TIMOTHEUS




                               TIMOTHEUS

                                  OR

                           The Future of the
                                Theatre

                             BONAMY DOBREE

              _Author of “Restoration Comedy 1660–1720,”
                “Histriophone,” “Essays in Biography”_


                            [Illustration]


       “_Even the powerful mind of Dr. Johnson seemed foiled by
       futurity._”――_Boswell._


                               NEW YORK
                        E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
                           681 FIFTH AVENUE




                            Copyright, 1925
                       By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

                         _All Rights Reserved_


                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




                                  _To
                         RICHARDSON KING WOOD_




                           PREFATORY NOTICE

This booklet is Chapter Twenty-three of a work already largely in
being, but of which very little will be published in the reader’s
lifetime; for though the author has none of that false respect for the
wishes of the dead and the privacies of contemporaries which still
causes so much avoidable inconvenience in social life, that feeling of
delicacy towards posterity, now so active an influence as sometimes
to shrink from exposing its members even to existence, hinders his
speaking fully.

Being obnoxious to the sufferings of others, he had, in 1915, the good
fortune to acquire Mr H. G. Wells’ Time Machine. Choosing a remote
corner of our island, and building due safeguards against possible
bumps in time――I will not forestall the account given in Chapter Two
of his work――he arrived at the year 2,100 (O.S.[1]) with no further
damage than a slight bruise on his knee caused by the shovel of an
archaeologist in search of human remains thought to be of the same
period as the Cro-Magnon man.

  [1] Our Style.

The details of how the author was greeted, conducted, honoured, and
spied upon are not here to be told――much is left to the reader to
infer; _verb. sap._, as we say. But there are two points the latter
must bear in mind: the first that there are things the author has
bound himself not to divulge, and which will never be known until
they occur; the second, that he has had to rely on his memory alone.
A little thought will make the reason plain: although he took copious
notes, and these are in existence, they are so only in future time, and
will not become available until the year 2,100. This last statement,
I fear, bristles with issues, and opens up deep scientific and
philosophical questions, involving on the one hand relativity and on
the other vitalism, which I have neither the space nor the ability to
dispose of. But very vivid in the author’s mind is the remembrance
of his emotion on first seeing the writing fade backwards out of his
notebooks, and becoming bitterly aware that time was a reversible
flux. He returned to 1920, a study of history having informed him, as
far as he could unravel the evidence, that his feelings would be less
lacerated in that year than seemed likely in 1915. He then settled down
to write his great work, which he will give to the world piecemeal as
discretion permits: (the reader has only to glance at our law reports
to see that were futurity displayed, the enjoyment of life and that
nice adjustment of personal desires to social duties which our time has
perfected, could not exist), and I have persuaded him to allow me to
make known this chapter on the theatre, which can break no bones, or
even abrade the most delicate skin.

I have, indeed, taken the liberty of making some omissions in order to
brevity, and, I freely admit, for decency’s sake; for I do not hold
with the modern fashion of protesting that nothing is withheld, and
forthwith teasing the reader with a series of dots or stars.

Why the book is called ‘Timotheus’ will be evident to those who bear
in mind the name of the ‘Mighty Master,’ the Wagner of Alexander the
Great’s day, who

    “Cou’d swell the Soul to Rage, or kindle soft Desire.”




                               CONTENTS


                                                PAGE
                        PREFATORY NOTICE         vii
                     I. THE NATIONAL THEATRE       1
                    II. THE DRAMATIC ACADEMY      21
                   III. OTHER THEATRES            45




                               TIMOTHEUS




                                   I

                         THE NATIONAL THEATRE


Our air-taxi landed us at what I took to be the nineteenth floor, and
we walked almost at once into a huge hyperboloid pit, the walls of
which consisted of tiers of seats. It would hold, I gathered, some
twenty thousand people, and much resembled a Roman theatre, except
for the peculiar curve of the walls, and the seats continuing to the
very bottom of the funnel. There was no sign of any stage, and on
my questioning Fabian,[2] he pointed to the saucer-like dome which
formed the roof, or lid of the building. I was afraid that to keep
my eyes fixed upon this airy stage would mean ricking my neck, but I
was reassured on being shown the shape of our seats. Not only were
they well slanted back, but they were also provided with rests for the
head, such as we are familiar with at our barbers’ and dentists’; and I
was told that with the body in the position proper to the chairs, our
emotional apparatus lent itself most readily to suggestion.

  [2] The author’s general guide――Vergil to his Dante.

I then asked him if the performance was to be a good one, and he
replied that “The clutch was officially ranked as A2 for efficiency,
but that he did not know what it was for.” I was much puzzled as to his
meaning until I learnt that ‘clutch’ was the name given to a drama of
the kind about to take place, where everything was under the control
of one man, the ‘fairfusser’ as he is called, who designs the movement,
the emotional sequences, the voices, and whatever else is needed. I
laid myself open to much banter on the part of Ierne[3] by asking
whether it was to be a tragedy or a comedy: such a crude distinction,
she said, was typical of the muddle-headedness of our age, on a
level with the antitheses classical-romantic, conservative-liberal,
matter-mind, and even intellect-emotion we were so fond of making, and
which for absurdity were only equalled by our craze for dressing men
and women in different sorts of clothes. The object of a drama, Fabian
enlightened me, was to summon up a given state of being, pure or
complex; and once the fairfusser knew what the clutch was for, it was
his business to produce the right emotion. I began to speak of emotion
for its own sake, but Ierne hurriedly checked me, saying that I would
shock anyone who might overhear, for there was no biological value in
emotion for its own sake. This made me think less agreeably of her
kindness to me on the last evening.

