The Shining Pyramid (collection)/"Sad Happy Race"

I must say at once that in treating of the actor and of certain matters pertaining thereto I have no intention of falling into the pit that Mr. Upton Sinclair digged for himself. This ingenuous American, it will be remembered, desiring to call attention to the wretched and horrible condition of the people who work in Packingtown, Chicago, Ill., U. S. A., wrote a book called "The Jungle." Per accidens, and in addition to his denunciation of the shocking conditions under which labour putrified [sic] and died in the service of the Tinned Meat Magnates, he described the nauseous and disgusting manner in which nauseous and disgusting food was prepared for the market; and the result was exactly that which might have been expected. We, his readers, were prepared to hear all about the misfortunes and miseries of the poor Slav, and the unhappy Swede, and the downtrodden labourer, generally with perfect equanimity. In our own happy land there are workpeople who are perhaps not quite so comfortable as they would like to be, who are forced to live in poisonous slum-settlements and to pursue trades which mean degradation and early death; and so we were ready to suppose that something of the same kind might happen in America. Still, one can always fall back on Providence and Smiles and the Blessings of Civilisation; and if the worst come to the worst it is usually safe to say that the author must be guilty of gross exaggeration. It is quite strange how we all hate to be told the plain hard truth about anything. I remember the late Dr. Traill, an amiable man, and in many ways an excellent critic, being intensely irritated by a book called "Tales of Mean Streets." This book merely said quite gently, using grey when scarlet would have been permissible, that the great majority of the London poor live under horrible and barbarous and soul-destroying conditions. I think Dr. Traill must have known in his heart that this was true; but he hated to be told this truth.

But Mr. Sinclair made, as I say, the great blunder. Any little notice that his book might have brought to the poor folk of Packingtown was nullified once and for all by the larger matter of our own stomachs. Any horror that we might have had to bestow on the fate of the characters was swallowed up in the more important question, "Have we eaten tinned rat—and other things—for luncheon?" And there was an end of Mr. Sinclair's fair design.

I am not going to share his fate if I can help it. I am perfectly well aware that my readers do not care two straws whether actors are humbugged, swindled, "done down," bullied by vague threats into silence and submission; and to the general public it is of course a matter of complete indifference whether certain theatres offer the player the handsome choice between death by typhoid, pneumonia, or electrocution. Between four and five years ago, at the Borough Theatre, Stratford, I had the pleasure of seeing an actor surrounded by blue flames, and our electrician assured him that he had had a narrow escape. These trifles are nothing in themselves to the public; and if I dwell upon them, and on others like them, it is because I wish to point a moral. The moral is that the miseries of the artist are likely to be reflected directly or indirectly in his art; and I hope the deduction is clear. If acting is, in the main, an uncomfortable, precarious, underpaid, ill-treated, sweated business, then the best people will be kept out of it, and consequently the performances will suffer, and therefore the public will miss several laughs and agonies that more competent players could have given them. Moreover—and this touches Londoners nearly—if from one reason or another the provincial theatres do not afford a good school, then London acting will deteriorate, and cultured, wealthy, and intelligent audiences will be brought within measurable distance of boredom. I am sure everybody will agree with me that this would be a dreadful catastrophe; and I want to make people see that it must be averted at any cost—even if actors have to be conceded some of the privileges and immunities of brick layers and chimney-sweeps. If you engage a sweep to exercise his art on three chimneys for eighteen-pence, and then put it to him that he might be a good chap and do the kitchen chimney as well "to oblige" (and for nothing), the man would jeer and depart. You do not say that you will send round a circular to every householder in the parish pointing out that he is "a troublesome sweep to have in the house"; and if you did, he would still jeer. In analogous circumstances the actor would tremble and obey.

