Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/347

Rh self—till, in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside!—for others besides myself to see, and know and love!

What is my part, and how am I to play it?

Returning to the latter image, there are two difficulties that beset one in playing a part on the stage of life, right at the outset. You are not allowed to "look" it, or "dress" it! What would an actor think, who, asked to play Hamlet, found that he would be expected to play it without make-up and in nineteenth-century costume? Yet many of us are in a like dilemma with similar parts. Actors and audience must all wear the same drab clothes and the same immobile expression. It is in vain you protest that you do not really belong to this absurd and vulgar nineteenth century, that you have been spirited into it by a cruel mistake, that you really belong to mediæval Florence, to Elizabethan, Caroline, or at latest Queen Anne England, and that you would like to be allowed to look and dress as like it as possible. It is no use; if you dare to look or dress like anything but your own tradesmen—and other critics—it is at your peril. If you are beautiful, you are expected to disguise a fact that is an open insult to every other person you look at; and you must, as a general rule, never look, wear, feel, or say what everybody else is not also looking, wearing, feeling, or saying.

Thus you get some hint of the difficulty of playing the part of yourself on this stage of life. In these matters of dressing and looking your part musicians seem granted an immunity denied to all their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is taken for granted that the musician is a fool—the British public is so intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet—without allowing him a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had Tennyson: of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it. Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his