No More Learning

I think the theatre must be reformed in its plays, its speaking, its
acting, and its scenery. That is to say, I think there is nothing good
about it at present.

_First. _ We have to write or find plays that will make the theatre a
place of intellectual excitement--a place where the mind goes to be
liberated as it was liberated by the theatres of Greece and England
and France at certain great moments of their history, and as it is
liberated in Scandinavia to-day. If we are to do this we must learn
that beauty and truth are always justified of themselves, and that
their creation is a greater service to our country than writing
that compromises either in the seeming service of a cause. We will,
doubtless, come more easily to truth and beauty because we love some
cause with all but all our heart; but we must remember when truth and
beauty open their mouths to speak, that all other mouths should be as
silent as Finn bade the Son of Lugaidh be in the houses of the great.
Truth and beauty judge and are above judgment. They justify and have no
need of justification.

Such plays will require, both in writers and audiences, a stronger
feeling for beautiful and appropriate language than one finds in the
ordinary theatre. Sainte-Beuve has said that there is nothing immortal
in literature except style, and it is precisely this sense of style,
once common among us, that is hardest for us to recover. I do not
mean by style words with an air of literature about them, what is
ordinarily called eloquent writing. The speeches of Falstaff are as
perfect in their style as the soliloquies of Hamlet. One must be able
to make a king of faery or an old countryman or a modern lover speak
that language which is his and nobody else's, and speak it with so much
of emotional subtlety that the hearer may find it hard to know whether
it is the thought or the word that has moved him, or whether these
could be separated at all.

If one does not know how to construct, if one cannot arrange much
complicated life into a single action, one's work will not hold the
attention or linger in the memory, but if one is not in love with words
it will lack the delicate movement of living speech that is the chief
garment of life; and because of this lack the great realists seem to
the lovers of beautiful art to be wise in this generation, and for the
next generation, perhaps, but not for all generations that are to come.

_Second.
_ But if we are to restore words to their sovereignty we must
make speech even more important than gesture upon the stage.

I have been told that I desire a monotonous chant, but that is not
true, for though a monotonous chant may be a safer beginning for an
actor than the broken and prosaic speech of ordinary recitation, it
puts one to sleep none the less. The sing-song in which a child says
a verse is a right beginning, though the child grows out of it. An
actor should understand how to so discriminate cadence from cadence,
and to so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose that he
delights the ear with a continually varied music. Certain passages of
lyrical feeling, or where one wishes, as in the Angel's part in _The
Hour-Glass_, to make a voice sound like the voice of an immortal, may
be spoken upon pure notes which are carefully recorded and learned as
if they were the notes of a song. Whatever method one adopts one must
always be certain that the work of art, as a whole, is masculine and
intellectual, in its sound as in its form.

_Third. _ We must simplify acting, especially in poetical drama, and
in prose drama that is remote from real life like my _Hour-Glass_. We
must get rid of everything that is restless, everything that draws the
attention away from the sound of the voice, or from the few moments
of intense expression, whether that expression is through the voice
or through the hands; we must from time to time substitute for the
movements that the eye sees the nobler movements that the heart sees,
the rhythmical movements that seem to flow up into the imagination from
some deeper life than that of the individual soul.

_Fourth. _ Just as it is necessary to simplify gesture that it may
accompany speech without being its rival, it is necessary to simplify
both the form and colour of scenery and costume. As a rule the
background should be but a single colour, so that the persons in the
play, wherever they stand, may harmonize with it and preoccupy our
attention. In other words, it should be thought out not as one thinks
out a landscape, but as if it were the background of a portrait, and
this is especially necessary on a small stage where the moment the
stage is filled the painted forms of the background are broken up and
lost. Even when one has to represent trees or hills they should be
treated in most cases decoratively, they should be little more than an
unobtrusive pattern. There must be nothing unnecessary, nothing that
will distract the attention from speech and movement. An art is always
at its greatest when it is most human.