I see that my subject is being developed by the way of digression; but I do not know that this is of much consequence. However, an effort to keep on the straight line of thought shall be made; and, to begin at the very beginning, one wonders whether acting is an art at all—even in its highest manifestation—in the work, for example, of Kean the First. For my part I cannot think that even the impersonations of such a man as Kean could have deserved the title of art in its true sense—unless he who reads the poem beautifully is as great an artist as the poet who wrote it. This surely were an intolerable conclusion; the maker must stand on a more exalted plane than the interpreter; and Bach must be for ever higher, even immeasurably higher, than the most skilled player of his fugues. And so the play and the playwright—if one be real art and the other a true artist—must always be far above the players. Indeed there is a sense (Lamb has pointed this out in speaking of King Lear) in which the great play meditated on is a far finer thing than the play seen, as natura naturans is greater than natura naturata. The play acted has gained in distinctness, but it has parted with a whole heaven of suggestion and of mystery.

It seems, then, that acting, even of the best, is not in the highest of all senses an art—for the reasons given, and for other reasons too, I think. Many people, in denying the title of art to the player's business, have alleged its fleeting, impermanent, fluid nature; the curtain falls, and only memories remain. I was urging this argument once to an actor, and he gravelled me by asking what title I should give to a painter whose work was splendid but faded out of sight in a few seconds. I should have answered that an analogy to a thing non-existent and inconceivable did not apply, and, further, that, even admitting the possibility of such a transient art of painting, the analogy was bad. The actor never shows us a complete picture; he does a series of lightning sketches, each disappearing to give place to another; there is no total and simultaneous impression. The circle is barely suggested by a succession of segments; it is never totus and teres.

Acting, then, may be considered as an artistic craft, and it so far partakes of the artistic matter that in its high grades the faculty for it must be innate; no lessons, no experience, will make a great actor out of a man who lacks the inborn gift. Conversely the great actors will rise from the darkest and foulest pits of evil circumstance; they will surge up out of tenth-rate melodrama companies and out of a Dramatic Academy. Of these we do not presume to treat in this place; our business is rather with the clever and competent craftsman, the man who is always to be relied on for "a good show," for an intelligent and lively demonstration of the character that he represents. This is the sort of actor whom circumstances can produce or exterminate. At present circumstances seem to be exterminating him; and I have pointed out that his absence will affect the theatre-going public. Not very long ago there was a Shakesperean production at a well-known theatre, and more than one critic remarked that, with very few exceptions, the whole company seemed ill at ease in Shakespeare, and more especially in the speaking of blank verse. In an orchestra I am told that it is most desirable for all the instruments, without exception, to be played in time and in tune. However good the leader may be, the whole effect is said to be deplorable if the other violins are uncertain, the flutes flat, the trombones sharp, and the bassoon-players just beginning to learn their business. Perhaps something remotely analogous to this state of things may sometimes be found on the boards of very creditable theatres.

And here, by the way, is one of the great causes of the ordinary competent actor's decline. If it is believed that people go to see one man or one woman, or perhaps a man and a woman together, and that it doesn't matter how the other parts are played, then evidently it will not be worth while paying good wages to good actors, and by consequence good actors will starve and die out. The logical end of this system would be for one or two players to give the whole play between them to the accompaniment of splendid revolving scenery. At intervals richly-clad supers at 2s. a night would rush on and do something brisk and exciting while the stars rested their voices. If the public wish for such a state of things there is nothing more to be said; but if they want to see a play played as a whole, then competent players must be engaged down to the smallest parts. The small-part actor is a negative but necessary person; he cannot, save in rare circumstances, do any good either to the play or to himself, and in nine cases out of ten the audience is not consciously aware of his existence. Yet he is a part of the picture, and though he may do no good by his competence, he can do an infinite deal of harm by his incompetence; he can be the one false note in the harmony, ruining the whole effect. Well, if this average actor-man that we are discussing is to be kept in existence, his life must be made tolerable and (under our present commercial dispensation) he must be paid decent wages.

