And next morning you saw by the papers that the secondary, but still renowned, actor, had succeeded in sharing the principal honours of the piece.So uncommonly well had he done, even for him.Then you understood that, though you had not known it, the tragedian must have been beaten in that dialogue.He had suffered himself in an instant of weakness, to be stimulated; he had for a moment - only a moment - got on.
That night was influential.We may see its results everywhere, and especially in Shakespeare.Our tragic stage was always - well, different, let us say - different from the tragic stage of Italy and France.It is now quite unlike, and frankly so.The spoilt tradition of vitality has been explicitly abandoned.The interrupted one waits, no longer with a roving eye, but with something almost of dignity, as though he were fulfilling ritual.
Benvolio and Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the leaping Romeo.They call without the slightest impetus.One can imagine how the true Mercutio called - certainly not by rote.There must have been pauses indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of listening for an answer, between every nickname.But the nicknames were quick work.At the Lyceum they were quite an effort of memory:
"Romeo! Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover!"The actress of Juliet, speaking the words of haste, makes her audience wait to hear them.Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's harry of phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing.None act, none speak, as though there were such a thing as impulse in a play.
To drop behind is the only idea of arriving.The nurse ceases to be absurd, for there is no one readier with a reply than she.Or, rather, her delays are so altered by exaggeration as to lose touch with Nature.If it is ill enough to hear haste drawled out, it is ill, too, to hear slowness out-tarried.The true nurse of Shakespeare lags with her news because her ignorant wits are easily astray, as lightly caught as though they were light, which they are not; but the nurse of the stage is never simply astray: she knows beforehand how long she means to be, and never, never forgets what kind of race is the race she is riding.The Juliet of the stage seems to consider that there is plenty of time for her to discover which is slain - Tybalt or her husband; she is sure to know some time; it can wait.
A London success, when you know where it lies, is not difficult to achieve.Of all things that can be gained by men or women about their business, there is one thing that can be gained without fear of failure.This is time.To gain time requires so little wit that, except for competition, every one could be first at the game.
In fact, time gains itself.The actor is really not called upon to do anything.There is nothing, accordingly, for which our actors and actresses do not rely upon time.For humour even, when the humour occurs in tragedy, they appeal to time.They give blanks to their audiences to be filled up.
It might be possible to have tragedies written from beginning to end for the service of the present kind of "art." But the tragedies we have are not so written.And being what they are, it is not vivacity that they lose by this length of pause, this length of phrasing, this illimitable tiresomeness; it is life itself.For the life of a scene conceived directly is its directness; the life of a scene created simply is its simplicity.And simplicity, directness, impetus, emotion, nature fall out of the trailing, loose, long dialogue, like fish from the loose meshes of a net - they fall out, they drift off, they are lost.
The universal slowness, moreover, is not good for metre.Even when an actress speaks her lines as lines, and does not drop into prose by slipping here and there a syllable, she spoils the tempo by inordinate length of pronunciation.Verse cannot keep upon the wing without a certain measure in the movement of the pinion.Verse is a flight.
