University of Virginia Library

I said just now that “worst of all it is”
To mar the actress's delight and bring
Fatigue upon her,—and the reason's plain.
In acting, as in love, the first force flows
Straight from the woman,—and she paves the way
For all that's noble, histrionically.
This is the reason why, when poets act,
They'll act so well:—because they, most of all,
Incomparably chief and most of all,
Are sensitive to woman's influence.
Set your true poet to act, and let him fall
In love with the actress—the result you'll get
Will be superb: she'll draw him on and on
And quite encompass and surround him with
Her strange magnetic influence, till he breathes
As she breathes, pulses with her very pulse,
Becomes a very living part of her,
And acts as if he spoke before God's stars
Watching, instead of flaring flames of gas,
And felt not the chill draught from corridors
But the cool sea-wind lifting his hot hair.

“Why, this is love!” you'll say: and so it is.
But acting, living, loving, all are one:—
The man who loveth best, will act the best,
And he who liveth highest too will reach
The highest mountain-plateaus of his art.

It needs imagination to become
A very part and portion of each scene,—
And that is why the poets who possess
Strong clear imagination most of all
Ought most of all to act: they have the power
By their creative force to turn the Stage
Into the very thing it represents.
Is it a lonely common? Then to them
It is a lonely common; and they see
The dandelions springing 'mid coarse grass
And seem almost to inhale the scent of furze
Or mark the purple heather blossoming.
Is it a mountain-region? Then on them
Swiftly arise the white eternal snows
And they can see the peaks in the blue air
And hear the ringing horns of mountaineers.
Is it a garden? Then the roses gleam
Fragrant and red and glad before their gaze
And through the sunlit noon or moonlit night
They see the green trees bend before the breeze
And hear the insects murmur in the leaves,—
Watching the daisies growing on the lawn.—
Or is the scene a scaffold? Most of all
Then their imagination hath avail,
And they can see the crowd of sansculottes
Seething just like an angry dark-waved sea
Around the foot of the scaffold, and can hear
The fierce mad Babel of revengeful tongues
All clamouring for their swift and violent death.

This is imagination: and this shows
How far out Mrs. Browning was when she
(Quoted above) declared that never high
Imagination revelled in the Stage.
The truth is just the very opposite:—
It needs imagination to enjoy
The Stage,—and though she had the poet's gift
(In noble excess, God knows!) yet this one gift,
This one theatric special fancy-side,
She had not, knew not,—else she had never dubbed
The drama-loving fancy poor or “low”.

It needs imagination to create
Out of the lifeless bony skeleton
Presented on the Stage the fleshy frame,
The blood, the nerves, the sinews, and to give
To each its proper place, and all their life.
And, in this making of the unreal real,
You use the audience for galvanic band
Or chain,—for an electrical machine,—
Gathering from them their swift magnetic force
That you may use it as creative power.
The music helps too: whence I think the plan
The French pursue of leaving music out
Between the Acts an obvious mistake,
Though done with a right motive,—motive, viz.,
That all shall be in earnest and the whole
Quite independent of accessories.
But music helps; the notes vibrate along
The nerves and brain and add creative vis
(But then it should be music suitable,
Not, as too often in our theatres,
Lightest dance-music in the intervals
Of some grim soul-absorbing tragedy
And vice versâ).
As I said, you get
From the spectators half your nervous force.
And that is why, if their attention swerves,
Yours swerves as well: you form a corporate whole—
You all are members of one wide-branched tree,
And if one twig shakes, the great branches shake:
Such is your indivisibility.

And that is why in a French theatre
You feel much more at home,—because you are
En rapport with each other and the whole
Audience;—they follow with attention fixed
(They view late-comers with intense disgust
For one thing)—and their solid complex force
Supports and cheers and lifts and stimulates.
You raise your finger, and you sway the whole;
Indeed they form your body for the time
(This is the triumph and the crown of Art)
And you can rule and move the whole of them
As if they were your arms and legs and feet
And you the guiding brain and heart of all.

