With the actor the style is
the man, in another, a more immediate, and a more obvious sense than was
ever intended by that saying. Therefore we may allow the critic--and not
accuse him of reaction--to speak of the division between art and Nature
in the painting of a landscape, but we cannot let him say the same things
of acting. Acting has a technique, but no convention.
Once for all, then, to say that acting reaches the point of Nature, and
touches it quick, is to say all. In other arts imitation is more or less
fatuous, illusion more or less vulgar. But acting is, at its less good,
imitation; at its best, illusion; at its worst, and when it ceases to be
an art, convention.
But the idea that acting is conventional has inevitably come about in
England. For it is, in fact, obliged, with us, to defeat and destroy
itself by taking a very full, entire, tedious, and impotent convention; a
complete body of convention; a convention of demonstrativeness--of voice
and manners intended to be expressive, and, in particular, a whole weak
and unimpulsive convention of gesture.
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