The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-04-29
OFFICE BoY-Anything to see the ball game.


 sting has to be taken out. Sir Henry Irving had to drop all the fee-faw-fum business of Richard Crookback and to present him as humorfst. MT. Forbes Robertson has been the most acceptable Hamlet of our time. because he insisted on the sunny side of the man and generally gave Fillmore q will be the first of the dramatic cate gories t6 go by the board. Comedy will foIlow--at any rate the comedy of manners and the comedy of intrigue. every form of comedy which assumes the differences. We fancy there is still long innings before the comedy of character, because this kind de- bends upon individual differences and the Socialist Confederation of 2270 A.. D. (M. Frances date) will scarcely have abolished those. Besides. the craving of the actors for character parts" is to be all quite ineradicable.
 Then drama, drama proper, accord ing to M. France, will vanish with the capitalization of an "exact knowledge of reality" We agree. Drama postu- lates the conflict of individual wills, sudden crisis, arbitrary wants. But drum and trumpet history is an an- achronism, the great man theory" ob- solete, and we read history as record of gradual economic changes, the re- sultant of social forces-that Is to say, we read 1t panoramically, not dramat- ically. Streams of tendency are too big for the play house. Statistical ta- bles, the rate of wages and the price of the quartern loaf, curves of imports and exports, are too dull for it. If we had all read Arthur Young and Taine we should be unable to sit out the av- craze French Revolution" play--all guillotines, tumbrils and "sea-green Incorruptibles' es'-with patience. Then the psychology of the stage Is too sum mary. Think of what the novel can do in this direction--Mr. Henry James's Golden Bowl" for instance. Only the merest fraction of the reality in that book could be conveyed through the medium of the theatre. We will risk conjecture on our own account about this spread of "an exact knowledge of reality" It will abolish the theatre by making acting impos- sible. We shall reject acting, as by its very natrue absurd. For 1t Is in the very nature of acting to present effects divorced from causes. A young man apes an old one by painted wrinkles, a gray wig and an artificial squeak in his voice. A LondOner who has just dined at his club and come down to the theater in hanson proceeds to harangue the Roman mob over Caesar s
 
 Richmond on Bosworth Field. These limitations of reality pass muster with us because of our ignorance. But an "exact knowledge of reality" would re- veal to us a thousand little touches of age which the young actor has missed and must miss because he Is not really aged. It would convince us that such a cause" as a Londoner of today, with his individuality and environment and life, cannot by any possibility produce such an "effect" as a Mark Antony or a Richard.
 Nietszche has drawn attention to this impossibility in his own blunt fashion. "It is the blissful illusion of actors," says he. that the historical persons re- presented by them really have felt as they do during their performance; but in this they are greatly mistaken. Their power of imitation and divination, which they are desirous of represent ing as a clear-sight faculty, only pen- etrates far enough to explain gestures, accents and looks--in short, the exte- rior; that is, they grasp the phantom soul of a great hero, statesman, war rior or an ambitious, jealous, desperate person; they come pretty near the soul, but fail to arrive at the spirit" This pretty near" which satisfies us today in our ignorance, will by and by fepel us in our completer knowledge. It is the little rift within the lute. In fact, to the eye of omniseence (the eye we are attributing to 2270 A. D.) there will be no such thing as successful imitation, because nothing ever really duplicates another thing in the unl- verse. Everything stands alone, point to which myriads of different forces, acting through all conceivable time, have at that moment converged.
 But in another aspect everything in the universe is in casual relationship with everything else; so that, as a sage has observed, If we knew one thing thoroughly, we should know every thing" Thus, with an exact knowi- edge of reality made universal. the subtlest conceivable acting would be but a fragrant imposture. Even as it is, though none of us has the exact knowledge there turks in our subcon- sciousness enough feeling for the es- sentiaI truth and harmony of things of so-called "Protean" acting, the twisting of one personality into the form of another by a tour de force. It is significant that we hear less and less of the old complaint that such and such an actor always plays himself" In reality 1t Is the best thing he can do. He offends less in that way against the memorable laws of nature. He gives us greater proportion of effects undivorced from cause. he is less out of harmony with the essential truth of things. Consequently, he is the one actor who will outlive the rest-until his fatal hour comes, circa 2270 A. D.