Picture and Text Part 5

Amicia. What a hideous prospect!

Dorriforth. Not necessarily, for we shall have grown used to it: we shall, as I say, have buried our dead. To-day it's cruel, because our old ideals are only dying, they are _in extremis_, they are virtually defunct, but they are above-ground--we trip and stumble on them. We shall eventually lay them tidily away. This is a bad moment, because it's a moment of transition, and we still _miss_ the old superst.i.tion, the bravery of execution, the eloquence of the lips, the interpretation of character. We miss these things, of course, in proportion as the ostensible occasion for them is great; we miss them particularly, for instance, when the curtain rises on Shakespeare. Then we are conscious of a certain divine dissatisfaction, of a yearning for that which isn't.

But we shall have got over this discomfort on the day when we have accepted the ostensible occasion as merely and frankly ostensible, and the real one as having nothing to do with it.

Florentia. I don't follow you. As I'm one of the squeezed, gaping public, I must be dense and vulgar. You do, by-the-way, immense injustice to that body. They do care for character--care much for it.

Aren't they perpetually talking about the actor's conception of it?

Dorriforth. Dear lady, what better proof can there be of their inept.i.tude, and that painted canvas and real water are the only things they understand? The vanity of wasting time over that! Auberon. Over what? Dorriforth. The actor's conception of a part. It's the refuge of observers who are no observers and critics who are no critics. With what on earth have we to do save his execution?

Florentia. I don't in the least agree with you.

Amicia. Are you very sure, my poor Dorriforth?

Auberon. Give him rope and he'll hang himself.

Dorriforth. It doesn't need any great license to ask who in the world holds in his bosom the sacred secret of the right conception. All the actor can do is to give us his. We must take that one for granted, we make him a present of it. He must impose his conception upon us--

Auberon (interrupting). I thought you said we accepted it.

Dorriforth. Impose it upon our _attention_. clever Auberon. It is because we accept his idea that he must repay us by making it vivid, by showing us how valuable it is. We give him a watch: he must show us what time it keeps. He winds it up, that is he executes the conception, and his execution is what we criticise, if we be so moved. Can anything be more absurd than to hear people discussing the conception of a part of which the execution doesn't exist--the idea of a character which never arrives at form? Think what it is, that form, as an accomplished actor may give it to us, and admit that we have enough to do to hold him to this particular honor.

Auberon. Do you mean to say you don't think some conceptions are better than some others?

Dorriforth. Most a.s.suredly, some are better: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The best are those which yield the most points, which have the largest face; those, in other words, that are the most demonstrable, or, in other words still, the most actable. The most intelligent performer is he who recognizes most surely this "actable"

and distinguishes in it the more from the less. But we are so far from being in possession of a subjective pattern to which we have a right to hold him that he is ent.i.tled directly to contradict any such absolute by presenting us with different versions of the same text, each completely colored, completely consistent with itself. Every actor in whom the artistic life is strong must often feel the challenge to do that. I should never think, for instance, of contesting an actress's right to represent Lady Macbeth as a charming, insinuating woman, if she really sees the figure that way. I may be surprised at such a vision; but so far from being scandalized, I am positively thankful for the extension of knowledge, of pleasure, that she is able to open to me.

Auberon. A reading, as they say, either commends itself to one's sense of truth or it doesn't. In the one case--

Dorriforth. In the one case I recognize--even--or especially--when the presumption may have been against the particular attempt, a consummate ill.u.s.tration of what art can do. In the other I moralize indulgently upon human rashness.

Florentia. You have an a.s.surance _a taute epreuve_; but you are deplorably superficial. There is a whole group of plays and a whole category of acting to which your generalizations quite fail to apply.

Help me, Auberon.

Auberon. You're easily exhausted. I suppose she means that it's far from true everywhere that the scenery is everything. It may be true--I don't say it is!--of two or three good-natured playhouses in London. It isn't true--how can it be?--of the provincial theatres or of the others in the capital. Put it even that they would be all scenery if they could; they can't, poor things--so they have to provide acting.

Dorriforth. They have to, fortunately; but what do we hear of it?

Florentia. How do you mean, what do we hear of it?

Dorriforth. In what trumpet of fame does it reach us? They do what they can, the performers Auberon alludes to, and they are brave souls. But I am speaking of the conspicuous cases, of the exhibitions that draw.

Florentia. There is good acting that draws; one could give you names and places.

Dorriforth. I have already guessed those you mean. But when it isn't too much a matter of the paraphernalia it is too little a matter of the play. A play nowadays is a rare bird. I should like to see one.

Florentia. There are lots of them, all the while--the newspapers talk about them. People talk about them at dinners.

Dorriforth. What do they say about them?

Florentia. The newspapers?

Dorriforth. No, I don't care for _them_. The people at dinners.

Florentia. Oh. they don't say anything in particular.

Dorriforth. Doesn't that seem to show the effort isn't very suggestive?

Amicia. The conversation at dinners certainly isn't.

Dorriforth. I mean our contemporary drama. To begin with, you can't find it there's no text.

Florentia. No text?

Auberon. So much the better!

Dorriforth. So much the better if there is to be no criticism. There is only a dirt prompter's book. One can't put one's hand upon it; one doesn't know what one is discussing. There is no "authority"--nothing is ever published.

Amicia. The pieces wouldn't bear that.

Dorriforth. It would be a small ordeal to resist--if there were anything in them. Look at the novels!

Amicia. The text is the French _brochure_. The "adaptation" is unprintable.

Dorriforth. That's where it's so wrong, It ought at least to be as good as the original.

Auberon. Aren't there some "rights" to protect--some risk of the play being stolen if it's published?

Dorriforth. There may be--I don't know. Doesn't that only prove how little important we regard the drama as being, and how little seriously we take it, if we won't even trouble ourselves to bring about decent civil conditions for its existence? What have we to do with the French _brochure?_ how does that help us to represent our own life, our manners, our customs, our ideas, our English types, our English world?

Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for portraiture, for satire, as they all make-such subjects as they would yield! Think of London alone--what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist--the most magnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the man London would have produced an Aristophanes. But somehow it doesn't.

Florentia. Oh, types and ideas, Aristophanes and satire--!

Dorriforth. I'm too ambitious, you mean? I shall presently show you that I'm not ambitious at all. Everything makes against that--I am only reading the signs.

Auberon. The plays are arranged to be as English as possible: they are altered, they are fitted.

Dorriforth. Fitted? Indeed they are, and to the capacity of infants.

They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They are neither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that's left out and all the navete that's put in, they cease to place before us any coherent appeal or any recognizable society.

Auberon. They often make good plays to act, all the same.

Dorriforth. They may; but they don't make good plays to see or to hear.

The theatre consists of two things, _que diable_--of the stage and the drama, and I don't see how you can have it unless you have both, or how you can have either unless you have the other. They are the two blades of a pair of scissors.

Auberon. You are very unfair to native talent. There are lots of _strictly original_ plays--

Amicia. Yes, they put that expression on the posters.

Auberon. I don't know what they put on the posters; but the plays are written and acted--produced with great success.