No More Learning

Frank Fay speaking verse
will understand me. That speech of his, so masculine and so musical,
could only sound monotonous to an ear that was deaf to poetic rhythm,
and one should never, as do London managers, stage a poetical drama
according to the desire of those who are deaf to poetical rhythm. It
is possible, barely so, but still possible, that some day we may write
musical notes as did the Greeks, it seems, for a whole play, and make
our actors speak upon them--not sing, but speak. Even now, when one
wishes to make the voice immortal and passionless, as in the Angel's
part in my _Hour-Glass_, one finds it desirable for the player to speak
always upon pure musical notes, written out beforehand and carefully
rehearsed. On the one occasion when I heard the Angel's part spoken
in this way with entire success, the contrast between the crystalline
quality of the pure notes and the more confused and passionate speaking
of the Wise Man was a new dramatic effect of great value.

If a song is brought into a play it does not matter to what school the
musician belongs if every word, if every cadence, is as audible and
expressive as if it were spoken. It must be good speech, and one must
not listen to the musician if he promise to add meaning to the words
with his notes, for one does not add meaning to the word 'love' by
putting four o's in the middle, or by subordinating it even slightly to
a musical note. But where will one find a musician so mild, so quiet,
so modest, unless he be a sailor from the forecastle or some ghost out
of the twelfth century? One must ask him for music that shall mean
nothing, or next to nothing, apart from the words, and after all he is
a musician.

When I heard the AEschylean Trilogy at Stratford-on-Avon last spring
I could not hear a word of the chorus, except in a few lines here
and there which were spoken without musical setting. The chorus was
not without dramatic, or rather operatic effect; but why should those
singers have taken so much trouble to learn by heart so much of the
greatest lyric poetry of Greece? 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star,' or
any other memory of their childhood, would have served their turn. If
it had been comic verse, the singing-master and the musician would
have respected it, and the audience would have been able to hear.
Mr. Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr have been working for some time
to find out some way of setting serious poetry which will enable us
to hear it, and the singer to sing sweetly and yet never to give a
word, a cadence, or an accent, that would not be given it in ordinary
passionate speech.
It is difficult, for they are trying to re-discover
an art that is only remembered or half-remembered in ships and in
hovels and among wandering tribes of uncivilised men, and they have to
make their experiment with singers who have been trained by a method
of teaching that professes to change a human being into a musical
instrument, a creation of science, 'something other than human life. '
In old days the singer began to sing over the rocking cradle or among
the wine-cups, and it was as though life itself caught fire of a
sudden; but to-day the poet, fanatic that he is, watches the singer go
up on to the platform, wondering and expecting every moment that he
will punch himself as if he were a bag. It is certainly impossible to
speak with perfect expression after you have been a bagpipes for many
years, even though you have been making the most beautiful music all
the time.

The success of the chorus in the performance of _Hippolytus_ last
Spring--I did not see the more recent performance, but hear upon all
hands that the chorus was too large--the expressiveness of the greater
portion as mere speech, has, I believe, re-created the chorus as a
dramatic method. The greater portion of the singing, as arranged by
Miss Farr, even when four or five voices sang together, though never
when ten sang together, was altogether admirable speech, and some of
it was speech of extraordinary beauty. When one lost the meaning,
even perhaps where the whole chorus sang together, it was not because
of a defective method, but because it is the misfortune of every new
artistic method that we can only judge of it through performers who
must be for a long time unpractised and amateurish. This new art has a
double difficulty, for the training of a modern singer makes articulate
speech, as a poet understands it, nearly impossible, and those who are
masters of speech very often, perhaps usually, are poor musicians.
Fortunately, Miss Farr, who has some knowledge of music, has, it may
be, the most beautiful voice on the English stage, and is in her
management of it an exquisite artist.

That we may throw emphasis on the words in poetical drama, above all
where the words are remote from real life as well as in themselves
exacting and difficult, the actors must move, for the most part, slowly
and quietly, and not very much, and there should be something in their
movements decorative and rhythmical as if they were paintings on a
frieze. They must not draw attention to themselves at wrong moments,
for poetry and indeed all picturesque writing is perpetually making
little pictures which draw the attention away for a second or two from
the player. The actress who played Lady Wishfort should have permitted
us to give a part of our attention to that little shop or wayside
booth. Then, too, one must be content to have long quiet moments, long
grey spaces, long level reaches, as it were--the leisure that is in all
fine life--for what we may call the business-will in a high state of
activity is not everything, although contemporary drama knows of little
else.

_Third. _ We must have a new kind of scenic art. I have been the
advocate of the poetry as against the actor, but I am the advocate of
the actor as against the scenery. Ever since the last remnant of the
old platform disappeared, and the proscenium grew into the frame of a
picture, the actors have been turned into a picturesque group in the
foreground of a meretricious landscape-painting.