The Actor's Heritage: Scenes From the Theatre of Yesterday and the Day Before

THEATRICAL history owns a precious, mellow charm of its own, a charm not wholly unconnected with the pathos of distance. When the poet or the painter dies, his work lives on, ever available for inspection, always ready to renew for us the experiences that once were ours. With the actor it is different: once gone he is gone forever, and not even those for whom he lives for a time in treacherous, distorted memory can pass on to others any adequate idea of the beauty that was his.

Of all who have tried to write of the theatre of yesterday, few have succeeded better than Mr. Eaton, for few can command the background of culture, the catholicity of outlook, the command of English which are his. The best thing about ‘this rambling book about the theatre,’ as the author chooses to describe it, is its inclusive theatrical sympathy. For Mr. Eaton ‘there is no school of the theatre but the theatre, and the theatre is wherever anybody gets up before a public and entertains by “pretending.” ‘ He begins with a childhood picture of a tent show; from thence he passes to Thomas Holcroft, to the strolling company in which Mrs. Siddons made her infantile debut, to the valid generalization that ‘under the blanket title of The Drama . . . have always gone hand in hand the good and the bad, the high and the low, the tragedian and the tight-rope walker, Booth’s Hamlet and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a tent.’

Besides Holcroft, The Actor’s Heritage memorializes, among others, Macklin, Sol Smith, Macready, Rachel, Colley Cibber, and Weber and Fields. It is fairly jammed with anecdote, curious bits of social history, and precious fragments of personality. Sometimes the method is literary. Mr. Eaton will choose a book — a book like Sol Smith’s autobiography, and read long passages and make comments thereupon, which are somehow charmingly right. Of more than incidental value are the quotations and the reproductions of rare old pictures.

The volume is about equally divided between biography and criticism. Of the former I should choose the chapter on Sol Smith, with its fascinating picture of Thespis on the American frontier; of the latter, perhaps the review of Colley Cibber’s criticism is most intrinsically interesting. Yet this is material fairly accessible; it is when he leads us to such rare stuff as Henry Siddons’s Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, 1807, that Mr. Eaton places us more definitely in his debt. Here is a sparkling record of an attempt to stereotype acting, ‘to discover what are the most natural gestures and expressions under the stress of various emotions, and then standardize them’; and picture and text are equally amusing. The paper on Shylock does not by any means exhaust the subject: but the only chapter that I personally find unworthy of inclusion is that which transcribes the puerile and ill-natured comments of Dr. William Everett on the Furness Shakespeare. The ‘Variorum’ is not infallible, but the ‘Bah’s’ and ‘Stuff’s’ that Dr. Everett scribbled on his margins do not get us far.

Because Mr. Eaton is not, like most ‘critics,’ colossally ignorant of the theatrical past, it must not be inferred that he is at all unsympathetic with the activities of the present. He does good service in his fine appreciation of the idealist Macready, and his tribute to Richard Mansfield is a good antidote to the slighting treatment which Mr. Hornblow, in his history of the American stage, meted out to that great actor and greater man. But he knows the past far too well to have any delusions about it, and he knows Glenn Hunter and Charlie Chaplin too well to imagine that they are n’t good. If in 1924 you find the manners of the theatreaudience annoying, you might do well to read about the Philadelphia gentleman of 1810 who wore his hat during a performance of Macbeth to prevent his head being split open by chestnuts from the gallery. And if you fear that in our day musical comedy is killing the drama, there is much for you in the chapter called ‘Legs in Grandpa’s Day.’ For instance, in 1924 New York had seventeen musical shows to thirtyseven dramas, while in 1869 fourteen out of sixteen theatres were playing burlesque or spectacle or ‘naked drama.’

A sane and gracious book — this of Mr. Eaton’s. Its appreciation of the ‘lively arts’ is unsoiled by vulgarity; its personalities never sink to self-exploitation. It is ideal reading for an autumn evening; il will revive on the stage of your mind many forgotten scenes from the make-believe world which is the theatre.

EDWARD WAGENKNECHT