help of actors in whom he 
 could trust, and especially of a leading- 
 actor who could interpret his greatest 
 dramatic creations ; such a one he found 
 in Richard Burbage. 
 
 Shakespeare came to London first in 
 1585. Whether on this, his first visit, he 
 became connected with the theatres is 
 uncertain. At any rate it is most prob- 
 able that he saw Burbage in some of his 
 favorite characters, and perhaps made 
 his acquaintance ; being first employed 
 as a kind of servant in the theatre, and 
 afterwards as a player of inferior parts. 
 It was not until about 1591-1592, that 
 Shakespeare began to turn his attention 
 
 "3
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 seriously to dramatic authorship. For 
 five years of his life we are absolutely 
 without any evidence as to what were 
 his pursuits. But there can be little doubt 
 that during this interval he was virtually 
 undergoing a special form of education, 
 consisting rather of the study of human 
 nature than that of books, and was ac- 
 quiring the art of dramatic construction 
 learnt better in a theatre than anywhere 
 else. Unfortunately, we have no record 
 of the intercourse between Shakespeare 
 and Burbage ; but there can be little doubt 
 that between the dramatist, who was him- 
 self an actor, and the actor, who gave 
 life to the greatest creations of his imagi- 
 nation, and who, probably, amazed no 
 less than delighted the great master by 
 the vividness and power of his imper- 
 sonations, there must have existed a close 
 friendship. Shakespeare, unlike most men 
 of genius, was no bad man of business ; 
 and, indeed, a friend of mine, who prides 
 114
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 himself upon being a practical man, once 
 suggested that he selected the part of 
 the Ghost in Hamlet because it enabled 
 him to go in front of the house between 
 the acts and count the money. Burbage 
 was universally acknowledged as the 
 greatest tragic actor of his time. In Bar- 
 tholomew Fair, Ben Jonson uses Burbage's 
 name as a synonym for " the best actor" ; 
 and Bishop Corbet, in his Her Boreale, 
 tells us that his host at Leicester 
 
 " when he would have said King Richard died, 
 And call'd, ' A horse ! A horse ! ' he, Burbage, cried," 
 
 In a scene, in which Burbage and the 
 comedian Kemp (the J. L. Toole of the 
 Shakespearean period) are introduced 
 in The Return from Parnassus a satirical 
 play, as you may know, written by some 
 of the Members of St. John's College, 
 Cambridge, for performance by them- 
 selves on New Year's Day, 1602 we have 
 proof of the high estimation in which the
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 great tragic actor was held. Kemp says 
 to the scholars who are anxious to try 
 their fortunes on the stage : "But be merry, 
 my lads, you have happened upon the 
 most excellent vocation in the world for 
 money ; they come north and south to 
 bring it to our playhouse ; and for honors, 
 who of more report than Dick Burbage 
 and Will Kempe ; he is not counted a 
 gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage 
 and Will Kempe; there's not a country 
 wench that can dance ' Sellenger's 
 Round,' but can talke of Dick Burbage 
 and Will Kempe." 
 
 That Burbage's fame as an actor out- 
 lived his life may be seen from the de- 
 scription given by Flecknoe: 
 
 " He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly 
 transforming himself into his part, and 
 putting off himself with his clothes, as he 
 never (not so much as in the 'tiring house) 
 assumed himself again until the play was 
 done. . . . He had all the parts of an ex- 
 116
 
 cellent orator, animating 1 his words with 
 speaking, and speech with acting, his au- 
 ditors being never more delighted than 
 when he spake, nor more sorry than when 
 he held his peace. Yet even then he was 
 an excellent actor still, never failing in 
 his part when he had done speaking, but 
 with his looks and gestures maintaining 
 it still to the height. " 
 
 It is not my intention, even if time 
 permitted, to go much into the private 
 life of the four actors of whom I propose 
 to speak. Very little is known of Bur- 
 bage's private life, except that he was 
 married ; perhaps Shakespeare and he 
 may have been drawn nearer together by 
 the tie of a common sorrow ; for, as the 
 poet lost his beloved son Hamlet when 
 quite a child, so did Burbage lose his 
 eldest son Richard. Burbage died on 
 March i3th, 1617, being then about 50 
 years of age: Camden, in his Annals of 
 James /., records his death, and calls him 
 
 117
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 a second Roscius. He was sincerely 
 mourned by all those who loved the dra- 
 matic art ; and he numbered among his 
 friends Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beau- 
 mont, and Fletcher, and other "common 
 players," whose names were destined to 
 become the most honored in the annals 
 of English literature. Burbage was the 
 first great actor that England ever saw, 
 the original representative of many of 
 Shakespeare's noblest creations, among 
 others, of Shylock, Richard, Romeo, 
 Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. 
 We may fairly conclude Burbage's acting 
 to have had all the best characteristics of 
 Natural, as opposed to Artificial acting. 
 The principles of the former are so clearly 
 laid down by Shakespeare, in Hamlet's 
 advice to the players, that, perhaps, I 
 cannot do better than to repeat them : 
 
 Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it 
 to you, trippingly on the tongue : but if you mouth 
 it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the 
 118
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air 
 too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently ; 
 for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, 
 the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and 
 beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. 
 O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious 
 periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very 
 rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for 
 the most part are capable of nothing but inexplica- 
 ble dumb-show and noise : I would have such a 
 fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant ; it out- 
 herods Herod ; pray you, avoid it. Be not too 
 tame neither, but let your own discretion be your 
 tutor ; suit the action to the word, the word to the 
 action ; with this special observance, that you o'er- 
 step not the modesty of nature : for anything so 
 overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, 
 both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 
 'twere, the mirror up to nature ; to show virtue her 
 own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age 
 and body of the time his form and pressure. Now 
 this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make 
 the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious 
 grieve ; the censure of the which one must in your 
 allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, 
 there be players that I have seen play, and heard 
 others praise, and that highly, not to speak it pro- 
 fanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians 
 
 119
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so 
 strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of 
 Nature's journeymen had made men and not made 
 them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. 
 
 When we try to picture what the 
 theatre in Shakespeare's time was like, it 
 strikes us that it must have been difficult 
 to carry out those principles. One would 
 think it must have been almost impossi- 
 ble for the actors to keep up the illusion 
 of the play, surrounded as they were 
 by such distracting elements. Figure to 
 yourselves a crowd of fops, chattering 
 like a flock of daws, carrying their stools 
 in their hands, and settling around, and 
 sometimes upon the stage itself, with as 
 much noise as possible. To vindicate 
 their importance in their own eyes they 
 kept up a constant jangling of petty, 
 carping criticism on the actors and the 
 play. In the intervals of repose which 
 they allowed their tongues, they ogled 
 the ladies in the boxes, and made a point 
 120
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 of vindicating the dignity of their intel- 
 lects by being always most inattentive 
 during the most pathetic portions of the 
 play. In front of the house matters were 
 little better : the orange girls going to 
 and fro among the audience, interchang- 
 ing jokes not of the most delicate 
 character with the young sparks and 
 apprentices, the latter cracking nuts or 
 howling down some unfortunate actor 
 who had offended their worships ; some- 
 times pipes of tobacco were being smoked. 
 Picture all this confusion, and add the 
 fact that the female characters of the 
 play were represented by shrill-voiced 
 lads or half-shaven men. Imagine an 
 actor having to invest such representa- 
 tives with all the girlish passion of a 
 Juliet, the womanly tenderness of a Des- 
 demona, or the pitiable anguish of a dis- 
 traught Ophelia, and you cannot but 
 realize how difficult under such circum- 
 stances great acting must have been. In
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 fact, while we are awe-struck by the 
 wonderful intellectuality of the best 
 dramas of the Elizabethan period, we 
 cannot help feeling that certain subtleties 
 of acting, elaborate by-play, for instance, 
 and the finer lights and shades of intona- 
 tion, must have been impossible. Reci- 
 tation rather than impersonation would 
 be generally aimed at by the actors. 
 
 Thomas Betterton was the son of one 
 of the cooks of King Charles I. He was 
 born in Tothill Street, Westminster, 
 about 1635, eighteen years after the 
 death of Burbage. He seems to have 
 received a fair education ; indeed, but 
 for the disturbing effect of the Civil War, 
 he would probably have been brought 
 up to one of the liberal professions. He 
 was, however, apprenticed to a book- 
 seller, who, fortunately for Betterton, 
 took to theatrical management. Better- 
 ton was about twenty-four years old 
 when he began his dramatic career. 
 
 122
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 For upwards of fifty years he seems to 
 have held his position as the foremost 
 actor of the day. It was fortunate, in- 
 deed, for the interests of the Drama that 
 so great an actor arose at the very time 
 when dramatic art had, as it were, to be 
 resuscitated. Directly the Puritans (who 
 hated the stage and every one connected 
 with it as heartily as they hated their 
 Cavalier neighbors) came into power, 
 they abolished the theatres, as they did 
 every other form of intellectual amuse- 
 ment ; and for many years the Drama 
 only existed in the form of a few vulgar 
 "Drolls." It must have been, indeed, a 
 dismal time for the people of England ; 
 with all the horrors of civil war fresh in 
 their memory, the more than paternal 
 government allowed its subjects no other 
 amusement than that of consigning their 
 neighbors to eternal damnation, and of 
 selecting for themselves by anticipation 
 all the best reserved seats in heaven. 
 
