' emotionalist,’ takes care to stipulate that feeling does not necessarily ensure its own expression, and that nobody prescribes ' somnambulistic absorption ' in a character. Yet, on the other hand, he repeatedly speaks of the ' anti-emotionalist ' case as claiming that the actor must be able to do everything he wants in 'perfectly cold blood.' Now, Diderot erred in repeatedly seeming to under - estimate the actor's nervous excitation ; but even he does not speak of ' cold blood,' and certainly no vigilant disputant does so now. It is clearly idle to say that the actor is 'cold' when we know as a matter of physiology that his circulation and innervation must be above the normal pitch ; but it is one thing to predicate his excitement, and another to insist that his emotion is ' real ' or ' genuine,' by way ostensibly of controverting the predicate that his emotion is ' assumed ' or ' simulated.'
It is perhaps possible to carry the formulation of the facts a trifle further than Mr. Archer does, though he furnishes all the necessary data. He shows us in detail that degree of habitual stage excitation varies very much in diiferent actors, and that the element of conscious judgment or calculation is present in very different degrees. Now this is plainly the outcome of constitutional variation to begin with. Salvini, a highly demonstrative man in actual life, is very much 'moved' by his parts, and avowedly plays Othello in a ' kind of dream ' ; to which it may be added that he is said to frighten and disturb the actresses who play with him. But, acting being a function of the two variables of sympathetic nervous activity and the conscious con- trol of that, a man who habitually lives, so to speak, at a high nervous potential, can be much more intensely excited than another man, without getting beyond con- scious self-conduct. On the other hand, it is the fact that Salvini (I know not whether the usage is customary in Italy, or whether it is more a usage than a necessity) is, at least at times, accompanied by the prompter line for line, a circumstance of which Mr. Archer does not take notice in discussing the pros and cons as to emo- tion. And Mr. Archer takes, I think, insufficient notice of the fact that ' nature,' or sympathetic emo- tion, may really spoil a performance by carrying the actor beyond self-control. He does not cite the story, lately told by M. Coquelin, of how Mr. Booth once alarmed his own daughter by the badness of his play- ing on an occasion when he was unwontedly moved in sympathy with his part ; and he somewhat slurs over other evidence he does give to similar effect, reserving his emphasis for the testimonies as to the value of emotion. He does not even give the familiar story of how Mile. Mars once warned Talma (possibly I am mixing names) that he was losing self-control in his playing to her. The just course would be, one sug- gests, to note alike the effect of sympathetic emotion in reinforcing acting up to a certain point, and the risk of the emotion spoiling the effect by arising in excess. But both of these facts may now be held to be established by Mr. Archer's collection of facts ; and both are indeed in consonance with experience outside the stage. Every one who has often spoken in public knows how a certain measure of nervous excitement gives oratorical animation and finds words ; and on the other hand, many know how a keen susceptibility to the poetic beauty of favourite passages may make entirely feeble the delivery of an extract^ or of certain lines, in the course of the reading of a paper which is otherwise given fairly enough. As a matter of fact, no acting that is within a thousand miles of pass- able mediocrity can be really ' unmoved' ; though Mr. Archer does so far forget what he had said about ' cold blood/ and the necessary double action of the brain, as to say (p. l66), by way of discrediting the 'anti- emotionalists,' that a second-rate Romeo who whispered a jocular aside while simulating frenzy in the tomb scene was, 'in all probability, really unmoved.' It is in any case unjudicial, if not injudicious, to thus assert entire absence of emotion in one actor who makes a humorous aside in a tragic scene, while expressly claiming, as Mr. Archer does, that other actors' asides do not negate ' genuine ' emotion. It is a simple matter to ' constate ' the facts, and recognise in both cases the play of the two strata of consciousness. And, again, the exposition would perhaps have been more complete if Mr. Archer had noted that, while it is sympathetic emotion that enables the actor to reach the right tone and gesture in the first instance, in regard to continued performance it follows that (to repeat words I have used elsewhere ^), ' in time the emotion gets to a minimum, precisely as the facility of the functional action reaches a maximum'; the actor thus gradually feeling less, up to a certain point, of the emotion of grief when exhibiting its symptoms, 'just as the gymnast at length does easily what he at first did with effort and pain.' It is only too easy for actors to misrepresent the intensity of an emotion by calling it ' real,' without regard to the element of customariness.
In one regard in particular Mr. Archer has profited, and aided us all, by his investigation of phenomena. He had set out with the assumption that while actors undoubtedly often shed spontaneous tears, and were moved in moving parts, they did not spontaneously laugh in comic roles. Now this was, on Mr. Archer's part, an inconsistency of psychological theory, the discovery of which might have made him more lenient to Diderot. It rested, indeed, on a mistaken generalisation of experience, to which he seems still to adhere. ' The most stoical among us,' he writes, ' will scarcely receive a crushing blow without exhibiting some outward sign of dejection ; but the best of good tidings (after, perhaps, a single exclama- tion of surprise) will hardly ruffle our outward calm.' On proper inquiry, Mr. Archer will probably find
1 Article on ' Diderot and tile Art of Acting,' in the [Vt:st-iniintci- Rcviav, January 1S87.
