WEEKLY EVENING MEETING,

Friday, May 26, 1893.

SIR JAMES CRICHTON-BROWNE, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S.
Treasurer and Vice-President, in the Chair.

HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE, Esq.

The Imaginative Faculty.

WHEN the gift of the Imagination was conferred upon mankind, a double-edged sword covered with flowers was thrust into its babyhands. Just as the highest joys which are known to us are those of the imagination, so also are our deepest sorrows-the sorrows of our fantasy. Love, ambition, heroism, the sense of beauty, virtue itself, become intensified by the imagination, until they reach that acute and passionate expression which renders them potent factors for good or evil in individuals. Even so has the imagination ever been the strongest power in fostering the aspirations, in shaping the destinations of nations. It is the vision through whose lens we see the realities of life, either in the convex or in the concave, diabolically distorted or divinely out of drawing.

"Can acting be taught?" is a question which has been theoretically propounded in many a magazine article, and has vexed the spirit of countless debating societies. It is answered in practice on the stage, and, I think, triumphantly answered in the negative. Acting, in fact, is purely an affair of the imagination-the actor more than any other artist may be said to be the "passion-winged minister of thought." Children are born actors. They lose the faculty only when the wings of their imagination are weighted by self-consciousness. It is not every one to whom is given the capacity of always remaining a child. It is this blessed gift of receptive sensibility which it should be the endeavour (the unconscious endeavour, perhaps) of every artist to cultivate and to retain. There are those who would have us believe that technique is the end and aim of art. There are those who would persuade us that the art of acting is subject to certain mathematical laws, forgetting that these laws are but the footnotes of adroit commentators, and in no sense the well-springs of art. What I venture to assert is that all that is most essential, most luminous, in acting may be traced to the imaginative faculty. It is this that makes the actor's calling at once the most simple and the most complex of all the arts. It is this very simplicity which has caused many to deny to acting a place among the arts, and which has so often baffled those who would appraise the art of acting as a precise science, and measure it by the yard-measure of unimaginative criticism. Yet in another sense no art is more complex than the dramatic art in its

highest expression, for in none is demanded of its exponent a more delicate poise, a subtler instinct; none is more dependent on that acute state of the imagination, on that divine insanity which we call genius. The actor may be said to rank with, if after, the poet. He, like the poet, is independent of recognised laws. The histrionic art is indeed essentially a self-governed one. Its laws are the unwritten laws of the book of nature, illuminated by the imagination. But if the actor can claim exemption from academic training, it would be idle to affirm that he is independent of personal attributes, or that he can reach any degree of eminence without those accomplishments which the strenuous exercise of art alone can give. His Pegasus, however, should be tamed in the broad arena of the stage rather than in the enervating stable of the academy. In acting, in fact, there is an infinity to learn, but infinitely little that can be taught. The actor must be capable, of course, of pronouncing his native language, and of having a reasonable control over the movements of his limbs, but thus equipped, his technical education is practically complete. He is his own "stock-in-trade." The painter has his pigments, the poet his pen, the sculptor his clay, the musician his lute; the actor is limited to his personality-he plays upon himself. To give free range to the imaginative quality is the highest accomplishment of the actor. He whose imagination is most untrammelled is he who is most likely to touch the imagination of an audience. To arrive at this emancipation of the mind is his ultimate and highest achievement. The development of this sensitive or receptive condition depends largely on the surrounding influences of life. A general knowledge of men and things is, of course, the first essential; but I doubt whether education, in its accepted sense, is so necessary or indeed desirable in an artistic career as it is in what I may call the more concrete walks of life. What is meat to one is often poison to the other. The midwife of science is sometimes the undertaker of art. I have touched upon what, in its restricting influence on the imaginative faculty, I have called the pernicious habit of reading books-a practice which in its too free indulgence may tend to fetter the exercise of that imagination and that observation of life which are so essential to the development of the artist. Some people are educated by their memories, others by observation, aided by the imagination. One man will be able by a look at a picture, or by the scanning of an old manuscript, to project himself into any period of history; while another will by laborious unimaginative study acquire no more artistic inspiration than can be obtained by learning the Encyclopædia Britannica' by heart. I have often noticed that those who devote their spare energies to indiscriminate reading acquire a habit of thinking by memory, and thus gradually lose the faculty which the spontaneous observation of life tends to quicken. Their thought becomes artificial-they think by machinery-originality loses its muscle; the memory is developed at the expense of the imagination. Take any incident of everyday life-to the man who is not in the

