ABSTRACT
They say that second thoughts are best. They also say it is good to make the best of a bad job, and it is merely making the best of a bad job that I am forced to alter my first and more optimistic dedication to my second. Therefore the second thoughts are best. What a pity and what a pain to me that we should be obliged to admit it! No such race of athletic workers in the Theatre of today exists; degeneration, both physical and mental, is round us. How could it be otherwise? Perhaps no surer sign of it can be pointed to than that all those whose work lies in the Theatre are to be continually heard announcing that all is well and that the Theatre is to-day at its highest point of development. But if all were well, no desire for a change would spring up instinctively
and continually as it ever does in those who visit or ponder on the modern Theatre. It is because the Theatre is in this wretched state that it becomes necessary that some one shall speak as I do; and then I look around me for those to whom I can speak and for those who will listen and, listening, understand; and I see nothing but backs turned towards me, the backs of a race of unathletic workers. Still the individual, the boy or man of personal courage, faces me. Him I see, and in him I see the force which shall create the race to come. Therefore to him I speak, and I am content that he alone shall understand me. It is the man who will, as Blake says, “leave father, mother, houses and lands if they stand in the way of his art”;1 it is the man who will give up personal ambition and the temporary success of the moment, he who will cease to desire an agreeable wealth of smooth guineas, but who shall demand as his reward nothing less than the restoration of his home, its liberty, its health, its power. It is to him I speak. You are a young man; you have already been a few years in a theatre, or
you have been born of theatrical parents; or you have been a painter for a
while but have felt the longing towards movement; or you have been a manufacturer. Perhaps you quarrelled with your parents when you were eighteen, because you wished to go on the stage, and they would not let you. They perhaps asked why you wanted to go on the stage, and you could give no reasonable answer because you wanted to do that which no reasonable answer could explain; in other words, you wanted to fly. And had you said to your parents, “I want to fly,” I think that you would have probably got further than had you alarmed them with the terrible words, “I want to go on the stage.” Millions of such men have had the same desire, this desire for move-
ment, this desire to fly, this desire to be merged in some other creature’s being, and not knowing that it was the desire to live in the imagination, some have answered their parents, “I want to be an actor; I want to go on the stage.” It is not that which they want; and the tragedy begins. I think when
walking, disturbed with this newly awakened feeling, a young man will say, “perhaps I want to be an actor”; and it is only when in the presence of the irate parents that in his desperation he turns the “perhaps” into the definite “I want.” This is probably your case. You want to fly; you want to exist in some
other state, to be intoxicated with the air, and to create this state in others. Try and get out of your head now that you really want “to go on the
stage.” If, unfortunately, you are upon the stage, try and get out of your head then that you want to be an actor and that it is the end of all your desires. Let us say that you are already an actor; you have been so for four or five years, and already some strange doubt has crept upon you. You will not admit it to any one; your parents would apparently seem to have been right; you will not admit it to yourself, for you have nothing else but this one thing to cheer yourself with. But I’m going to give you all sorts of things to cheer yourself with, and you may with courage and complete good spirits throw what you will to the winds and yet lose nothing of that which you stood up for in the beginning. You may remain on, yet be above the stage. I shall give you the value of my experience for what it is worth, and may
be it will be of some use to you. I shall try to sift what is important for us from what is unimportant; and if while I am telling you all this you want any doubts cleared or any more exact explanations or details, you have only to ask me for them and I am ready to serve you. To begin with, you have accepted an engagement from the manager of
the Theatre. You must serve him faithfully, not because he is paying you a salary, but because you are working under him. And with this obedience to your manager comes the first and the greatest temptation which you will encounter in your whole work. Because you must not merely obey his words but his wishes; and yet you
must not lose yourself. I do not mean to say you must not lose your
personality, because it is probable your personality has not come to its complete form. But you must not lose sight of that which you are in quest of, you must not lose the first feeling which possessed you when you seemed to yourself to be in movement with a sense of swinging upwards. While serving your apprenticeship under your first manager listen to all