 123
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 When the Restoration took place, the 
 inevitable reaction followed : society, 
 having been condemned to a lengthened 
 period of an involuntary piety which 
 sat anything but easily on it rushed 
 into the other extreme ; all who wanted 
 to be in the fashion professed but little 
 morality, and it is to be feared that, for 
 once in a way, their practice did not 
 come short of their profession. Now 
 was the time when, instead of ' ' poor 
 players," "fine gentlemen " condescend- 
 ed to write for the stage ; and it may be 
 remarked that as long as the literary in- 
 terests of the theatre were in their keep- 
 ing, the tone of the plays represented 
 was more corrupt than it ever was at any 
 other period of the history of the Drama. 
 It is something to be thankful for, that at 
 such a time, when the highly-flavored 
 comedies of Wycherley and Congreve 
 were all the vogue, and when the monot- 
 onous profligacy of nearly all the char- 
 124
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 acters introduced into those plays was 
 calculated to encourage the most artifi- 
 cial style of acting it was something, I 
 say, to be thankful for, that at such a 
 time, Betterton, and one or two other 
 actors, could infuse life into the noblest 
 creations of Shakespeare. Owing, more 
 especially, to Betterton 's great powers, 
 the tragedy of Hamlet held its own in 
 popularity, even against such witty pro- 
 ductions as Love for Love. It was also 
 fortunate that the same actor who could 
 draw tears as Hamlet, was equally at 
 home in the feigned madness of that 
 amusing rake Valentine, or in the some- 
 what coarse humor of Sir John Brute. 
 By charming the public in what were the 
 popular novelties of the day, he was 
 able to command their support when he 
 sought it for a nobler form of Drama. 
 He married an actress, Mrs. Saunderson, 
 who was only inferior in her art to her 
 husband. Their married life seems to 
 
 I2 5
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 have been one of perfect happiness. 
 When one hears so much of the profli- 
 gacy of actors and actresses, and that 
 they are all such a very wicked lot, it is 
 pleasant to think of this couple, in an 
 age proverbial for its immorality, in a 
 city where the highest in rank set an ex- 
 ample of shameless licence, living their 
 quiet, pure, artistic life, respected and 
 beloved by all that knew them. 
 
 Betterton had few physical advantages. 
 If we are to believe Antony Aston, one 
 of his contemporaries, he had "a short, 
 thick neck, stooped in the shoulders, and 
 had fat, short arms, which he rarely 
 lifted higher than his stomach. His left 
 hand frequently lodged in his breast, 
 between his coat and waistcoat, while 
 with his right hand he prepared his 
 speech." Yet the same critic is obliged 
 to confess that, at seventy years of age, 
 a younger man might have personated 
 but could not have acted, Hamlet better. 
 126
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 He calls his voice "low and grumbling," 
 but confesses that he had such power 
 over it that he could enforce attention 
 even from fops and orange-girls. I dare 
 say you all know how Steele and 
 Addison admired his acting, and how 
 enthusiastically they spoke of it in The 
 Taller. The latter writes eloquently of 
 the wonderful agony of jealousy and the 
 tenderness of love which he showed in 
 Othello, and of the immense effect he 
 produced in Hamlet. 
 
 Betterton, like all really great men, 
 was a hard worker. Pepys says of him, 
 "Betterton is a very sober, serious man, 
 and studious, and humble, following of 
 his studies ; and is rich already with 
 what he gets and saves." Alas ! the 
 fortune so hardly earned was lost in an 
 unlucky moment : he entrusted it to a 
 friend to invest in a commercial venture 
 in the East Indies which failed most 
 signally. Betterton never reproached 
 
 127
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 his friend, he never murmured at his ill- 
 luck. The friend's daughter was left un- 
 provided for ; but Betterton adopted the 
 child, educated her for the stage, and 
 she became an actress of merit, and 
 married Bowman, the player, afterwards 
 known as "The Father of the Stage." 
 
 In Betterton's day there were no long 
 runs of pieces ; but, had his lot been 
 cast in these times, he might have been 
 compelled to perform, say, Hamlet for 
 three hundred or four hundred nights : 
 for the rights of the majority are entitled 
 to respect in other affairs besides politics, 
 and if the theatre-going public demand a 
 play (and our largest theatres only hold a 
 limited number) the manager dare not 
 cause annoyance and disappointment by 
 withdrawing it. 
 
 Like Edmund Kean, Betterton may be 
 
 said to have died upon the stage ; for in 
 
 April, 1710, when he took his last benefit, 
 
 as Melantius, in Beaumont and Flet- 
 
 128
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 cher's Maid's Tragedy (an adaption of 
 which, by the way, was played by Mac- 
 ready under the title of The Bridal,') he 
 was suffering tortures from gout, and had 
 almost to be carried to his dressing- 
 room ; and though he acted the part with 
 all his old fire, speaking these very 
 appropriate words : 
 
 " My heart 
 
 And limbs are still the same, my will as great, 
 To do you service," 
 
 within forty-eight hours he was dead. 
 He was buried in the Cloisters of West- 
 minster Abbey with every mark of 
 respect and honor. 
 
 I may here add that the censure said 
 to have been directed against Betterton 
 for the introduction of scenery is the 
 prototype of that cry, which we hear so 
 often nowadays, against over-elabora- 
 tion in the arrangements of the stage. 
 If it be a crime against good taste to 
 
 129
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 endeavor to enlist every art in the 
 service of the stage, and to heighten the 
 effect of noble poetry by surrounding it 
 with the most beautiful and appropriate 
 accessories, I myself must plead guilty 
 to that charge ; but I should like to 
 point out that every dramatist who has 
 ever lived, from Shakespeare down- 
 wards, has always endeavored to get 
 his plays put upon the stage with as 
 good effect and as handsome appoint- 
 ments as possible. 
 
 Indeed, the Globe Theatre was burned 
 down during the first performance of 
 King Henry VIII., through the firing off 
 of a cannon which announced the arrival 
 of King Henry. Perhaps, indeed, some 
 might regard this as a judgment against 
 the manager for such an attempt at 
 realism. 
 
 It was seriously suggested to me by 
 an enthusiast the other day, that cos- 
 tumes of his own time should be used 
 130
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 for all Shakespeare's plays. I reflected 
 a little on the suggestion, and then I put 
 it to him whether the characters in 
 Julius Ccssar or in Antony and Cleopatra 
 dressed in doublet and hose would not 
 look rather out of place. He answered, 
 ' ' He had never thought of that. " In 
 fact, difficulties almost innumerable must 
 invariably crop up if we attempt to 
 represent plays without appropriate cos- 
 tume and scenery, the aim of which is to 
 realize the locale of the action. Some 
 people may hold that paying attention 
 to such matters necessitates inattention 
 to the acting ; but the majority think it 
 does not, and I believe that they are 
 right. What would Alma-Tadema say, 
 for instance, if it were proposed to him 
 that in a picture of the Roman Amphi- 
 theatre the figures should be painted in 
 the costume of Spain ? I do not think 
 he would see the point of such a noble 
 disregard of detail ; and why should he,
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 unless what is false in art is held to be 
 higher than what is true ? 
 
 Little more than thirty years were to 
 elapse between the death of the honored 
 Betterton and the appearance of David 
 Garrick, who was to restore Nature once 
 more to the stage. In this comparatively 
 short interval progress in dramatic affairs 
 had been all backward. Shakespeare's 
 advice to the actors had been neglected ; 
 earnest passion, affecting pathos, ever- 
 varying gestures, telling intonation of 
 voice, and, above all, that complete 
 identification of themselves in the part 
 they represented all these qualities, 
 which had distinguished the acting of 
 Betterton, had given way to noisy rant, 
 formal and affected attitudes, and a 
 heavy stilted style of declamation. Bet- 
 terton died in 1710, and six years after, 
 in 1 7 1 6, Garrick was born. About twenty 
 years after, in 1737, Samuel Johnson and 
 his friend and pupil, David Garrick, set 
 132
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 out from Lichfield on their way to Lon- 
 don. In spite of the differences in their 
 ages, and their relationship of master and 
 pupil, a hearty friendship had sprung up 
 between them, and one destined, in spite 
 of Johnson's occasional resentment at 
 the actor's success in life, to last till it 
 was ended by the grave. Much of John- 
 son's occasional harshness and almost 
 contemptuous attitude towards Garrick 
 was, I fear, the result of the conscious- 
 ness that his old pupil had thoroughly 
 succeeded in life, and had reached the 
 highest goal possible in the career which 
 he had chosen ; while he himself, though 
 looked up to as the greatest scholar of his 
 time, was conscious, as he shows us in 
 his own diary, of how much more he 
 might have done but for his constitutional 
 indolence. 
 
 Garrick's family was of French origin, 
 his father having come over to England 
 during the persecution of the Huguenots
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 in 1687, and on his mother's side he had 
 Irish blood in his veins ; so that by 
 descent he was a combination of French, 
 English, and Irish, a combination by no 
 means unpromising 1 for one who was 
 going to be an actor. 
 
 On reaching London, Garrick enrolled 
 his name in Lincoln's Inn, and was look- 
 ing about him to see what would turn 
 up, when the news of his father's death 
 reached him. There is no doubt that, if 
 Garrick had consulted his own wishes 
 only, he would at once have gone upon 
 the stage. But fortunately, perhaps, for 
 his future career, he could not bear to 
 grieve his mother's heart by adopting at 
 once, and at such a time when she was 
 crushed with some sorrow for her great 
 loss, a calling which he knew she de- 
 tested so heartily. 
 