habit of exercising his imagination it will appear as a vulgar fact; to him who sees the, same incident with the dramatic, the imaginative eye, it will give birth to an original thought, which is often more vital than a quotation.

The education of the artist, then, should be directed rather to the development of the imagination than to the storage of facts. For purposes of immediate information the British Museum is always open to him; the judges of the land are ever ready to set him right on points of law into a misapprehension of which a too lively imagination may have led him. I am so bold as to think that an university education, which is so propitious to success in other callings may be a source of danger to the artist. The point of view is apt to become academic, the academic to degenerate into the didactic, for all cliques, even the most illustrious, have a narrowing tendency. The development of those qualities which are so favourable to distinction in other callings may tend to check in the artist that originality which is so essential to the exercise of our fascinating, if fantastic, calling. The very social advantages which an university career brings may tend to inculcate a conventional regard for the "good form" of a "set," and to divert the current of youthful enthusiasm into an undue sense of the importance of boot-varnish. I maintain that such surroundings, and the influences of a too prosperous society, may tend to hinder rather than to foster the growth of this sensitive plant, which will often flourish in the rude winds of adversity and perish in the scent-laden salons of fashion. To argue that the artist should shut himself off from the world, and wrap himself round with a mantle of dignified ignorance, would of course be absurd. I have already said that a knowledge of men and things is essential to him, and this knowledge is manifestly impossible unless he is in sympathetic touch with his generation, for we cannot give out what we have not taken in. His should be the bird's-eye view. But the allurements of society should never be allowed to absorb or enslave him-lest in sipping its enervating narcotic he should drift from the broad stream of life into the backwater of self-indulgence. The poet, like the soldier, may caper nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute," but if he dances a too frequent attendance in the antechamber of fashion, the jealous muse deserts him, and the poet's song henceforth finds utterance in the lisping treble of the "vers de Société," and a fitful inspiration in the chronicling of an illustrious birth or a serene demise. It takes a genius to survive being made Poet-Laureate-indeed this official reward might often be conferred only on the poet when he is dead, to benefit his family and to point out the beauties of his works to an otherwise indifferent posterity.

Of all the fetters which cramp the imagination, none is so frequent as self-consciousness. With many of us this failing becomes a disThe actor is more liable to its attacks than any other artist, since he cannot separate his personality from his work. This is the

ease.

necessary condition under which he works; he cannot, like the poet or the painter, choose his mood-he is the slave of the moment. Under what disadvantages would a painter work if his patron were standing at his elbow watching each stroke of his brush.

It is only when the mind of the actor is emancipated from the trammels of his surroundings that his imagination is allowed full play. The nervousness which afflicts him in his first performance of a new role will often paralyse his imagination; though it is true that the dependence on this imaginative faculty varies in individuals. . . .

