The other day, in “Ulysses,” there was only one piece of acting that was quite convincing:  the acting of Mr. Brough as the Swineherd.  It is a small part and an easy part, but it was perfectly done.  Almost any other part would have been more striking and surprising if it had been done as perfectly, but no other part was done as perfectly.  Mr. Brough has developed a stage-personality of his own, with only a limited range of emotion, but he has developed it until it has become a second nature with him.  He has only to speak, and he may say what he likes; we accept him after the first word, and he remains what that first word has shown him to be.  Mr. Tree, with his many gifts, his effective talents, all his taste, ambition, versatility, never produces just that effect:  he remains interestingly aside from what he is doing; you see his brain working upon it, you enjoy his by-play; his gait, his studied gestures, absorb you; “How well this is done!” you say, and “How well that is done!” and, indeed, you get a complete picture out of his representation of that part:  a picture, not a man.

I am not sure that melodrama is not the hardest test of the actor:  it is, at least, the surest.  All the human emotions throng noisily together in the making of melodrama:  they are left there, in their naked muddle, and they come to no good end; but there they are.  To represent any primary emotion, and to be ineffective, is to fail in the fundamental thing.  All actors should be sent to school in melodrama, as all dramatic authors should learn their trade there.

THE PRICE OF REALISM

Modern staging, which has been carried in England to its highest point of excellence, professes to aim at beauty, and is, indeed, often beautiful in detail.  But its real aim is not at the creation of beautiful pictures, in subordination to the words and actions of the play, but at supplementing words and actions by an exact imitation of real surroundings.  Imitation, not creation, is its end, and in its attempt to imitate the general aspect of things it leads the way to the substitution of things themselves for perfectly satisfactory indications of them.  “Real water” we have all heard of, and we know its place in the theatre; but this is only the simplest form of this anti-artistic endeavour to be real.  Sir Henry Irving will use, for a piece of decoration meant to be seen only from a distance, a garland of imitation flowers, exceedingly well done, costing perhaps two pounds, where two or three brushes of paint would have supplied its place more effectively.  When d’Annunzio’s “Francesca da Rimini” was put on the stage in Rome, a pot of basil was brought daily from Naples in order that it might be laid on the window-sill of the room in which Francesca and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere.  In an interview published in one of the English papers, d’Annunzio declared that he had all his stage decorations made in precious metal by fine craftsmen, and that he had done this for an artistic purpose, and not only for the beauty of the things themselves.  The gesture, he said, of the actor who lifts to his lips a cup of finely-wrought gold will be finer, more sincere, than that of the actor who uses a gilded “property.”