Part 10 (2/2)
An actor who has not the habits or instincts of a gentleman cannot be made to appear like one on the stage by dress; he only caricatures and discredits what he tries to represent; and the unaccustomed clothes and situation make him much more unnatural and insufferable than he would otherwise be. Dressed appropriately for parts for which he is fitted, he will act well enough, probably. What I mean is, that the clothes inappropriate to the man make the incongruity of him and his part more apparent. Vulgarity is never so conspicuous as in fine apparel, on or off the stage, and never so self-conscious. Shall we have, then, no refined characters on the stage? Yes; but let them be taken by men and women of taste and refinement and let us have done with this masquerading in false raiment, ancient and modern, which makes nearly every stage a travesty of nature and the whole theatre a painful pretension. We do not expect the modern theatre to be a place of instruction (that business is now turned over to the telegraphic operator, who is making a new language), but it may give amus.e.m.e.nt instead of torture, and do a little in satirizing folly and kindling love of home and country by the way.
This is a sort of summary of what we all said, and no one in particular is responsible for it; and in this it is like public opinion. The Parson, however, whose only experience of the theatre was the endurance of an oratorio once, was very cordial in his denunciation of the stage altogether.
MANDEVILLE. Yet, acting itself is delightful; nothing so entertains us as mimicry, the personation of character. We enjoy it in private.
I confess that I am always pleased with the Parson in the character of grumbler. He would be an immense success on the stage. I don't know but the theatre will have to go back into the hands of the priests, who once controlled it.
THE PARSON. Scoffer!
MANDEVILLE. I can imagine how enjoyable the stage might be, cleared of all its traditionary nonsense, stilted language, stilted behavior, all the rubbish of false sentiment, false dress, and the manners of times that were both artificial and immoral, and filled with living characters, who speak the thought of to-day, with the wit and culture that are current to-day. I've seen private theatricals, where all the performers were persons of cultivation, that....
OUR NEXT DOOR. So have I. For something particularly cheerful, commend me to amateur theatricals. I have pa.s.sed some melancholy hours at them.
MANDEVILLE. That's because the performers acted the worn stage plays, and attempted to do them in the manner they had seen on the stage. It is not always so.
THE FIRE-TENDER. I suppose Mandeville would say that acting has got into a mannerism which is well described as stagey, and is supposed to be natural to the stage; just as half the modern poets write in a recognized form of literary manufacture, without the least impulse from within, and not with the purpose of saying anything, but of turning out a piece of literary work. That's the reason we have so much poetry that impresses one like sets of faultless cabinet-furniture made by machinery.
THE PARSON. But you need n't talk of nature or naturalness in acting or in anything. I tell you nature is poor stuff. It can't go alone. Amateur acting--they get it up at church sociables nowadays--is apt to be as near nature as a school-boy's declamation. Acting is the Devil's art.
THE MISTRESS. Do you object to such innocent amus.e.m.e.nt?
MANDEVILLE. What the Parson objects to is, that he isn't amused.
THE PARSON. What's the use of objecting? It's the fas.h.i.+on of the day to amuse people into the kingdom of heaven.
HERBERT. The Parson has got us off the track. My notion about the stage is, that it keeps along pretty evenly with the rest of the world; the stage is usually quite up to the level of the audience. a.s.sumed dress on the stage, since you were speaking of that, makes people no more constrained and self-conscious than it does off the stage.
THE MISTRESS. What sarcasm is coming now?
HERBERT. Well, you may laugh, but the world has n't got used to good clothes yet. The majority do not wear them with ease. People who only put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an artificial feeling.
OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder if that's the reason the Parson finds it so difficult to get hold of his congregation.
HERBERT. I don't know how else to account for the formality and vapidity of a set ”party,” where all the guests are clothed in a manner to which they are unaccustomed, dressed into a condition of vivid self-consciousness. The same people, who know each other perfectly well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in their ordinary apparel. But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of people together who rarely ”dress up.” It seems impossible to make the conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it dies in a kind of inane helplessness. Especially is this true in the country, where people have not obtained the mastery of their clothes that those who live in the city have. It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization, that we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident as dress.
Perhaps Mandeville can tell us whether this clothes panic prevails in the older societies.
THE PARSON. Don't. We've heard it; about its being one of the Englishman's thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit down to dinner without a dress-coat, and all that.
THE MISTRESS. I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to eat a dinner would dress for that, the princ.i.p.al event of the day, and do respectful and leisurely justice to it.
THE YOUNG LADY. It has always seemed singular to me that men who work so hard to build elegant houses, and have good dinners, should take so little leisure to enjoy either.
MANDEVILLE. If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the chief clothes question abroad just now is, how to get any; and it is the same with the dinners.
II
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