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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..eb2aa91 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #63188 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63188) diff --git a/old/63188-0.txt b/old/63188-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 2e35992..0000000 --- a/old/63188-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2828 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Critic and the Drama, by George Jean -Nathan - - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - - -Title: The Critic and the Drama - - -Author: George Jean Nathan - - - -Release Date: September 12, 2020 [eBook #63188] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - - -***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA*** - - -E-text prepared by David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading -Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by -Internet Archive (https://archive.org) - - - -Note: Images of the original pages are available through - Internet Archive. See - https://archive.org/details/criticdrama00nath - - -Transcriber’s note: - - Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. - - - - - -THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA - - - * * * * * * - -_THE BOOKS OF GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_ - - -_The Theatre_ - - COMEDIANS ALL - THE POPULAR THEATRE - MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS - ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE - THE THEATRE, THE DRAMA, THE GIRLS - THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA - - -_Satire_ - - A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE - BOTTOMS UP - - -_Plays_ - - THE ETERNAL MYSTERY - HELIOGABALUS (_in collaboration with H. L. Mencken_) - - -_Philosophy_ - - THE AMERICAN CREDO: A CONTRIBUTION TOWARD - THE INTERPRETATION OF THE NATIONAL MIND - (_in collaboration with H. L. Mencken_) - - -_Travel and Reminiscence_ - - EUROPE AFTER 8:15 (_in collaboration with H. L. Mencken_) - - * * * * * * - - -THE · CRITIC · AND -THE · DRAMA - -by - -GEORGE JEAN NATHAN - - -[Illustration] - - - - - - -New York Alfred · A · Knopf Mcmxxii - -Copyright, 1922, by -Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. -Published January, 1922 - -Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y. -Paper (Warren’s) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y. -Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y. - -Manufactured in the United States of America - - - - - WITH HIS PERMISSION - TO EDWARD GORDON CRAIG - THE FIRST ÆSTHETICIAN OF THE THEATRE - - - - -CONTENTS - - - CHAPTER - - I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE 3 - - II. DRAMA AS AN ART 29 - - III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE 63 - - IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING 83 - - V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM 113 - - VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA 133 - - - - -_Of all the arts and half-arts--perhaps even above that of acting--is -the art of criticism founded most greatly upon vanity. All criticism -is, at bottom, an effort on the part of its practitioner to show off -himself and his art at the expense of the artist and the art which he -criticizes. The heavy modesty practised by certain critics is but a -recognition of, and self-conscious attempt to diminish, the fundamental -and ineradicable vainglory of criticism. The great critics are those -who, recognizing the intrinsic, permanent and indeclinable egotism of -the critical art, make no senseless effort to conceal it. The absurd -critics are those who attempt to conceal it and, in the attempt, make -their art and themselves doubly absurd._ - - - - -I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE - - - - -I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE - - -I - -Art is a reaching out into the ugliness of the world for vagrant beauty -and the imprisoning of it in a tangible dream. Criticism is the dream -book. All art is a kind of subconscious madness expressed in terms of -sanity; criticism is essential to the interpretation of its mysteries, -for about everything truly beautiful there is ever something mysterious -and disconcerting. Beauty is not always immediately recognizable as -beauty; what often passes for beauty is mere infatuation; living beauty -is like a love that has outlasted the middle-years of life, and has met -triumphantly the test of time, and faith, and cynic meditation. For -beauty is a sleep-walker in the endless corridors of the wakeful world, -uncertain, groping, and not a little strange. And criticism is its -tender guide. - -Art is a partnership between the artist and the artist-critic. The -former creates; the latter re-creates. Without criticism, art would of -course still be art, and so with its windows walled in and