to the actor's art, and its present state and prospects in England, that may not be without interest or out of place at the present

moment.

In the histrionic, as in other arts, there are epochs crowded with great names, and epochs distinguished by few or none; periods of ebb, when genius and skill seem dormant or dead, and periods of flow, when they carry their triumphs to the highest point, and infect the public with their own enthusiasm. It would be strange indeed, were it otherwise. We do not marvel that there is no perpetual succession of Van Eycks, Leonardos, Titians, Raffaels, or Michael Angelos, or that the age of Marlowe, Shakspeare, Chapman, Massinger, Jonson, Ford, and all that noble brotherhood of dramatic writers remains without rival in our literary history. Why, then, should we expect, that genius of the highest order in an art which, perhaps more than any other, demands an unusual combination of qualities of body as well as of mind, should show itself otherwise than at rare intervals? Genius in any art can never be otherwise than rare; and how rare it has been in the actor's art is at once apparent from the comparatively few, whose renown has survived themselves. Polos and agros on the Grecian stage, Esopus and Roscius on the Roman, are almost the only names that have escaped oblivion; and brief indeed is the catalogue of those who have achieved pre-eminence on the modern European stage.

Yet in none of the arts is the influence of individual genius upon the public taste, and also upon the followers of the art itself, at once so necessary and so intimate, as in that of the actor. Literature, sculpture, painting, music, all leave their records. None of these can be without models to emulate, or standards to appeal to, so long as any of their great masterpieces, which have outlived the shock of time, continue to survive. By these it is possible to learn wherein excellence consists, and he who has mastered, however imperfectly, the secret of the charm by which they are pervaded, is in a position to appraise the worth of every fresh effort in the same field. If an age, therefore, were barren in these arts, the love for them might still be kept alive and the public taste be preserved at a high level. But it is not so with the stage. Without the actual presence of genius upon it, the art must languish and the public taste decline. Nor is the reason far to seek. The actor's noblest successes perish with the hour that sees them, with the eyes and hearts on which their spell has been impressed. However vivid the chronicle of his triumphs, although a pen, dipped in the very hues of life, should be found to do for each, what Cibber has done for Betterton,

B 2

Betterton, Monfort, and Bracegirdle, the impression conveyed can only be vague and phantasmal at the best. Neither pen nor pencil can ever set Betterton or Garrick, Siddons or Kean before us, 'in form and moving, express and admirable'—with all that magic of presence, voice, and gesture, of dignity, tenderness, vivacity, and passion, which kindled a soul within the most torpid, or charmed the imagination of the most accomplished of their contemporaries. To conceive the pleasures,' as Cibber has truly said, arising from such harmony, you must have been present at it 'tis not to be told you.' Nor is this all; for not only can we form no satisfactory picture of what these great artists were, but unless we have actually seen great actors, we can form no adequate conception of what their art is capable. Were it otherwise, we should not so often find the highest praise bestowed even by people of culture and intelligence upon acting, which in a better condition of the stage would be barely tolerated. As a 'sprawling Verrio' seems to an untutored eye more admirable than a Francia steeped in the beauty of profound but tempered feeling, and in colours of luminous purity, so the showy effects of a style radically false and artificial often meet, for a time at least, with greater success upon the stage than the quiet truth of real gifts and self-respecting artistic power. This must always be expected, for it requires training and exact observation to discriminate between the true and false in all art, and in none more than in that in which the complex elements of character and emotion are so largely concerned. And how much more must it prevail if there be no living models of excellence by which the judgment of the public may be steadily disciplined?

Nor does the loss to public taste end here; for without "the living comment and interpretation" of fine acting, dramatic literature in its highest forms must be in a great degree a sealed book to us. We may, indeed, think that we see all the significance of a great conception. We may imagine, as so many people obviously do, that actual impersonation will never make us better acquainted with Imogen, Rosalind, Portia, Othello, Macbeth, or Coriolanus, than our own unaided study has done. There can be no greater mistake. Plays are written, not to be read, but to be seen and heard. No reader, be his imagination ever so active, can therefore thoroughly understand a finely conceived character, or a great play, until he has seen them on the stage. The dramatic poet himself may be independent of what it is the office of the stage to perform in giving completeness to his conception, but no one else can be. He knows that words can never paint the passions of the soul, whether in sunshine or

in storm, can never suggest the infinitely subtle phases of emotion, like an accent, a gesture, or a look. By the very nature of his genius he feels intuitively where silence is most eloquent, where the passion-charged utterance of the simplest phrase can do more than torrents of imagery; and, as he writes, he fills up the pauses and breaks of emotion with the appropriate look, and tones, and action of his ideal forms. Therefore does he leave much for the actor to do, knowing well that if he did not, however his dialogues might sparkle, or his periods glow, his work would not be one to move an audience.

Of all dramatists this is true, but it is pre-eminently true of Shakspeare. And herein lies the secret of the unquestionable fact that his plays are, more than all others, the crucial test of an actor's power. None suffer more by bad acting, and none gain more by good. A clever declaimer, or practised player, may produce an impersonation not disagreeable; but kindred genius can alone seize and turn to account the opportunities furnished by the poet to the performer for filling in the tints and shadows which are essential to complete the picture. Such, to all appearance, was the genius of Betterton. What Steele has said of his Othello (Tatler, No. 167) happily illustrates at once the genius of the actor and the dramatist in the particulars just indicated.

