Symons, A: Plays, Acting, and Music (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Plays, Acting, and Music

Spiritual Adventures. Side by side with these studies 1 the arts I have my own art, that of verse, which is, after 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 aesthetics choose to confine them selves 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.

July 1903./a Paradox on Art: p. 1. Technique and the Artist: p. 5. Nietzsche on Tragedy: p. 9. A Re¿ection at a Dolmetsch Concert: p. I 3. The Dramatisation of Song: p. 18. The Speaking of Verse: p. 23. Sarah Bernhardt: p. 27. Rostand, Sarah, and Coquelin: p. 34. Coquelin and Moliere: p. 39. Rejane and Jane Hading: p. 44. Fsir Henry Irving: p. 48. Duse in some of her Parts: p. 53. Pachmann, Parsifal, and the Pathetic Symphony: p. 64. Pachmann and the Piano: p. 68. Maeterlinck, Everyman, and the Japanese Players: p. 72. /music, Staging, and some Acting: p. 78. The Test of the Actor: p. 84. Tolstoi and the Others: p. 88. Literary Drama: p. 94. Mr. Stephen Phillips and a Lecture: p. 99. Some Plays and the Public: p. 105. Ben Hur on the Stage: p. 109. Faust at the Lyceum: p. 1 13. Yvette Guilbert: p. 117. The Paris Music Hall: p. 12 3.

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