No More Learning

_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. Greek acting was great because
it did everything with the voice, and modern acting may be great when
it does everything with voice and movement. But an art which smothers
these things with bad painting, with innumerable garish colours, with
continual restless mimicries of the surface of life, is an art of
fading humanity, a decaying art.

MORAL AND IMMORAL PLAYS.

A writer in _The Leader_ has said that I told my audience after the
performance of _The Hour-Glass_ that I did not care whether a play
was moral or immoral. He said this without discourtesy, and as I
have noticed that people are generally discourteous when they write
about morals, I think that I owe him upon my part the courtesy of an
explanation. I did not say that I did not care whether a play was
moral or immoral, for I have always been of Verhaeren's opinion that a
masterpiece is a portion of the conscience of mankind. My objection was
to the rough-and-ready conscience of the newspaper and the pulpit in a
matter so delicate and so difficult as literature. Every generation of
men of letters has been called immoral by the pulpit or the newspaper,
and it has been precisely when that generation has been illuminating
some obscure corner of the conscience that the cry against it has been
more confident.

The plays of Shakespeare had to be performed on the south side of
the Thames because the Corporation of London considered all plays
immoral. Goethe was thought dangerous to faith and morals for two or
three generations. Every educated man knows how great a portion of the
conscience of mankind is in Flaubert and Balzac, and yet their books
have been proscribed in the courts of law, and I found some time ago
that our own National Library, though it had two books on the genius
of Flaubert, had refused on moral grounds to have any books written
by him. With these stupidities in one's memory, how can one, as many
would have us, arouse the mob, and in this matter the pulpit and the
newspaper are but voices of the mob, against the English theatre in
Ireland upon moral grounds? If that theatre became conscientious as
men of letters understand the conscience, many that now cry against
it would think it even less moral, for it would be more daring, more
logical, more free-spoken. The English Theatre is demoralizing, not
because it delights in the husband, the wife and the lover, a subject
which has inspired great literature in most ages of the world, but
because the illogical thinking and insincere feeling we call bad
writing, make the mind timid and the heart effeminate.