45

STAGE EMOTION.

BY MONKSHOOD.

MONTAIGNE, in one of his discursive essays, "ventilates" the question of orator and comedian being touched to the quick in acting their parts, though in fiction. The orator shall, he says, in the "force of his pleading," be moved with the sound of his own voice and feigned emotions, and suffer himself to be imposed upon by the passion he represents-imprinting in himself a true and real grief by means of the part he plays, to transmit it to the judges, who are less concerned than he: "as they do who are hired at funerals to assist in the ceremony of sorrow, who sell their tears and mourning by weight and measure. For although they act in a borrowed form, nevertheless by habituating themselves, and settling their countenances to the occasion, 'tis most certain they are often really affected with a true and real sorrow. Quintilian reports to have seen players so deeply engaged in a mourning part, that they could not give over weeping when they came home; and of himself, that having undertaken to stir up that passion in another, he himself espoused it to that degree as to find himself surprised not only into tears, but even with paleness, and the port of a man overwhelmed with grief."* One can fancy Shakspeare not unmindful of the passage-for he was a reader of Montaigne, at least had a copy of him-when putting into Hamlet's mouth such lines as,

Is it not monstrous, that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit,
That from her working, all his visage wann'd;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive, and the cue for passion,

That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,

And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;

Make mad the guilty, and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant; and amaze, indeed,

The very faculties of eyes and ears.†

Talking one day, with John Philip Kemble, on the subject of his pro-
fession, Dr. Johnson inquired, "Are you, Sir, one of those enthusiasts
who believe yourself transformed into the very character you repre-
sent?" Upon the young actor's answering-that he had never felt so
strong a persuasion himself; "To be sure not, Sir," said Johnson; "the
thing is impossible. And if Garrick really believed himself to be that
monster, Richard the Third, he deserved to be hanged every time he

* Montaigne's Essays (Cotton's translation), book iii. ch. iv.
† Hamlet, Act II. Sc. 2.

performed it."* Alluding to this interview, Leigh Hunt has remarked, "It was Johnson's opinion (speaking of a common cant of critics) that an actor who really took himself for Richard III., deserved to be hanged; and it is easy enough to agree with him; except that an actor who did so would be out of his senses. Too great a sensibility seems almost as hurtful to acting as too little. It would too soon wear out the performer." There must, according to this authority-and, in his time, Leigh Hunt emphatically was one- there must be a quickness of conception, sufficient to seize the truth of the character, with a coolness of judgment to take all advantages; but as the actor is to represent as well as conceive, and to be the character in his own person, he could not with impunity give way to his emotions in any degree equal to what the spectators suppose. "At least, if he did, he would fall into fits, or run his head against the wall."+

Madame Dudevant touches on the question at large in one of the art conversations she constructs between Consuelo and Joseph Haydn-when the former, under agitating circumstances, is bent on quitting the lyric stage. Hitherto the prima donna has denied the influence of emotional feelings on the boards. "I always entered on the stage with calmness and a modest determination to fulfil my part conscientiously. But I am no longer my former self, and should I make my appearance on the stage at this moment, I feel as if I should commit the wildest extravagances; all prudence, all self-command would leave me. To-morrow I hope it will not be so, for this emotion borders on madness." Beppo, however, -for so she nominally Italianises her humble German friend,-fears, or rather hopes, that it will ever be so. Without true and deep emotion where would be her power? he asks. And then tells her how often he has endeavoured to impress upon the musicians and actors he has met, that without this agitation, this delirium, they could do nothing, and that, in place of calming down with years and experience, they would become more impressionable t each fresh attempt. "It is a great mystery," rejoins Consuelo, sighing. "Neither vanity, nor jealousy, nor the paltry wish of triumphing, could have exerted such overwhelming power over me. No! I assure you that in singing this prayer of Zenobia's and this duet with Ziridates, in which I am borne away as in a whirlwind by Caffariello's vigour and passion, I thought neither of the public, nor of the rivals, nor of myself. I was Zenobia, and believed in the gods of Olympus with truly Christian fervour, and I burned with love for the worthy Caffariello, whom, the performance once over, I could not look at without a smile." All this is so strange to the disguised performer, that she begins to think that, dramatic art being a perpetual falsehood, Heaven inflicts on her profession the punishment of making them believe as real the illusions they practise on the spectator.‡ Dr. Johnson, if consistent, would have condemned this stage renegade from the faith, to whatever pains and penalties his orthodoxy (critical and theological) might deem appropriate to an apostasy so complete.

