1863: The Art of Being Played
Felix Marchant, from “A Gentleman’s Gentlemen”
A delightful new volume has come into my possession this week—Dr. Fumbleton’s Lexicon Ludicrum, or The Etymology of Entertainment—a title which already feels like a nervous confession. The learned doctor, writing from the moral height of Oxford or possibly Chelsea, informs us that illusion, that dear companion of stage and salon alike, is descended from the Latin illudere: “to play against.” Observe: not “to deceive,” but to play. We are not sinners, then, but athletes in an ancient game.
This revelation arrives none too soon. For many a moral journalist (and one or two suspicious magistrates) has taken to asserting that actors practice a trade of deception. So we do—just as card‑players practice mathematics and clergymen rehearsal. The word itself vindicates us. Illusion is not trickery but sport. When I bow to applause, I am merely continuing in the fine Roman tradition of ludus, the sacred play. Indeed, the old Latin volume yields a whole family of cousins chasing one another round the linguistic drawing room: delusion, elusion, collusion, allusion—each a merry variant on the theme of play. Even prelude joins the party like a well‑bred pianist arriving fashionably late.
The philosopher Miss Celia Wren, in her much‑banned treatise The Physiology of Pretence, remarks that “men act because matter is not yet interesting enough.” That, I think, is the secret of every illusion—the desire to upholster reality. Religion does it with incense, politics with bunting, lovers with sincerity. The actor merely admits it.
Of course, our profession is not the only sanctuary of the ludicrous, that child of ludus whose name has been insulted by humorists and moralists alike. “Ludicrous” once meant, according to Dr. Fumbleton, “pertaining to play.” Only in the dour century of steam did it become a synonym for folly. The age is terrified of its own laughter, lest it reveal too much choreography in creation.
Consider, as evidence, the recent sensation at the Parthenon Theatre—Mr. Tyrell’s The Illusionist of Islington. The critics hailed it as “depraved,” which is merely their way of saying it succeeded. The plot involved a gentleman able to replicate himself indefinitely, thus alarming his fiancée and delighting his valet. The illusion, they said, was too convincing. But if the mirror is clear, blame the polish, not the glass.
In truth, all acting schools, from Drury Lane down to the discreet parlour academies of Marylebone, devote themselves to perfecting the art of the acceptable falsehood. At my own Conservatoire—officially named “The London School of Elocutionary Ethics”—we are taught that sincerity must be maintained precisely up to the curtain call, and never beyond it, lest artifice become personality. Some of us, of course, failed gloriously in that lesson.
There is also a theological branch to this inquiry. Illudere, “to play against,” implies an opponent, perhaps Heaven itself. May we not be God’s stage‑hands, performing comic interludes while the Almighty takes his supper? The Reverend Dr. Pimbleton, in last year’s scoldingly amusing sermon The Devil’s Matinée, declared that “illusion is the Devil’s costume‑change.” I admired his phrase more than his doctrine. Surely even angels require rehearsal.
And yet the danger remains that illusion, unchecked, becomes delusion—the prefix sliding from gallant to guilty. History provides abundant examples. There was that memorable scandal of the portraitist Wigg‑Farnby, who so idealised his patrons that half of fashionable London proposed marriage to their own images. The bishop who defrocked him later sat seven times for a “spiritual likeness.” And need we mention poor Lady Hesketh, who mistook the leading man for his costume and eloped with a doublet?
Still, I would rather be deluded by beauty than undeceived by arithmetic. The heart adores deceit provided it is decorous. Society, being collectively at leisure, demands perpetual illusion to maintain its dignity. Were every valet to confess his master’s adventures, and every master his valet’s, the British class system would dissolve into applause.
The roots of play run deeper than theatre. The Romans applied ludus also to schooling; all education was play. Possibly it still is. Every tutor merely an illusionist armed with chalk instead of moonlight. In our own day, the metaphysicians have caught the infection: Mr. Balcombe’s Treatise on Cosmic Pretence (long suppressed by the Society for Moral Geometry) argues that existence is “an extensive rehearsal for a performance never staged.” If so, London’s players have achieved metaphysical perfection—they rehearse constantly and open only by accident.
A few months ago, over brandy at Wilton’s, I asked the celebrated tragedian Mr. H. H. Vane what precisely distinguishes illusion from reality upon the stage. He paused, regarded his cigar theatrically, and replied, “Rent.” A formidable answer—proof that art requires both deception and deposit.
Let the reader, therefore, cease to rank illusion among the minor vices. It is our national industry. The House of Commons survives by delusion; the Ministry by collusion; the Royal Academy by allusion; the stock exchange by elusion; and the Church by prelude. Every institution from Parliament to pantomime is a conjugation of the same verb.
The Lexicon Ludicrum further informs us that the verb’s root may derive from an older Celtic word meaning “song.” We are transported, then, from the gaming board to the choir stall. Ludere—to play, to sing, to deceive—one sees at once why creation hums in harmony while pretending to be serious. The universe is clearly performing an endless operetta, in which each of us is both chorus and audience.
If I may conclude without concluding, illusion is the one polite deceit we should never renounce. Without it, love would resemble arithmetic and theatre taxation. Let us rather preserve the great ludicrosity of existence, play earnestly, and deceive decorously.
As I tell my students at the Conservatoire, “Never trust a reality that cannot dance.”
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