It has always been a lamentation of the actor that for his art there is no safe way to posterity. His passion may shine a fierce poetic light; his technique may explore the remotest parts of his mind and soul and express the whole man of him: he may move us as finely as any symphony or sonnet Ñ yet when he dies also dies his art. His creations may be immortal in the spirit, but they are bound to the mortal flesh of him. Let no one deny the actorÕs ability to achieve art unaided by the dramatist; look at what Irving made of ÒThe Bells.Ó Yet IrvingÕs Matthias is to-day as near to oblivion as the play itself. The ages will know Irving as a mere name. None the less, a name he will remain, and little more. Until the other day the great singer had a like lamentation. The beauty of his art, too, was perishable. Then came the gramophone, a chain for him to hold on to posterity. And if there be anybody yet sceptical of the gramophoneÕs power to capture and retain the secret of great song let him listen to the records lately made by Galli Curci.
The actor, then, has had to bewail the mortality of his art in solitude. It was an unjust fate, and now at last, it seems, the vital spark of him is to be saved from the limbo when his poor body falters. The invention of the talking kinema Ñ reported the other day from Sweden Ñ promises to endow the art of the actor with some sort of immortality. Is the notion laughable at first thought? Then suppose the invention was conceived twenty years ago, and that Forbes Robertson was Òphotophoned.Ó The film would show us Robertson as he walked across the stage in profile; the abstract purity of his deportment would be there Ñ and his voice. In a word, some essential part of RobertsonÕs art would be stolen from time the destroyer. We should lack, of course, the bloom of the manÕs own presence. But do we reject a Turner because now the bloom of the original paint has gone? The photophone, if it is capable of all that is claimed for it, will reproduce a play and the actorsÕ art in it as true to the original, say, as a steel engraving of a painting; some of the colour which give it authentic life may go, but the outlines will be preserved. The new invention may indeed perform immense services for the dramatist as well as for the actor. It should be an ally, not a rival, of his own art. He will continue to write, as ever, for the theatre, confident that the instinct of the theatre which is deep in all of us will never be killed by the kinema. Yet by means of the photophone his play may be given a permanent existence. To all parts of the world it may be sent and reproduced at one and the same hour. Writing for the theatre, he will, if he is clever enough, be able to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak Ñ address himself, through two expressive mediums, to two distinct publics. A photophone version of a play need damage the theatre no more than it is damaged now by the play in Òbook form.Ó Just as the printed play tends to give birth to a new form of dramatic expression, combining, as it does in Mr. ShawÕs hands, elements of the stage play and the novel, so might the photophoned play combine elements of the theatre and kinema proper.
The scope of the new invention is hardly likely to be confined to art and entertainment. At the moment, indeed, one could hardly explore half its possibilities. In Villiers de lÕIsle AdamÕs novel ÒLÕEve FutureÓ the author laments that the gramophone was not invented thousands of years ago. Had it been, so his speculations go, some of the great noises and sounds of history might have been preserved for us Ñ the Fiat Lux, the precise sound of JoshuaÕs trumpet, the
sigh of Memnon at the dawn. Well, the photophone will possess the power of the gramophone and also the power of the camera. Will it not be able, then, to send from time to time down the ages some vivid image of its period? Let the photophone be present the next time an Oliver Cromwell declaims his ÒTake away that bauble!Ó Let the photophone enable the unborn generations to see and hear their forbears. The instrument might be set to work on a modern crowd at a Test match; the sight of the multitude, sitting in silence, would perhaps show our children how seriously a pleasure can be taken. The photophone at a performance of ÒThe Rhinegold,Ó in these days, would, if set working during the playing of the prelude, put on record for ever our great genius as a people at adapting witty conversation to 135 bars of matchless music.
The influence of the photophone on the kinema play itself is not certain to be good. The film play is happiest depicting man in action, and the technique which has given us Chaplin and Fairbanks has been built up to express action without the aid of the spoken word. If the kinema play of the future is so full of conversation that it approximates in type to the stage play, possibly it will dwindle into a shadowy imitation of another art and lose its own individuality. Excess of dialogue would tend to hinder that sweeping, changeful action which is the kinemaÕs finest asset. ÒIn the volume, variety, and impetus of its actions,Ó Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has written of the kinema, Òin its swift vivid, multiple transformation, its capacity for flashing suggestion, the film play offers an infinitude of opportunity.Ó How is a dramatist to keep faith with the kinemaÕs rapid pace, and yet give to it carefully modulated dialogue? Who wants to listen to FairbanksÕs conversation as he leads the law a merry dance over housetops? And has anybody watching the staccato significance of ChaplinÕs dumb-show ever felt the need of the spoken word?
The best films, both in the ÒpopularÓ and the artistic sense, have been those which have been crowded with swift action that needed no spoken word or letterpress to point their meaning. ÒEvery picture tells a storyÓ is the motto of the skilful playwright for the kinema. The conventions of the film, as we know them at present, might be modified in instances where the plot demands some dialogue for the job of elucidation. But for many folk the great charm of the kinema is that it takes you into a dream-world, where reality becomes romantically merged in shadows, where one may move on a magic carpet, where everything happens in a delightfully inconsequential way. For those who go to the kinema seeking a dreamland the spoken word might only mean sad disillusion Ñ a quick awakening to the world of hard, unromantic fact.