[3] The author’s guide in the more intimate social relationships.

I was therefore still confused by their speaking of what a clutch was
‘for,’ as though it might be a sort of charity matinée, and was about
to put the question, when the theatre became pitch dark: the clutch was
beginning.

At first I was aware only that the roof, or ‘stage’ had become
luminous, the light varying in strength, as it does on the ceiling of
a room when clouds travel across the sun. Soon it became more steadily
bright, and vague human figures began to take shape on it, shadows at
first, some of enormous size, advancing and retreating, making wide
gestures of an import I could not grasp. Sometimes the shadows would
assume solid shape and stand up as live beings, seeming to detach
themselves from the dome so as not to appear in the least like those
extravagant persons who populate the ceilings of many of our own
theatres: and among them was one singularly graceful form which seemed
to dominate the rest, and whose motions I could not help following, so
great was the pleasure they gave me.

Soon I became conscious that the air of the theatre was pulsating in
a manner which never quite became sound, and in a definite rhythm,
which varied occasionally, but yet seemed to conform to the original
beat, much as a poet will modulate his verse. Now a faint perfume hit
the sense, while an uneasy feeling stole over me, as if something had
been done I did not want. Then, from the body of the theatre, as from a
member of the audience, a voice spoke, in the tones of a man resigned
to grief:

    No means at all to hide
    Man from himself can find:
    No way to start aside.
    Out of the hell of mind.

and I felt myself sinking into such an agony of despair as I can
remember having gone through only in dreams, or under the influence
of supernatural fear. Struggle as I might against the weight of
oppression, I was forced to abandon myself to the flow of dire
tribulation, in which remorse succeeded terror, and all the passions of
the world were black. And from all around the theatre, now from here,
now from there, above me and below me, sometimes in front and sometimes
at my back, I could hear voices and the noise of approaching events.
Once I thought a voice cried out:

    Desolate, as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the
    sun has gone down to his rest.

and in the midst of a tumult of pulsations and perfumes and shadowy
occurrences, a woman whispered, it seemed close by my ear:

    And Pity, like a naked, new-born babe.

At that the sense of intolerable woe lightened; the rhythm changed, the
figures appeared human and brave, while joy seemed to issue from the
very walls of the theatre with the words:

    Love’s banners on the battlements of song,

which trickled from every side. At last, without warning, in a
triumphant burst of sudden glory such as makes us laugh with active
lungs, a loud but harmonious cry resounded from the very middle of the
theatre, where there was nothing visible but empty air, calling:

    Where are the eagles and the trumpets?

and I remembered no more till we found ourselves perched on the outer
landing of the theatre waiting for our taxi to take us home.

It was then that I found myself prey to strange and mingled, but
insistent emotions, partly of kindly generosity, and partly of
self-sacrifice. Looking at the men and women around me I could see that
they too were strongly moved, making gestures foreign to the occasion,
such as taking out their pocket-books, searching in them feverishly,
and doing sums on slips of paper. Some whom I could see were giving
themselves up to despair, and others were arguing with their wives.
Fabian then pointed out to me that most of the carriages taking people
away from the theatre, instead of flying in all directions, made for a
building upon which was written large

    SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR THE EURBANK LOAN.      OFFICES OPEN.

That, he said, accounted for the clutch. There was a crisis, he
continued, in the bank upon which the credit of the League of Europe
was founded, and the governments were anxious to sell the scrip of the
new loan. The clutch we had seen had, no doubt, been performed that
afternoon in the larger towns all over the continent, the language
alone being suitably varied; and by this means the bank would be
placed on a firm footing once more. My emotion was damped on learning
this, for after all, I could have little interest in the finances of a
country in which I had no stake: but enough of my feeling was left to
make me give a foolishly large tip to the driver of our machine.

I was naturally curious to know by what means the frame of mind had
been aroused, and in the evening Fabian was kind enough to enlighten
me, going very learnedly into the origins of the form which met with
such success. I was very surprised, and not a little proud, to find
that a large part of the science had had its starting point in our own
day, as he showed from several old books: but he on his part seemed
inclined to think we had been wanting in genius to have had so much
knowledge to hand, and yet not have been able to use it.

The shape of the theatre had been chosen for acoustic reasons, on
account of certain properties of the hyperbola, which I had not the
mathematics to understand, but which, Fabian said, had been utilised in
the third (1914–1918) of the five great wars of European settlement,
for finding out by their report, the exact post of hidden guns. It
was this which had enabled the fairfusser to make the last cry seem
to come from the void; the other speeches had merely been delivered
by variously placed loud-speakers, connected in due turn with a
wireless gramophone. I may here say that the phrases I have remembered
and written down are only a very small number of those used in the
performance, and which, for some reason, seemed familiar. The other
words spoken in the clutch were of like great emotive power, chosen
or invented by the fairfusser for this reason alone: and though they
may seem to have no logical thread, or connection in real life, their
place in the scheme was very carefully thought out. The reasons, and
the terminology, for all this were too far advanced for me to be able
to hold them in my head, but I have since traced some passages Fabian
showed me as early sources of the form, and which will give the reader
some idea of the great cleverness of the design.