 Within a year Mrs. Garrick followed to 
 the grave the husband whom she never 
 ceased to mourn, and David had nothing 
 134
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 more to face than the prejudice of his 
 brother, Peter, and of his sisters, if he 
 should resolve ultimately to adopt the 
 profession on which his heart was fixed. 
 It was not, however, till nearly three 
 years after, in 1741, that Garrick, deter- 
 mined to take the decisive step, first feel- 
 ing his way by playing Chamont in The 
 Orphan, and Sir Harry Wildair, at Ips- 
 wich, \rhere he appeared under the name 
 of Mr. Lydall ; and under this same 
 name, in the same year, he made his 
 first appearance at Goodman's Fields 
 Theatre, in the part of Richard III. His 
 success was marvellous. Considering 
 the small experience he had had, no 
 actor ever made such a successful debut. 
 No doubt by waiting and exercising his 
 powers of observation, and by studying 
 many parts in private, he had to a cer- 
 tain extent, matured his powers. But 
 making allowance for all his great natural 
 gifts, there is no denying that Garrick, in
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 one leap, gained a position which, in the 
 case of most other actors, has only been 
 reached through years of toil. He seems 
 to have charmed all classes : the learned 
 and the ignorant, the cultured and the 
 vulgar ; great statesmen, poets, and even 
 the fribbles of fashion were all nearly 
 unanimous in his praise. The dissentient 
 voices were so few that they were 
 drowned in the clamor of applause. 
 Quinn might snarl and growl ; and 
 Horace Walpole, who seems to have 
 grown alarmed at so much of the incense 
 of praise finding its way to the nostrils 
 of another, might give vent to a few 
 feeble sneers ; such as when he said, "I 
 do not mention the things written in his 
 praise because he writes most of them 
 himself. " But the battle was won. Na- 
 ture in the place of Artificiality, Origin- 
 ality in the place of Conventionality, had 
 triumphed on the stage once more. 
 
 Consternation reigned in the home at 
 136
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Lichfield when the news arrived that 
 brother David had become a play-actor ; 
 but ultimately the family were reconciled 
 to such degradation by the substantial 
 results of the experiment. Such rec- 
 oncilements are not uncommon. Some 
 young man of good birth and position 
 has taken to the stage ; his family, who 
 could not afford to keep him, have been 
 shocked, and in pious horror have cast 
 him out of their respectable circle ; but 
 at last success has come, and they have 
 managed to overcome their scruples and 
 prejudices and to profit by the harvest 
 which the actor has reaped. 
 
 Garrick seems to have continued play- 
 ing under the name of Lydall for two 
 months, though the secret must have 
 been an open one. It was not till 
 December the second, the night of his 
 benefit, that he was at last announced 
 under his own name ; and henceforward 
 his career was one long triumph, check- 
 
 137
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 ered, indeed, by disagreements, quarrels 
 and heart-burnings (for Garrick was ex- 
 tremely sensitive), caused, for the most 
 part, by the envy and jealousy which 
 invariably dog the heels of success. 
 
 Second-rate actors, like Theophilus 
 Gibber, or gnats such as Murphy, and 
 others, easily stung him. He was lam- 
 pooned as "The Sick Monkey" on his 
 return to the stage after having taken a 
 much needed rest. But discretion and 
 audacity seemed to go hand-in-hand, 
 and the self-satisfied satirizer generally 
 over-shoots the mark. Garrick was ever 
 ready with a reply to his assailants ; 
 when Dr. Hill attacked his pronuncia- 
 tion, saying that he pronounced his "i's" 
 as if they were ' ' u's, " Garrick answered 
 
 "If 'tis true, as you say, that I've injured a letter, 
 I'll change my note soon, and I hope for the better. 
 May the j ust right of letters as well as of men, 
 Hereafter be fixed by the tongue and the pen. 
 Most devoutly I wish that they both have their due, 
 And that / may be never mistaken for U" 
 138
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Comparing Garrick with Betterton, it 
 must be remembered that he was more 
 exposed to the attacks of envy from the 
 very universality of his success. Never, 
 perhaps, was there a man in any profes- 
 sion who combined so many various 
 qualities. A fair poet, a most fluent cor- 
 respondent, an admirable conversation- 
 alist, possessing a person of singular 
 grace, a voice of marvellous expressive- 
 ness, and a disposition so mercurial and 
 vivacious as is rarely found in any Eng- 
 lishman, he was destined to be a great 
 social as well as a great artistic success. 
 He loved the society of men of birth and 
 fashion ; he seems to have had a more 
 passionate desire to please in private 
 even than in public, and almost to have 
 justified the often quoted couplet in Gold- 
 smith's "Retaliation." 
 
 " On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, 
 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting." 
 
 Some men, envious of the substantial 
 
 '39
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 fortune which he realized by almost in- 
 cessant hard work, by thorough good 
 principle with regard to money, and by a 
 noble, not a paltry, economy, might call 
 him mean ; though many of them knew 
 well, from their own experience, that his 
 nature was truly generous his purse, as 
 well as his heart, ever open to a friend, 
 however little he might deserve it. Yet 
 they sneered at his want of reckless ex- 
 travagance, and called him a miser. The 
 greatest offender in this respect was 
 Samuel Foote, a man of great accom- 
 plishments, witty, but always ill-natured. 
 It is difficult to speak of Foote's conduct 
 to Garrick in any moderate language. 
 Mr. Forster may assert that behind 
 Foote's brutal jests there always lurked a 
 kindly feeling ; but what can we think of 
 the man who, constantly receiving favors 
 from Garrick's hand, could never speak 
 of him before others without a sneer ; 
 who the moment he had received the loan 
 140
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 of money or other favor for which he had 
 cringed, snarled I will not say like a 
 dog, for no dog is so ungrateful and 
 snapped at the hand which had adminis- 
 tered to him of its bounty. When this 
 man, who had never spared a friend, 
 whose whole life had been passed in 
 maligning others, at last was himself a 
 victim of a vile and cruel slander, Gar- 
 rick forgot the gibes and sneers of which 
 Foote had made him so often the victim, 
 and stood by him with a noble devotion 
 as honorable to himself as it was ill- 
 deserved by its object. Time would not 
 suffice, had I as many hours as I have 
 minutes before me, to tell you of all the 
 acts of generosity that this mean man, 
 this niggardly actor, performed in his 
 lifetime. One characteristic anecdote 
 will suffice. When Whitfield was build- 
 ing his Tabernacle in Tottenham Court 
 Road, he employed one of the carpenters 
 who worked for Garrick at Drury Lane. 
 
 141
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Subscriptions for the Tabernacle do not 
 seem to have come in as fast as they 
 were required to pay the workmen, so 
 that the carpenter had to go to Garrick to 
 ask for an advance. When pressed for 
 his reason he confessed that he had not 
 received any wages from Mr. Whitfield. 
 Garrick made the advance asked for, and 
 soon after quietly set out to pay a visit 
 to Mr. Whitfield, when, with many 
 apologies for the liberty he was taking, 
 he offered him a five hundred pound 
 bank note as his subscription towards the 
 Tabernacle. Considering that Garrick 
 had no particular sympathy with Non- 
 conformists, this action speaks as much 
 for his charity as a Christian as it does 
 for his liberality as a man. 
 
 Perhaps Richard III. remained Gar- 
 rick's best Shakesperean character. Of 
 course he played Gibber's version and 
 not Shakespeare's. In fact, many of the 
 Shakesperean parts were not played from 
 142
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 the poet's own text, but Garrick might 
 have doubted whether even his popularity 
 would have reconciled his audiences 
 to the unadulterated poetry of our great- 
 est dramatist. 
 
 Next to Richard, Lear would seem to 
 have been his best Shakesperean perform- 
 ance. In Hamlet and Othello he did 
 not equal Betterton ; and in the latter, 
 certainly from all one can discover, he 
 was infinitely surpassed by Edmund 
 Kean. In fact Othello was not one of his 
 great parts. But in the wide range of 
 characters which he undertook, Garrick 
 was probably never equalled. A poor 
 actor named Everard, who was first 
 brought out as a boy by Garrick, says : 
 " Such or such an actor in their respect- 
 ive fortes have been allowed to play such 
 or such a part equally well as him ; but 
 could they perform Archer and Scrub like 
 him ? and Abel Drugger, Ranger, and 
 Bayes, and Benedick ; speak his own
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 prologue to Barbarossa, in the character 
 of a country-boy, and in a few minutes 
 transform himself in the same play to 
 Selim f 3 Nay, in the same night he has 
 played Sir John Brute and the Guardian, 
 Romeo and Lord Chalkslone, Hamlet and 
 Sharp, King Lear and Fribble, King Rich- 
 ard and the Schoolboy ! Could anyone 
 but himself attempt such a wonderful 
 variety, such an amazing contrast of 
 character, and be equally great in all ? 
 No, no, no ! Garrick, take the chair." 
 
