Celebes

“ It follows that if we do not pursue a celebrity, sooner or later he will pursue us. He must; it is the law of his being. So I wait here very comfortably on my farm, and as I work in my fields I glance up casually from time to time to see if any celebrities are by chance coming up the town road to seek me out. Oh, we are crusty people, we farmers! Sooner or later they all come this way, all the warriors and the poets, all the philosophers and the prophets and the politicians. ”

“ In those days I belonged to a Press-cutting Agency, and I discovered that—to measure Fame by the square inch—you may get many more yards of reputation by the most flippant playlet than by your literary magnum opus; to say nothing of the pictures and interviews of your actors and actresses. That your silliest player—especially if it be a pretty she—gets photographed in the papers sixteen times to your once, goes without saying. The only real recipe for Fame nowadays is to be a pretty girl and exhibit yourself publicly. ”

“ Every now and then I feel quite proud at the idea of acting in a play of my own at two and twenty, and then I look again at my "good works," this precious play, and it seems to be no better than "filthy rags." But perhaps I may do better hereafter. Hereafter! Oh dear! how many things are better than doing even the best in this kind! how many things must be better than real fame! but if one has none of those, fame might, perhaps, be pleasant. No actor's fame, or rather celebrity, or rather notoriety, would satisfy me ”

“ But nevermore the same two sister pearls Ran down the silken thread to kiss each other On her white neck—so is it with this rhyme: It lives dispersedly in many hands, And every minstrel sings it differently; Yet is there one true line, the pearl of pearls: ‘Man dreams of Fame while woman wakes to love.’ Yea! Love, though Love were of the grossest, carves A portion from the solid present, eats And uses, careless of the rest; but Fame, The Fame that follows death is nothing to us; And what is Fame in life but half-disfame, And counterchanged with darkness? ”

“ Did ever any human being escape more intacte in person and mind from the fiery furnace of popular admiration? Let us remember the severity of the ordeal to which she was exposed; the hard lot of those who pass their lives in the full-noon glare of public observation, where every speck is noted! What a difference too, between the aspiration after immortality and the pursuit of celebrity!—The noise of distant and future fame is like the sound of the [45] far-off sea, and the mingled roll of its multitudinous waves, which, as it swells on the ear, elevates the soul with a sublime emotion ”

“ The voices that have thrilled us, the animated and beautified forms that have called forth our admiration and praise, are stilled forever by the chilling touch of death; genius, mediocrity, incompetency, all alike go down, and the greatest names in a few brief years are forgotten; so transitory is the actor's fame. ”

“ Then, indeed, the distant blast of Fame’s trumpet is a sound that wakes him early in the morning, and keeps him at his post in the night watches. But then fame means income, position, the world’s esteem, all the good things of life. ”

“ One thunder of applause from pit, boxes, and gallery, is equal to a whole immortality of posthumous fame: and when we hear an actor, whose modesty is equal to his merit, declare, that he would like to see a dog wag his tail in approbation, what must he feel when he sees the whole house in a roar! Besides, Fame, as if their reputation had been entrusted to her alone, has been particularly careful of the renown of her theatrical favourites: she forgets one by one, and year by year, those who have been great lawyers, great statesmen, and great warriors in their day ”

“ They know well enough that they must give us something which we in our commonness regard as valuable enough to exchange for a bushel of our potatoes, or a sack of our white onions. No poem that we can enjoy, no speech that tickles us, no prophecy that thrills us—neither dinner nor immortality for them! And we are hard-headed Yankees at our bargainings; many a puffed-up celebrity loses his puffiness at our doors!
This afternoon, as I came out on my porch after dinner, feeling content with myself and all the world, I saw a man driving our way in a one-horse top-buggy. ”

“ The regent produces an infinitely diverse spectacle, where stage and ground floor, actor and audience are one, and he himself is poet, director and hero of the play at the same time. How delightful when, as with the king, the directrice is at the same time the hero's lover and the heroine of the piece, when one catches a glimpse of the muse in her, it fills the poet with holy passion, and his lyre attunes to gentle heavenly melodies. ”

“ She loved her profession, of course, and would have been an accomplished actress had she never known Wrath——for talent does not rest on the accident of forming a certain friendship or meeting such and such a person, but he was her audience, the historic one in a vast multitude, whom every artist singles out as the critic of all others to please. ”

“ Poems by Alan Seeger.
THE SONG OF FAME Fame always lures Youth. Perhaps later experience proves that it is indeed a hollow thing, hardly worth striving for. But to Youth there is no goal that calls more insistently than Fame. Youth and Beauty and Fame—how closely akin they are! If Beauty and Fame keep him company, Youth is next the stars with delight. And so it is natural that this young poet shall sing the song of Fame with exuberant enthusiasm. ”

“ One evening, during one of my finest moments, when it seemed as if the roof would fall under the explosions of frantic applause, my eyes fell upon a face in a proscenium box almost on the stage, an impassive face, the sight of which made my blood suddenly run cold. You have no idea of the mysterious influences which govern the actor's inspiration, how the expression of certain faces absorbs him, and stimulates or deadens his audacity. ”

“ In my public life I was striving after the emptiness of popular fame, going so far as to seek theatrical applause, entering poetic contests, striving for the straw garlands and the vanity of theatricals and intemperate desires. ”

“ Actors of genius have accustomed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour before the curtain was drawn, that they might fill their minds with all the phantoms of the drama, and so suspend all communion with the external world. The great actress of our age, during representation, always had the door of her dressing-room open, that she might listen to, and if possible watch the whole performance, with the same attention as was experienced by the spectators. ”