    “Thus the indirect methods of hypnotising, like many of the
    technical procedures used in making jokes, have the effect of
    checking certain distributions of mental energy which would
    interfere with the course of events in the unconscious, and
    they lead eventually to the same result as the direct methods
    of influence by means of staring or stroking.”[4]

  [4] Freud, _Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego_, page 97.

From there the high road is plain to see; the phrases of the clutch
check or loosen ‘certain distributions of mental energy,’ for art is
only a kind of hypnotism: but the perfection which I had ‘felt’ had
not been arrived at without much arduous trial. At one time jumbled
up words had been tried, or single ones, but even the most striking,
such as _death_, or _beauty_, or _ruin_, had not had an effect at all
to be put beside that of the shortest sentence. Familiar quotations
had also been made use of, but they were put by for two reasons. The
first was that all men did not respond in the same way, since all men
are not equally noble, some even finding risible “Tears, idle tears,
I know not what they mean.” The second was that hardly any quotations
were familiar enough to be known by everybody: for example, the words
“Till the conversion of the Jews” moved people quite unevenly, some
connecting them with religion, others with their pass-books, and a few
with an old obscure poem. This, besides preventing many from entering
into the proper mood, destroyed that singleness in the audience without
which the highest suggestible state cannot be reached: for an emotion
is infectious only if the units of the crowd are ready to agree
together, as I have often noticed on first nights when the friends of
an author try to sweep the critics away on a tide of noisy enthusiasm.
And further, emotion caught on the wing is always stronger than when it
is the result of deliberate thought.

As to the shadows on the ‘stage,’ these were for fixing the attention
of all upon the same thing; and I discovered that every member of the
audience had been greatly drawn towards the figure which had seized
upon my imagination, and had to some extent made himself one with it,
as we now do sometimes with the hero of a play. This had served to
transform the loose ‘herd’ into a unified and thus suggestible ‘horde,’
if I do not mistake the terms.

The air being made to throb was merely to create a rhythm, the effects
of which had been keenly studied. Again to copy a passage I have
traced:

    “Among the results of rhythm susceptibility and vivacity
    of emotion, limitations of the field of attention, marked
    differences in the incidence of belief feelings closely
    analogous to those which alcohol and nitrous oxide can induce
    ... may be noted.”[5]

and I can willingly believe this, for I have myself often felt very
curiously stirred when listening to the jazz-band at young people’s
parties.

  [5] I. A. Richards, _The Principles of Literary Criticism_, page 143.

The naming of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas as it used to be called,
brings me to the perfumes, which, I learnt, were led along each row
of seats by what I had taken for hot-water pipes. This again, Fabian
said, was a legacy of the third (1914–1918) Great War of European
Settlement, and he gave me to read an account I have since recovered of
a gas which caused “the most appalling mental distress and misery.”[6]
Of course the means had been much refined, and the fairfusser could
at will set free gases which brought about sorrow, fear, joy, shame,
the love of glory or of animals, and indeed any emotion, all without
the least risk of harm; though it is true that some serious mishaps,
especially in the early stages, had unluckily happened.

  [6] J. B. S. Haldane, _Callinicus_.

The combined result was that almost any feeling, and any required
degree of that feeling, could be produced by the fairfusser, and this
the government found of the greatest use at times of political or
European crisis, when wars were to be declared or averted, or any
controversial measure passed.

I was bound to utter my high admiration of the lengths to which the
art of the drama had been carried, and made so salutary an influence,
though I could not help doubting whether such a tool in the hands of
rulers might not be a little dangerous: but I was assured that this
had already been foreseen, and that the national theatres were closed
during the period of a general election, and of debates of high moment,
such as those on the budget.

I asked if there were no theatres in which human beings came upon the
stage and strutted and talked after the manner of common life, as
they do to-day, and I was told that there were many kinds: but that
before going to see them I would be taken to the Dramatic Academy,
which had been handsomely endowed by an Anglo-Caucasian millionaire.
I thought I should learn more of the trend of the art by going there
than by attendance at a number of theatres, and gladly consented to the
proposal.




                                  II

                         THE DRAMATIC ACADEMY


This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of
several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste (owing
to changes in fashion), was purchased and applied to that use. I was
received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the
academy.

This was composed in three parts; one for research professors, another
for play-makers, or fairfussers, and the third for students; the first
being trained psychologists, the last, young men and women remarkable
for beauty, fine feeling and intelligence, as they are in our own
day. The notion was for the professors to find out facts, for the
fairfussers to apply them, and for the students to carry them out: and
if it may occur to the reader that the workers in one side paid small
heed to the discoveries of the rest, a little consideration will show
that this is all to the good; for slavishly to accept the opinions of
others can never lead to clarity of thought, and the warden was anxious
to maintain in every inmate that active spirit of self-reliance without
which no advance can be made in any of the sciences. I saw many of
each division, but to write of them all would be to take up inordinate
space in these memorials, since the arts are not of large importance
to the state or to the public. I shall, therefore, confine myself to
describing one or two of each kind, choosing those which throw most
light on the methods of those days, and the great progress we can
shortly expect.