I am afraid that no efforts, but merely time and circumstance, can do anything to mend one of the greatest evils in the matter of the stage. So long as hundreds of provincial towns prefer absurd blood-and-thunder "dramas" to decent plays, ancient and modern, so long will thousands of actors be trained in a very bad school, in a rubbishy method of enacting rubbish. There is no help, I say, for this. So long as melodrama pays, so long will it be produced; so long will the players be taught to practise a series of absurd conventions found to be effectual in "getting rounds." Only at rare intervals can a competent recruit be gained from such a field as this; only a strong man can go through a course of undiluted blood and remain unaffected by it. But other woes are not beyond remedy—if only the players will look to it. Take, for example, the ordinary touring contract. You have an interview with the manager, and he tells you that the tour will be one of twelve weeks. On this consideration, amongst others, you name the salary you require, and later a list of the towns to be visited is given you with your contract. There is, then, a convention on both sides that you are to be in receipt of so much a week for three months, and you pretend to believe that this is so. But you know very well that it is not so. Your contract will be found to be terminable at a fort night's notice on either side; you are not engaged for three months at all, but for a fortnight, with a fortnightly option of renewal and a fortnightly liability to dismissal. Fair to both parties? It is nothing of the kind. I know of two cases in which actors, for one reason or another, gave the notice in question. In the first case the actor was told to go, and never to dream of applying to that management for another engagement; in the second the manager told the player (a beginner) that if he persisted he would be posted in managerial circles and his career ruined. But what happens when the case is reversed—when the manager gives notice to the actor? Well, the latter goes home and starves, or gets another engagement, as the case may be. In fairness he ought to be able to say to his manager: "If you persist I shall denounce you to the Actors' Union, and no decent actor will work for you." The manager would be vastly amused. There is an Actors' Union—with a membership of eight hundred or thereabouts. Actors tell me that they are artists, and as such they do not care to be classed with low, common working-men; so they stay outside their Union. When the low fellows in question work overtime they get extra pay, and, I think, on an advanced scale; the proud artist does his overtime—or matinée—usually for nothing, rarely for half-pay. It is not at all uncommon for a whole company, who have been engaged for a nominal three months, who have rehearsed, gratis, for a fortnight, to see "the notice" go up at the end of six weeks, which means that the management has robbed them of a month's pay. It is not at all uncommon for the stroller to be confronted with an announcement that "the date of November 1st-7th has not yet been filled in"—which signifies the docking of a week's wages, in spite of the fact that the tour-list contained the line: "November 1st ....... T.R., Mudflat." This practice, I believe, is illegal, and the salary in question would be recoverable at law; but of what use is the law to the actor? He may win his case and secure his pound or two, and be regarded ever after as "a troublesome man to have in a theatre." It is not to be wondered at that he grumbles in his dressing-room and does nothing. Still, of course he has the comfort of knowing that he is an Artist, not a working-man; so he stays outside the Union. And all this, as I have said. does not tend to attract the average capable man into the profession; and by remote consequence when Shakespeare is produced at a big London theatre the performance is a duologue—sometimes even a monologue.

And there is another cause that leads to this melancholy end: that is, the practice of putting raw beginners and moneyed boobies into small parts, and sometimes, one is afraid, into quite considerable parts. Naturally the result is ruinous; the booby spoils his part and does his best to spoil the whole play, and all the while he is keeping a man of experience out of a living. In Utopia managers will agree together that this practice shall cease; in London it will continue and performances will get more ragged and incompetent, and the good craftsman will become scarcer, till the general public signifies in some way or another that it is displeased with the result. There are many reasons why the music-halls flourish at the theatres' expense, and perhaps one of them is that the music-hall "artistes," with few exceptions, know their business. An evening at a good "hall" does not mean "Mr. Blank and Miss Dash, supported by a large company of Idiots and Incompetents." I have heard of a manager who was very proud of a Wall which was made of Real Bricks; it would be better to boast of a company composed of Real Actors.

