In making a critical examination of Belasco’s “The Story of My Life,”--a document which, of course, it has been necessary for me to consult in writing this Memoir,--I have observed many misstatements of fact in it, due to defective memory or to haste and heedlessness in composition, and also the assertion of various erroneous notions and mistaken doctrines as to the art of acting, and as to the difference in the practice of that art between the customs of the present and the past. Turning to that “Story” in the expectation that it would prove helpful, I found only another specimen of the irresponsible writing which is deemed permissible relative to the Theatre, and viewing its formidable array of misstatements I have ruefully recalled the remark of Artemus Ward that “it is better not to know so many things than to know so many things that ain’t so.” Some of its errors I have specified and rectified, in other places, in the course of this narrative. Others of its errors and some of its errant notions and doctrines require passing reference here.
Belasco records that he early observed and condemned “the incongruity between the stage way of doing things and the way of life itself,”--the implication being that, in acting, actual life should be literally copied. That is an error. There always is, and from the nature of things always will be, a certain incongruity between actual life and an artistic transcript of it. A literal copy of actual life shown on the stage does not usually cause the effect of actual life: it causes the effect of prolixity and tediousness. Belasco lays much stress on his early and sedulous practice of making himself acquainted, by observation, with all sorts of grewsome facts, assuring his readers that he visited lunatic asylums in order to study madness; talked with condemned murderers immediately prior to their execution and later witnessed the hanging of them; observed the effects of surgical operations performed in hospitals; contemplated deaths occurring there as the result of violence elsewhere; obtained from a friendly, communicative physician knowledge of the manner of death which ensues from the action of several sorts of poison, and was favored, in a dissecting room, with a view of a human heart which had just been extracted from a corpse,--his purpose in this line of inquiry having been to ascertain the multifarious manners in which persons suffer and die, and thus to qualify himself, as actor and stage manager, to imitate them himself or instruct others in the imitation of them. His notion, obviously, is that the actor ought to be acquainted with these things, and, when depicting death, should correctly and literally simulate the particular variety of the throes of dissolution which is appropriate as a climax to the mortal ailment or lethal stroke that destroys him.