My first visit was to a small, active professor, with a tiny
clean-shaven chin, and unusually bright weasel eyes, who, speaking very
fast, and with vivid gesture, easily convinced me of the usefulness
of his discoveries. He had applied his mind for fifteen years to
proving that there was no such thing as thought, for, he said, the
conversation he had to listen to, or the acts he was able to observe,
could be accounted for without supposing such a thing existed.
Speech, he explained, was merely a habit, like that of scratching
when something causes our skin to itch; and, moreover, all our deeds
were like scratching, which we do thoughtlessly, however much we may
flatter ourselves that we prepare great things far ahead. He did not
go to the lengths of some of his colleagues, who denied the existence
of consciousness: for, so as not to be too positive, he preferred to
regard ‘awareness of the emotions’ as a fiction convenient to his
purpose, or, to put it differently, as words merely to describe a
sequence of events. By his system, when impulses are set up, something
occurs, such as eating, and we are ‘satisfied,’ as we say: or we are
‘disappointed,’ as when prevented from a kindly action.

I paid close heed to this part of his discourse, because he begged me
not to confuse his theory with that of a rival professor, who believed
that allusive gestures gave rise to a corresponding emotion. This, he
pointed out, was merely the out-of-date heresy that “A dog does not wag
his tail because he is happy; but that he is happy because his tail
wags.” This rival believed that if he made the gestures which usually
go with certain emotions, he would undergo these feelings; and the
spectator would, by ‘in-feeling’ or ‘empathy’ (such were his barbarous
terms) put their muscles in readiness to go through these movements,
and so, in their turn, experience these emotions. For his part, when he
had been to see this professor acting woe, far from feeling unhappy,
he had barely been able to master his mirth. But, so as to give the
theory a fair trial, he had wished with one of his pupils to observe
the result of moving the tail of a dog quickly from side to side, but
that unluckily, the pupil had been bitten before the experiment had
reached a stage from which anything could be learnt.

His own idea, he informed me, was to set up a known order of stresses
and strains in the watchers’ nerves, and this could be done by cunning
movements performed in front of them. I was not, however, to tax him
with inconsistency, for his motto was ‘Not miming but movement,’ and
though an actor had to use gestures, they must by no means be after
the naif manner of his rival. He himself had spent over four years
in the abstract study of the movements proper to the passion of
benevolence――abstract, because nothing is more misleading than what
people relate of their own feelings: cruelty, for instance, they often
describe as a wish to better their neighbours. Indeed, another of his
mottoes, he declared chuckling, was ‘No motion, no emotion’; and I
could not but agree with him when I considered that after all, to lie
in one’s bed all day and simply ‘think,’ as we stupidly call it, is no
life at all.

Yet I could not help trying to argue, feebly enough, that the showing
of dreadful acts would call forth feelings of horror, as we may judge
from the murder of Desdemona, and that fitting words would arouse pity
in us, as they do in the same play. But, smiling at the clumsiness of
my example, he remarked that just there lay the error; for if we were
truly to see a Moor, however splendid, plunging a knife into the body
of a beautiful lady, our emotions, if we knew her to be guiltless,
would be very different from those we feel in a theatre; and that,
instead of sitting still, we should most certainly interpose, or run
to fetch the police. Again, while we were children, before our minds
are distorted by what we erroneously call thought (but which is only an
idle luxury-habit), Mr Punch beating his wife causes us to laugh very
loudly. This instance, he said, would also prove how much more useful
movements were than words, since for ten who would laugh at a Punch and
Judy show, hardly one would smile at the wittiest things in Pascal. It
was only on reflection that I could altogether make his views my own,
for it is not easy for us to give up opinions we have held ever since
we can remember.

To test the movements appropriate to various emotions, this professor
had invented a machine, which, by reason of the changes in electrical
resistance a body undergoes under the action of the passions, recorded
the feelings of any person subjected to it. This machine he had just
brought to perfection, and to give me a demonstration, he sat me in
a chair made of some amalgam unknown to me, and fitted with sockets
into which my head, hands and feet were clamped. A piece of wireless
apparatus, supplied with a diaphragm such as make a part of our
telephone receivers, was placed over my heart, and, my loins being
bared, my lumbar vertebrae were played upon by a peculiar ray. Above
my head, where I could not see it, was placed a marker, much like our
telegraph morse-code dials, but corrugated and rayed after the manner
of a fan. The professor could watch this while evolving before me
the strange movements I could connect with nothing I had ever seen,
and so could vary his gestures according to the results shown. After
about a quarter of an hour of erudite passes, the professor, wiping
the sweat from his brow, triumphantly announced the successful issue
of his experiment, and asked me what emotion I felt. At that moment,
having overcome my awe, I was filled with a profound sense of pity,
and on my confessing this, the professor danced with glee. Crying
“Typical! Typical!” he pointed at the dial; but as the needle showed
‘Lust tempered with Sentimentality’ I could not but feel that his
wonderful invention needed alteration in a few details to perfect it.
Nevertheless, while doing up my braces, I framed a few remarks to make
known my pleasure at seeing the drama make such strides in his hands;
and promising to meet at a later day we parted with many expressions
of esteem. I must also add this tribute to his ability: when I did
visit him again, very fast, on my backward journey through time, even
when all the motions were reversed, I once more felt very deeply the
compassion his gestures had provoked.

