Things near & far Chapter 24: Part 24

and, again, unless he were a very eminent actor indeed, he very rarely associated with people beyond the range of the call-boy’s voice. The stage in those days was a world apart, and the men and women who trod it a race apart; the actor was a type, just as the sailor of Smollett’s day was a type. But all that is long over; it would be very difficult to find a general formula to cover the life of the stage to-day. Commodore Trunnion viewed all existence as a voyage on board one of His Majesty’s ships; and I knew a stage-manager who, playing skittles, avowed his determination to bring down “that O.P. skittle”; but the Commodore is dead, and the stage-manager is dying. In fact I should say that the average actor of to-day is far from being gratified when he is recognised as an actor; rather he is inclined to be ashamed of his profession. I remember that as I was talking to two stage friends on a London pavement an old man who was selling laces and studs and such matters in the gutter implored us to buy: “I was an actor once myself, gentlemen.” I perceived that my friends were very far from being pleased. I think that the poor old man would have done better if he had said: “I was an officer in the Guards once myself, gentlemen.” So, in brief, the actors are no longer the race apart of the old days; they mix with all sorts of people and have, naturally, become very much like all sorts of people. Some of them think that the change is for the better, others disagree. I venture no judgment save this: that they are certainly less picturesque, because less differenced than of old, and thus it is that nobody is likely to do much good with a story of the stage. I daresay that few people outside the profession are aware that the old players had a language of their own, or rather a language which they shared with another and a widely different craft. Not merely the technical language of the stage, though that had its curiosities too. For example, I once heard George Alexander at rehearsal say to one of the company: “Too much of the old, Smith, too much of the old!” And Smith, though he had been for many years on the stage, told me afterwards that he had never heard the phrase before, and didn’t know what it meant. I knew what it meant, having associated, like Mr. Lillyvick, with members of the theatrical profession in the provincial, that is more or less, the less fortunate grade. “The old” means the melodramatic style of acting, the manner which used to be associated with the name of Barry Sullivan. When an actor said, “I gave them a bit of the old,” he meant that he exaggerated somewhat both in his tones and in the business of the scene; in other words, that he made it “big” and “broad.” But this is not the language I mean. Once on a provincial tour I found that the stage-manager had somehow heard of my connection with literature, and was inclined, in consequence, to suspect me a little of being, as we should say now, a “high-brow” and to resent the supposed fact. So I put him through an examination. I asked if he knew what “omees” were, in particular as to the character signified by the phrase “omee of the carser.” Then as to the idioms “nunty munjare” and “nunty dinnari” and so on. He broke down badly, but he put away his evil suspicions from that moment; he knew that if I had written books in my day I had turned over a new leaf and had become a reformed character: I knew the curious speech better than he did. It is barbarous Italian, and was the lingo of old-fashioned actors and thieves. _Chapter XI_ It is a very odd experience to go on the stage at the age of thirty-nine. It is, of course, unpractical, since at that age a man is too old to learn the business properly; but it is a great entertainment. The change was so extreme. I had always lived a very quiet life. I had few friends, few acquaintances. My life was in reading books and in writing them. All my preoccupations were literary. Every morning after breakfast I went over what I had written the night before, correcting here and there and everywhere, generally convinced that the passage which had pleased me so much as I wrote it was, after all, not magnificent. I took the bulldog for a walk from 12 to 1, and another half-hour walk in the afternoon. Then two cups of tea without milk or sugar at 4, and the rigour of the literary game till 7, and again after dinner till 11. It was a life of routine, and all its adventures, difficulties, defeats and rare triumphs were those of the written page. I did not know a single actor, and had no curiosity as to the actor’s life, circumstances, customs or manners. And then, one afternoon in February, 1901, I found myself stuck up with a number of ladies and gentlemen on a thing like a greenhouse flower-pot stand, and we were all required to express suitable and varied emotions as Shylock appealed for the fulfilment of the bond which Antonio had given him. This was the first thing I had tried to do on the stage, and I believe it was the most difficult. No doubt Mr.