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Impressions In The Theatre
by
Aristotle and Havelock Ellis and Louis Sherwin have taught us that the theatre should be an outlet for suppressed desires. So, indeed, the ideal theatre should. As a matter of fact, in most playhouses (I will generously refrain from naming the one I visited yesterday) I am continually suppressing a desire to strangle somebody or other, but after a visit to the Spaniards I walk out into Columbus Circle completely purged of pity and fear, love, hate, and all the rest. It is an experience.
November 3, 1917.
II
A Note on Mimi Aguglia
“Art has to do only with the creation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or colour, or outline, or rhythmical movement; and the man who writes music is no more truly an artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who composes rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the dancer who composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no more to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in those forms of art which we have agreed to recognize as of equal value.”
Arthur Symons.
The only George Jean, “witty, wise, and cruel,” and the “amaranthine” Louis Sherwin, who understands better than anybody else how to plunge the rapier into the vulnerable spot and twist it in the wound, making the victim writhe, have been having some fun with the art of acting lately, or to be exact, with the art of actors. Now actor-baiting is no new game; as a winter sport it is as popular as making jokes about mothers-in-law, decrying the art of Bouguereau or Howard Chandler Christy, or discussing the methods of Mr. Belasco. Ever so long ago (and George Henry Lewes preceded him) George Moore wrote an article called “Mummer Worship,” holding the players up to ridicule, but George really adores the theatre and even acting, goes to the playhouse constantly, and writes a bad play himself every few years. None of these has achieved success on the stage. The list includes Martin Luther, written with a collaborator, The Strike at Arlingford, The Bending of the Bough (Moore’s version of a play by Edwin Martyn), a dramatization of “Esther Waters,” Elizabeth Cooper, and the fragment, The Apostle, on which “The Brook Kerith,” was based. Now he is at work turning the novel back into another play…. When the Sunday editor of a newspaper is at his wit’s end he invariably sends a competent reporter to collect data for a symposium on one of two topics, Is the author or the player more important? or Does the stage director make the actor? The amount of amusement this reporter can derive in gathering indignant replies from mountebanks and scribblers is only limited by his own sense of humour. Even the late Sir Henry Irving felt compelled on more than one occasion to defend his “noble calling.”
The actor, when he slaps back, usually overlooks the point at issue, but sometimes he has something to say over which we may well ponder. Witness, for example, the following passage, quoted from that justly celebrated compendium of personal opinions and broad-shaft wit called “Nat Goodwin’s Book”: “The average author and manager of today are prone to advertise themselves as conspicuously as the play (as if the public cared a snap who wrote the play or who ‘presents’). I doubt if five per cent of the public know who wrote ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,’ ‘In Mizzoura,’ or ‘Richelieu,’ but they know their stage favourites. I wonder how many mantels are adorned with pictures of the successful dramatist and those who ‘present’ and how many there are on which appear Maude Adams, Dave Warfield, Billie Burke, John Drew, Bernhardt, Duse, and hundreds of other distinguished players.”