IITHE DRAMATIC ACADEMY
This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste (owing to changes in fashion), was purchased and applied to that use. I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy.
This was composed in three parts; one for research professors, another for play-makers, or fairfussers, and the third for students; the first being trained psychologists, the last, young men and women remarkable for beauty, fine feeling and intelligence, asthey are in our own day. The notion was for the professors to find out facts, for the fairfussers to apply them, and for the students to carry them out: and if it may occur to the reader that the workers in one side paid small heed to the discoveries of the rest, a little consideration will show that this is all to the good; for slavishly to accept the opinions of others can never lead to clarity of thought, and the warden was anxious to maintain in every inmate that active spirit of self-reliance without which no advance can be made in any of the sciences. I saw many of each division, but to write of them all would be to take up inordinate space in these memorials, since the arts are not of large importance to the state or to the public. I shall, therefore, confinemyself to describing one or two of each kind, choosing those which throw most light on the methods of those days, and the great progress we can shortly expect.
My first visit was to a small, active professor, with a tiny clean-shaven chin, and unusually bright weasel eyes, who, speaking very fast, and with vivid gesture, easily convinced me of the usefulness of his discoveries. He had applied his mind for fifteen years to proving that there was no such thing as thought, for, he said, the conversation he had to listen to, or the acts he was able to observe, could be accounted for without supposing such a thing existed. Speech, he explained, was merely a habit, like that of scratching when something causes our skin toitch; and, moreover, all our deeds were like scratching, which we do thoughtlessly, however much we may flatter ourselves that we prepare great things far ahead. He did not go to the lengths of some of his colleagues, who denied the existence of consciousness: for, so as not to be too positive, he preferred to regard ‘awareness of the emotions’ as a fiction convenient to his purpose, or, to put it differently, as words merely to describe a sequence of events. By his system, when impulses are set up, something occurs, such as eating, and we are ‘satisfied,’ as we say: or we are ‘disappointed,’ as when prevented from a kindly action.
I paid close heed to this part of his discourse, because he begged me notto confuse his theory with that of a rival professor, who believed that allusive gestures gave rise to a corresponding emotion. This, he pointed out, was merely the out-of-date heresy that “A dog does not wag his tail because he is happy; but that he is happy because his tail wags.” This rival believed that if he made the gestures which usually go with certain emotions, he would undergo these feelings; and the spectator would, by ‘in-feeling’ or ‘empathy’ (such were his barbarous terms) put their muscles in readiness to go through these movements, and so, in their turn, experience these emotions. For his part, when he had been to see this professor acting woe, far from feeling unhappy, he had barely been able to master his mirth.But, so as to give the theory a fair trial, he had wished with one of his pupils to observe the result of moving the tail of a dog quickly from side to side, but that unluckily, the pupil had been bitten before the experiment had reached a stage from which anything could be learnt.
His own idea, he informed me, was to set up a known order of stresses and strains in the watchers’ nerves, and this could be done by cunning movements performed in front of them. I was not, however, to tax him with inconsistency, for his motto was ‘Not miming but movement,’ and though an actor had to use gestures, they must by no means be after the naif manner of his rival. He himself had spent over four years in the abstract study ofthe movements proper to the passion of benevolence—abstract, because nothing is more misleading than what people relate of their own feelings: cruelty, for instance, they often describe as a wish to better their neighbours. Indeed, another of his mottoes, he declared chuckling, was ‘No motion, no emotion’; and I could not but agree with him when I considered that after all, to lie in one’s bed all day and simply ‘think,’ as we stupidly call it, is no life at all.
Yet I could not help trying to argue, feebly enough, that the showing of dreadful acts would call forth feelings of horror, as we may judge from the murder of Desdemona, and that fitting words would arouse pity in us, as they do in the same play. But, smiling atthe clumsiness of my example, he remarked that just there lay the error; for if we were truly to see a Moor, however splendid, plunging a knife into the body of a beautiful lady, our emotions, if we knew her to be guiltless, would be very different from those we feel in a theatre; and that, instead of sitting still, we should most certainly interpose, or run to fetch the police. Again, while we were children, before our minds are distorted by what we erroneously call thought (but which is only an idle luxury-habit), Mr Punch beating his wife causes us to laugh very loudly. This instance, he said, would also prove how much more useful movements were than words, since for ten who would laugh at a Punch and Judy show, hardly one wouldsmile at the wittiest things in Pascal. It was only on reflection that I could altogether make his views my own, for it is not easy for us to give up opinions we have held ever since we can remember.