I next went to see a fairfusser, though not one in the service of the
government, and was much impressed by his freedom from doubt as to the
way in which the best result was to be reached. He said, with justice,
that the artist’s desire was to communicate with his fellow creatures,
and that the object of an actor was to place his soul in touch with
that of others. Man, being in each case a unique individual, was fitted
for work more noble than that of a mere interpreter, or conduit pipe
from an author to an audience, and the contrary view had been the
grand error of all producers from the time of Shakespeare almost to
his own day. The aim of an actor was to express himself (as a part of
universal nature) and reveal a cup overbrimming with passions. Any
ideas introduced by an author were to be deprecated, for his business
was strictly to provide the raw material; and so the teacher’s main
efforts were to be directed towards training his pupils to rid the
author’s words of any meaning they might contain, simply by the manner
of speaking them. In this way nothing was allowed to come between the
actor and the audience. This he claimed to be the especial discovery
of his age, and one which he could not help regarding with more than a
little pride.

I made bold to tell him that his notion was not so new as he imagined,
and that we too had actors who disbelieved that words had any plausible
meaning apart from the emotion the actor could register through them:
men (as a rule well set up, or even bulky, since these are always the
most passionate) who by a clever alteration in stress, or an abrupt
cleavage of a sentence in the middle, could effectively cancel any
extraneous idea the words of an author might interpose between the
feelings of the player and the minds of the audience. This constructor
was good enough to say that he was quite sure our age had not been so
dark as was commonly supposed, but that, at least in our classical
plays, which had been in verse, a form which compels a certain manner
of speech, he thought the ‘pure’ actor must have met with difficulties
hardly to be overcome. I was able to assure him that this was not so,
and that, indeed, it was just in these very plays many of our actors
had shown their highest genius; that one might know _Hamlet_, for
example, quite well by the book, and yet go to two or three versions of
the play and hardly recognise any of the speeches, so much were they
heightened and made subtle in the speaking of them.

I was also much taken by an investigator who had made a highly
diverting play simply with scenery, and a few mutes who now and again
varied their place. It was his view that we had always been astray in
making people the centre of our dramas: it was their surroundings that
mattered――for who, he said, given the choice of seeing Brown eat his
dinner, or a thunderstorm on Mount Everest, would not prefer to look at
Mount Everest? A modern producer could not help laughing at the remark
of Aristotle, if he ever read it, that ‘the spectacle was the least
artistic part of a drama.’ A comely staircase, he averred, or even a
rickety ladder, if it was tall enough, had more significance than a
tale of hopeless love; and he was about to design a series of scenes
in a logical order of forms and colours, green following pink, which
would make a spectator sadder than even a play by Sophocles. This I
could well believe: but I found it hard to understand how it was right
to allude to pink as though it were a premiss, for after all, nobody
dreams of calling a rainbow a syllogism, any more than they do of
saying ‘paradox’ when they mean a hill.

On another day I was taken to see a fairfusser at work on an
old-fashioned play which was to be ‘acted,’ in our sense of the word,
by students. He made his actors rehearse a scene; and then all sat down
on chairs and took up stereoscopic glasses. Immediately, at the other
end of the room, two coloured films appeared, exactly reproducing the
movements of the actors, while at the same time a gramophone repeated
the words they had uttered, in such a manner as to seem to come from
the mouth of each actor who spoke. With the glasses the illusion was
complete, and I could hardly believe I was not re-dreaming the scene
I had just witnessed, except that the producer could stop the play at
will, or even go back to a phrase or gesture to point out the errors of
voice or movement of which the actors had been guilty. He could also
show how a gesture would be more effective if performed at a greater or
less speed; and how admirable this method was I could judge from the
looks of pleasure or mortification on the actors’ faces as they saw
themselves displayed.

There was one handsome young actor who seemed by his vehemence and
assurance to be more talented than the rest, and to him I asked to be
introduced, that I might learn his views from him. He led me aside, and
with great earnestness explained to me how experience had shown that
one could not take for granted the least intelligence in an audience.
Words, he said, conveyed nothing to them unless accompanied with
appropriate action: and this he ascribed to the fact that an audience
was a crowd, and therefore followed the normal law of mass psychology
in being much stupider and more primitive than a single person. The
actor, therefore, had to deal with the simplest objects or ideas,
indicating them by a kind of airy drawing. The connection between
them, the grammar or the syntax as it were (so he was kind enough to
phrase it for my understanding) was portrayed by the actors’ emotion as
expressed in gesture or tone. That was why plays with few words were
better than plays with many words, as in the latter case the number
of gestures became very tiring both to the eyes of the audience and
the muscles of the actors. He had a noble, yet reasoned, scorn for any
player who stood still and with hardly a movement allowed sentences
merely to trundle out of his mouth, and he considered his place could
very well be taken by a gramophone.

To illustrate the stages of his art, he took me to a room to see a
young actress practice an easy passage, and I was much gratified by
the manner in which she expressed by gesture the meaning of the words
she was uttering; and I could not but admire the subtle difference
she made in pointing to the floor when she said in one case ‘down’
meaning merely downstairs, in another the infernal regions. The same
variation was introduced in her rendering of ‘up,’ and I did not fail
to note that each gesture emphasised a new beauty in her arms. She
also practised some ‘tone-work’ as they call it, and for my benefit
declaimed an old-fashioned line “To lie in cold obstruction and to
rot,” and it is hard to imagine, as it is impossible to describe, the
frigidity she put into the word ‘cold,’ or the horror and loathing with
which she vivified the word ‘rot,’ so making their meaning quite clear
to any audience.

