The Spiritualist newspaper > No.312, August 16th 1878

84
THE SPIRITUALIST.
Aug. 16, 1878.
THE MENTAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL INFLUENCE OF
ACTING.
(From <( The Spectator”)
The death of Charles Mathews—a most regrettable event, for within
a limited range he was an admirable artist—reminds us of a curious
lacuna in the history of the Stage. There does not exist, so far as we
know, certainly there does not exist in English, anything like a good auto¬
biography of an actor, a life describing the intellectual and moral effect
of the profession upon the actor’s self. This effect should be great.
The world believes much, and we think justly, in the effect of books, and
swallows greedily stories of groups of boys made bandits by Schiller’s
“ Robbers,” and every now and then proposes to prohibit “ penny dread¬
fuls ; ” and the effect of reading must be slight compared with that of
acting. It is simply impossible that a man gifted with the sympathies
essential to an actor should be able to realise many characters so com¬
pletely to himself that he can represent them to others, and make them
laugh or weep with his temporary second self, without those characters
exercising some effect upon his mind ; and we want to know both its
kind and its degree. Was Charles Mathews or was he not more of an
agreeable rattle because he incessantly studied how agreeable rattles
should be' depicted? His biographers say that his cool, laughing
insouciance lasted all his long life, and sustained him under all diffi¬
culties, and it is at least possible that it may have been deepened by his
professional assumption of the quality. The effect must be increased
by the process of natural selection, which induces an actor to choose
those parts which he can represent best, and with which, therefore, he
must have a certain nearness of sympathy that one would think must
greatly deepen the impact of their impression upon himself. One
catches qualities from friends who are similar. Elliston, for instance,
perhaps the best known of all actors Of the second rank, had about him
a certain liking at once for graciousness and for pomp which made him
inclined to represent kings ; and he studied so many parts of that kind,
and acted them so well, that his friends all believed in their influence
on his character. He became, as life went on, more and more the kind
of benignant but over-stately and ceremonious grandee that he loved to
represent, regarded all about him from a certain height, as his subjects,
and met the endless difficulties of his career with a feeling which kept
him always cheerful, and which could not be distinguished from
benign condescension towards the creditors, supers, patrons, and
other stupid people with a right to exist who kept trying to ruffle
his serenity. It has now and then happened to an actor to play
a part so well that the public never ceases to demand it, and he himself
has begun to confess to an influence arising from the repetition which
perplexed and worried his mind. We do not know if the saying attri¬
buted to Mrs. Dion Boucicault is true or not, but it exactly represents
our point. Her representation of the dark “ Colleen ” in the Colleen
Hawn so charmed all London that the piece, perhaps the best melo¬
drama ever written, to have no genius in it, went on for hundreds of
nights, till at last the actress declared that she must stop, that her
brain was growing confused, and that “ she began to be uncertain
whether she was acting the Colleen Bawn, or the Colleen Bawn was
acting Mrs. Boucicault.” We have heard Americans say that they
believed that most perfect of actors, Mr. Jefferson, was distinctly modi¬
fied in character, and for the better, by his endless repetitions of Rip
Van Winkle ; and certainly it is difficult to conceive how a man could
create that character, and then pass his life in representing it, without
imbibing in some degree its essential qualities—the spirit of humorous
tolerance and sense of the puzzle of daily life. But one wants direct
evidence of that. Does Mr. Irving, for example, find that when he has
been acting Hamlet for fifty nights the tone of his own inner mind has
become more or less Hamletian ? We say less because, of course, the
chance of an influence of repulsion must always exist, and we can
imagine an actor hating ambition more because he was every night a
Richard III., or growing graver because for part of every day he was
Mercutio. Liston’s incessant playing of fools helped, in all human
probability, to make of him the depressed Evangelical he was; and
we could hardly imagine Mr. Irving less alive to the uselessness of
religious formalism because he had played for seventy nights as
Louis XI. Could a man act Prospero every day for a year, and not
acquire something, however little, of dignified serenity of mind, of the
sense of the power possessed by the immaterial to rule material circum¬
stances ? Or could he be Jaques for a year, and not tend to melancholy
reflectiveness ? It has often been remarked that men to whom life
seems unreal, who have a sense of the histrionic element in it, are
the least dependable of mankind; and of all foibles, absence of
dependableness is the one most frequent with an actor. May not that
be increased by his half-dubiety whether he is himself or that other
man whom every night he seems, to a watching audience, to be ? Can
Mr. Charles Mathews have separated himself entirely from the Sir
Charles Coldstream, of whom the little girl said that she did not
admire that Mr. Mathews, he was so lazy, and all through the play
was only himself. Is Mr. Jefferson ever quite sure, as he walks about,
that Schneider is not at his heels ? That the long repetition of a
dramatic character will make certain physical mannerisms cling to an
actor for months, and even years after he has discontinued the per¬
formance, is quite certain—just watch Mr. Sothern as Garrick—and
why not mental mannerisms too 1 Was there no trace of Lady
Macbeth’s nature, no iron of resolve in Mrs. Siddons, even though she
had acted tragedy, and especially that tragedy, so long that she could
not get rid of her grandeur in private life, and appalled an
unhappy waiter with—
You’ve brought me water, boy I I asked for beer.
