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BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES, PARIS.

PUPPETS AND ACTORS

(Daily Telegraph, February 20, 1892.)

To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

SIR,--I have just been sent an article that seems to have appeared in
your paper some days ago, {164} in which it is stated that, in the course
of some remarks addressed to the Playgoers' Club on the occasion of my
taking the chair at their last meeting, I laid it down as an axiom that
the stage is only 'a frame furnished with a set of puppets.'

Now, it is quite true that I hold that the stage is to a play no more
than a picture-frame is to a painting, and that the actable value of a
play has nothing whatsoever to do with its value as a work of art. In
this century, in England, to take an obvious example, we have had only
two great plays--one is Shelley's Cenci, the other Mr. Swinburne's
Atalanta in Calydon, and neither of them is in any sense of the word an
actable play. Indeed, the mere suggestion that stage representation is
any test of a work of art is quite ridiculous. In the production of
Browning's plays, for instance, in London and at Oxford, what was being
tested was obviously the capacity of the modern stage to represent, in
any adequate measure or degree, works of introspective method and strange
or sterile psychology. But the artistic value of Strqfford or In a
Balcony was settled when Robert Browning wrote their last lines. It is
not, Sir, by the mimes that the muses are to be judged.

So far, the writer of the article in question is right. Where he goes
wrong is in saying that I describe this frame--the stage--as being
furnished with a set of puppets. He admits that he speaks only by
report, but he should have remembered, Sir, that report is not merely a
lying jade, which, personally, I would willingly forgive her, but a jade
who lies without lovely invention is a thing that I, at any rate, can
forgive her, never.

What I really said was that the frame we call the stage was 'peopled with
either living actors or moving puppets,' and I pointed out briefly, of
necessity, that the personality of the actor is often a source of danger
in the perfect presentation of a work of art. It may distort. It may
lead astray. It may be a discord in the tone or symphony. For anybody
can act. Most people in England do nothing else. To be conventional is
to be a comedian. To act a particular part, however, is a very different
thing, and a very difficult thing as we