BOUCICAULT ON THE ART OF ACTING.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3513, 11 October 1882, Page 4

BOUCICAULT ON THE ART OF ACTING.

Mr Dion Boueicault, in a letter to tho Pall Mall Gazette, says : —I regret to remove an impression many leading journals bare received, that the simple precepts and principles underlying the art of acting are known to the merest tyro in our profession. It is not so. There is no collect of these precepts in any form or chape. There Ims never appeared in any time or in any language, so far as we know, any work containing, in an elementary form, the rules of acting ; its rudiments are unwritten. There is no source to which the tyro has access when he seeks to study our art. Its precepts lie scattered about the stage, where, as you put it, be is obliged to find them out for themselves as ' pigeons pick peas.' During the short seventy minutes employed in the recent Conference it was possible only to exhibit and illustrate the simplest and plainest of these precepts. Nevertheless, simple and plain as they may appear, necessary as they are, our prominent actors admit that they observe them by artistic instinct, and acqxiire knowledge of them as precepts late in their artistic career. The young and rising comedians of the day will remain, what they are now, accomplished amateurs if you flatter them that they know all they need to know. A young lady with a pretty face, influential friends, and a pocketful of money learns five or six leading parts —Juliet, Eosalind, Julia, Lady Teazle, and others ; she seeks an old artist, who teaches her to play these characters, drills her, parrots her. Beyond these she knows nothing. Like one who has learned by ear to play two or three pieces, she could not decipher a noto of the simplest music if placed before her. Furnished thus, she circulates photographs of herself in costume in the various roles she is going to play ; she covers the walls of the cities with notices and woodcuts in every form of mural literature. And then she starts on her professional career, fully equipped as a ' stai , , , sustaining herself by such means on a plane far above the actress who lifts her face from her studies to see herself beaten in the race by Imposture, This is one of the results arising from the teaching that our art is the effusion of enthusiasm —that anybody and everybody knows its principles, if they ?an be dignified by the name ; that grace and and propriety" are old-fashioned grooves : ar.d there is'something ' fresh ' and'fetching ' in the squirm and sprawl which appears to be the modern method —an easy one, it may be confessed —of indicating sujdpressed feeling. It is this kind of teaching that emasculates the young ones, whose minds are occupied with-costumes and means to secure ' good press notices,' Thus they follow the by-paths leading to notoriety, trying short cuts to fortune over Swindle Common, rather than pursue the uphill highway to fame. Some Journals hinted, that the Conference with my fellow comedians was a puff preliminary for the new Dramatic School; on the contrary, it is a protest against any school of elocution and declamation calling itself a school of tho drama. I respectfully contend that the technique only of our art can be taught; but this the actor should learn before he can be entrusted with his own enthusiasm, that he may order all things gently, and 'in the whirlwind of passion acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.'