Amateurism

“ If you do, you stamp yourself as an amateur; you add to the crowd of futilities that choke the market; and, if you have it in you to write a novel which shall be a good piece, you are handicapping yourself by placing a bad novel on your record. People sin out of thoughtlessness, as well as depravity, and we would not say that every amateur novelist is, ex officio, infamous, nefarious, and felonious. ”

“ The amateur is very rare in French literature—as rare as he is common in our own. ”

“ These gentry presume to dictate to rowing men what shall constitute the status of the Amateur. For my own part (and the world will acknowledge that I have done some rowing in my time) I prefer the straight-forward conduct of any passing rag-and-bone merchant to the tricks of the high and mighty champions of the amateur qualification in whose nostrils the mere name of professional oarsman seems to stink. These pampered denizens of the amateur hothouse would, doubtless, wear a kid-glove before they ventured to shake hands with one who, like myself, despises them and their absurd pretensions. ”

“ Yes, it is only fair to distinguish, when we talk about the “amateur”—and no one has less tolerance for the feeble amateur than I have—it is necessary to distinguish between the mind of the dilettante, of the idler, of the wishy-washy person who, from the high realms of an unbroken self-satisfaction, condescends occasionally to an art, and the mind of the trained and exact, and therefore of presumably the strenuous. ”

“ The professional quickly assimilates mannerisms which are only too likely to become mechanical, but which the amateur, because he is an amateur, [pg 69] is not likely to learn, if at first he is trained to avoid them. ”

“ Modern plays are on the whole more difficult: [pg 3] the portrayal of a modern character calls for greater variety, maturity, and skill than the average amateur possesses. The characters in Molière's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" ("The Merchant Gentleman") , Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors", Sheridan's "The Rivals", are more or less well-known types, and acting of a conventional and imitative kind is better suited to them. On the other hand, only the best-trained amateurs are able to impart the needful appearance of life and actuality to a play like Henry Arthur Jones's "The Liars." ”

“ The question is what is the amateur an amateur of? What is he really in love with? Is he in love with other people, thinking he sees something which he would like to show them, which he feels sure they would enjoy if they could only see it as he does, which he is therefore trying as best he can to put before the few nice people whom he knows? ”

“ Yes, amateurs, indeed, in the fullest sense of a misinterpreted word, amateurs of beautiful sensations, amateurs in their devotion to an ideal hopeless of attainment, amateurs who might well be patterned after in this age of hasty production, vulgar appeal to the sentimental, to the cheap and obvious. ”

“ In an unabridged dictionary dated 1907, for example, the full definition of "amateur" is as follows: "A person attached to a particular pursuit, study or science, as to music or painting; especially one who cultivates any study or art, from taste or attachment, without pursuing it professionally." Of what use would such a definition be to you if you were arguing in favor of strengthening or relaxing the amateur rules in college athletics, in which you had to follow through the intricacies of summer baseball and of reimbursements for training table and traveling expenses? ”

“ These can be produced as easily by amateurs as can Shakespeare and Sheridan.
3. The Kind of Play to be presented usually raises many questions which are entirely without the scope of purely dramatic considerations. In this country especially, there is a studied avoidance among schools and often among colleges and universities, of so-called "unpleasant plays." Without entering into the reasons for this aversion, it is rather fortunate, [pg 4] because as a general rule, "thesis", "sex", and "problem" plays are full of pitfalls for amateur actors and producers. ”

“ The conscious amateur confesses this himself, makes no pretension to mastership, and calls himself—in distinction from the professional, who subjects himself to rules—an unlearned person. But sometimes the amateur, on the contrary, covers over his weakness, cherishes in himself the self-conceit that he is equal to the heroes of his art or science, constitutes himself the first admirer of his own performances, seeks for their want of recognition in external motives, never in their own want of excellence ”

“ The amateur it is who really astonishes them. They cannot come up even with your amateur beginner, performing at close quarters; whereas the master of his craft on a platform runs quite away at the outset from the lagging senses of his honest audience. ”

“ For what is the difference between artists and amateurs? That the amateur has the will and not the power--the will to do what he cannot accomplish; and the artist can accomplish what he will, and wills nothing but what he can accomplish. ”

“ Gentlemen are summoned from the audience to tie the mediums. Now, tell me, is it an easy task for an amateur to tie a man up off-hand with a rope three yards long, in a very secure way? The amateur is flurried, self-conscious, anxious to acquit himself well of the business, but he is a gentleman, not a brute, and if one of the Brothers sees the ropes getting into a dangerous tangle, he gives a slight groan, as if he were being injured, and the instantaneous impulse of the other man is to loosen the cord a trifle. ”

“ Let us beware of the despotism of the intelligent amateur, and cease our toying with that quaint and winsome bogey of ours, the British Philistine, whilst the intelligent amateur, the deadliest of Art's enemies, is creeping up in our midst.
For the familiarity of the man in the street with the material employed by the artist in fiction, will ever militate against the acquisition of a sound, fine, and genuine standard of workmanship. Unlike the musician, the painter, the sculptor, the architect, the artist in fiction enjoys no monopoly in his medium. ”

“ Most amateurs in the art of magic, and also only too many professional performers, place their reliance mainly upon the trick itself—the deceptive manipulation or the novel apparatus—and are satisfied to get out of it what they can. ”

“ His journalist friends proclaim the value of his ideas, and the literary expression of them in his play, and it is only the carelessness of the players and the stupidity of the playgoers that hinder his success. It is all to the good for the stage that men of education and intellect should be players, and that good artists should be scene painters, but no one [210] who is a player or a painter expects to succeed in his stage work without learning the rules of the game. Why should a literary man despise the craft of the playwright when he seeks to earn his wages as a craftsman? ”