This is the glory of acting; thus to sway
A thousand hearts as if they were but one.—
Just as a poet reads his lines aloud
To some fair girl and holds her quite spell-bound
So that she folds her hands at last and sways
From side to side with rhythmic movement timed
In strict accordance to the waves of verse:
And he can see—being a lover perhaps—
How all her sweet face flushes at some line,
And he laughs inwardly and feels his power.
Just so the audience is but one rapt girl
Hanging upon the actor's voice and lips
If he but hath the power to hold them fast,
And he can almost make the women at least
(For these are ever the most sensitive
And sweetly open to emotion's waves)
Sway listening pliant forms from side to side
And sob a low accompaniment to him.

This is the triumph of Art; and no such height
Can any other of the professions reach.
Not pleading, no, nor preaching; not in these
(Though they be glorious and their scope be large),
Encumbered as they are with purpose set,
And definite responsibility,
Can such a goal of mighty human force
Be reached and such a triumph be achieved
As on the Stage:—where, losing all of self,
You pass by loss of self to higher life,
And share with God, and with the stars and sun,
Impassioned boundless immortality.

Moreover all the spirits who came before
Unite to lift and buoy the actor up:—
This most of all on great historic boards.
At Drury Lane, at Covent Garden, at
The Théatre Francais, what strange memories throng
The actor's soul and render him sublime!
Macready, Siddons, Rachel, Mathews, Kean,
Garrick, Desclée, Robson, Peg Woffington,—
These and a hundred others storm the heart
Of a great actor pacing the same boards
And fill his eyes with tears, his soul with fire,
And mightily inspire and comfort him,
So that his thoughts are not his own at all
But theirs: there comes a rush of fiery wings,
“A sound as of a mighty wind and tongues
Cloven:” the spirit of the past descends
Upon the worthy actors of to-day,
And they now act not only unto us
But unto these,—that grim stern critic-band
Gazing upon them from the Green-Room door,
Saying—“Outstrip, surpass us if you can”.—
To these (as at the tomb of Charlemagne
Don Carlos prays) the earnest actor prays,—
Lifting up heart and soul and eager hands
To these the dead great spirits, and their God.

Just as—I well remember—when I first
Entered Queen Mary's Palace, Holyrood
(E'en now I almost tremble at the name),
There came around me such a rush of wings
And all the eyes of such a ghostly crew
That I fell back, and wept for very awe.
And then along the air Queen Mary came—
I felt her and I knew that it was she—
Her quick robes swept around her as she came
And touched me, passing,—and for half the day—
Aye, for a week or more—I walked the town
And watched the grim grey tall crags in a dream.

Just so the garments of the mighty dead
Rustle by modern actors; and they bring
Strange intuitions, and a sense of awe,
And in the end divine ascendency.

And this is why I have so often felt
That acting is the one most restful thing
In all the world: you have the gathered force
Of living beings to help you, and the dead
As well. When summer sets her flowers upon
Green bank and hedgerow, and the airs are sweet,
And lovers wander 'neath the moon o' nights,
And the warm woodbine scents the window-pane,
And star-beams kiss the slowly-rocking sea,—
Then people say, “In summer what a task
It surely must be thus to act and act
And act!” And yet—I know not—but it seems
To me that grander than all ocean-space
Lit by a summer moon, and sweeter even
Than summer forests filled with smell of ferns,—
Lordlier than mountains whose high peaks of blue
Stare sunward,—more august than all these things
And more divine and sweeter (and I speak
Who know),—it is to hold a thousand hearts
Like one heart in the hollow of your hand.

For, after all, to us poor human souls
Humanity is all and everything:
And, after yachting over boisterous seas,
Or mountain-climbing,—or just one small cruise
At Whitby or at Brighton,—how divine
Gleams the first fairy petticoat on shore!