The feelings to which Consuelo gave passionate, and withal plaintive Boswell's Life of Johnson, sub anno 1783.

†The Town; its Memorable Characters and Events, by Leigh Hunt, vol. ii. ch. vii.

Consuelo, II. 35.

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utterance, are essentially the same as those expressed by Mrs. Browning, with a less restricted application:

While Art

Sets action on the top of suffering:
The artist's part is both to be and do,
Transfixing with a special central power,
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing

He feels the inmost: never felt the less
Because he sings it. . .

O sorrowful great gift

Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,

When one life has been found enough for pain!*

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in one of her letters from Paris, describes a visit she made to the fair of St. Lawrence (which she thinks "much better disposed than ours of Bartholomew"), and though "their opera-house is a booth, compared to that of the Haymarket, and the play-house not so neat as that of Lincoln's Inn-fields," still, her ladyship comes away gratified at the amount of stage emotion she has witnessed, which contrasts liberally, by her report, with the maximum in London. "It must be owned, to their praise, their tragedians are much beyond any of ours. I should hardly allow Mrs. Od a better place than to be confidante to La I have seen the tragedy of Bajazet so well represented, that I think our best actors can be only said to speak, but these to feel; and 'tis certainly infinitely more moving to see a man appear unhappy, than to hear him say that he is so, with a jolly face, and a stupid smirk in his countenance."+ The English actress referred to, is of course Mistress Oldfield, who does not seem, therefore, to have taken the heart of Lady Mary by storm, as she had done those of all "the town" besides. Perhaps her ladyship would have been more propitious to Mrs. Barrywhose "emotional" power of exciting pity, and suggesting unfeigned distress, Cibber declares to have been "beyond all the actresses I have yet seen, or what your imagination can conceive;"-and of whose performance of Otway's Monimia, Gildon bears this record: "I have heard her say that she never said

Ah, poor

Castalio!

without weeping; and I have frequently observed her change her countenance several times, as the discourse of others on the stage have [sic] affected her in the part she acted."§

It so happens that Mrs. Oldfield herself, in a modern fiction, has been made to illustrate this very question of stage emotion, and frankly bearher testimony, from personal and nightly experience, as to its character and operation. A simple-hearted admirer, fresh from the country, has had his head turned by the lady's acting. He has found his way to her house, and gasps out his homage as best he can. Each of her achievements on the stage, he begins by telling her, seems to him greater than

VOL. LI.

* Aurora Leigh, book v.

† Letters of Lady Mary W. Montagu, Oct. 10, 1718.
An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, ch. v.
Gildon's Life of Betterton.

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the last. The others are all puppets, played by rule around her, the queen of speech and poetry; her pathos is so true, her sensibility so profound; hers are real tears: "You lead our sorrow in person; you fuse your soul into those great characters, and wit becomes nature: you are the thing you seem, and it is plain each lofty emotion passes through that princely heart on its way to those golden lips." "No, thank you," is Nance Oldfield's studiously prosaic rejoinder-(she being engaged by promise to discourage the lad): "No, thank you: emotions don't pass through my, what's the name-well, you are green-you don't come from the country -you are from Wales. I must enlighten you; sit down: sit down, I tell you. The tears, my boy, are as real as the rest-as the sky, and that's pasteboard-as the sun, and he is three candles mirking upon all nature, which is canvass-they are as real as ourselves, the tragedy queens, with our cries, our sighs, and our sobs, all measured out to us by the five-foot rule. Reality, young gentleman, that begins when the curtain falls, and we wipe off our profound sensibility along with our rouge, our whiting, and our beauty spots."