with its -lights extinguished would the Louvre still be the Louvre. Criticism -is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping -darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, -and perhaps altogether unseen. - -Criticism, at its best, is a great, tall candle on the altar of art; -at its worst, which is to say in its general run, a campaign torch -flaring red in behalf of æsthetic ward-heelers. This campaign torch -motif in criticism, with its drunken enthusiasm and raucous hollering -born of ignorance, together with what may be called the Prince Albert -motif, with its sober, statue-like reserve born of ignorance that, -being well-mannered, is not so bumptious as the other, has contributed -largely to the common estimate of criticism as a profession but -slightly more exalted than Second Avenue auctioneering if somewhat less -than Fifth. Yet criticism is itself an art. It might, indeed, be well -defined as an art within an art, since every work of art is the result -of a struggle between the heart that is the artist himself and his mind -that is the critic. Once his work is done, the artist’s mind, tired -from the bitterness of the struggle, takes the form of a second artist, -puts on this second artist’s strange hat, coat and checkered trousers, -and goes forth with refreshed vigour to gossip abroad how much of the -first artist’s work was the result of its original splendid vitality -and how much the result of its gradually diminished vitality and sad -weariness. The wrangling that occurs at times between art and criticism -is, at bottom, merely a fraternal discord, one in which Cain and -Abel belabour each other with stuffed clubs. Criticism is often most -sympathetic when it is apparently most cruel: the propounder of the -sternest, hardest philosophy that the civilized world has known never -failed sentimentally to kiss and embrace his sister, Therese Elisabeth -Alexandra Nietzsche, every night at bed-time. “It is not possible,” -Cabell has written, “to draw inspiration from a woman’s beauty unless -you comprehend how easy it would be to murder her.” And--“Only those -who have firmness may be really tender-hearted,” said Rochefoucauld. -One may sometimes even throw mud to tonic purpose. Consider Karlsbad. - -Art is the haven wherein the disillusioned may find illusion. Truth is -no part of art. Nor is the mission of art simple beauty, as the text -books tell us. The mission of art is the magnification of simple beauty -to proportions so heroic as to be almost overpowering. Art is a gross -exaggeration of natural beauty: there was never a woman so beautiful -as the Venus di Milo, or a man so beautiful as the Apollo Belvedere -of the Vatican, or a sky so beautiful as Monet’s, or human speech so -beautiful as Shakespeare’s, or the song of a nightingale so beautiful -as Ludwig van Beethoven’s. But as art is a process of magnification, -so criticism is a process of reduction. Its purpose is the reducing of -the magnifications of art to the basic classic and æsthetic principles, -and the subsequent announcement thereof in terms proportioned to the -artist’s interplay of fundamental skill and overtopping imagination. - -The most general fault of criticism lies in a confusion of its own -internal processes with those of art: it is in the habit of regarding -the business of art as a reduction of life to its essence of beauty, -and the business of criticism as an expansion of that essence to its -fullest flow. The opposite is more reasonable. Art is a beautiful, -swollen lie; criticism, a cold compress. The concern of art is with -beauty; the concern of criticism is with truth. And truth and beauty, -despite the Sunday School, are often strangers. This confusion of the -business of art and that of criticism has given birth to the so-called -“contagious,” or inspirational, criticism, than which nothing is more -mongrel and absurd. Criticism is designed to state facts--charmingly, -gracefully, if possible--but still facts. It is not designed to exhort, -enlist, convert. This is the business not of the critic, but of -those readers of the critic whom the facts succeed in convincing and -galvanizing. Contagious criticism is merely a vainglorious critic’s -essay at popularity: facts heated up to a degree where they melt into -caressing nothingness. - -But if this “criticism with a glow” is not to be given countenance, -even less is to be suffered the criticism that, in its effort at a -fastidious and elegant reserve, leans so far backward that it freezes -its ears. This species of criticism fails not only to enkindle the -reader, but fails also--and this is more important--to enkindle the -critic himself. The ideal critic is perhaps much like a Thermos bottle: -full of warmth, he suggests the presence of the heat within him without -radiating it. This inner warmth is essential to a critic. But this -inner warmth, where it exists, is