Players, in spite of their miseries and misfortunes, are in the main good-tempered folk; they grumble and bear it if they cannot always grin and bear it. So it is only fitting that the recital of a few of their woes should end on a more cheerful note. I have been waiting for the last few weeks for a certain article in the daily or weekly Press—and that article is the fit eulogy of Mr. F. R. Benson's company from the pen of some competent Bensonian veteran. The article has not appeared—or, at any rate, I have not seen it—and so I make bold here to consecrate a little space to the man who has done more for the craft of acting than all other managers put together. The other managers—one does not blame them—are not in the business "for their health"; they are more or less obedient to the maxim endorsed by that great literary authority Mr. Arnold Bennett—Money Talks; and many of them have well deserved the success that they have attained in the commercial order. But for the last twenty-five years Mr. Benson has both preached and practised the better gospel of the craft for the craft's sake; at one time and another he has produced almost all the plays of Shakespeare, and with but slender means he has surpassed the West-end managers in accuracy and historical knowledge, if not in material splendours and in "real velvet" at twenty-five shillings a yard. I once heard a dialogue between the antiquarian adviser of a fashionable theatre and an old Bensonian, the latter being not only an actor, but a sound authority on heraldry and costume. The antiquary was scoffing at the idea of Mr. Benson producing a certain piece which this person had decorated and costumed in town. "How can Benson dress such a play?" said the antiquary. "He will dress it in the costume of the period," answered the old Bensonian—"not in dresses fifty years after date, like yours."

But Mr. Benson has excelled in more important paths than these. He has just celebrated the twenty-fifth birthday of his company, and he may reflect with pleasure on the fact that during all this time he has kept the best possible school of acting that England has possessed, or is likely to possess. I have heard that somewhere in London there is an "Academy" of Acting—a place with professors and lectures and such apparatus, a place where well-to-do beginners can be coached in a special part, taught to "parrot" Hamlet (let us say) for thirty shillings a week; a procedure which saves the touring manager money, and is of course greatly to the benefit to the whole profession. Mr. Benson has not such high pretensions; he does not profess to turn out dramatic geniuses to order, and when I had the honour of entering his company he had neither lectures nor professors. But the man who started his career with Mr. Benson in the old days learned the craft in the only possible way: he began at the bottom, he "walked on" for about a year, he was entrusted with a line or two, he was given a small part, he was given a larger part, as his ability and readiness deserved. A clever young fellow at special seasons, such as the Stratford Celebration, might be called on to play (say) twelve minor and varying parts in the course of a week; it is scarcely necessary to compare such a school as this with the work of "Academies," with the three or four parts in the year that the young actor has the chance of playing in the ordinary run of the profession. And not only is such a diverse experience of the utmost—of incalculable—value in the formation of a sound, well-trained actor; but the method employed was (and I have no doubt is) whole heavens above the ordinary stage-management to which the beginner is usually subjected. Under the system to which I have alluded—the system of "Mr. Blank and Miss Dash, supported by a large company of Idiots and Incompetents"—it is a question of drilling inexperienced people into automata; their speech is measured, their gestures are measured, their stations on the stage are chalked out for them. Indeed, this is the only way, when Thirty Shillings is doing the work of Five Pounds. But Mr. Benson, who has the passion of Shakespeare, expects his company to cherish something of the same ardour in their breasts, to think for themselves, to watch the work of their elders, to bring something of the freedom of Nature and of life on to the boards, to be men and women, not things that have been wound up by the puppet showman, that can always be depended upon to be on a certain square at a certain moment, and to waggle the little finger of the left hand according to careful instructions at a given cue. There is no company where the necessary technique is so thoroughly taught; but it is a technique of general principles and of general application, and no matter of a certain gesture or a certain tone prescribed without reason given for a certain line, and repeated mechanically without feeling and without intelligence. Before I knew anything about the stage I met an actor who spoke with authority; he had played (I think) one part for five years in Charley's Aunt. "The Bensonians," he said, "are capital fellows and good athletes, but they can't act." I believe that it is only necessary to think of certain names now honoured on our London boards to decide that this gentleman was an Ass.

For my part I wish to take leave of Mr. F. R. Benson and of his company in the words of The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha:

"God speed you, good people; keep your festival, and remember, if you demand of me aught wherein I can render you a service, I will do it gladly and willingly, for from a child I was fond of the play, and in my youth a keen lover of the actor's art."