1895.] Mr. Henry Irving on Acting : an Art. 419 



WEEKLY MEETING, 



Friday Afternoon, February 1, 1895. 



Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D. LL.D. F.R.S. Treasurer and 

 Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Henry Irving, Esq. D.Lit. 



Acting : an Art. 



My immediate purpose is not so much to deal with the existing 

 classification of the Fine Arts as to add to the recognised number 

 one other, the Art of Acting — that art which Voltaire spoke of as 

 " the most beautiful, the most difficult, the most rare." The claim 

 that I make is purely a technical one, for the thing itself has long 

 ago been done. The great bulk of thinking — and unthinking — 

 people accept Acting as one of the Arts ; it is merely for a formal 

 and official recognition of the fact that I ask. The people, who 

 are the students of life, have learned their lesson, and perhaps the 

 professors should now learn it also. In the face of the widespread 

 influence of the stage of to-day and its place in the thoughts and 

 hearts of the people, it would seem about as necessary to vindicate 

 acting as an art as it would be to justify the existence of the air 

 we breathe or the sunshine which makes life joyous ; but when 

 we find that up to now the records are deficient, we should, I think, 

 endeavour to have them completed. Even so widely sympathetic 

 a writer as Taine by inference excludes acting when he speaks of 

 " the five great arts of poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, and 

 music"; and sometimes lesser minds than his use the general 

 omission to classify acting as amongst the higher organized efforts 

 of man, as a means of perpetually assailing this particular craft and 

 those who follow it ; recalling an eccentric and intolerant time, when 

 it was said against Shakespeare that he had never been to Court, 

 and against Moliere's memory that his body had been denied full 

 Christian burial. Official recognition of anything worthy is a good, 

 or at least a useful thing. It is a part, and an important part, of 

 the economy of the State ; if it is not, of what use are titles and 

 distinctions, names, ribbons, badges, offices, in fact all the titular 

 and sumptuary ways of distinction ? Systems and courts, titles and 

 offices, have all their part in a complex and organised civilisation, 

 and no man and no calling is particularly pleased at being compelled 

 to remain outside a closed door. 



Acting is a part of human nature. It is originally nature's own 

 method of education in the earliest stages ; and its purposeful organi- 

 sation is like that of any other organisation — an Art. Out of their 

 heightening civilisation the Greeks evolved and formulated a drama, 



