The Actor and His Feelings. It is all nonsense that an actor must feel his part just as the character would in life. The old doctrine has it, to be Macbeth you must be overpowered with ambition to the point of murder, to be a Lear you must be "every inch a king" but in your decline, to be a Romeo you must be full of "rapture and a wild desire," to be a Katherine you must be an uncontrolled shrew. Of course all of this is just sheer nonsense. Carry it to its logical conclusion and it would be entirely impossible to find an actor to play Richard III and keep out of jail, Hamlet and stay out of the madhouse, or Caliban and escape the psychopathic hospital. No, the rule is not so simple as that. Yet the rule is very understandable; it is, in simple, the actor must feel his part richly enough to act it well, but not enough to be lost in it.

Let us explain this a little further, for it is the key to the problem of controlling the emotions in interpretation. An actor or interpreter of lines to be successful must be sensitive enough to the meaning of the lines to be moved by them in the spirit the author intended. If he lacks this sensitivity, he might just as well be angry when trying to portray love or be jealous when imitating ambition; it will not make any difference for he will miss it anyway. If, however, he is capable of white passion or red anger or black remorse, he stands a chance of interpreting the lines with some success. But because all art requires headwork and planning and foresight, he must not get so caught in emotion that he loses his judgment and his sense of values. No matter how moved he is or how much more moved he seems to be, he must keep his head enough to know what he is doing and whether he has gone far enough or too far. Any time he has not wit enough left to tell himself how near he has come to hitting the mark, he is no artist; he is just a temperamentalist having a pleasant little orgy all by himself.

The psychology of the situation bears this out. In the first place one cannot go through all the motions and tensions of being angry, or passionate, or frightened, without feeling something of anger, passion, or fright; because, after all, what

constitutes anger is simply tensing the muscles in that degree and complexity that we call anger; what we call passion is tensing those muscles that when tensed we call passion; what we call fear is in turn tensing-and relaxing-into fear postures. Emotion itself is a certain pattern of tension and slacking, and it is nothing else. So that the actor who, by his skill and mastery of his bodily parts, can make his body go through the tensions of anger, or at least such of them as he can let go safely without losing his head, will be to that extent angry. This holds true especially the first few score times that he tries it. You have all had the experience of being so moved to tears by a certain story that you could not read it aloud because the story gave you the tension and postures of weeping. But after enough readings, you could go through it with gradually lessening floods of tears and finally could read it in complete cold blood, simply because it did not send you through all those tensions any more.

All art is suggestive, but some is more suggestive than others. Any art seeks to bring out essentials and to omit all that is not essential. If it were possible to reproduce life on the stage exactly, it would not be art. A photograph untouched by an artist's hand is not art-it is science. It reproduces exactly non-essentials as well as essentials. A good painting of the same object is art for it reproduces only the essentials of color, form, and perspective, and gives the impression of a real reproduction.1

Herein lies the secret of successful emotional presentation by an actor. He will be at his best in any given part during that period when the lines and postures he takes still stir him, and when he has not yet learned to do it all merely on the surface. Your first sweeping emotion goes all through you and ought to be overpowering; at the end, through practice of and skill in your art, you can put it all under control. The actor's problem is first of all to be caught up in the emotion just as any other richly endowed person is caught up on

1 From Rollo Anson Tallcott: The Art of Acting and Public Reading. Copyright, 1922. Used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

reading the lines to himself, and then to get that emotion controlled enough so that he can employ his actor's art in reading to others; that is, so that he can study and calculate and criticize what he is doing and note what effect it has upon other people. This is the answer to the question, “Must the actor feel his part?" The answer clearly is, Yes and No.

It is plain to be seen by now that the good interpreter must have a sense of values. He must have rich and pressing urges, but he must always know what he is doing. To be something other than mediocre, he must understand men and women and their relations one to another; the feeling of the mother for her babe, children for their parents, the bride for the bridegroom, the family around the deathbed, friends and neighbors at the ordination service; the feeling of the soldier for his buddy, the maiden for her good name, the lad for his ambition. The best of literature is always made up from the relations of people with each other, and he who would interpret this literature richly must have a rich experience with human contacts. He must also have a sense of moral values, some feeling for right and wrong, some recognition of the standards by which men carry on. There should be, too, some measure of religious elevation, some regard for devotion, for wholehearted sacrifice, for fullness of life. And above all, the interpreter should be human, tolerant, sympathetic, understanding that all of us are after all but people, and that our common humanity makes us in common brothers and sisters.

The following poem, it so happens, carries one of the important secrets of art: can you probe the meaning and find. the secret?

A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

And breaking the golden lilies afloat

With the dragon-fly on the river?

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river,
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flow'd the river;

And hack'd and hew'd as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan
(How tall it stood in the river!),

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.

"This is the way," laugh'd the great god Pan, (Laughed while he sat by the river),

"The only way, since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh, as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain-
For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds in the river.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

CHAPTER III

THE RELATION BETWEEN INTERPRETATION,

IMPERSONATION, AND ACTING

We have seen that interpretation is the art of obtaining from written symbols the inspiration to carry an author's meaning to some one else. Before launching into the actual study and practice of interpretation, we should have a differentiation between two similar forms of art that also use the printed page, the arts of impersonation and acting. These three sister arts are easily differentiated on the basis of the amount of activity employed. Acting uses the whole man; voice, arms, body, face-everything. In addition it may employ costuming, lighting, movement, and one's relation to other people on the stage. It is the fullest form of expression dealing with the reading of "lines." Impersonation is a little less full in its demands: it is acting with the omission of costuming, lighting, stage pictures. Interpretation in turn is impersonation with the omission of walking about, change of posture, and fullness of gesture and facial expression.

There are in fact no hard and fast lines of demarcation among these three, for the problem as to which of these to use is solved always in terms of the audience to which they are to be addressed and the intention of the reader. If you are going to take part in a play, move about and take your part in the stage pictures to fulfill your part in telling the story. Do not stand still and impersonate only, and especially do not eliminate posture, gesture, and facial expression leaving nothing but interpretation.

If you are using literature to present the character of the people whose words you purpose to use, and if this is all you want to do, do not pretend that you have a stage full of