The Columbian. [volume] (Bloomsburg, Pa.) 1866-1910, 1882-06-09
Dramatic Academies.

When we were admonished in our
copy-books to live and learn, the most
of us would have preferred that method
to studying to learn. But the copy.
book was right, it is only by living that
we learn. What copy-book would ever
have told us, for example, that the
wonderful men and women, with the
wanderful things they say and do on
the stage, are the result of spontan-
eous conjunction9 There isn't copy
book in the universal curriculum that
would have taught a man that But it
is fact. The world that has been
going to the theatre in growing num-
bers since the circus became nomad,
would never have dreamed, we dare
say, that the glass of fashion and mould
of form held up for public instruction,
had never been created by study or re.
fined by artistic application.
In other words seriously, the world
is Just reminded by a meeting in Lon
don, at Irving's Lyceum, that of the
vast number of actors and actresses
who haye interpreted every phase of
human emotion, from SHAKESPEARE at
the Globe, in Houndsditch, to Wallack
in his new Broadway shell, none have
been schooled. A man must serve an
apprenticeship to make boots, or gloves,
or bread, or what not man, even be
he genius, must serve long years of
apprenticeship to plead at the bar; to
sit in judgement; to discount notes; to
write a newspaper paragraph: man
must be long and welltrained to take
a pulpit; to practice or teach the science
of medicine-in short, it is only the
poet who is born and not made, and
yet even he must learn the variations
that make his verse, the history
that graces his figures, the science
without which his measure is empty.
But the man or woman who is to
combine in the subtlest shape all these
callings, walks from the night of igno-
rance to the light of fulfillment. The
actors profession is the only one which
has neither school nor academy, meth
ods of instruction or standards of de.
gree. So eminent person-ages in the
ranks, suddenly aroused to the gro
tesque attitude of the stage, come
together in London to devise national
school for dramatic teaching, such as
exists in France, in Bavaria, in Prus-
sia, in Saxony, in Austria, in Russia.
The speeches were made by men who
have amused and delighted audiences,
but Toole himself never personated
anything funnier than his own charac-
ter as he stood there owning that his
mind never received an hours training
for the undertaking of the master
pieces he has for years displayed to de-
lighted and critical audiences.
We wonder how many people who
go to our home theatres ever reflect on
the anomaly of the situation. Houses
are filled with spectators to witness the
characterizations of personages whom
the actors cannot possibly present,
since they not only have none of the
training requisite, but they want in the
historical knowledge as well as the in
sight into metaphysical conditions,
without which the actor is mere
hummer and the stage derision. In
one sense, however, experience is a
species of education, as the careers of
many of our illustrious actors attest.
Were it not for this, our American
dramatic art would rank even lower
than it does-for while we have some
eminent students of the drama and
conspicuous exponents of the passions
they are rare and only once in life
time upported.-PreSS.