he has to say and all he can show you about the theatre, about acting, and go further for yourself and search out that which he does not show you. Go where they are painting the scenes; go where they are twisting the electric wires for the lamps; go beneath the stage and look at the elaborate constructions; go up over the stage and ask for information about the ropes and the wheels; but while you are learning all this about the Theatre and about acting be very careful to remember that outside the world of the Theatre you will find greater inspiration than inside it: I mean in nature. The other sources of inspiration are music and architecture. I tell you to do this because you will not have it told you by your man-
ager. In the Theatre they study from the Theatre. They take the Theatre as their source of inspiration, and if at times some actors go to nature for assistance, it is to one part of nature only, to that which manifests itself in the human being. This was not so with Henry Irving,2 but I cannot stop here to tell you of
him, for it would mean book upon book to put the thing clearly before you. But you can remember that as actor he was unfailingly right, and that he studied all nature in order to find symbols for the expression of his thoughts. You will be probably told that this man, whom I hold up to you as a
peerless actor, did such and such a thing in such and such a way; and you will doubt my counsel; but with all respect to your present manager you must be very careful how much credence you give to what he says and to what he shows, for it is upon such tradition that the Theatre has existed and has degenerated. What Henry Irving did is one thing; what they tell you he did is another.
I have had some experience of this. I played in the same Theatre as Irving in Macbeth, and later on I had the opportunity of playing Macbeth myself in a theatre in the north or the south of England. I was curious to know how much would strike a capable and reliable actor of the usual fifteen years’ experience, especially one who was an enthusiastic admirer of Henry Irving. I therefore asked him to be good enough to show me how Irving had treated this or that passage; what he had done and what impression he had created, because it had slipped my memory. The competent actor thereupon revealed to my amazed intelligence something so banal, so clumsy, and so lacking in distinction, that I began to understand how much value was in tradition; and I have had several such experiences. I have been shown by a competent and worthy actress how Mrs.
Siddons3 played Lady Macbeth. She would move to the centre of the stage
and would begin to make certain movements and certain exclamations which she believed to be a reproduction of what Mrs. Siddons had done. I presume she had received these from some one who had seen Mrs. Siddons. The things which she showed me were utterly worthless in so far as they had no unity, although one action here, another action there, would have some kind of reflected value; and so I began to see the uselessness of this kind of tuition; and it being my nature to rebel against those who would force upon me something which seemed to me unintelligent, I would have nothing to do with such teaching. I do not recommend you to do the same, although you will disregard
what I say and do as I did if you have much of the volcano in you; but you will do better to listen, accept and adapt that which they tell you, remembering that this your apprenticeship as actor is but the very beginning of an exceedingly long apprenticeship as craftsman in all the crafts which go to make up the art. When you have studied these thoroughly you will find some which are
of value, and you will certainly find that the experience as actor has been necessary. The pioneer seldom finds an easy road, and as your way does not end in becoming a celebrated actor but is a much longer and an untrodden way leading to a very different end, you will have all the advantages and the disadvantages of pioneering; but keep in mind what I have told you: that your aim is not to become a celebrated actor, it is not to become the manager of a so-called successful theatre; it is not to become the producer of elaborate and much-talked-of plays; it is to become an artist of the Theatre; and as a base to all this you must, as I have said, serve your term of apprenticeship as actor faithfully and well. If at the end of five years as actor you are convinced that you know what your future will be; if, in fact, you are succeeding, you may give yourself up for lost. Short cuts lead nowhere in this world. Did you think when the longing came upon you and when you told your family that you must go upon the stage that such a great longing was to be so soon satisfied? Is satisfaction so small a thing? Is desire a thing of nothing, that a five years’ quest can make a parody of it? But of course not. Your whole life is not too long, and then only at the very end will some small atom of what you have desired come to you. And so you will be still young when you are full of years.