 Garrick was, without doubt, a very in- 
 tense actor ; he threw himself most thor- 
 oughly into any part that he was play- 
 ing. Certainly we know that he was not 
 wanting in reverence for Shakespeare ; in 
 spite of the liberties which he ventured to 
 take with the poet's text, he loved and 
 worshipped him. To Powell, who threat- 
 ened to be at one time a formidable rival, 
 his advice was, "Never let your Shake- 
 speare be out of your hands ; keep him 
 144
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 about you as a charm ; the more you read 
 him, the more you will like him, and the 
 better you will act." As to his yielding 
 to the popular taste for pantomime and 
 spectacle, he may plead a justification in 
 the words which his friend Johnson put 
 into his mouth in the Prologue that he 
 wrote for the inauguration of his manage- 
 ment at Drury Lane : 
 
 " The Drama's laws the Drama's patrons give, 
 And we, who live to please, must please to live." 
 
 We must remember how much he did 
 for the stage. Though his alterations of 
 Shakespeare shock us, they are nothing 
 to those outrages committed by others, 
 who deformed the poet beyond recogni- 
 tion. Garrick made Shakespeare's plays 
 once more popular. He purged the ac- 
 tors, for a time at least, of faults that were 
 fatal to any high class of drama, and, 
 above all, he gradually got rid of those 
 abominable nuisances (to which we have 
 
 '45
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 already alluded), the people who came 
 and took their seats at the wings, on the 
 stage itself, while the performance was 
 going on, hampering the efforts of the 
 actors and actresses. The stage would 
 have had much to thank Garrick for if he 
 had done nothing more than this if only 
 that he was the first manager who kept 
 the audience where they ought to be, on 
 the other side of the footlights. 
 
 In his private life Garrick was most 
 happy. He was fortunate enough to 
 find for his wife a simple-minded, loyal 
 woman, in a quarter which some people 
 would deem very unpromising. Mrs. 
 Garrick was, as is well-known, a cele- 
 brated danseuse, known as Mademoiselle 
 Violette, whose real name was Eva Maria 
 Weigel, a Viennese. A more affectionate 
 couple were never seen ; they were not 
 blessed with children, but they lived to- 
 gether in the most uninterrupted happi- 
 ness, and their house was the scene of 
 146
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 many social gatherings of a delightful 
 kind. Mrs. Garrick survived her cele- 
 brated husband, and lived to the ripe age 
 of ninety-eight, retaining to the very last 
 much of that grace and charm of expres- 
 sion which had won the actor's heart. 
 
 Time will not allow me to dwell on 
 the many points of interest in Garrick's 
 career ; all of which are to be found in 
 Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's Life of Garrick. On 
 returning to London after a visit to the 
 Spensers at Althorp in January, 1779, he 
 was struck down by a fatal attack of his 
 old malady, the gout, and died at the 
 age of sixty-three. 
 
 He was buried in Westminster Abbey 
 with ceremonies as imposing as ever 
 graced the funeral of a great man. The 
 pall-bearers were headed by the Duke of 
 Devonshire and the Earl Spenser, while 
 round the grave there were gathered such 
 men as Burke and Fox, and last, not 
 least, his old friend and tutor, Samuel
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Johnson, his rugged countenance stream- 
 ing with tears, his noble heart filled with 
 the sincerest grief. The words so often 
 quoted, artificial though they may seem, 
 came from that heart when, speaking of 
 his dear Davy's death, he said that it ' ' had 
 eclipsed the gayety of nations." 
 
 Garrick's remarkable success in society, 
 which achieved for him a position only 
 inferior to that he achieved on the stage, 
 is the best answer to what is often talked 
 about the degrading nature of the actor's 
 profession. Since the days of Roscius no 
 contempt for actors in general, or for their 
 art, has prevented a great actor from at- 
 taining that position which is accorded to 
 all distinguished in what are held to be 
 the higher arts. 
 
 Nearly nine years after the death of 
 Garrick, on November 4th, 1787, a young 
 woman, who had run away from home 
 when little more than a child to join a 
 company of strolling players, and who, 
 148
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 when that occupation failed, earned a 
 scanty living as a hawker in the streets 
 of London, gave birth, in a wretched 
 room near Gray's Inn, to an illegitimate 
 child. This woman was Nancy Carey, 
 the grand-daughter of Henry Carey, the 
 author of the "National Anthem." She 
 was the great-grand-daughter of George 
 Saville, Marquis of Halifax, whose nat- 
 ural son Henry Carey was. A compas- 
 sionate actress, Miss Tidswell, who 
 knew the father of the child, Aaron 
 Kean, gave her what assistance she could. 
 Poor Nance was removed to her father's 
 lodgings, near Gray's Inn, and there, 
 on the day before mentioned, Edmund 
 Kean was born. 
 
 Three months after his birth his mother 
 deserted him, leaving him, without a word 
 of apology or regret, to the care of the 
 woman who had befriended her in her 
 trouble. When he was but three years 
 old he was brought, amongst a number 
 
 149
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 of other children, to Michael Kelly who 
 was then bringing out the opera of Cymon 
 at the Opera House in the Haymarket, 
 and, thanks to his personal beauty, he 
 was selected for the part of Cupid. Short- 
 ly afterwards he found his way to Drury 
 Lane, where the handsome baby for he 
 was little more figured among the imps 
 in the pantomime. Taught here the 
 tricks of the acrobat, he had at four years 
 old acquired such powers of contortion 
 that he was fit to rank as an infant phe- 
 nomenon. But the usual result followed : 
 the little limbs became deformed, and had 
 to be put in irons, by means of which 
 they regained that symmetry with which 
 nature had at first endowed them. Three 
 years afterwards, in March, 1794, John 
 Kemble was acting Macbeth at Drury 
 Lane; and, in the "cauldron scene," he 
 engaged some children to personate the 
 supernatural beings summoned by the 
 witches from that weird vessel. Little 
 '5
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Edmund with his irons was the cause of 
 a ridiculous accident, and the attempt to 
 embody the ghostly forms was abruptly 
 abandoned. But the child seems to have 
 been pardoned for his blunder, and for a 
 short time was permitted by the manager 
 to appear in one or two children's parts. 
 Little did the dignified manager imagine 
 that the child who was one of his cauld- 
 ron of imps in Macbeth was to be- 
 come, twenty years later, his formidable 
 rival formidable enough to oust almost 
 the representative of the Classical school 
 from the supremacy he had hitherto en- 
 joyed on the Tragic stage. In Orange 
 Court, Leicester Square, where Holcroft, 
 the author of The Road to Ruin, was 
 born, Edmund Kean received his first 
 education. Scanty enough it was, for it 
 had scarcely begun before his wretched 
 mother stepped in and claimed him ; 
 and; after her re-appearance, his educa- 
 tion seems to have been of a most spas-
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 modic character. Hitherto, the child's 
 experience of life had been hard enough. 
 When only eight years of age he ran 
 away to Portsmouth, and shipped him- 
 self on board a ship bound to Madeira. 
 But he found his new life harder than that 
 from which he had escaped, and, by dint 
 of feigning deafness and lameness, he 
 succeeded in procuring his removal to 
 an hospital at Madeira, whence, the doc- 
 tors finding his case yielded to no rem- 
 edies, the authorities kindly shipped him 
 again to England. He insisted on being 
 deaf and lame ; indeed, so deaf that in a 
 violent thunder-storm he remained per- 
 fectly unmoved, explaining his compo- 
 sure by declaring that he could not hear 
 any noise at all. From Portsmouth he 
 made his way on foot to London. On 
 presenting himself at the wretched lodg- 
 ings where his mother lived, he found 
 that she had gone away with Richard- 
 son's troupe. Penniless and half-starving, 
 152
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 he suddenly thought of his uncle, Moses 
 Kean, who lived in Lisle Street, Leicester 
 Square, a queer character, who gained 
 a precarious living by giving entertain- 
 ments as a mimic and ventriloquist. 
 The uncle received his nephew warmly 
 enough, and seems to have cultivated, 
 to the best of his ability, the talent for 
 acting which he recognized at once in the 
 boy. Edmund again enjoyed a kind of 
 desultory education, partly carried on at 
 school and partly at his uncle's home, 
 where he enjoyed the advantage of the 
 kind instructions of his old friend, Miss 
 Tidswell, of D'Egville, the dancing mas- 
 ter, of Angelo, the fencing master, and 
 of no less a person than Incledon, the 
 celebrated singer, who seems to have 
 taken the greatest interest in him. But 
 the vagrant, half-gypsy disposition, which 
 he inherited from his mother, could never 
 be subdued, and he was constantly dis- 
 appearing from his uncle's house for
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 weeks together, which he would pass in 
 going about from one roadside inn to an- 
 other, amusing the guests with his acro- 
 batic tricks, and his monkey-like imita- 
 tions. In vain was he locked up in 
 rooms, the height of which from the 
 ground was such as seemed to render 
 escape impossible. He contrived to get 
 out somehow or other, even at the risk 
 of his neck, and to make his escape to 
 some fair, where he would earn a few 
 pence by the exhibition of his varied ac- 
 complishments. During these periods of 
 vagabondism he would live on a mere 
 nothing, sleeping in barns, or in the 
 open air, and would faithfully bring back 
 his gains to Uncle Moses. But even this 
 astounding generosity, appealing, as it 
 must have done, to the uncle's senti- 
 ments, could not appease him. His 
 uncle went so far, apparently with the 
 concurrence of Miss Tidswell, as to 
 place round the boy's neck a brass collar
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 with the inscription, "This boy belongs 
 to No. 9 Lisle Street ; please bring him 
 home." His wandering propensities be- 
 ing for a time subdued, we find the little 
 Edmund again engaged at Drury Lane, 
 and delighting the actors in the green- 
 room by giving recitations from Richard 
 III., probably in imitation of Cooke ; and, 
 on one occasion, among his audience 
 was Mrs. Charles Kemble. During this 
 engagement he played Arthur to Kem- 
 ble's King John and Mrs. Siddon's Con- 
 stance, and appears to have made a great 
 success. Soon after this, his uncle Moses 
 died suddenly, and young Kean was left 
 to the severe but kindly guardianship of 
 Miss Tidswell. We cannot follow him 
 through all the vicissitudes of his early 
 career. The sketch I have given of his 
 early life ample details of which may be 
 found in Mrs. Hawkins's Life of Edmund 
 Kean will give you a sufficient idea of 
 what he must have endured and suffered. 
 
