PLAYS ACTING AND MUSIC A BOOK OF THEORY BY ARTHUR SYMONS LONDON 1909 _To Maurice Maeterlinck in friendship and admiration_ PREFACE When this book was first published it contained a large amount of material which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besides many corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has been remodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first; what I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to have been: a book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentions which I made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events, the programme was carried out. This book, I said then, is intended to form part of a series, on which I have been engaged for many years. I am gradually working my way towards the concrete expression of a theory, or system of æsthetics, of all the arts. In my book on "The Symbolist Movement in Literature" I made a first attempt to deal in this way with literature; other volumes, now in preparation, are to follow. The present volume deals mainly with the stage, and, secondarily, with music; it is to be followed by a volume called "Studies in Seven Arts," in which music will be dealt with in greater detail, side by side with painting, sculpture, architecture, handicraft, dancing, and the various arts of the stage. And, as life too is a form of art, and the visible world the chief storehouse of beauty, I try to indulge my curiosity by the study of places and of people. A book on "Cities" is now in the press, and a book of "imaginary portraits" is to follow, under the title of "Spiritual Adventures." Side by side with these studies in the arts I have my own art, that of verse, which is, after all, my chief concern. In all my critical and theoretical writing I wish to be as little abstract as possible, and to study first principles, not so much as they exist in the brain of the theorist, but as they may be discovered, alive and in effective action, in every achieved form of art. I do not understand the limitation by which so many writers on æsthetics choose to confine themselves to the study of artistic principles as they are seen in this or that separate form of art. Each art has its own laws, its own capacities, its own limits; these it is the business of the critic jealously to distinguish. Yet in the study of art as art, it should be his endeavour to master the universal science of beauty. 1903, 1907. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION An Apology for Puppets 3 PLAYS AND ACTING Nietzsche on Tragedy 11 Sarah Bernhardt 17 Coquelin and Molière 29 Réjane 37 Yvette Guilbert 42 Sir Henry Irving 52 Duse in Some of Her Parts 60 Annotations 77 M. Capus in England 93