DONKEY RACES

English acting had for some time past still been making a feint of running the race that wins.  The retort, the interruption, the call, the reply, the surprise, had yet kept a spoilt tradition of suddenness and life.  You had, indeed, to wait for an interruption in dialogue—­it is true you had to wait for it; so had the interrupted speaker on the stage.  But when the interruption came, it had still a false air of vivacity; and the waiting of the interrupted one was so ill done, with so roving an eye and such an arrest and failure of convention, such a confession of a blank, as to prove that there remained a kind of reluctant and inexpert sense of movement.  It still seemed as though the actor and the actress acknowledged some forward tendency.

Not so now.  The serious stage is openly the scene of the race that loses.  The donkey race is candidly the model of the talk in every tragedy that has a chance of popular success.  Who shall be last?  The hands of the public are for him, or for her.  A certain actress who has “come to the front of her profession” holds, for a time, the record of delay.  “Come to the front,” do they say?  Surely the front of her profession must have moved in retreat, to gain upon her tardiness.  It must have become the back of her profession before ever it came up with her.

It should rejoice those who enter for this kind of racing that the record need never finally be beaten.  The possibilities of success are incalculable.  The play has perforce to be finished in a night, it is true, but the minor characters, the subordinate actors, can be made to bear the burden of that necessity.  The principals, or those who have come “to the front of their profession,” have an almost unlimited opportunity and liberty of lagging.

Besides, the competitor in a donkey race is not, let it be borne in mind, limited to the practice of his own tediousness.  Part of his victory is to be ascribed to his influence upon others.  It may be that a determined actor—­a man of more than common strength of will—­may so cause his colleague to get on (let us say “get on,” for everything in this world is relative); may so, then, compel the other actor, with whom he is in conversation, to get on, as to secure his own final triumph by indirect means as well as by direct.  To be plain, for the sake of those unfamiliar with the sports of the village, the rider in a donkey race may, and does, cudgel the mounts of his rivals.

Consider, therefore, how encouraging the prospect really is.  The individual actor may fail—­in fact, he must.  Where two people ride together on horseback, the married have ever been warned, one must ride behind.  And when two people are speaking slowly one must needs be the slowest.  Comparative success implies the comparative failure.  But where this actor or that actress fails, the great cause of slowness profits, obviously.  The record is advanced.  Pshaw! the word “advanced” comes unadvised to the pen.  It is difficult to remember in what a fatuous theatrical Royal Presence one is doing this criticism, and how one’s words should go backwards, without exception, in homage to this symbol of a throne.