To test the movements appropriate to various emotions, this professor had invented a machine, which, by reason of the changes in electrical resistance a body undergoes under the action of the passions, recorded the feelings of any person subjected to it. This machine he had just brought to perfection, and to give me a demonstration, he sat me in a chair made of some amalgam unknown to me, and fitted with sockets into which my head, hands and feet were clamped. A piece of wireless apparatus, supplied with a diaphragm such as make a part of ourtelephone receivers, was placed over my heart, and, my loins being bared, my lumbar vertebrae were played upon by a peculiar ray. Above my head, where I could not see it, was placed a marker, much like our telegraph morse-code dials, but corrugated and rayed after the manner of a fan. The professor could watch this while evolving before me the strange movements I could connect with nothing I had ever seen, and so could vary his gestures according to the results shown. After about a quarter of an hour of erudite passes, the professor, wiping the sweat from his brow, triumphantly announced the successful issue of his experiment, and asked me what emotion I felt. At that moment, having overcome my awe, I was filled with a profoundsense of pity, and on my confessing this, the professor danced with glee. Crying “Typical! Typical!” he pointed at the dial; but as the needle showed ‘Lust tempered with Sentimentality’ I could not but feel that his wonderful invention needed alteration in a few details to perfect it. Nevertheless, while doing up my braces, I framed a few remarks to make known my pleasure at seeing the drama make such strides in his hands; and promising to meet at a later day we parted with many expressions of esteem. I must also add this tribute to his ability: when I did visit him again, very fast, on my backward journey through time, even when all the motions were reversed, I once more felt very deeply the compassion his gestures had provoked.
I next went to see a fairfusser, though not one in the service of the government, and was much impressed by his freedom from doubt as to the way in which the best result was to be reached. He said, with justice, that the artist’s desire was to communicate with his fellow creatures, and that the object of an actor was to place his soul in touch with that of others. Man, being in each case a unique individual, was fitted for work more noble than that of a mere interpreter, or conduit pipe from an author to an audience, and the contrary view had been the grand error of all producers from the time of Shakespeare almost to his own day. The aim of an actor was to express himself (as a part of universal nature) and reveal a cup overbrimmingwith passions. Any ideas introduced by an author were to be deprecated, for his business was strictly to provide the raw material; and so the teacher’s main efforts were to be directed towards training his pupils to rid the author’s words of any meaning they might contain, simply by the manner of speaking them. In this way nothing was allowed to come between the actor and the audience. This he claimed to be the especial discovery of his age, and one which he could not help regarding with more than a little pride.
I made bold to tell him that his notion was not so new as he imagined, and that we too had actors who disbelieved that words had any plausible meaning apart from the emotion the actor could register through them:men (as a rule well set up, or even bulky, since these are always the most passionate) who by a clever alteration in stress, or an abrupt cleavage of a sentence in the middle, could effectively cancel any extraneous idea the words of an author might interpose between the feelings of the player and the minds of the audience. This constructor was good enough to say that he was quite sure our age had not been so dark as was commonly supposed, but that, at least in our classical plays, which had been in verse, a form which compels a certain manner of speech, he thought the ‘pure’ actor must have met with difficulties hardly to be overcome. I was able to assure him that this was not so, and that, indeed, it was just in these very plays many of our actorshad shown their highest genius; that one might knowHamlet, for example, quite well by the book, and yet go to two or three versions of the play and hardly recognise any of the speeches, so much were they heightened and made subtle in the speaking of them.
I was also much taken by an investigator who had made a highly diverting play simply with scenery, and a few mutes who now and again varied their place. It was his view that we had always been astray in making people the centre of our dramas: it was their surroundings that mattered—for who, he said, given the choice of seeing Brown eat his dinner, or a thunderstorm on Mount Everest, would not prefer to look at Mount Everest? A modern producer could nothelp laughing at the remark of Aristotle, if he ever read it, that ‘the spectacle was the least artistic part of a drama.’ A comely staircase, he averred, or even a rickety ladder, if it was tall enough, had more significance than a tale of hopeless love; and he was about to design a series of scenes in a logical order of forms and colours, green following pink, which would make a spectator sadder than even a play by Sophocles. This I could well believe: but I found it hard to understand how it was right to allude to pink as though it were a premiss, for after all, nobody dreams of calling a rainbow a syllogism, any more than they do of saying ‘paradox’ when they mean a hill.