My actor friend afterwards told me that she had sadly bungled the
word ‘obstruction,’ because she had not yet reached the year in which
abstract terms were studied; and being himself nearly at the conclusion
of that period, he gave me a finished version of the line “The quality
of mercy is not strained,” which quite transported me, and which I
should not know how to praise sufficiently. The gesture for ‘quality,’
initially too simple, was raised to a high state of complexity by the
young man’s genius, and I should no doubt have understood it perfectly
had I been more used to the method.

I later asked the young woman if such interpretation did not involve
work almost too arduous, since nothing is more tiring than to bring
one’s ideas to the level of common minds; and she told me that though
the intellectual labour was harder than in any other profession, their
task was lessened by the fact that so few authors had any idea of what
they really meant that the actors could substitute such phrases as lent
themselves more readily to their temperament.

There was another actor, with a mobile mouth and masterful manner,
whom I saw practising for his thirty-third performance of a part,
and therefore engaged in working out a thirty-third reading. I was
amazed at this, which is so contrary to our own method, but was soon
persuaded of its rightness. For a work of art, this actor said, did
not exist apart from the observer――it was a collaboration; and as no
observer was ever twice in the same mood, he could never experience the
same sensation from the identical thing. One might say, to adapt the
words of an old Greek sophist, “No man can go to the same play twice.”
He then went on to argue very brilliantly that since the actor made
the work of art, was indeed himself a piece of it, his share of the
collaboration was to make it on each occasion as different as possible
from the last, so as to help any observer who might come more than
once to any play. (He knew several ladies who had been to see him no
less than seventeen times in the same character). This also had the
extra advantage of avoiding that dull monotony――for what is art without
an element of surprise?――so often to be seen in our actors, who think
they have achieved a final rendering, and attempt day after day to
repeat a thing which can never really occur even twice.

I was much satisfied at what I had seen and learnt at the Academy,
but was made slightly melancholy by the thought that if ever I should
return to my own time, I should find our actors and actresses much
below the level of what I had come to expect from their calling.




                                  III

                            OTHER THEATRES


The National theatre which I have described was not, of course, the
only kind, though it had many imitators; and I shall now pass to some
others, beginning with that which I think will most interest readers
of the present day, but which was rarely mentioned in the polite
society of the age. This was the Cathartic Theatre, where people went
to be cured of the passion of love. In our day, as has been for many
generations past, we often refer to love-sickness but it is half in
jest, and there are few of us who do not think the undoubted pains of
the state amply repaid with its joys. Its dangers, however, now only
beginning to be recognised, were fully taken into account in 2,100,
for it was seen that the claims of society were incompatible with
an emotion then relegated to the songs of derivative poets. Already
we know that the battle between the self and the ideal social self
gives rise to the most frightful diseases, but in our day we only try
to cure the unhealthy symptom instead of going to the root of the
matter and abolishing the cause. At this time, though the malady was
well in hand, its approaches were so insidious that patients going
to a doctor for what they thought was one sickness would often be
surprised by a diagnosis which convicted them of love, and would later
be seen entering the Cathartic Theatre with shamed faces or that air
of studied indifference we assume when we do not wish to be noticed,
thinking that by this method we shall appear to have no face at all.

The theory of this theatre was very simple; and this too, I was proud
to think, had been foreshadowed by writers of our own time, one of whom
had written, “We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have art,”[7]
and another “Poetry acts as a physician.”[8] The aim of the performance
was to break down the obstacles we wrongly oppose to our thoughts in
rude attempts to fit ourselves to social life, and so allow to drain
away those impulses which in any really harmonious nature should never
be set up. I must warn the reader of this age not to confuse the method
with one of ‘sublimation’ as we say, for this involves the ‘will,’ a
fiction of which the futility had long been exposed. It is true that I
did not very clearly grasp these matters, which are too far beyond our
time――just as Dryden would, perhaps, have found it hard to grasp the
true subtleties of Expressionism――but I hope I do not err in saying
that an element of vicarious fulfilment also entered into these dramas,
on the ground, which no one will contradict, that it is the function of
art to provide what everyday life denies us. The name of the theatre, I
found indeed, had arisen from that reading of Aristotle which confuses
the meaning of Catharsis with that of ‘purgation by excess’: for even
in those days the Faculty of Medicine was not always happy in the names
it chose for the ills and remedies it invented.

  [7] Havelock Ellis, _Affirmations_.

  [8] Robert Graves, _Poetic Unreason_.

The authorities were, of course, fully aware of the risks run in using
such a specific, and its abuse was hindered in the same way as we
curtail the buying of opium and other drugs, which wrongly applied
prove harmful; and a man was only able to buy a ticket if he showed a
paper signed by a doctor to declare him a fitting subject. Medical men
were themselves allowed to buy as many tickets as they liked, and a
large percentage of the audience was always composed of them, because
they wished to observe the effects of the cure upon their patients. It
was not without difficulty that Fabian was able to get us the needful
pass, and it was only after representing to the authorities that any
account of their age which omitted so beneficial a device would be very
faulty, that I was granted it.