 '55
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 When, years afterwards, the passionate 
 love of Shakespeare, which, without ex- 
 aggeration, we may say he showed almost 
 from his cradle, had reaped its own re- 
 ward in the wonderful success which he 
 achieved, if we find him then averse to 
 respectable conventionality, erratic, and 
 even dissipated in his habits, let us mer- 
 cifully remember the bitter and degrad- 
 ing suffering which he passed through in 
 his childhood, and not judge too harshly 
 the great actor. Unlike those whose 
 lives we have hitherto considered, he 
 knew none of the softening influences of 
 a home ; to him the very name of mother, 
 instead of recalling every tender and 
 affectionate feeling, was but the symbol 
 of a vague horror, the fountain of that 
 degradation and depravation of his nat- 
 ure, from which no subsequent prosper- 
 ity could ever redeem it 
 
 For many years after his boyhood 
 his life was one of continual hardship.
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 With that unsubdued conviction of his 
 own powers, which often is the sole 
 consolation of genius, he toiled on and 
 bravely struggled through the sordid 
 miseries of a strolling player's life. The 
 road to success lies through many a 
 thorny course, across many a dreary 
 stretch of desert land, over many an ob- 
 stacle, from which the fainting heart is 
 often tempted to turn back. But hope, 
 and the sense of power within, which no 
 discouragements can subdue, inspire the 
 struggling artist still to continue the con- 
 flict, till at last courage and perseverance 
 meet with their just reward, and success 
 comes. The only feeling then to which 
 the triumphant artist may be tempted is 
 one of good-natured contempt for those 
 who are so ready to applaud those merits 
 which, in the past, they were too blind 
 to recognize. Edmund Kean was twenty- 
 seven years old before his day of triumph 
 came.
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Without any preliminary puffs, without 
 any nourish of trumpets, on the evening 
 of the 26th January, 1814, soaked through 
 with the rain, Edmund Kean slunk more 
 than walked in at the stage-door of Drury 
 Lane Theatre, uncheered by one word 
 of encouragement, and quite unnoticed. 
 He found his way to the wretched dress- 
 ing-room he shared in common with 
 three or four other actors ; as quick as pos- 
 sible he exchanged his dripping clothes 
 for the dress of Shylock ; and, to the 
 horror of his companions, took from 
 his bundle a black wig the proof of his 
 daring rebellion against the great law of 
 conventionality, which had always con- 
 demned Shylock to red hair. Cheered 
 by the kindness of Bannister and Oxberry, 
 the latter of whom offered him a wel- 
 come glass of brandy and water, he de- 
 scended to the stage dressed, and peeped 
 through the curtain to see a more than 
 half-empty house. Dr. Drury was wait-
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 ing at the wings to give him a hearty 
 welcome. The boxes were empty, and 
 there were about five hundred people in 
 the pit, and a few others "thinly scat- 
 tered to make up a show. " Shylock was 
 the part he was playing, and he no sooner 
 stepped upon the stage than the inter- 
 est of the audience was excited. Noth- 
 ing he did or spoke in the part was 
 done or spoken in a conventional man- 
 ner. The simple words, "I will be 
 assured I may," were given with such 
 effect that the audience burst into ap- 
 plause. When the act-drop fell, after the 
 speech of Shylock to Antonio, his success 
 was assured, and his fellow-actors, who 
 had avoided him, now seemed disposed 
 to congratulate him ; but he shrank from 
 their approaches. The great scene with 
 Tubal was a revelation of such origin- 
 ality and of such terrible force as had not 
 probably been seen upon those boards 
 before. "How the devil so few of them 
 
 159
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 could kick up such a row was something 
 marvellous ! " naively remarked Oxberry. 
 At the end of the third act every one 
 was ready to pay court to him ; but 
 again he held aloof. All his thoughts 
 were concentrated on the great "trial" 
 scene, which was coming. In that scene 
 the wonderful variety of his acting com- 
 pleted his triumph. Trembling with 
 excitement, he resumed his half-dried 
 clothes, and, glad to escape, rushed home. 
 He was in too great a state of ecstasy at 
 first to speak, but his face told his wife 
 that he had realized his dream that he 
 had appeared on the stage of Drury Lane, 
 and that his great powers had been 
 instantly acknowledged. With not a 
 shadow of doubt as to his future, he ex- 
 claimed, " Mary, you shall ride in your 
 carriage ; " and taking his baby boy from 
 the cradle and kissing him, said, "and 
 Charley, my boy, you shall go to Eton," 
 and he did. 
 160
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 The time when Edmund Kean made 
 his first appearance in London was cer- 
 tainly favorable for an actor of genius. 
 For a long while the national theatre had 
 been in a bad way ; and nothing but fail- 
 ure had hitherto met the efforts of the 
 Committee of Management, a committee 
 which numbered among its members 
 Lord Byron. When the other members 
 of the committee, with a strange blindness 
 to their own interests, proposed that for 
 the present, Kean's name should be re- 
 moved from the bills, Byron interested 
 himself on his behalf: "You have a 
 great genius among you," he said, " and 
 you do not know it." On Kean's sec- 
 ond appearance the house was nearly 
 doubled. Hazlitt's criticism had roused 
 the whole body of critics, and they were 
 all there to sit in judgment upon the new- 
 comer. His utter indifference to the 
 audience won him their respect, and be- 
 fore the piece was half over the sentence 
 
 161
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 of the formidable tribunal was in his 
 favor. From that moment Kean exer- 
 cised over his audiences a fascination 
 which was probably never exercised by 
 any other actor. Garrick was no doubt 
 his superior in parts of high comedy ; he 
 was more polished, more vivacious his 
 manner more distinguished, and his 
 versatility more striking. In such parts 
 as Coriolanus or Rolla, John Kemble ex- 
 celled him : but in Shylock, in Richard, 
 in lago, and, above all, in Othello, it may 
 be doubted whether Edmund Kean ever 
 had an equal. As far as one can judge 
 not having seen Kean one's-self from 
 the many criticisms extant, written by 
 the most intellectual men, and from the 
 accounts of those who saw him in his 
 prime, he was, to my mind be it said 
 without any disparagement to other great 
 actors the greatest genius that our stage 
 has ever seen. Unequal he may have 
 been, perhaps often so, but there were 
 162
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 moments in his acting which were, with- 
 out exaggeration, moments of inspiration. 
 Coleridge is reported to have said that to 
 see Kean act was "like reading Shake- 
 speare by flashes of lightning." This 
 often-quoted sentence embodies per- 
 haps the main feature of Edmund Kean's 
 greatness as an actor ; for, when he was 
 impersonating the heroes of our poet, he 
 revealed their natures by an instant flash 
 of light so searching that every minute 
 feature, which by the ordinary light of 
 day was hardly visible, stood bright and 
 clear before you. The effect of such act- 
 ing was indeed that of lightning it 
 appalled ; the timid hid their eyes, and 
 fashionable society shrank from such 
 heart-piercing revelations of human pas- 
 sion. Persons who had schooled them- 
 selves to control their emotion till they 
 had scarcely any emotion left to control, 
 were repelled rather than attracted by 
 Kean's relentless anatomy of all the 
 
 163
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 strongest feeling of our nature. In Sir 
 Giles Overreach, a character almost de- 
 void of poetry, Kean's acting displayed 
 with such powerful and relentless truth 
 the depths of a cruel, avaricious man, 
 baffled in all his vilest schemes, that the 
 effect he produced was absolutely awful. 
 As no bird but the eagle can look without 
 blinking on the sun, so none but those 
 who in the sacred privacy of their 
 imaginations had stood face to face 
 with the mightiest storms of human pas- 
 sion could understand such a perform- 
 ance. Byron, who had been almost 
 forced into a quarrel with Kean by the 
 actor's disregard of the ordinary courte- 
 sies of society, could not restrain himself, 
 but rushed behind the scenes and grasped 
 the hand of the man to whom he felt that 
 he owed a wonderful revelation. 
 