The speculation, though it may seem of little importance, is of rare
interest to students of the human mind, and solid evidence about it
might greatly affect education, more particularly by determining
tutors as to the Jesuits’ contention, the utility of an enforced attitude i
of mind in moulding the inner character ; but solid evidence can only
be obtained when some considerable actor, himself a man able enough
and conscious enough to trace the workings of his own mind, shall
delight the world and keep his memory fresh by giving us his auto¬
biography, with accounts in it of other things than his triumphs over
audiences, his difficulties with managers, or his disputes with rivals or
assistants. Such a book would be a treasure.
THE MOST VULGAR FORM OF MATERIALISM.
{From “ Truth.”)
There are men of whose success no one is jealous, others of whose
prosperity no one is envious ; men whom all rejoice to see on the
pinnacle where their long and honourable toil has earned them the right
to stand, and others whose exceptional wellbeing excites now a laugh,
and now a sneer, with the feeling, from the stricter sort, that they would
not have twice that amount of money if they had to get it by half those
dirty practices. For there is no question about it—according to the way
in which things go at this present time, dirty practices pay in pelf if not
in repute. The successful man is always self-betrayed; not always in
the same manner but to the same invariable result. He may be of many
kinds. Let us take first the type dear to novelists—a man of low birth,
with a loud voice and a dictatorial manner, capacious as to his chest and
defective in his English, respectful to no man, deferential to no woman,
worshipping chiefly the wealth which a man has made by his own
exertions, yet not disinclined to hobnob with a title if he can catch one
willing to be treated in a corner—when he brings down his golden feet
heavily on the frayed old patent of nobility, and makes my Lord feel the
force of wealth if not the power of breeding. He is the living monument
of his own greatness, and he takes care that no one shall overlook him
—the clever alchemist who has found the Universal Solvent, and learnt
the secret of transmutation. Perhaps his alkahest was discovered in
the cauldron where he boiled his soap; or he may have picked his gold
out of rags and bones; but, say the experts, by no possibility can he
ever be a gentleman, or even pass muster in the ranks with the rest.
Rich and uncultivated, he hangs, like Mahomet’s coffin, between the
heaven of the aristocrat and the earth of the proletaire. The one will
not have him, and he will not have the other. Even the middle-class
gentry who hold their own, and all of whom he could buy and not feel
the loss, even the rector and the lawyer, the doctor and the half-pay
captain, do not want him. His wealth overpowers them, and his
vulgarity offends. Everything is inharmonious throughout—the man
and his money, the coarse core and the splendid envelope, the lavish
expenditure on all that will make a show, with the certain meanness in
all that speaks of early personal habits. If he does not find friends
among the middle classes, still less does he among the higher; and it is
only when he has bought husbands and wives for his children in the
ranks of the impecunious well-born that he is able to lift up his head
as a man among men, and is not the flying-fish of the neighbourhood,
pecked at by the birds and pursued by the sharks.
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.
Errata.—In Baron Dirckinck-Holtnfeld’s recent article there were several
printer’s errors, chiefly in proper names, due to indistinct writing. The
words “ to Rome,” in a quoted paragraph, should have been between
brackets, as an interpolation by the author.
Price Two Shillings. Post Free. Cloth. Red Edges,
SPIRITUALISM.
By P. P. Alexander, M.A.;
Author of Mill and Carlyle, Moral Causation, etc.
This work contains among other items of interest a record of phenomena
observed at seances by the author, and a close criticism of some of the writings
of Professor Tyndall about Spiritualism.
“'Mr. Alexander is unquestionably a very clever writei’.”—Saturday Review,
The Spiritualist Newspaper Branch Office, Bloomsbury, London.
Price Five Shillings. Post Free. Cloth.
A LYRIC OF THE GOLDEN AGE.
Given through the inspirational mediumship of Thomas Lake Harris. These
poems, given while Mr. Harris was in a state of trance, are of rare literary
excellence.
The Spij'itualist Newspaper Branch Office, Bloomsbury, London.
Price Five Shillings. Post Free.- Cloth. Crown 8vo.
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SOMNAMBULISM.
By Edwin Lee, M.D.,
Corresponding member of the Medical Academies of Paris, Berlin, Munich,'
Brussels, Madrid, Turin, and Florence. Author of the Prize Essay on
“Mesmerism and Therapeutics,” awarded by the Milan Society for the
Promotion of Science, Arts, and Letters.
The Spiritualist Newspaper Branch Office, Bloomsbury, London.
Price 3s. 6d. Post Free. Illustrated. Demy 8vo, 407 pp.
STUDIEN UBER DIE GIESTERWELT,
By the Baroness Adelma von Yay (Countess Wurmbrand).
Also, by the same Authoress, price 2s. Gd., post free (Illustrated with diagrams),
GEIST, KRAFT, STOFF.
The Spiritualist Newspaper Branch Office, Bloomsbury, London.