Before entering the theatre Fabian told me to abandon myself freely to
any impulse to laugh, as that was a condition of perfect purging: and
of this I was very glad, for I have often, not only before, but since
my visit to this time, felt the pain of constraint at light plays,
especially if I was with relatives, or else friends with whom I did
not wish to become too intimate. But what was my surprise to find,
instead of the fescennine jesting I was prepared for, a play I had
already seen in Manchester, a drama of the most correct sentiment by
one of our notably respectable, even titled playwrights, which might
call forth smiles and tears alternately, but not those crude outbursts
of mirth I now heard on every side. So little was I able to enter into
the spirit of the thing that after the first act Fabian took me out,
whispering to me that my callous behaviour might have the worst effect
upon the patients seated near me. He seemed to think my bearing had
been of set purpose, and only grudgingly gave the explanation I longed
for, which was that the people in these times saw a wealth of allusion
lurking beneath the innocent phrases; and that what the audience
so much relished and admired in our author was the simplicity with
which he had hidden the ‘latent content’ under the ‘manifest.’ When I
protested my belief that nothing had been more remote from the writer’s
mind, Fabian looked coldly at me, as though he were sure I was trying
to dupe him.

It was in vain that I pleaded with him to be allowed to attend
another of these plays, one of later date, for Fabian would by no
means recommend me for a pass, saying that the sense would certainly
be beyond me. There was, however, another level of play of the same
nature, designed for the stupider sort of people, such as members of
Parliament, wardens of libraries, teachers in science or religion at
the Public Schools, municipal architects and so on, for which, not
without a contemptuous word, he recommended me. He excused his own
absence, however; for even, he said, if he could obtain permission,
which he doubted, he would not care to go. And indeed, after I had
seen the piece, I could not blame him. For determined as I was, this
time, to behave with propriety, I allowed myself the license of which
we are all guilty sometimes, when our conscience, or ‘censor’ to use
the modern term, is off its guard; and laughing very heartily, I have
since felt ashamed at my acquiescence in a remedy that must prove so
greatly worse than the disease. The least things there were such as
make us keep some of our Callot etchings locked in a drawer, and to
leave certain portions of Mr Loeb’s excellent library in the original
tongue, though some I am told, regard this only as an ingenious device
to outwit the laziness of students. At all events, since I was not ill,
the performance, I fear, did me no good: whether it would have done so
in less happy conditions I am unable to tell, and I dwell upon it no
longer, as in any case the experiment will not, I think, be tried in
our day, even in the hospitals. Nor would I be convinced of the wisdom
of the venture if it were.

In going about the streets I had often noticed, especially in the
business quarters, what appeared to be shops or booths, not unlike
those places one may see abroad, where men sit in rows to have their
boots polished. Above them was displayed a sign on which was written
“Two Minutes,” or “Thirty Seconds,” or some like period of time. I
had seen the backs of men standing in lines, with pads clamped over
their ears and their faces pushed forward into a sort of camera, and
had supposed these retreats to be telephone boxes. I was much surprised
when Ierne told me they were “Hurry Theatres,” and invited me to
accompany her to one of them.

They were erected, as the name implies, for those without the leisure
to attend longer performances, and were found very beneficial to
brokers and such, who, hurrying from their offices to snatch their
midday meal, could pause for the declared number of seconds, and gain,
without waste of time, a modicum of ‘organised emotion,’ as Ierne
called it; and this was often a great relief to them. For when we are
too much troubled by our affairs we may usefully go to art for escape
or refreshment. There were a few booths in the more fashionable parts,
for errand boys, journalists, and taxi-drivers, while it was found that
those in the dentists’ quarter were much patronised: for in going to
have our teeth seen to, if we do not like to be late, yet we shrink
from entering the place until the last moment, although the waiting
rooms are made homely and cheerful with time-tables, comic papers,
and copies of Academy pictures. These theatres were also agreeable to
those who had arranged to meet friends at a certain spot and were kept
waiting, and some had even, in the early days, gained a notoriety as
rendezvous.

The camera through which one looked was simply a stereoscopic glass
directed on a double film screen, and the pads were the telephone
receivers through which one heard the voices of the actors, which
seemed to come from their mouths. The plays themselves were most
dramatic in character, since their object was to endue the spectator
with a highly disturbing emotion in a minimum of time. They were
therefore very allusive, and I should have found it hard to understand
many of them if the gestures and tones of the actors had not been
profoundly striking. I grew to be fond of them and, indeed, with weakly
emotional men, they readily become a vice; for when thrills are as
easily obtained as cocktails, and as rapidly swallowed, if I may use
the term, they form a tonic as difficult to resist as any digestive,
and are perhaps as harmful.

It would be useless for me to write down a typical drama, for the
reader of to-day would not follow it, nor, for that matter, relish it
more than he does those quaint old seventeenth-century plays where
women dress up as men, and blood so freely flows. There were, indeed,
a few from our own era, known as ‘classics,’ and sometimes acted as
curiosities in the neighbourhood of museums, but the earliest of these
must date, I think, from at least 1940, and was a comedy with the
strange title _The Psycho-Fans_. A young man wishing to make a girl his
bride, she puts him through a number of scientific, but comical tests,
to prove his worth and his affection: she was afraid, I gathered, that
he might turn out to be an ‘introvert,’ and not at all a suitable mate
for an ‘extravert’ such as she was. All I remember of the words is the
opening of a sort of epilogue he spoke:

    Oh had I wist
    Before I kissed,
    That you were a Behaviourist....

