complete, as splendid an isolation. The critic who is within every artist should be his only acknowledged audience. Per "Besides," she added, "the audience often tells you wrong. I tremble for you if you are confirmed in your weakness by popular success. Beware of that. haps you have not done your best. The audience may forgive you, the reviewers may forgive you. Both may be too lenient, too indulgent, or they may not know what your best really is. Often that is the case. But you cannot forgive yourself. You must not. seems to me that Modjeska once told me there was noth It thoughtful way toward the door and out into the hubbub of Bleecker Street. Then we devoted ourselves to a most extraordinary confection, the zabaglione aforesaid. It had arrived unbidden, as a matter of course. Even this could not banish Madame Réjane-"A performance of hers would no sooner begin than I would feel perfectly free to go out of the theater and take a walk' " heart, and ask yourself, 'Did I really play well to-night?' Or, better still," and here I caught Mrs. Fiske's eyes twinkling as if she only half meant what she was saying, but would say it for the young man's good,-"turn to the critic. within you and ask, 'What was so very wrong with my performance to-night?'" With which parting admonition we watched our young friend betake his a persistent phrase, "You must forget the audience's very existence." It lin gered in the air and brought trooping in a host of old memories-old memories . of Mrs. Fiske confiding her emotions to the back-drop when it was apparently no part of her intention that those out front should catch the exact content of her speech, memories of many a critic's comment on her diction and many a player's fretful complaint that sometimes he "could n't hear a word she said." I could not resist singing a bit of F. P. A.'s "bit of deathless rhyme" at this point. "Time was, when first that voice I heard, Despite my close and tense endeavor, When many an important word Was lost and gone forever; "Some words she runstogetherso; Some others are distinctly stated; Some cometoofast and so me too slow And some are syncopated. And yet no voice-I am sincereExists that I prefer to hear." "Charming!" said Mrs. Fiske, vastly pleased. And did she defend herself? Not she. Quite the reverse. "My friend," she confessed, "that was no part of a misguided theory of acting; it was simply slovenliness. For years I had no appreciation whatever of the importance of careful speech. Only of recent years, after some preliminary lessons given to me by Victor Maurel, have I learned to use my voice. Three hours of voice practice every day of the seasonthat, properly, is the actor's chore. He must have such practice at least one hour a day. With any less time than that it is absolutely impossible to keep the instrument in proper condition, absolutely impossible. Without such practice the voice will not respond instantly to every tone requirement; yet the actor must be able to play with his voice as Tetrazzini plays with hers. Indeed, he must have more than one voice. He must have at least three three complete registers. You could write a book about this long, delicate, mysterious, and interesting science, a book that every actor should study. From it he could evolve his own method. Monsieur Maurel taught me how to teach myself. The practice followed, and still goes on. Only so, and then only in the last few years, have I even begun to speak decently in the theater. Before that it was monstrous, so dreadful that I should not have been allowed to act at all. I should have been wiped out. And I suspect that, if the American theater had been in a state of health, I would have been." This confession would in all probability surprise a good many of Mrs. Fiske's critics as well as a good many of her most fervent admirers who have, I fancy, been rather flattering themselves that they were merely growing accustomed to the articulation of a voice, "staccato, hurried, nervous, brisk, cascading, cascading, intermittent, choppy," or who had vaguely accepted an occasional moment of inaudibility as in some way an essential of that kind of acting which has inspired many a chapter headed "Restraint." "Restraint!" said Mrs. Fiske, a little amused at its inevitable recurrence. "I seem to have heard that word before. But is it anything more than normality in acting, the warning from the critic that dwells in the inner consciousness of every artist? Is it not merely good taste controlling the tumult of emotion? "There has been a disposition in some quarters to speak of it as a modern factor in the actor's art, but was it ever better expressed than in Hamlet's immortal advice to the players? I think not. Perhaps there has been more stress upon it in our generation, but that was merely because it followed immediately upon a generation somewhat given to violent hysteria in what they absurdly call emotional acting, as if there was any other kind. But that was the exception, not the rule, a passing storm, gone, I think, for good. "It offends us all now; I think it offended some of us always. But it was something more than an offense against taste. The actress who used to shake the very theater with her sobs, and sometimes -actually, I have seen it-knock over the lamp and tear down the curtains in the excess of her woe, was a humiliating, degrading spectacle. Such acting, the hysterical emotionalism of a day gone by, was ignoble, essentially ignoble. Human beings are far better than that, less selfish, more gallant. The woman, on the stage or off it, who wildly goes to pieces over some purely personal, and therefore petty, grief of her own is ignoble. 'My head is bloody, but unbowed'-there is the ideal. The quivering hand, the eyes moist, but the upper lip stiff, the brave smile-that is it. The brave smile in the face of adversity has more of the stuff of tragedy than all the outward emotionalism ever ranted, more moving to the reflective mind, touching far more readily the human heart than all the stage tears ever shed.” It was probably inevitable that the old question of stage suffering-how much does the actor really feel?