 I might discant for hours with an en- 
 thusiasm which, perhaps, only an actor 
 could feel on the marvellous details of 
 164
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Kean's impersonations. He was not a 
 scholar in the ordinary sense of the word, 
 though Heaven knows he had been 
 schooled by adversity, but I doubt if there 
 ever was an actor who so thought out his 
 part, who so closely studied with the in- 
 ward eye of the artist the waves of emotion 
 that might have agitated the minds of the 
 beings whom he represented. One hears 
 of him during those early years of strug- 
 gle and privation, pacing silently along 
 the road, foot-sore and half-starved, but 
 unconscious of his own sufferings, be- 
 cause he was immersed in the study of 
 those great creations of Shakespeare's 
 genius which he was destined to endow 
 with life upon the stage. When you 
 read of Edmund Kean as, alas ! he was 
 later on in life, with mental and physical 
 powers impaired, think of the description 
 those gave of him who knew him best in 
 his earlier years ; how amidst all the 
 wildness and half-savage Bohemianism,
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 which the miseries of his life had en- 
 sured, he displayed, time after time, the 
 most large-hearted generosity, the ten- 
 derest kindness of which human nature 
 is capable. Think of him working with 
 a concentrated energy for the one object 
 which he sought, namely, to reach the 
 highest distinction in his calling. Think 
 of him as sparing no mental or physical 
 labor to attain this end, an end which 
 seemed ever fading further and further 
 from his grasp. Think of the disappoint- 
 ments, the cruel mockeries of hope 
 which, day after day, he had to encoun- 
 ter; and then be harsh if you can to 
 those moral failings for which his mis- 
 fortunes rather than his faults were 
 responsible. If you are inclined to be 
 severe, you may console yourselves with 
 the reflection that this genius, who had 
 given ihe highest intellectual pleasure 
 to hundreds and thousands of human 
 beings, was hounded by hypocritical 
 166
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 sanctimoniousness out of his native 
 land ; and though, two years afterwards, 
 one is glad to say, for the honor of 
 one's country, a complete reaction took 
 place, and his reappearance was greeted 
 with every mark of hearty welcome, the 
 blow had been struck from which neither 
 his mind or his body ever recovered. 
 He lingered upon the stage, and died at 
 the age of forty-six, after five years of 
 suffering almost a beggar with only 
 a solitary ten-pound note remaining of 
 the large fortune his genius had realized. 
 It is said that Kean swept away the 
 Kembles and their Classical school of 
 acting. He did not do that. The mem- 
 ory of Sarah Siddons, tragic queen of the 
 British stage, was never to be effaced, 
 and I would remind you that when Kean 
 was a country actor (assured of his own 
 powers, however unappreciated), resent- 
 ing with passionate pride the idea of 
 playing second to "the Infant Roscius," 
 
 167
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 who was for a time the craze and idol of 
 the hour, "Never," said he, "never; 
 I will play second to no one but John 
 Kemble ! " I am certain that when his 
 better nature had the ascendency no one 
 would have more generously acknowl- 
 edged the merits of Kemble than Ed- 
 mund Kean. It is idle to say that be- 
 cause his style was solemn and slow, 
 Kemble was not one of the greatest 
 actors that our stage has produced. It 
 is only those whose natures make them 
 incapable of approbation or condemna- 
 tion in artistic matters without being 
 partisans, who, because they admire 
 Edmund Kean, would admit no merit in 
 John Kemble. The world of art, thank 
 Heaven, is wide enough for both, and 
 the hearts of those who truly love art are 
 large enough to cherish the memory of 
 both as of men who did noble work 
 in the profession which they adorned. 
 Kean blended the Realistic with the 
 1 68
 
 FOUR GREAT ACTORS 
 
 Ideal in acting, and founded a school of 
 which William Charles Macready was, 
 afterwards, in England, the foremost 
 disciple. 
 
 Thus have we glanced, briefly enough, 
 at four of our greatest actors whose 
 names are landmarks in the history of 
 the Drama in England, the greatest 
 Drama of the world. We have seen 
 how they all carried out, by different 
 methods perhaps, but in the same spirit, 
 the principle that in acting Nature must 
 dominate Art. But it is Art that must 
 interpret Nature ; and to interpret the 
 thoughts and emotions of her mistress 
 should be her first object. But those 
 thoughts, those emotions, must be 
 interpreted with grace, with dig- 
 nity and with temperance ; 
 and these, let us re- 
 member, Art alone 
 can teach. 
 
 169
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 SESSIONAL OPENING 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTION 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 9 NOVEMBER 
 1891
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 HAVE chosen as the subject 
 of the address with which I 
 have the honor to inaugur- 
 ate for the second time the 
 Session of the Edinburgh 
 Philosophical Institution, 
 "The Art of Acting." I 
 have done so, in the first instance, be- 
 cause I take it for granted that when you 
 bestow on any man the honor of asking 
 him to deliver the inaugural address, it 
 is your wish to hear him speak of the 
 subject with which he is best acquainted ; 
 and the Art of Acting is the subject to 
 which my life has been devoted. I have 
 another reason also which, though it 
 may, so far as you are concerned, be 
 
 173
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 personal to those of my calling, I think 
 it well to put before you. It is that there 
 may be, from the point of view of an 
 actor distinguished by your favor, some 
 sort of official utterance on the subject. 
 There are some irresponsible writers who 
 have of late tried to excite controversy 
 by assertions, generally false and always 
 misleading, as to the stage and those 
 devoted to the arts connected with it. 
 Some of these writers go so far as to 
 assert that Acting is not an Art at all ; 
 and though we must not take such wild 
 assertions quite seriously, I think it well 
 to place on record at least a polite de- 
 nial of their accuracy. It would not, of 
 course, be seemly to merely take so 
 grave an occasion as the present as an 
 opportunity for such a controversy, but 
 as I am dealing with the subject before 
 you, I think it better to place you in 
 full knowledge of the circumstances. It 
 does not do, of course, to pay too much 
 174
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 attention to ephemeral writings, any 
 more than to creatures of the mist and 
 the swamp and the night. But even the 
 buzzing of the midge, though the insect 
 may be harmless compared with its more 
 poison-laden fellows, can divert the mind 
 from more important things. To dis- 
 regard entirely the world of ephemera, 
 and their several actions and effects were 
 to deny the entirety of the scheme of 
 creation. 
 
 I take it for granted that in addressing 
 you on the subject of the Art of Acting I 
 am not, prima facie, encountering set 
 prejudices ; for had you despised the Art 
 which I represent I should not have had 
 the honor of appearing before you to-day. 
 You will, I trust, on your part, bear this 
 in mind, and I shall, on my part, never 
 forget that you are members of a Philo- 
 sophical Institution, the very root and 
 basis of whose work is to inquire into the 
 heart of things with the purpose, of dis- 
 
 '75
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 covering why such as come under your 
 notice are thus or thus. 
 
 The subject of my address is a very 
 vast one, and is, I assure you, worthy of 
 a careful study. Writers such as Vol- 
 taire, Schlegel, Goethe, Lessing, Charles 
 Lamb, Hazlitt, and Schiller, have not dis- 
 dained to treat it with that seriousness 
 which Art specially demands which 
 anything in life requires whose purpose 
 is not immediate and imperative. For 
 my own part I can only bring you the 
 experience of more than thirty years of 
 hard and earnest work. Out of wide 
 experience let me point out that there 
 are many degrees of merit, both of aim, 
 of endeavor, and of execution in acting, 
 as in all things. I want you to think of 
 acting at its best as it may be, as it can 
 be, as it has been, and is and as it shall 
 be, whilst it be followed by men and 
 women of strong and earnest purpose. 
 I do not for a moment wish you to be- 
 176
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 lieve that only Shakespeare and the great 
 writers are worthy of being played, and 
 that all those efforts that in centuries 
 have gathered themselves round great 
 names are worthy of your praise. In 
 the House of Art are many mansions 
 where men may strive worthily and live 
 cleanly lives. All Art is worthy, and 
 can be seriously considered, so long as 
 the intention be good and the efforts to 
 achieve success be conducted with seem- 
 liness. And let me here say, that of all 
 the arts none requires greater intention 
 than the art of acting. Throughout it is 
 necessary to do something, and that 
 something cannot fittingly be left to 
 chance, or the unknown inspiration of 
 a moment. I say " unknown," for if 
 known, then the intention is to repro- 
 duce, and the success of the effort can be 
 in nowise due to chance. It may be, 
 of course, that in moments of passionate 
 excitement the mind grasps some new 
 
 177
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 idea, or the nervous tension suggests to 
 the mechanical parts of the body some 
 new form of expression ; but such are 
 accidents which belong to the great 
 scheme of life, and not to this art, or any 
 art, alone. You all know the story of 
 the painter who, in despair at not being 
 able to carry out the intention of his 
 imagination, dashed his brush at the im- 
 perfect canvas, and with the scattering 
 paint produced by chance the very effect 
 which his brush guided by his skill alone, 
 had failed to achieve. The actor's busi- 
 ness is primarily to reproduce the ideas 
 of the author's brain, to give them form, 
 and substance, and color, and life, so 
 that those who behold the action of a 
 play may, so far as can be effected, be 
 lured into the fleeting belief that they 
 behold reality. Macready, who was an 
 earnest student, defined the art of the 
 actor "to fathom the depths of charac- 
 ter, to trace its latent motives, to feel its 
 178
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 finest quivering of emotion, is to compre- 
 hend the thoughts that are hidden under 
 words, and thus possess one's-self of the 
 actual mind of the individual man " ; 
 and Talma spoke of it as "the union of 
 grandeur without pomp, and nature 
 without triviality " ; whilst Shakespeare 
 wrote, "the purpose of playing, whose 
 end, both at the first and now, was and 
 is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to 
 nature ; to show virtue her own feature, 
 scorn her own image, and the very age 
 and body of the time his form and pres- 
 sure. " 
 
 This effort to reproduce man in his 
 moods is no mere trick of fancy carried 
 into execution. It is a part of the char- 
 acter of a strong nation, and has a 
 wider bearing on national life than per- 
 haps unthinking people are aware. Mr. 
 Froude, in his survey of early England, 
 gives it a special place ; and I venture to 
 quote his words, for they carry with them, 
 
 179
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 not only their own lesson, but the au- 
 thority of a great name in historical 
 research. 
 
