m at preconceived effects, but merge their personalities wholly in
this or that idea and allow themselves to be driven by it. When to this
common instinct is added an understanding of stage requirements and a
sharp sense of the theatre, the result is pure delight. We live in a
little age, and, in the absence of great figures, we are perhaps prone
to worship little things, and especially to cultivate to excess the
wonder-child and often the pseudo-wonder-child. But the gifted
stage-children have a distinct place, for they give us no striving after
false quantities, no theatricality, and their effects are in proportion
to the strength of their genius. Of course, when they are submitted to
the training of a third-rate manager, they become mere mechanical dolls,
full of shrill speech and distorted posings that never once touch the
audience. You have examples of this in any touring melodrama. These
youngsters are taught to act, to model themselves on this or that adult
member of the company, are made conscious of an audience, and are
carefully prevented from being children. The result is a horror. The
child is only an effective actor so long as it does not "act." As soon
as these youngsters reach the age of fifteen or sixteen the dramatic
faculty is stilled, and lies dormant throughout adolescence. They are
useless on the stage, for, beginning to "find themselves," they become
conscious artists, and, in the theatrical phrase, it doesn't come off.
It is hardly to be expected that it should, for acting, of all the arts,
most demands a knowledge of the human mind which cannot be encompassed
even by genius at seventeen. That is why no child can ever play such a
part as that of the little girl in Hauptmann's "Hannele." Intuition
could never cover it. Nor should children ever be set to play it. The
child of melodrama is an impossibility and an ugliness. Children on the
stage must be childish, and nothing else. They must not be immature men
and women. Superficially, of course, as I have said, every child of
talent becomes world-weary and sophisticated; the bright surface of the
mind is dulled with things half-perceived. But this, the result of
moving in an atmosphere of hectic brilliance, devoid of spiritual
nourishment, is not fundamental: it is but a phase. Old-fashioned as the
idea may be, it is still true that artificial excitement is useful,
indeed necessary, to the artist; and conditions of life that would
spoil or utterly dest