automatically chilled and banished -from a critic by a protracted indulgence in excessive critical reserve. -Just as the professional frown assumed by a much photographed public -magnifico often becomes stubbornly fixed upon his hitherto gentle brow, -so does the prolonged spurious constraint of a critic in due time -psychologically hoist him on his own petard. A writer’s work does not -grow more and more like him; a writer grows more and more like his -work. The best writing that a man produces is always just a little -superior to himself. There never was a literary artist who did not -appreciate the difficulty of keeping up to the pace of his writings. A -writer is dominated by the standard of his own writings; he is a slave -_in transitu_, lashed, tormented, and miserable. The weak and inferior -literary artist, such a critic as the one alluded to, soon becomes -the helpless victim of his own writings: like a vampire of his own -creation they turn upon him and suck from him the warm blood that was -erstwhile his. A pose in time becomes natural: a man with a good left -eye cannot affect a monocle for years without eventually coming to need -it. A critic cannot write ice without becoming in time himself at least -partly frosted. - -Paraphrasing Pascal, to little minds all things are great. Great art is -in constant conflict with the awe of little minds. Art is something -like a wonderful trapeze performer swinging high above the heads of the -bewildered multitude and nervous lest it be made to lose its balance -and to slip by the periodic sudden loud marvellings of the folks below. -The little mind and its little criticism are the flattering foes of -sound art. Such art demands for its training and triumph the countless -preliminary body blows of muscular criticism guided by a muscular -mind. Art and the artist cannot be developed by mere back-slapping. If -art, according to Beulé, is the intervention of the human mind in the -elements furnished by experience, criticism is the intervention of the -human mind in the elements furnished by æsthetic passion. Art and the -artist are ever youthful lovers; criticism is their chaperon. - - -II - -I do not believe finally in this or that “theory” of criticism. There -are as many sound and apt species of criticism as there are works -to be criticized. To say that art must be criticized only after this -formula or after that, is to say that art must be contrived only out -of this formula or out of that. As every work of art is an entity, a -thing in itself, so is every piece of criticism an entity, a thing in -itself. That “Thus Spake Zarathustra” must inevitably be criticized by -the canons of the identical “theory” with which one criticizes “Tristan -and Isolde” is surely difficult of reasoning. - -To the Goethe-Carlyle doctrine that the critic’s duty lies alone in -discerning the artist’s aim, his point of view and, finally, his -execution of the task before him, it is easy enough to subscribe, -but certainly this is not a “theory” of criticism so much as it is -a foundation for a theory. To advance it as a theory, full-grown, -full-fledged and flapping, as it has been advanced by the Italian Croce -and his admirers, is to publish the preface to a book without the book -itself. Accepted as a theory complete in itself, it fails by virtue -of its several undeveloped intrinsic problems, chief among which is -its neglect to consider the undeniable fact that, though each work of -art is indubitably an entity and so to be considered, there is yet -in creative art what may be termed an æsthetic genealogy that bears -heavily upon comprehensive criticism and that renders the artist’s aim, -his point of view and his execution of the task before him susceptible -to a criticism predicated in a measure upon the work of the sound -artist who has just preceded him. - -The Goethe-Carlyle hypothesis is a little too liberal. It calls for -qualifications. It gives the artist too much ground, and the critic -too little. To discern the artist’s aim, to discern the artist’s point -of view, are phrases that require an amount of plumbing, and not a few -foot-notes. It is entirely possible, for example, that the immediate -point of view of an artist be faulty, yet the execution of his -immediate task exceedingly fine. If carefully planned triumph in art -is an entity, so also may be undesigned triumph. I do not say that any -such latter phenomenon is usual, but it is conceivable, and hence may -be employed as a test of the critical hypothesis in point. Unschooled, -without aim or point of view in the sense of this hypothesis, -Schumann’s compositions at the age of eleven for chorus and orchestra -offer the quasi-theory some resistance. The question of the comparative -merit of these compositions and the artist’s subsequent work may not -strictly be brought into the argument, since the point at issue is -merely a theory