--afterwards Sir Frank--Benson was right in saying that it was the only way to learn how to act; but gesture, facial expression, pantomime, the knack of knowing how to be individual and yet to join in effectively with the crowd; all these things are extremely difficult, very much more difficult than the art of speaking an effective line effectively. But--very likely because the change from my former way of living was so tremendous in every respect--I found the life an enchanting one. Of course I could not have begun under happier auspices; nay, I could not have begun under any auspices half so happy. It has been said, I think, more than once, and said by men far more qualified to speak than I, that if it had not been for the Benson Company, acting as an ordered art, with its technique and tradition, would pretty well have perished out of England. The old stock companies were gone, with their manifold opportunities for learning the actor’s craft. The young man who went on the stage probably walked on for six months or a year in a London production, and unless he were an exceptionally bright young fellow he learned very little. Perhaps, if he were lucky, he was promoted from a thinking part to a speaking one and uttered the line: “You don’t say so!” every night; but still he learned very little. If he became a good actor under this régime, it was a case of genius triumphing over circumstance. Of course good actors come from everywhere: from the academies, from melodramas travelling in the fit-ups, from the chorus of the musical play, from the ranks of the walkers-on in the long London run; but, as I say, these are cases of greatness overcoming difficulties. But under the training provided by the Benson Company it was a man’s fault if he did not learn to act; it was pretty definite proof that there was no acting in his composition. I remember Henry Ainley saying in this very year, 1901: “Well, in the last fortnight I have played twelve different parts, and if that won’t teach a man how to act, nothing will.” This, I may say, was at the end of the Festival Season at Stratford-on-Avon, a strenuous and a delightful time. But, as I say, I could have entered on the boards under no happier auspices. There was a constant succession of small parts, so graded with due tenderness both to the beginner and the audience that not much harm could be done by uneasy awkwardness, and much good was certain to be gained by the beginner. For example, I have a suspicion that the whole pack of us on that flower-pot stand in “The Merchant,” all of us beginners, were about as bad as bad can be; but it really signified little. The people in front were looking at Shylock and Portia, not at us; and I don’t suppose that our incapacity diminished to any calculable extent the public entertainment. Then in the next piece, “As You,” I was a Forest Lord with a line. I had to say to the Banished Duke: “I’ll bring you to him straight,” and Oscar Asche took pains to show me that I must speak it as I moved up stage with my back to the audience; but the fortunes of the play hardly depended on that line, while I was beginning to grow a slight seed of confidence. And how all this was an utterly different world from anything that I had ever conjectured; I cannot express the gulf that yawned between the old and the new. In the former years I struggled with words and phrases and sentences and shades of meaning implied by them: now I strove to understand how something like an attenuated pigtail could become a highly probable fifteenth-century beard and moustaches in a couple of minutes, when skilled hands were laid upon it. And I was occupied with R.U.E. and L.U.E. and 5 and 8, and how to stand so that you command the stage as F. R. B. instructed me, and the endeavour to take in and profit by the kindly tips and hints and cautions given by the elder members of the company: here was a holiday, indeed, for a man who had tried to tear the secret of literature from the thorn castle where it is concealed, who had torn his hands and his heart sadly enough in the endeavour. I have mentioned the tips and hints of the Elder Brethren amongst the Bensonians. This was a great part of the discipline and instruction of the course. It was not only what Benson said at rehearsal, it was also what Asche or Rodney or Brydone or Swete said after the rehearsal or after the show, and often what they said was, quite rightly, highly uncomplimentary. I remember when Henry Herbert--“starring” in America now, I believe--was playing in “King John,” it fell to him to pronounce the lines which speak of painting the lily and gilding refined gold. He spoke them, as I thought, with great spirit; but Brydone--dead not long ago--took him apart afterwards and