-should arise then. Mrs. Fiske warned me not to trust any player's analysis of his own psychology, not hers or any other's. Eleanora Duse-"With such genius as hers has always "Often we 're the last who can really tell are his stock in trade. Why, if you have ever wept over a story or at the play you yourself know the feeling and its extent. But in his case, in addition to that sympathy, the more poignant his expression, the more cheering is the approval from the critic within him. He may be sobbing his heart out, but, such is the dual nature of the actor, at the same time he hears the inner voice saying: 'Well done to-night! Well done!' And he is glad. "And the intense suffering he may feel in the earlier performances becomes a matter of memory. He remembers the method, the symbols, by which at first he gave it expression. He remembers the means, and relying on that memory, need not himself feel so keenly. The greater the artist, the less keenly need he feel. The actor with no science must keep lashing his own emotions to get the effect a master technician would know how to express with his thoughts at the other end of the world. I suppose Paderewski does play a little better with his mind on the composition before him, but so skilled a virtuoso can afford to spare his own feelings." "And you?" I suggested. "Oh, I have found the tragic rôles wearing beyond my strength. Hannele, Rebecca West, Tess-such racking parts as these I shall never play again. Hereafter you will see me only in comedy. For, let me tell you something,"—and her voice dropped to a whisper,-"I have retired from the stage." As I knew perfectly well that she was at that very time embarking lightly on something like an eighty-weeks' tour of the country, I suppose I looked incredulous. "That's because no one ever withdrew so modestly. Usually, when an actor retires, the world knows it. I have retired, but nobody knows it. I am a little tired, and I must husband my strength. So from now on for me only 'play' in the theater. But this question of 'to feel or not to feel' which actors solemnly discuss until they are black in the face, it is all set forth here by a man who was not an actor at all." She extracted then from under my hat on the chair beside me a little green volume which I had just been rereading. Obviously she approved. It was George Henry Lewes's "On Actors and the Art of Acting." Indeed, it must have been some chance reference to this that started the whole conversation. "Here we have the soundest and most discerning treatise on the subject I have ever read, the only good one in any language. Every actor would agree with it, but few could have made so searching an analysis, and fewer still could have expressed it in such telling, clarifying phrases. Some of it is so obvious as to seem scarcely worth being said, and yet many reams of silly stuff about the stage would never have been printed if the writers had had these same obvious principles as a groundwork of opinion. For all the changing fashions, what Lewes wrote forty years ago and more holds good to-day. Thus fixed are the laws of science. I think," she said, "we 'll have to rename it 'The Science of Acting,' and use it as a text-book for the national conservatory when the theater's ship comes in. "And see here," she said, turning to the introduction and reading aloud with tremendous solemnity: "A change seems coming over the state of the stage, and there are signs of a revival of the once splendid art of the actor. To effect this revival there must be not only accomplished artists and an eager public; there must be a more enlightened public. The critical pit, filled with players who were familiar with fine acting and had trained judgments, has disappeared. In its place there is a mass of amusement seekers, not without a nucleus of intelligent spectators, but of this nucleus only a small minority has very accurate ideas of what constitutes good art." "Dear man," said Mrs. Fiske as we gathered up our things to depart, "that might have been written yesterday or a hundred years ago. In fact, I imagine it was. Of course it was. I have never known a time when a writer of the stage was not either deploring the 'degradation of the drama,' as Mr. Lewes does here a little later, or else descrying on the horizon the promise of a wonderful revival. Do you know that they were uttering this same lament in accents of peculiar melancholy at a time when Fielding managed one theater, when Sheridan was writing, and when you had only to go around the corner to see Kemble or Garrick or Mrs. Siddons?" As we strolled up through Washington Square Mrs. Fiske became a little troubled about her admonitions to the imaginary would-be actor. "Of course," she confided to me, "we were a little toplofty with that nice young man. For his own good we said a great deal about the need of ignoring the audience, and so forth. When he is a little older he will understand that to try to please the audience is to trifle with it, if not actually to insult it. He will instinctively turn for judgment to the far less lenient critic within himself. But I wish we had told him he must go on the stage with love in his heart-always. He must love his fellows back of the curtain. He must love even the 'my-part' actor, though he die in the attempt. He must love the people who in his subconsciousness he knows are 'out there.' He must love them all, the dull, tired business man, the wearied critic, the fashionably dressed men and women who sometimes (not often) talk too loud, and thereby betray a lack of breeding and intelligence. There are always splendid souls 'out there.' But most of all he will love the boys and girls, the men and women, who sit in the cheapest seats, in the very last row of the top gallery. They have given more than they can afford to come. In the most selfeffacing spirit of fellowship they are listening to catch every word, watching to miss no slightest gesture or expression. To save his life the actor cannot help feeling these nearest and dearest. He cannot help wishing to do his best for them. He cannot help loving them best of all." (The topic of the next article will be "Mrs, Fiske Designs a National Theater."-THE EDITOR.) The Blundering in Greece By T. LOTHROP STODDARD Author of "Rome Rampant," "The Economic Heresy of the Allies,” etc. T long since became a truism that in IT the present war the Balkan Peninsula has been the graveyard of Allied diplomatic and military reputations. From the hour when the Goeben and the Breslau dropped anchor in the Golden Horn down. to the latest disasters on the Rumanian plains, the Entente powers have marched with uncanny regularity from disaster to disaster. Yet nowhere has this Balkan fatality wrought a more pathetic tragedy than in Greece. The result of Entente ineptitude has here been the temporary ruin of one of the most promising of European races, with no commensurate gain to the Allies themselves. How this came to pass will appear from the melancholy story. When the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914, the Allies, so far as Greece was concerned, held all the cards. For two of the Entente powers, France and England, the Greek people felt an al most filial veneration. Prime sponsors at the Greek birth and indulgent watchers over the rather trying crises of Hellenic adolescence, England and France had ever posed as Greece's best friends, and this traditional Philhellenism the Greeks requited by a warm affection for the great powers of the West. Lord Byron was one of Greece's national heroes, while French culture and French ideals were vital factors in Greek intellectual and social life. Toward Russia, it is true, Greek feeling was by no means so cordial, and this for many excellent reasons. Nevertheless, this coolness toward Russia was of slight moment beside Hellenic sympathy for the Western powers. But Anglo-French sympathies were not the only bonds which drew Hellas toward the Allies. The whole Balkan political situation as it then stood tended to range Greece on the Entente side. The upshot of the recent Balkan wars had been an |
