IX

Thus we have come back to Irving’s original proposition:

“If you do not pass a character through your own mind it can never be sincere.” The logical wheel has gone its full round and is back at the starting-place. Begin with the argument where you will it must come sooner or later to the same end: “To know others know yourself.” Your own identity is that which you must, for histrionic purposes, clothe with attributes not your own. You must have before your mind some definite image of what you would portray; and your own feeling must be ultimately its quickening force.

So far, the resolution of the poet’s thought into a moving, breathing, visible, tangible character. But that is not the completion of the endeavour. In the philosophy of histrionic art are rarer heights than mere embodiment, mere vitality, mere illusion. The stage is a world of its own, and has its own ambitions, its own duties. Truth either to natural types or to the arbitrary creations of the dramatist is not sufficient. For the altitudes something else is required. Irving set it forth thus:

“Finally in the consideration of the Art of Acting, it must never be forgotten that its ultimate aim is beauty. Truth itself is only an element of beauty, and to merely reproduce things vile and squalid and mean is a debasement of art.”

Here he supports the theory of Taine that art, like nature, has its own selective power; and that in the wisdom of its choosing is its power for good. Does it not march with that sublime apothegm of Burke: “Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness”?

Finally Irving summed up the whole Philosophy of his Art and of its place amongst the sister Arts in a few sentences:

“In painting and in the drama the methods of the workers are so entirely opposed, and the materials with which they work are so different, that a mutual study of the other work cannot but be of service to each. Your painter works in mouldable materials, inanimate, not sensitive but yielding to the lightest touch. His creation is the embodiment of the phantasm of his imagination, for in art the purpose is to glorify and not merely to reproduce. He uses forms and facts of nature that he may not err against nature’s laws. But such natural facts as he assimilates are reproduced in his work, deified by the strength of his own imagination. Actors, on the other hand, have to work with materials which are all natural, and not all plastic, but are all sensitive—with some of the strength and all the weakness of flesh and blood. The actor has first to receive in his own mind the phantasmal image which is conveyed to him by the words of the poet; and this he has to reproduce as well as he can with the faulty material which nature has given to him. Thus the painter and the poet begin from different ends of the gamut of natural possibilities—the one starts from nature to reach imagination, the other from imagination to reach at reality. And if the means be not inadequate, and if the effort be sincere, both can reach that veritable ground where reality and imagination join. This is the true realism towards which all should aim—the holy ground whereon is reared the Pantheon of all the Arts.”