I have endeavoured to show how the imaginative faculty in acting may be cramped by self-consciousness, and how susceptible it is to social and other influences which surround the life of the artist. In the same way it is also susceptible of infinite cultivation if left to its own devices. I am willing to admit that every artist works according to his own method; but I maintain that that art is likely to produce the greatest effect which is least reliant on what are called the canons of art, that is to say, that art which springs spontaneously from the yielding up of the artist to his imagination. I have known actors who frequently arrive at many of their best effects through patient study; indeed, I believe, great actors have been known to study each gesture before a looking-glass. This seems to me, nevertheless, a mistaken system, and one certainly which would be destructive to the effects of those who prefer to rely on the mood of the moment. Another aspect of our art which has of late been much debated is, whether it is desirable that the actor should or should not sink his individuality in the part he is playing; whether, in fact, the actor should be absorbed in his work, or the work be absorbed in the actor. It seems to me, in spite of all that certain writers are never tired of dinning into our ears, that the higher aim of the artist is to so project his imagination into the character he is playing that his own individuality becomes merged in his assumption. This indeed seems to me the very essence of the art of acting. I remember that when I first went upon the stage, I was told that to obtain any popular success, an actor must be always himself, that the public even like to recognise the familiar voice before he appears on the scene, that he should, if possible, confine himself to what was called "one line of business," and that he should seek to cultivate a certain mannerism which should be the badge of his individuality. It seems to me that this is an entirely erroneous and mischievous doctrine Indeed, I will go so far as to maintain that the highest expression in every branch of art has always been the impersonal. The greatest artist that ever lived was the most impersonal, he was the most impersonal because the most imaginative. I mean our own Shakespeare. Where do we find him in his work? The spirit, the style everywhere-but the man? nowhere-except in the sense le style c'est l'homme. Take 'Othello,' for instance, the finest perhaps of all his stage-plays. If we think we have found him in the noble outbursts of the Moor, in the over-mastering passion of the simple-minded warrior, we lose him

immediately in the intellectual sympathy which he seems to lavish on the brutal cynicism of the subtle and brilliant Iago. In one moment he soars to the very heights of poetic ecstasy, in the next he descends with equal ease and apparent zest into the depths of sottish animalism. We find him in the melodious wail of Hamlet, we lose him in the hoggish grunts of Falstaff. What sort of a man Shakespeare was we none of us know. We are led to believe that he was an excellent business man, with a taste for agriculture. In his work he becomes effaced-his spirit is like a Will-o'-the-wisp. His mind is like the Irishman's flea-" you no sooner put your finger upon him, but he isn't there." His was essentially a plastic mind he was capable of entering into the thoughts of all men, and made their point of view his own. Nowhere did he insist on his personal predilections-he was, in fact, the artist-the creator-he looked upon mankind with all the impartiality of a god, he laid their hearts bare with the imperturbability of an inspired vivisectionist. The abiding hold which the play of Hamlet' has exercised over so many successive generations is mainly due to its wondrous mystery which holds the imagination of an audience enthralled, for, in the conventional sense, it cannot be said to be a pattern stage-play. In what a masterful fashion is the key-note of mystery struck in the very first scene on the ramparts; from the moment when the solitary soldier calls through the night, "Who's there?" the imagination of the audience is held spellbound; with such marvellous power is it played upon by the dramatist that from the first scene a modern sceptical audience accepts the supernatural basis of the play. Probably more inspired nonsense has been written on the subject of 'Hamlet' by the unimaginative commentator than on any subject within the scope of literature. Yet to him who will approach Shakespeare's masterpiece in the right spirit, it will be seen to have that simplicity which is characteristic of all great works. The finest poems which have ever been penned, the greatest pictures which have ever been painted, the greatest inventions which have been given to the world have been distinguished by this quality of simplicity. I have noticed this same characteristic in great men. It is only when we do not yield ourselves up to our imagination that the simple appears incomprehensible. Nearly all the mad doctors have diagnosed Hamlet's case, and nearly all claim him as their own. This is the tendency of the specialist. It is rather a question, I think, as to the sanity of Hamlet's commentators. An astounding instance of this super-subtlety-(in itself a symptom of madness)-is shown in the comments of some of the German critics. One of these gravely informs us that the passage, "You know sometimes he walks for hours here in the lobby," proves beyond a doubt that Hamlet was really a fat man, for, in order to reduce his obesity, he took four hours' regular exercise in the lobby; but, perhaps, our German friend was a specialist in Banting. Another critic, Leo by name, supplies a still more marvellous instance of painstaking misunderstanding of the obvious in his elucidation of