“ In the show business the rule seems to be that a man who takes money for his work and does it with a keenly calculated stupidity can be rated as a professional. It is not even the point of view of the average orator, for example, who really thinks that his mouthings are very fine, but a deliberate, deadly earnest, almost pathetic cultivation of the very worst. The first sign of relaxed, moderated thought stamps a man as the amateur. ”

“ Do not regard your writing as a medium for the exhibition of your own cleverness. Never try to show off your own learning or to [Pg 110] impress the reader with your own brilliancy.
Early amateur efforts often bristle with quotations, foreign words, stilted phrases, pedantic remarks, or references to classical personages. The reason for this is clear; when the amateur writes he invariably sees himself as the chief object of interest in the foreground, rather than his subject-matter. ”

“ Whereas the amateur who works with no higher aim than that of immediate recognition betrays it from the vanity and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty because he is needy, the other from natural depravity. Besides, the amateur can keep his work to himself, whereas the professional man must exhibit or starve. ”

“ It may, of course, be urged that all artists are amateurs before they secure a paying public. The amateur novelist may be compared to the young dramatic author who gives his piece at a matinée, and who, once in a hundred times, finds a manager to approve it. ”

“ But when I first became initiated into the mysteries of amateur performances, and saw how entirely destitute some men were of any notion of natural acting, and how they made a point of repeating two lines of familiar dialogue with the tone and manner, but without the correctness, of a schoolboy going through a task—then it ceased to be any matter of wonder that those to whom acting was no joke, but an unhappily earnest mode of getting bread, should so often make their performance appear the uneasy effort which it is. ”

“ Come out into the world, measure yourself against the best, criticise your own work as if it were a stranger's. Be honest, and say, "That man's work knocks mine into a cocked hat," and then go home miserable, but determined to beat that man's work or perish in the attempt. Never sneak! If you see first-class work by anyone, go boldly and say, "Sir, I am an amateur," or, "I am a young professional," as the case may be. ”

“ Now, for several reasons, the knowledge that an amateur acquires is of the kind most current in society. Firstly, as he does not study according to rule, he interests himself above all in curiosities; he learns by preference racy and novel details, and it is precisely these that people of society want to know. Besides, the very multiplicity of the studies which tempt him, prevents him 139exhausting any; his caprice always carries him off elsewhere before he has thoroughly examined anything. ”

“ Etymologically, the amateur is one who loves, the connoisseur one who knows. In usage, the term amateur is applied to one who pursues any study or art simply from the love of it; the word carries a natural implication of superficialness, tho marked excellence is at times attained by amateurs. A connoisseur is supposed to be so thoroughly informed regarding any art or work as to be able to criticize or select intelligently and authoritatively; there are many incompetent critics, but there can not, in the true sense, be an incompetent connoisseur. ”

“ Every artist was first an amateur. ”

“ The whole art of making-up is still hide-bound by tradition, because of stupid ideals which persist in the minds of those whose business it is to direct, as well as many in the acting profession itself. ”

“ The amateur, content with knowing that he is recounting what did actually happen, falls into the most inartistic ways, because he does not understand that facts are properly only crude material for the fictionist. ”

“ Yet, in spite of all these drawbacks and of this childish immaturity, the amateur and enthusiast finds himself charmed and held as if in the clutch of some Old-World spell, and this at what others will call the dreary and monotonous intoning of the savage. ”

“ Many of his adventures, indeed, are so droll that we can easily understand the great popularity they once enjoyed. But they are not merely amusing—they present a continuous satire upon contemporary society, upon a social condition in which every pretender, every reckless impostor, every private plunderer or public depredator, saw the world exposed to him in its folly and credulity as an easy prey. ”

“ It would be too dreadful a humiliation to crawl back into the place which she had so confidently quitted for a better; to be pointed out as a distinguished amateur who had not succeeded as a professional; and to take up once more the rounds of dinners, dances, and sports which serve so well to keep the purposeless young and ignorant. ”

“ Curiously enough, in many cases, the amateur not only executes his work better than his salaried rival, but often outclasses him in the very important respect that he is more enterprising. Acting on his own responsibility, he knows that by smartness alone can he make way against professionals. ”

“ There is no particular excuse for presenting plays which can be seen acted anywhere and any time by professionals; amateurs should strive to produce classics, or modern plays which for one reason or another are not often seen, and impart to them that peculiar flavor which charms as well as interests and attracts. Nor is there much use in the amateur actor's striving to become professional in manner: he cannot hope, in the short time he can spare for his work, to become a good professional ”

“ The conquering word is, 'This one thing I do.' The difference between the amateur and the artist is that the one pursues an art at intervals by spurts, as a parergon—a thing that is done in the intervals of other occupations—and that the other makes it his life's business. ”

“ The essential distortion, caricature, or transposition which you find in a serious work of art or in a vaudeville sketch, is missing here. And the efforts to ram this sort of play home by pretending that only morons do not like it is exactly and precisely bunk. Most plays fail because they are bad plays; and the greater part of the intellectual drama following this divine LAW, fails. ”

“ They cannot, perhaps, make great music themselves, but they hand the lyre to Apollo. They have not the training, but they have the passion that finds talent in others and protects the flame while it is young. They suspect the secret of a lost art and go in search of it as for the Golden Fleece. And amateurs, yes the amateurs are the persons who will keep the drama from ever quite losing all relation to its ancestor—its good genius—the charade.
The great aim of any drama is to make all the audience and all the actors think of the same thing at the same moment during the entire evening. ”