 "No genius can dispense with expe- 
 rience ; the aberrations of power, un- 
 guided or ill-guided, are ever in propor- 
 tion to its intensity, and life is not long 
 enough to recover from inevitable mis- 
 takes. Noble conceptions already exist- 
 ing, and a noble school of execution 
 which will launch mind and hand at 
 once upon their true courses, are indis- 
 pensable to transcendent excellence; and 
 Shakespeare's plays were as much the 
 offspring of the long generations who 
 had pioneered his road for him, as the 
 discoveries of Newton were the offspring 
 of those of Copernicus. 
 
 "No great general ever arose out of a 
 nation of cowards ; no great statesman 
 or philosopher out of a nation of fools ; 
 no great artist out of a nation of material- 
 ists ; no great drama, except when the 
 180
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 drama was the possession of the people. 
 Acting was the especial amusement of 
 the English, from the palace to the vil- 
 lage green. It was the result and expres- 
 sion of their strong, tranquil possession 
 of their lives, of their thorough power 
 over themselves, and power over cir- 
 cumstances. They were troubled with 
 no subjective speculations ; no social 
 problems vexed them with which they 
 were unable to deal ; and in the exuber- 
 ance of vigor and spirit, they were able, 
 in the strict and literal sense of the word, 
 to play with the materials of life." So 
 says Mr. Froude. 
 
 In the face of this statement of fact set 
 forth gravely in its place in the history 
 of our land, what becomes of such bold 
 assertions as are sometimes made regard- 
 ing the place of the drama being but a 
 poor one, since the efforts of the actor 
 are but mimetic and ephemeral, that they 
 pass away as a tale that is told ? All 
 
 181
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 art is mimetic ; and even life itself, the 
 highest and last gift of God to His people, 
 is fleeting. Marble crumbles, and the 
 very names of great cities become buried 
 in the dust of ages. Who then would 
 dare to arrogate to any art an unchang- 
 ing place in the scheme of the world's 
 development, or would condemn it be- 
 cause its efforts fade and pass? Nay, 
 more ; has even the tale that is told no 
 significance in after years ? Can such not 
 stir, when it is worth the telling, the 
 hearts of men, to whom it comes as an 
 echo from the past ? Have not those 
 tales remained most vital and most wide- 
 ly known which are told and told again 
 and again, face to face and heart to 
 heart, when the teller and the listener are 
 adding, down the ages, strength to the 
 current of a mighty thought or a mighty 
 deed and its record ? 
 
 Surely the record that lives in the 
 minds of men is still a record, though it 
 182
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 be not graven on brass or wrought in 
 marble. And it were a poor conception 
 of the value of any art, if, in considering 
 it, we were to keep our eyes fixed on 
 some dark spot, some imperfection, and 
 shut our eyes to its aim, its power, its 
 beauty. It were a poor age indeed where 
 such a state of things is possible ; as poor 
 as that of which Mrs. Browning's un- 
 happy poet spoke in the bitterness of his 
 soul : 
 
 " The age culls simples, 
 
 With a broad clown's back turned broadly to the 
 glory of the stars." 
 
 Let us lift our faces when we wish to 
 judge truly of any earnest work of the 
 hand or mind of man, and see it placed 
 in the widest horizon that is given to us. 
 Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, archi- 
 tecture, all have a bearing on their time, 
 and beyond it ; and the actor, though his 
 knowledge may be, and must be, limited 
 by the knowledge of his age, so long as 
 
 183
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 he sound the notes of human passion, has 
 something which is common to all the 
 ages. If he can smite water from the 
 rock of one hardened human heart if he 
 can bring light to the eye or wholesome 
 color to the faded cheek if he can bring 
 or restore in ever so slight degree the 
 sunshine of hope, of pleasure, of gayety, 
 surely he cannot have worked in vain. 
 It would need but a small effort of imag- 
 ination to believe that that great wave 
 theory, which the scientists have proved 
 as ruling the manifestations of light and 
 sound, applies also to the efforts of human 
 emotion. And who shall tell us the ulti- 
 mate bounds of these waves of light and 
 sound? If these discernible waves can 
 be traced till they fade into impalpable 
 nothingness, may we not think that this 
 other, impalpable at the beginning as 
 they are at the end, can alone stretch 
 into the dimness of memory ? Sir 
 Joshua's gallant compliment, that he 
 184
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 achieved immortality by writing his name 
 on the hem of Mrs. Siddons's garment, 
 when he painted her as the Tragic Muse, 
 had a deeper significance than its pretty 
 fancy would at first imply. 
 
 Not for a moment is the position to be 
 accepted that the theatre is merely a 
 place of amusement. That it is primarily 
 a place of amusement, and is regarded 
 as such by its habitues, is of course ap- 
 parent; but this is not its limitation. 
 For authors, managers, and actors it is 
 a serious employment, to be undertaken 
 gravely, and of necessity to be adhered 
 to rigidly. Thus far it may be considered 
 from these different stand-points ; but 
 there is a larger view that of the State. 
 Here we have to consider a custom 
 of natural growth specially suitable to 
 the genius of the nation. It has ad- 
 vanced with the progress of each age, and 
 multiplied with its material prosperity. 
 It is a living power, to be used for good, 
 
 '85
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 or possibly for evil ; and far-seeing men 
 recognize in it, based though it be on the 
 relaxation and pleasures of the people, 
 an educational medium of no mean order. 
 Its progress in the past century has been 
 the means of teaching to millions of peo- 
 ple a great number of facts which had 
 perhaps otherwise been lost to them. 
 How many are there who have had 
 brought home to them in an understand- 
 able manner by stage-plays the costumes, 
 habits, manners, and customs of countries 
 and ages other than their own ; what 
 insight have they thus obtained into facts 
 and vicissitudes of life of passions and 
 sorrows and ambitions outside the nar- 
 row scope of their own lives, and which 
 yet may and do mould the destinies of 
 men. All this is education education 
 in its widest sense, for it broadens the 
 sympathies and enlarges the intellectual 
 grasp. And beyond this again for these 
 are advantages on the material side 
 186
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 there is that higher education of the heart, 
 which raises in the scale of creation all 
 who are subject to its sweetening in- 
 fluences. To hold his place therefore 
 amongst these progressing forces, the 
 actor must at the start be well endowed 
 with some special powers, and by train- 
 ing, reading, and culture of many kinds, 
 be equipped for the work before him. 
 No amount of training can give to a dense 
 understanding and a clumsy personality 
 certain powers of quickness and spon- 
 taneity ; and, on the other hand, no 
 genius can find its fullest expression with- 
 out some understanding of the principles 
 and method of a craft. It is the actor's 
 part to represent or interpret the ideas 
 and emotions which the poet has created, 
 and to do this he must at the first have a full 
 knowledge and understanding of them. 
 This is in itself no easy task. It requires 
 much study and much labor of many 
 kinds. Having then acquired an idea, 
 
 187
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 his intention to work it out into reality 
 must be put in force ; and here new diffi- 
 culties crop up at every further step taken 
 in advance. Now and again it suffices 
 the poet to think and write in abstrac- 
 tions ; but the actor's work is absolutely 
 concrete. He is brought in every phase 
 of his work into direct comparison with 
 existing things, and must be judged by 
 the most exacting standards of criticism. 
 Not only must his dress be suitable to the 
 part which he assumes, but his bearing 
 must not be in any way antagonistic to 
 the spirit of the time in which the play is 
 fixed. The free bearing of the sixteenth 
 century is distinct from the artificial one 
 of the seventeenth, the mannered one of 
 the eighteenth, and the careless one of 
 the nineteenth. And all this quite ex- 
 clusive of the minute qualities and indi- 
 vidualities of the character represented. 
 The voice must be modulated to the 
 vogue of the time. The habitual action 
 188
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 of a rapier-bearing age is different to that 
 of a mail-clad one nay, the armor of 
 a period ruled in real life the poise and 
 bearing of the body ; and all this must 
 be reproduced on the stage, unless the 
 intelligence of the audience, be they ever 
 so little skilled in history, is to count as 
 naught. 
 
 It cannot therefore be seriously put for- 
 ward in the face of such manifold require- 
 ments that no Art is required for the 
 representation of suitable action. Are we 
 to imagine that inspiration or emotion of 
 any kind is to supply the place of direct 
 knowledge of facts of skill in the very 
 grammar of craftsmanship ? Where a 
 great result is arrived at much effort is 
 required, whether the same be immediate 
 or has been spread over a time of previous 
 preparation. In this nineteenth century 
 the spirit of education stalks abroad and 
 influences men directly and indirectly, 
 by private generosity and national fore- 
 
 189
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 sight, to accumulate as religiously as in 
 former ages ecclesiastics and devotees 
 gathered sacred relics, all that helps to 
 give the people a full understanding of 
 lives and times and countries other than 
 their own. Can it be that in such an age 
 all that can help to aid the inspiration 
 and to increase direct knowledge is of no 
 account whatever, because, forsooth, it 
 has a medium or method of its own ? 
 There are those who say that Shakespeare 
 is better in the closet than on the stage ; 
 that dramatic beauty is more convincing 
 when read in private than when spoken 
 on the stage to the accompaniment of 
 suitable action. And yet, if this be so, 
 it is a strange thing that, with all the 
 activity of the new-born printing-press, 
 Shakespeare's works were not known to 
 the reading public till the fame of the 
 writer had been made on the stage. And 
 it is a stranger thing still, if the drama be 
 a mere poetic form of words, that the 
 190
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 writer who began with Venus and Adam's, 
 when he found the true method of ex- 
 pression to suit his genius, ended with 
 Hamlet and Tfie Tempest. 
 