"Impossible!" cries the poet, "those tears, those dew-drops on the tree of poetry!"

Then the enthusiast is requested not to make Mrs. Oldfield "die of laughing" with his tears; his common sense is appealed to. "Now, my good soul, if I was to vex myself night after night for Clytemnestra and Co., don't you see that I should not hold together long? No, thank you! I've got Nance Oldfield' to take care of, and what's Hecuba to her? For my part," continues this frank lady, "I don't understand half the authors give us to say." These, purposely exaggerated, confessions the tragedy queen multiplies, with corresponding candour; and then, suddenly interrupting her disclosures, she offers her perplexed auditor a snuffbox, and says dryly, "D'ye snuff?" His eyes dilate with horror. She observes him, and explains, "There's no doing without it, in our business: we get so tired!" (here Mrs. Oldfield yawns as only actresses yawn,-like one going out of the world in four pieces ;" and resumes the thread of her discourse :) "We get so tired of the whole concern. This is the real source of our inspiration," quo' she, taking a pinch, " or how should we ever rise to the Poet's level, and launch all those awful execrations they love so? as, for instance-Ackishoo!-God bless you!" The sneeze interrupts the intended instance, and considerably disenchants the rapt listener.

Later in the story, there is a scene where the tragedian, disappointed and dispirited, whimpers a little, " much as a housemaid whimpers "-and it was not at all, the author assures us, "like the 'real tears' that had so affected Alexander."-One other passage in the tale is note-worthy, in connexion with our theme. Fresh crosses and vexations have occurred to harass the Oldfield-and she has to control her emotions lest she carry them from home with her to the theatre. She is studying the part of Statira, which she is to play to-night; and her cousin Susan, observing "a strange restlessness and emotion" in her manner, asks what is the matter? "It is too bad of these men," is the answer. "I ought to be all Statira to-day, and instead of a tragedy-queen they make me feellike a human being! This will not do; I cannot have my fictitious feelings, in which thousands are interested, endangered for such a trifle as

my real ones." And so, by a stern effort, she glues her eyes to her part, and is Statira.* To protend this tension of the feelings on to the stage itself, would, by her philosophy, be out of the question. To be really agitated there, would spoil all.

It has been remarked of a medical man-in reference to his aggravating apathy at the death of a patient-that if he did feel strongly during the progress of a disease, his judgment might be affected by that very sensibility, and he might be rendered incapable of doing his duty steadily and without fear.t The remark applies to the actor-as regards his selfcommand upon the stage. M. Sainte-Beuve says of Balzac, the novelist, qu'il était en proie à son œuvre, et que son talent l'emportait souvent comme un char lancé à quatre chevaux. Power, the critic recognises in this very emportement, but there is another and higher kind of power, he contends-"l'autre puissance, qui est sans doute la plus vraie, celle qui domine et régit une œuvre, et qui fait que l'artiste y reste supérieur comme à sa création." This, too, applies direct to stage passion, its impulses, its excesses, its artistic management. The charioteer will do well to show off the mettle of his steeds, and may lash them up to the desired speed, or give rein to their eager abandon; but he must remain master of the situation throughout, must not let his horses run away with him, and must not only know when, but at once and without a struggle be able, to pull them up.

does Elia

In the same way argue of the true poet, that he is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. "He wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos and old night. Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a 'human mind untuned' [Elia spoke feelingly], he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that—never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions."§ From poet to player, the application is obvious.

Diderot, in his Treatise on Acting, maintains, that not only in the art of which he treats, but in all those which are called imitative, the possession of real sensibility is a bar to eminence ;-sensibility being, according to his view, "le caractère de la bonté de l'âme et de la médiocrité du génie.” His ideal actor might so far be characterised in a Shakspearean line, which originally bears no such import,—

Who, moving others, is himself as stone. Or, again, in the Miltonic picture of some old