"The wonderful agony which he appeared in when he examined the circumstance of the handkerchief in Othello; the mixture of love that intruded upon his mind, upon the innocent answers Desdemona makes, betrayed in his gesture such a variety and vicissitude of passions, as would admonish a man to be afraid of his own heart, and perfectly convince him that it is to stab it, to admit that worst of daggersjealousy. Whoever reads in his closet this admirable scene will find that he cannot, except he has as warm an imagination as Shakspeare himself, find any but dry, incoherent, and broken sentences; but a reader that has seen Betterton act observes, there could not be a word added; that longer speeches had been unnatural, nay, impossible, in Othello's circumstances.'

Here we see the actor's gift acting as the complement of the poet's genius. A kindred intuition of human passion and its modes of expression is at the root of the excellence of each. 'What knowledge of the human heart does Talma display?' says Madame de Stael, speaking of the life thrown by that great actor into his parts. 'He becomes their second author by his accents and his physiognomy.' It is only when a great drama is dealt with by an actor or actress of whom this can be truly said, that the full meaning of the poet is revealed. And indeed the poet himself will probably be the foremost to admit, that even he had scarcely known the full significance of his work-it being, as all the best work is, spontaneous and unconscious-until it has been presented

presented to him in action. What is this,' said Murphy, the first time he saw Mrs. Siddons in Euphrasia, in his own play of The Grecian Daughter'—'What is this? I never wrote that scene. It has been added.' So hard was it for him to believe that it was only the exquisite life thrown into it by the great actress which had wrought the delusion. Nor is this an exceptional case merely. Est ce bien moi, qui ai fait cela?' Voltaire had exclaimed, not many years before, in surprise at the undreamt-of power developed in one of his own scenes by the deep sensibility and splendid declamation of Madame Clairon. The Vous pleurez, Zäire!' of Le Kain was no less a revelation to him of a pathos which the words, as they dropped from his pen, had not suggested to himself. suppose that Shakspeare might have felt in the same way, had And it is no exaggeration to he heard the Prithee, undo this button!' of Garrick in Lear,' or the Fool, fool, fool!' of the elder Kean's Othello. His best critics at least have been most ready to acknowledge the light cast upon his pages by the actor's genius. Thus, for example, George Steevens writes to Garrick (27th December, 1765):—*

I am contented with the spirit of the author you first taught me to admire; and when I found you could do so much for him, I was naturally curious to know the materials he had supplied you with; and often when I have taken the pen in my hand to try to illustrate a passage, I have thrown it down again with discontent when I remembered how able you were to clear that difficulty with a single look, or particular modulation of voice, which a long and laboured paraphrase was

insufficient to explain so well.

Nor is what we have said true in the case of single phrases,

a whole.

even

more true with reference to the comprehension of a great play as Without the aid of actual representation this is possible only to a vigorous imagination, and a mind trained to continuous and sustained exertion, and even to these only after repeated perusal and elaborate study. But three hours in a theatre, before

Garrick Correspondence,' vol. i. p. 217.

successors. Nothing, though ever so barren, if within the bounds of nature, + What Cibber says of Mrs. Monfort has been no less true of many of her could be flat in her hands. She gave many heightening touches to characters but coldly written, and often made an author vain of his work, that in itself had but In these cases the actor is more than the second author. He is the Mrs. Jordan, who had often in this way to create 'a soul under remarked, Many a character one has to perform is in

little merit.'

only real one.

the ribs of death,' once

itself insipid, it all depends upon what you can put into it. This recals you bring into it.' So a Merchant of Venice' grows out of a dull Italian tale, Madame Schwetzine's remark on life, What you find in life depends on what of which could never be surmised from reading Jonson's text.

and Carrick's Abel Drugger' convulses

an audience with laughter, the possibility

a company

a company of 'well-graced actors,' will raise the most unlettered of spectators, and the most unpractised of thinkers, if only he be possessed of ordinary intelligence and sensibility, quite up to the level of the most laborious critic; nay, more, will teach the critic what, if left to himself, he would never have discovered. The pages of a book can never affect the mind so powerfully as a direct appeal by voice and motion to the very faculties of eyes and ears. Whatever is so presented with the truth of nature supplies, as Coleridge has said, 'a species of actual experience.' Brain and heart are both moved, and, being so, the spectator is in the mood to meet the poet more than half way. His imagination is aroused, so that the appropriate thought or emotion will be there before the poet's words are spoken; and thus the truth of character and of feeling, and the fitness or beauty of the language, will come home to him as they never can do in the calm and often languid silence of the study. Borne along upon a tide of living sympathy, he follows the development of the plot without an effort, and carries away with him a deep impression of the whole bearing and compass of the poet's design, as of some actual event in which he has himself borne a part.

*

To infuse this life into the poet's creations by quickening the hearts and imaginations of the multitude is the great actor's vocation. A poet himself in breadth of sympathy, in range and accuracy of observation, and in intensity of feeling, he converts his audience into poets for the time, waking them out of their habitual lethargy, and kindling those sympathies, aspirations, and passions which slumber, often unsurmised by ourselves, beneath the crust of our daily life. Humanity in all its forms is 'the haunt and main region' of his working. His business is to find living embodiment and expression for

'All thoughts, all feelings, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame;'

and to do this in forms stamped with the truth of nature, but modulated at the same time by the subtle graces of art. He must delight, not here and there only by some fine burst of passion, by the power or pathos of some particular speech, by the exquisite finish of some separate scene. If these things fall naturally into his conception, good and well; but he will not go out of his way to catch unintelligent applause by what are technically called 'points.' These are the cheap triumphs of inferior artists—the 'purple patches' of a vicious style. What

My ever dear friend Garrick,' says Burke ('Letters on a Regicide Peace') was the first of actors, because he was the most acute observer of nature I ever saw.'