 How is it, I ask, if these responsible 
 makers of statements be correct, that 
 every great writer down from the days of 
 Elizabeth, when the drama took practical 
 shape from the wish of the poets to 
 render human life in all its phases, have 
 been desirous of seeing their works, when 
 written in dramatic form, represented on 
 the stage and not only represented, but 
 represented under the most favorable con- 
 ditions obtainable, both as to the fitness 
 of setting and the choice of the most 
 skilled and excellent players ? Are we to 
 take it that the poet, with his eye in a 
 fine phrenzy rolling, sees all the minute 
 details of form, color, light, sound, and 
 action which have to be rendered com- 
 plete on the stage ? Is there nothing in 
 what the individual actor, who is gifted 
 
 191
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 with fine sense and emotional power, can 
 add to mere words, however grand and 
 rolling in themselves, and whatsoever 
 mighty image they may convey ? Can 
 it be possible that there is any sane per- 
 son who holds that there is no such thing 
 as expression in music so long as the 
 written notes are correctly rendered 
 that the musical expression of a Paganini 
 or a Liszt, or that the voice of a Mali- 
 bran or a Grisi, has no special charm 
 nay more, that there is not some special 
 excellence in the instruments of Amati or 
 Stradivarius ? If there be, we can leave 
 to him, whilst the rest of mankind marvel 
 at his self-sufficient obtuseness, to hold 
 that it was nothing but his own imagina- 
 tion which so much influenced Hazlitt 
 when he was touched to the heart by 
 Edmund Kean's rendering of the words of 
 the remorseful Moor, "Fool, fool, fool ! " 
 Why, the action of a player who knows 
 how to convey to the audience that he is 
 192
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 listening to another speaking, can not 
 only help in the illusion of the general 
 effect, but he himself can suggest a run- 
 ning commentary on what is spoken. In 
 every moment in which he is on the 
 stage, an actor accomplished in his craft 
 can convey ideas to the mind. 
 
 It is in the representation of passion 
 that the intention of the actor appears in 
 its greatest force. He wishes to do a par- 
 ticular thing, and so far the wish is father 
 to the thought that the brain begins to 
 work in the required direction, and the 
 emotional faculties and the whole nerv- 
 ous and muscular systems follow suit. A 
 skilled actor can count on this develop- 
 ment of power, if it be given to him to 
 rise at all to the height of a passion ; and 
 the inspiration of such moments may, 
 now and again, reveal to him some new 
 force or beauty in the character which 
 he represents. Thus he will gather in 
 time a certain habitual strength in a par- 
 
 193
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 ticular representation of passion. Diderot 
 laid down a theory that an actor never 
 feels the part he is acting. It is of course 
 true that the pain he suffers is not real 
 pain, but I leave it to any one who has 
 ever felt his own heart touched by the 
 woes of another to say if he can even 
 imagine a case where the man who fol- 
 lows in minutest detail the history of an 
 emotion, from its inception onward, is the 
 only one who cannot be stirred by it 
 more especially when his own individu- 
 ality must perforce be merged in that 
 of the archetypal sufferer. Talma knew 
 that it was possible for an actor to feel 
 to the full a simulated passion, and yet 
 whilst being swept by it to retain his con- 
 sciousness of his surroundings and his 
 purpose. In his own words "The in- 
 telligence accumulates and preserves all 
 the creations of sensibility." And this is 
 what Shakespeare means when he makes 
 Hamlet tell the players "for in the 
 194
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, 
 whirlwind of your passion, you must 
 beget a temperance that may give it 
 smoothness. " 
 
 How can any one be temperate in the 
 midst of his passion, lest it be that his 
 consciousness and his purpose remain to 
 him ? Let me say that it is this very dis- 
 cretion which marks the ultimate boun- 
 dary of an Art, which stands within the 
 line of demarcation between Art and Na- 
 ture. In Nature there is no such discre- 
 tion. Passion rules supreme and alone ; 
 discretion ceases, and certain conse- 
 quences cease to be any deterrent or to 
 convey any warning. It must never be 
 forgotten that all Art has the aim or ob- 
 ject of seeming and not of being ; and 
 that to understate is as bad as to over- 
 state the modesty or the efflorescence of 
 Nature. It is not possible to show with- 
 in the scope of any Art the entire com- 
 plexity and the myriad combining influ- 
 
 195
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 ences of Nature. The artist has to accept 
 the conventional standard the accepted 
 significance of many things, and confine 
 himself to the exposition of that which is 
 his immediate purpose. To produce the 
 effect of reality it is necessary, therefore, 
 that the efforts of an artist should be 
 slightly different from the actions of real 
 life. The perspective of the stage is not 
 that of real life, and the result of seeming 
 is achieved by means which, judged by 
 themselves, would seem to be indirect. 
 It is only the raw recruit who tries to hit 
 the bull's-eye by point-blank firing, and 
 who does not allow for elevation and 
 windage. Are we to take it for a mo- 
 ment, that in the Art of Acting, of which 
 elocution is an important part, nothing is 
 to be left to the individual idea of the 
 actor ? That he is simply to declaim the 
 words set down for him, without refer- 
 ence to the expression of his face, his 
 bearing, or his action ? It is in the union 
 196
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 of all the powers the harmony of gait 
 and utterance and emotion that convic- 
 tion lies. Garrick, who was the most 
 natural actor of his time, could not de- 
 claim so well as many of his own mani- 
 fest inferiors in his art nay, it was by 
 this that he set aside the old false method, 
 and soared to the heights in which, as 
 an artist, he reigned supreme. Garrick 
 personated and Kean personated. The 
 one had all the grace and mastery of the 
 powers of man for the conveyance of 
 ideas, the other had a mighty spirit which 
 could leap out in flame to awe and sweep 
 the souls of those who saw and heard 
 him. And the secret of both was that 
 they best understood the poet best 
 impersonated the characters which he 
 drew, and the passions which he set 
 forth. 
 
 In order to promote and preserve the 
 idea of reality in the minds of the public, 
 it is necessary that the action of the play 
 
 197
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 be set in what the painters call the proper 
 milieu, or atmosphere. To this belongs 
 costume, scenery, and all that tends to 
 set forth time and place other than our 
 own. If this idea be not kept in view 
 there must be, or at all events there may 
 be, some disturbing cause to the mind of 
 the onlooker. This is all literally all 
 that dramatic Art imperatively demands 
 from the paint room, the wardrobe, and 
 the property shop ; and it is because the 
 public taste and knowledge in such mat- 
 ters have grown that the actor has to play 
 his part with the surroundings and acces- 
 sories which are sometimes pronounced 
 to be a weight or drag on action. Suita- 
 bility is demanded in all things ; and it 
 must, for instance, be apparent to all 
 that the things suitable to a palace are 
 different to those usual in a hovel. There 
 is nothing unsuitable in Lear in kingly 
 raiment in the hovel in the storm, because 
 such is here demanded by the exigencies 
 198
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 of the play : but if Lear were to be first 
 shown in such guise in such a place with 
 no explanation given of the cause, either 
 the character or the stage-manager would 
 be simply taken for a madman. This 
 idea of suitability should always be borne 
 in mind, for it is in itself a sufficient 
 answer to any thoughtless allegation as to 
 overloading a play with scenery. 
 
 Finally, in the consideration of the Art 
 of Acting, it must never be forgotten that 
 its ultimate aim is beauty. Truth itself is 
 only an element of beauty, and to merely 
 reproduce things vile and squalid and 
 mean is a debasement of Art. There is 
 apt to be such a tendency in an age of 
 peace, and men should carefully watch 
 its manifestations. A morose and hope- 
 less dissatisfaction is not a part of a true 
 national life. This is hopeful and ear- 
 nest, and, if need be, militant. It is a 
 bad sign for any nation to yearn for, or 
 even to tolerate, pessimism in its enjoy- 
 
 199
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 ment ; and how can pessimism be other 
 than antagonistic to beauty ? Life, with 
 all its pains and sorrows, is a beautiful 
 and a precious gift ; and the actor's Art 
 is to reproduce this beautiful thing, giving 
 due emphasis to those royal virtues and 
 those stormy passions which sway the 
 destinies of men. Thus the lesson given 
 by long experience by the certain pun- 
 ishment of ill-doing and by the rewards 
 that follow on bravery, forbearance, and 
 self-sacrifice, are on the mimic stage con- 
 veyed to men. And thus every actor 
 who is more than a mere machine, and 
 who has an ideal of any kind, has a duty 
 which lies beyond the scope of his per- 
 sonal ambition. His art must be some- 
 thing to hold in reverence if he wishes 
 others to hold it in esteem. There is noth- 
 ing of chance about this work. All, actors 
 and audience alike, must bear in mind that 
 the whole scheme of the higher Drama is 
 not to be regarded as a game in life which 
 200
 
 THE ART OF ACTING 
 
 can be played with varying success. Its 
 
 present intention may be to interest 
 
 and amuse, but its deeper purpose 
 
 is earnest, intense, sincere. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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