“ After this, the deluge, of biographies, autobiographies, interviewings, photographic realities, portraits plain and coloured—many of them uncommonly plain, and some of them wonderfully coloured,—until a Celebrity who has not been done and served up, with or without a plate, is a Celebrity indeed.
"Celebrities" have hitherto been valuable to the interviewer, photographer, and proprietor of a Magazine in due proportion. ”

“ As on the stage, those actors who play best their parts are recalled and applauded after the curtain has fallen, so those in the brief drama of life, who have best performed their duties are, after their mortal costumes have been forever laid away in restful graves, again called out by their admiring cotemporaries, and thus their intellectual and moral personalities reappear before the lights, amidst tumultuous and emulative applause. ”

“ But their genius, or talent, and their unblemished reputation have combined to place them on that pedestal exalted above their fellows. But was it not always so? Have there not always been a privileged few among the actors, as among other citizens of the Great Republic of Art and Letters, who have been admitted to the assemblies of the great, and whose hospitality the great have condescended to accept in return? Go back thirty years and at least a dozen names of prominent actors and actresses will occur to us as having been received in the best society. ”

“ The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air,
To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do
And the divine, wise trees that do not care
Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair! ”

“ The two men were one day discussing the question of the permanency of fame, how ephemeral for example was that reputation which depended upon the living presence of the artist to make good its claim; how an actor, an orator, a singer, was bound to enjoy his glory while it lasted, since at the instant of his death all tangible evidence of greatness disappeared; he could not be proven great to one who had never seen and heard him. ”

“ The finest picture in the world may escape the admiration of the connoisseurs, if it is not placed in a proper light. But since I have been suitably framed and varnished, which could only happen in consequence of a theatrical finish, what a revolution! The finest young fellows of all the towns we pass through are shuffling at my heels. An actress, therefore, has all her little comforts about her, without deviating from the line of her duty. ”

“ We look upon an actor, sitting amongst ordinary men and women, with a certain curiosity,—we regard him as a creature from another planet, almost. His life and his world are quite different from ours. The orchestra, the foot-lights, and the green baize curtain, divide us. He is a monarch half his time—his entrance and his exit proclaimed by flourish of trumpet. He speaks in blank verse, is wont to take his seat at gilded banquets, to drink nothing out of a pasteboard goblet. ”

“ What's the connecting thread that can reach from the lowest dives of the East Side, out of another country and another race, and mix with the grandeurs of so extremely well-known and high-flying a young lady, on the very day that she becomes a world-celebrity? ”

“ Have our kids seen the day where Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill had a beer over their differences, or have they learned that to lead, you must tweet, and sometimes all in caps, because now this is Hollywood, fame is the ultimate goal? ”

“ In connection with the cultivation and support of a National Drama, the friends of the stage will not be unmindful of the claims of our own deserving actors, among whom, I am proud to say, there are some may challenge successful comparison with any of the 'Stars' that twinkle on us from abroad, and, unlike most of those 'Stars,' they shine with their own and not with a borrowed lustre. ”

“ Shadows of the Stage. 18mo, Cloth, 75 Cents.
"The fame of the actor more than that of any other artist is an evanescent one—a 'bubble reputation'—indeed, and necessarily so from the conditions under which his genius is exercised. While the impression it makes is often more vivid and inspiring for the moment than that of the poet and the painter, it vanishes almost with the occasion which gave it birth, and lives only as a tradition in the memory of those to whom it had immediately appealed. ”

“ And it was peculiarly interesting to me, because the argument touched upon problems in the actor’s art that I have always thought to be profoundly significant. How far may the personality of the performer intrude itself in the presentation of the chosen character, and to what extent are assumption and disguise part of the indispensable equipment of the artist? These are questions which every generation is apt to raise in regard to its popular favourites upon the stage. ”

“ Our performers, who became illustrious by their art, charmed the spectators by the beauty of their voice, their spontaneous gestures, the flexibility of their passions, while a certain natural air never failed them in their motions and their dialogue."
Here, then, is a species of the histrionic art unknown to us, and running counter to that critical canon which our great poet, but not powerful actor, has delivered to the actors themselves, "to speak no more than is set down for them." ”

“ To see the actress in the midst of her guests must have been a useful object-lesson for any lady who aspired to social popularity. “With what art she knew how to talk to some the language of the Court of Marie Antoinette, to the generals of their victories, to the orators, to the financiers, of their ambitions or their affairs; to salute a marquis of thirty-six quarterings with a sweeping courtesy, to carve an epigram, to improvise a quatrain, to analyse a play!... ”

“ I have to thank the notoriety of your debaucheries for learning the place of your abode. It is the privilege of such fame as yours, that it cannot lie concealed. You are acquiring celebrity by an unerring path. ”

“ And, above all, because you are actors and actresses, for that very reason be sincere and unaffected; avoid rather than court publicity, for you will have quite enough of it if you get on in your profession; the successful actor is being constantly tempted to indiscretion. Do not yield too readily to the blandishments of the photographer, or the enterprising editor who asks you what are the love scenes you have most enjoyed playing on the stage, and whether an actor or actress can be happy though married. Be natural on the stage, and be just as natural off it ”

“ Moreover, that coil of cable which makes the whole world kin has burdened us with the celebrities of the universe. When to these are added the celebrities of the past, of every period, country, and variety, the brain reels. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and too many celebrities numb our faculty of wonder. The vivid feeling that is possible when heroes are few fades into a faint reflection of emotion. ”

“ I know Americans of both sexes who, rather than lead an idle life, have taken to the stage. These actors and actresses belong to good society, which admires them in public and welcomes them in private. Such things do honour to the national spirit, and raise the dramatic profession in the eyes of the public. Why should not all actresses be as respected and respectable as singers or pianists? ”

“ While taste survives, his fame can never die.
But he who struts his hour upon the stage
Can scarce extend his fame for half an age.
Nor pen nor pencil can the actor save,—
The art and artist share one common grave. ”