plenty of people whose experience is exactly the other way, they finding It possible to take bad news stoically, but vert difficult to avoid 'beaming' over good. It is all a matter of bias of temperament. And if actors sorrow and weep in sorrowing parts, it stands to reason that they must feel elated and tend to laugh with facility when the character is high-spirited and mirth-making, Mr. Archer's theory notwithstanding. 'Every theatre-goer,' he tells us (p. 112), 'must have noticed the comparative rarity of good laughter on the stage. Tolerable pathos is far commoner than even moderately convincing merriment—so it seems to me, at any rate, and (I find) to many other observers.' Here again (to say nothing of the difficulty of reconciling the passage with the previous dictum (p. 3S), that 'every one instinctively recognises that it is a much simpler and more trivial task' to be comic than to be tragic) the generalisation is premature, there being many people whose experience is quite the reverse. I for one find good pathos very rare indeed on the stage, and tolerable merriment comparatively common ; from which I infer that Mr. Archer is more physically susceptible to pathos and less to laughter than I. He falls, I think, into fallacy in the explanation he suggests for his own experience— that 'the rarity of good laughers on the stage' is due to 'the simple fact that good laughers are no less rare in life.' If that were so, the average laugh on the stage, to be 'convincing,' ought not to be 'good' in Mr. Archer's sense of 'pleasant,' since on his own statement a preponderance of pleasant laughing in the play would be untrue to actual life, which it is the business of comedy to mirror. Mr. Archer uses 'pleasant' and 'convincing' as equivalent terms.
And another fallacy, I think, lurks in the proposition (which in any case is surely not soundly related to the general induction) that 'love, unlike sorrow, has no simple and characteristic physical expression to which the nerve-centres require to be attuned' (p. 97). 'Unlike the simple emotions,' says Mr. Archer again (p. 93), 'love and hatred do not manifest themselves in characteristic and unmistakable external symptoms. They are emotional attitudes rather than individual emotions.' I cannot think this is a durable distinction. In an earlier chapter (p. 55) Mr. Archer admits, under pressure, that he is 'inclined to think that the actual shedding of tears is not, in itself, particularly effective,' agreeing with a critic who holds, as Talma did, that pathos is often best reached otherwise. What 'characteristic expression,' then, is left for grief that is not paralleled by the normal vocal and facial expressions of love and hate? The evidence may well be less abundant as to the reinforcing of dramatic love and hatred by personal sympathies; but the whole drift of the investigation goes to prove the likelihood. And in opposition to Mr. Archer one is moved to say that grief, love, hate, and jealousy are alike passions or 'individual emotions,' and that if one may be called an 'attitude of mind,' so may all.
Further observations in plenty are suggested by this stimulating treatise; but the subject is one perhaps more attractive to those who have meditated it than to the unspecialising reader, and it must suffice to close with these suggestions on points of detail—(1) That the 'videbatur' and 'seeming tears' in the passage of Cicero, and the translation, cited by Mr. Archer on p. 42, have reference to the concealing effect of the actor's mask, and do not constitute an inconsistency; (2) That it is not inconsistent to attribute to the 'ideal actor' a superiority to emotion that is not possessed even by the best-known actor; (3) That it is hardly fair to pronounce Garrick an 'emotionalist' on the strength of one or two pieces of evidence, in view of the story of his exordium (p. 79) to Cape Everard, and of Diderot's account of his face-play; (i) That it is quite beside the case to urge (p. 162) that actors are never known through absorption to tread consciously on a dropped trinket ; and (5) That it is an error to treat Diderot (chap, xi.) as justifying by anticipation the long runs of the modern English stage, his account of the prolonged playing of a company of Neapolitan amateurs being apparently misconceived by Mr. Archer as a plea for continuous nightly performances of one piece ad libitum. The Neapolitan amateurs would certainly not play every night.
But these and the foregoing criticisms of passages in Mr. Archer's book impute only a slight infusion of shortcoming to his lucid and workmanlike performance. That will take its place in the literature of the stage and of psychology, as doing adequately a work that needed to be done on many accounts. I have suggested that it achieves even more than Mr. Archer thinks; since instead of demolishing an important half-truth, as he would sometimes seem to be bent on doing, it serves to unite that with the other half, which is the scientific and conclusive course. It ought to make an end, despite the perhaps excessive controversial element in Mr. Archer's own exposition, of the unintelligent strife of partisans who respectively contend in crude terms that an artist must have no 'feeling,' and that it is 'feeling' which makes effective acting. He that runs may now read the demonstration that sub-induced feeling perfectly controlled by artistic judgment—precisely the process described by Talma as Lekain's—is the secret of fine acting as of fine poetry, fine prose, fine oratory, fine singing, fine playing ; all of which arts are indirectly elucidated by the investigation of acting. If the book has any serious blemish, it is, as above urged, the too constantly slighting treatment of the adventurous Diderot. As to this, posterity will decide.
John M. Robertson.