Normally, however, these dramas aimed at producing dread, and I
naturally avoided one which was advertised as “Guaranteed to make your
soul writhe.” We are not yet made of such stern stuff as to derive
courage to face the battle of life from art of this sort, though I have
seen robust clerks stagger from these booths with white faces and a
much increased zest for their humdrum labours. This being so, I had the
temerity to suggest that one of these theatres might be installed in
each government office for the use of civil servants, and am gratified
to be able to say that my proposal was acted upon, only the Inland
Revenue Department being excepted.

There was one theatre which several young people told me was the best,
but as it did not meet with general favour, I did not go there until
the end of my visit, for I have always felt an abhorrence of what is
at all precious, and avoided the highbrow and snobbish. It was quite a
mean place, not in the capital but in a small provincial town, and was
regulated by a fairfusser who had never been able to make his way in a
decent centre, owing to his poor skill in the art of advertisement.

The stage was much like that which we know, but though built in
pleasant enough proportions was too simply decorated to be striking.
The settings were so unobtrusive that at the end of a scene one could
hardly say whether the framing had been good or bad, which I thought a
pity, for one was in this manner robbed of a subject for conversation.
The effects were obtained chiefly by the lighting, but unfortunately
this was kept uniform throughout each scene, and thus one lost the
pleasure of admiring the agility of the electrician, who nowadays,
is, with his switches, as great a virtuoso as an organist with his
stops. The most noticeable difference was the stage being only about
two-thirds the size of ours, the reason for it that the actors were not
people, but puppets, rather smaller than human beings.

I have always regarded these dolls as a mistake, for they must needs
be anonymous, and how can one tell if the acting is good if one does
not know the name of the performers? I think too, that if one is to
have puppets at all, they should be either grotesque or fairy-like,
and these were neither, resembling instead those early Egyptian or
Indian sculptures we have so far out-distanced, or those Byzantine
paintings, which, once thought beautiful, would look so oddly on the
walls of Burlington House. I must confess that their movements were
graceful, their deftness above that of any human being, but not more
so than one could imagine human beings capable of. They were actuated,
not by strings, but by some invisible power, and everything they did
seemed to be of such happy invention that one felt they had all nature
at their command to use. But I detected a grave error in the way the
fairfusser made the words issue from their lips, for they did not
speak at all like actors, but simply and swiftly, as we all try to
do in real life, and it is not for that we go to the theatre. Their
speeches were so cadenced that they dwelt in the ear like a harmony in
music, which is contrary to all experience, so that the characters did
not seem like men ennobled, but, rather, fleshly embodiments of the
thought or feeling it was their purpose to express. One enthusiast,
eager to convert me, quoted to me the words of some foreign actress of
our time:[9] “To save the Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, the
actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air,
they make art impossible,” which is cruel and absurd, and in any case
should not have come from an actress. For these semblances of mankind
by their remoteness banished all the accidental things which make a
play realistic and warmly human, and all the personal emotion which
makes us feel for an actor, and applaud him for the pain he has gone
through. But we cannot feel for a puppet, or applaud him, even if he
has played King Lear, for we know his sufferings were not real.

  [9] Eleonora Duse (Ed.).

These plays were always made entirely by one man――for this fairfusser
actually had one or two disciples――who directed each movement, whether
of single persons or crowds, either tumultuous, or in the dances,
which met with much applause, though they seemed to me even less
comprehensible than some of the later Russian ballets which were lately
in vogue for a short time. I was told he was always very careful about
the ‘rhythmic order’ of the piece, whatever that may mean, and its
groupings. All was done first on a little model, which in the end
became a record repeated on the larger scale. For the voices he took
human beings, going over and over each phrase until he got exactly
the tone he wanted, and these he recorded, timing them afterwards with
the movements, so that the whole play went, as it were, by clockwork.
Thus there was nothing spontaneous about it, and this is a fault, since
art, according to many serious philosophers, is a kind of game, and
thus, surely, if any notion of being drilled creeps in, the pleasure
evaporates.

The same man also, as a rule, wrote the words, which did not remain in
my memory because I understood them so little, seeing that they dealt
with thoughts and feelings which in our day we take small notice of.
That this must be so is easy to see; for every age concerns itself
with a different relation of man to what is outside him. We are now,
to be sure, beginning to do what they were doing,[10] in dealing with
man’s relation to man’s idea of what he is; that is, so to say in the
plain words of Albertus Magnus, seeking “the causation of causes in
the causes of things.” But these plays bewildered me, as I own without
shame, for would not Dr. Johnson himself have been adrift at a play by
Signor Pirandello? And since there was so much I could not fathom, I
should only impart a false twist to the meaning however much I tried to
give a true account.

  [10] In 2,100 O. S.

But I fear these plays disordered me, for the unnatural is a sort of
poison, and I have never since been able to feel real pleasure at any
drama of to-day even in the best theatres in Paris, New York, or
London. Indeed I have almost conceived an aversion from our stage; and
it is only the importunities of my friends that make me go to a play
once or twice in a year, so as not to seem unsociable. If the choice is
left to me, we go to the English version of a French farce, for these
are usually free from any meaning at all: and if one expects nothing,
one cannot be disappointed.


                   *       *       *       *       *


 Transcriber’s Notes:

 ――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

 ――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

 ――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.