1895.] on Acting : an Art. 423 



assume the attitude of Cinderella's sisters in the fairy tale. Let me 

 offer a suggestion in the shape of a logical problem. 



Hogarth painted a picture of David Garrick at a moment of his 

 life and in such a way that all who ever saw him recognise the pro- 

 totype of a certain historical character. No one denies — can deny — 

 that this is a work of art. Now Shakespeare wrote a play in which 

 Kichard III. is a character. Can any one deny that this is a work 

 of art? Garrick, in his playing, appeared on the stage in such 

 wise that those who saw him knew that the man before them was 

 the man Garrick, whilst at the same time he seemed by many signs 

 and in many ways to be the image, copy — what you will — of 

 Shakespeare's Eichard III., though Garrick gave his Shakespeare 

 adulterated with Cibber. Yet Garrick's work in producing this im- 

 pression was, we are to be told, not a work of art. Why it was not 

 so I leave those to say who assert that acting is not an art. But let 

 me point out to such that they will have this difficulty to encounter 

 — if Garrick's purposed labour was not the exercise of an art, 

 what was it ? If the product of such purposed labour was not a work 

 of art, what was it ? The poet Shakespeare conceived a thought, the 

 artist Shakespeare worked it out into dramatic form — the actor 

 Garrick translated the poet's thought, as given in the artist's words, 

 into something which the public who saw and heard recognised. The 

 painter Hogarth took the image which he saw — Shakespeare's idea 

 and Garrick's form transmuted by something not an art to a visible 

 and tangible shape — and fixed it on his canvas for future ages to see 

 and admire. What, then, was it that broke the chain of intentional 

 effort that led from Shakespeare's imagination to Hogarth's canvas ? 

 Where is the flaw in this intellectual lode ? By what quip or crank 

 of thought are we asked to deny that one alone of these varied steps 

 in the crystallisation of a thought is not ruled by Art — and that one, 

 man's intelligent use of the powers nature has given him ? Which 

 denial reminds one of the butcher who asked whether Edmund Kean 

 spoke the character of Othello out of his own head or learnt it from 

 a book ; and on being told the state of the case, exclaimed against 

 paying to hear a man repeat what every man able to read could do 

 as well for himself. 



The only reasons for acting not being an art that I have ever heard 

 alleged, are that it is simply imitative or mimetic, that it does not 

 create, that it does not last, and that it is not exercised with materials 

 such as are used in the other arts. The second of these has been 

 disposed of by the simplest examination of the word in its philo- 

 logical aspect. Let us examine the first. At the beginning I deny 

 that the statement is correct. But even if it were true — true in the 

 plainest and baldest way — this would not remove it from the category 

 where for positive reasons we have placed it, and for negative 

 reasons left it. All art is mimetic, and even M. Taine speaks of " the 

 three imitative arts of sculpture, painting, and poetry." And I 

 think that, as I shall try to show later, we may add music to the 



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