No More Learning

The actress acted so much and so admirably that when she
first played it--I heard her better a month ago, perhaps because I
was nearer to the stage--I could not understand a word of a passage
that required the most careful speech. Just as the modern musician,
through the over-development of an art that seems exterior to the
poet, writes so many notes for every word that the natural energy of
speech is dissolved and broken and the words made inaudible, so did
this actress, a perfect mistress of her own art, put into her voice so
many different notes, so run up and down the scale under an impulse of
anger and scorn, that one had hardly been more affronted by a musical
setting. Everybody who has spoken to large audiences knows that he must
speak difficult passages, in which there is some delicacy of sound
or of thought, upon one or two notes. The larger his audience, the
more he must get away, except in trivial passages, from the methods
of conversation. Where one requires the full attention of the mind,
one must not weary it with any but the most needful changes of pitch
and note, or by an irrelevant or obtrusive gesture. As long as drama
was full of poetical beauty, full of description, full of philosophy,
as long as its words were the very vesture of sorrow and laughter,
the players understood that their art was essentially conventional,
artificial, ceremonious.

The stage itself was differently shaped, being more a platform than
a stage, for they did not desire to picture the surface of life, but
to escape from it. But realism came in, and every change towards
realism coincided with a decline in dramatic energy. The proscenium
was imported into England at the close of the seventeenth century,
appropriate costumes a generation later. The audience were forbidden to
sit upon the stage in the time of Sheridan, the last English-speaking
playwright whose plays have lived. And the last remnant of the
platform, the part of the stage that still projected beyond the
proscenium, dwindled in size till it disappeared in their own day.
The birth of science was at hand, the birth-pangs of its mother had
troubled the world for centuries. But now that Gargantua is born at
last, it may be possible to remember that there are other giants.

We can never bring back old things precisely as they were, but must
consider how much of them is necessary to us, accepting, even if it
were only out of politeness, something of our own time. The necessities
of a builder have torn from us, all unwilling as we were, the apron, as
the portion of the platform that came in front of the proscenium used
to be called, and we must submit to the picture-making of the modern
stage.
We would have preferred to be able to return occasionally to
the old stage of statue-making, of gesture. On the other hand, one
accepts, believing it to be a great improvement, some appropriateness
of costume, but speech is essential to us. An Irish critic has told us
to study the stage-management of Antoine, but that is like telling a
good Catholic to take his theology from Luther. Antoine, who described
poetry as a way of saying nothing, has perfected naturalistic acting
and carried the spirit of science into the theatre. Were we to study
his methods, we might, indeed, have a far more perfect art than our
own, a far more mature art, but it is better to fumble our way like
children. We may grow up, for we have as good hopes as any other sturdy
ragamuffin.

An actor must so understand how to discriminate cadence from cadence,
and so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose, that he
delights the ear with a continually varied music. This one has to say
over and over again, but one does not mean that his speaking should be
a monotonous chant. Those who have heard Mr. 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.