On another day I was taken to see a fairfusser at work on an old-fashionedplay which was to be ‘acted,’ in our sense of the word, by students. He made his actors rehearse a scene; and then all sat down on chairs and took up stereoscopic glasses. Immediately, at the other end of the room, two coloured films appeared, exactly reproducing the movements of the actors, while at the same time a gramophone repeated the words they had uttered, in such a manner as to seem to come from the mouth of each actor who spoke. With the glasses the illusion was complete, and I could hardly believe I was not re-dreaming the scene I had just witnessed, except that the producer could stop the play at will, or even go back to a phrase or gesture to point out the errors of voice or movement of which the actors had beenguilty. He could also show how a gesture would be more effective if performed at a greater or less speed; and how admirable this method was I could judge from the looks of pleasure or mortification on the actors’ faces as they saw themselves displayed.
There was one handsome young actor who seemed by his vehemence and assurance to be more talented than the rest, and to him I asked to be introduced, that I might learn his views from him. He led me aside, and with great earnestness explained to me how experience had shown that one could not take for granted the least intelligence in an audience. Words, he said, conveyed nothing to them unless accompanied with appropriate action: and this he ascribed to the fact that anaudience was a crowd, and therefore followed the normal law of mass psychology in being much stupider and more primitive than a single person. The actor, therefore, had to deal with the simplest objects or ideas, indicating them by a kind of airy drawing. The connection between them, the grammar or the syntax as it were (so he was kind enough to phrase it for my understanding) was portrayed by the actors’ emotion as expressed in gesture or tone. That was why plays with few words were better than plays with many words, as in the latter case the number of gestures became very tiring both to the eyes of the audience and the muscles of the actors. He had a noble, yet reasoned, scorn for any player who stood still and withhardly a movement allowed sentences merely to trundle out of his mouth, and he considered his place could very well be taken by a gramophone.
To illustrate the stages of his art, he took me to a room to see a young actress practice an easy passage, and I was much gratified by the manner in which she expressed by gesture the meaning of the words she was uttering; and I could not but admire the subtle difference she made in pointing to the floor when she said in one case ‘down’ meaning merely downstairs, in another the infernal regions. The same variation was introduced in her rendering of ‘up,’ and I did not fail to note that each gesture emphasised a new beauty in her arms. She also practised some ‘tone-work’ as they call it, and for mybenefit declaimed an old-fashioned line “To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,” and it is hard to imagine, as it is impossible to describe, the frigidity she put into the word ‘cold,’ or the horror and loathing with which she vivified the word ‘rot,’ so making their meaning quite clear to any audience.
My actor friend afterwards told me that she had sadly bungled the word ‘obstruction,’ because she had not yet reached the year in which abstract terms were studied; and being himself nearly at the conclusion of that period, he gave me a finished version of the line “The quality of mercy is not strained,” which quite transported me, and which I should not know how to praise sufficiently. The gesture for ‘quality,’ initially too simple, wasraised to a high state of complexity by the young man’s genius, and I should no doubt have understood it perfectly had I been more used to the method.
I later asked the young woman if such interpretation did not involve work almost too arduous, since nothing is more tiring than to bring one’s ideas to the level of common minds; and she told me that though the intellectual labour was harder than in any other profession, their task was lessened by the fact that so few authors had any idea of what they really meant that the actors could substitute such phrases as lent themselves more readily to their temperament.
There was another actor, with a mobile mouth and masterful manner, whom I saw practising for his thirty-thirdperformance of a part, and therefore engaged in working out a thirty-third reading. I was amazed at this, which is so contrary to our own method, but was soon persuaded of its rightness. For a work of art, this actor said, did not exist apart from the observer—it was a collaboration; and as no observer was ever twice in the same mood, he could never experience the same sensation from the identical thing. One might say, to adapt the words of an old Greek sophist, “No man can go to the same play twice.” He then went on to argue very brilliantly that since the actor made the work of art, was indeed himself a piece of it, his share of the collaboration was to make it on each occasion as different as possible from the last, so as to helpany observer who might come more than once to any play. (He knew several ladies who had been to see him no less than seventeen times in the same character). This also had the extra advantage of avoiding that dull monotony—for what is art without an element of surprise?—so often to be seen in our actors, who think they have achieved a final rendering, and attempt day after day to repeat a thing which can never really occur even twice.
I was much satisfied at what I had seen and learnt at the Academy, but was made slightly melancholy by the thought that if ever I should return to my own time, I should find our actors and actresses much below the level of what I had come to expect from their calling.