and since theory is properly to be tested by theory. - -Intent and achievement are not necessarily twins. I have always -perversely thought it likely that there is often a greater degree of -accident in fine art than one is permitted to believe. The aim and -point of view of a bad artist are often admirable; the execution of a -fine artist may sometimes be founded upon a point of view that is, from -an apparently sound critical estimate, at striking odds with it. One -of the finest performances in all modern dramatic writing, upon its -critical reception as such, came as a great surprise to the writer who -almost unwittingly had achieved it. Art is often unconscious of itself. -Shakespeare, writing popular plays to order, wrote the greatest plays -that dramatic art has known. Mark Twain, in a disgusted moment, threw -off a practical joke, and it turned out to be literature. - -A strict adherence to the principles enunciated in the Goethe-Carlyle -theory would result in a confinement of art for all the theory’s -bold aim in exactly the opposite direction. For all the critic may -accurately say, the aim and point of view of, say, Richard Strauss -in “Don Quixote” and “A Hero’s Life,” may be imperfect, yet the one -critical fact persists that the executions are remarkably fine. All -things considered, it were perhaps better that the critical theory -under discussion, if it be accepted at all, be turned end foremost: -that the artist’s execution of the task before him be considered -either apart from his aim and point of view, or that it be considered -first, and then--with not too much insistence upon them--his point of -view and his aim. This would seem to be a more logical æsthetic and -critical order. Tolstoi, with a sound, intelligent and technically -perfect aim and point of view composed second-rate drama. So, too, -Maeterlinck. Synge, by his own admissions adjudged critically and -dramatically guilty on both counts, composed one of the truly -first-rate dramas of the Anglo-Saxon stage. - -In its very effort to avoid pigeon-holing, the Goethe-Carlyle theory -pigeon-holes itself. In its commendable essay at catholicity, it is -like a garter so elastic that it fails to hold itself up. That there -may not be contradictions in the contentions here set forth, I am not -sure. But I advance no fixed, definite theory of my own; I advance -merely contradictions of certain of the phases of the theories held -by others, and contradictions are ever in the habit of begetting -contradictions. Yet such contradictions are in themselves apposite and -soundly critical, since any theory susceptible of contradictions must -itself be contradictory and insecure. If I suggest any theory on my -part it is a variable one: a theory that, in this instance, is one -thing and in that, another. Criticism, as I see it--and I share the -common opinion--is simply a sensitive, experienced and thoroughbred -artist’s effort to interpret, in terms of æsthetic doctrine and his -own peculiar soul, the work of another artist reciprocally to that -artist and thus, as with a reflecting mirror, to his public. But to -state merely what criticism is, is not to state the doctrine of its -application. And herein, as I see it, is where the theorists fail to -cover full ground. The anatomy of criticism is composed not of one -theory, but of a theory--more or less generally agreed upon--upon which -are reared in turn other theories that are not so generally agreed -upon. The Goethe-Carlyle theory is thus like a three-story building on -which the constructor has left off work after finishing only the first -story. What certain aspects of these other stories may be like, I have -already tried to suggest. - -I have said that, if I have any theory of my own, it is a theory -susceptible in practice of numerous surface changes. These surface -changes often disturb in a measure this or that phase of what lies -at the bottom. Thus, speaking as a critic of the theatre, I find it -impossible to reconcile myself to criticizing acting and drama from the -vantage point of the same theory, say, for example, the Goethe-Carlyle -theory. This theory fits criticism of drama much better than it -fits criticism of acting, just as it fits criticism of painting and -sculpture much more snugly than criticism of music. The means whereby -the emotions are directly affected, and soundly affected, may at times -be critically meretricious, yet the accomplishment itself may be, -paradoxically, artistic. Perhaps the finest acting performance of our -generation is Bernhardt’s Camille: its final effect is tremendous: yet -the means whereby it is contrived are obviously inartistic. Again, -“King Lear,” searched into with critical chill, is artistically a -poor instance of play-making, yet its effect is precisely the effect -striven for. Surely, in cases like these, criticism founded strictly -upon an inflexible theory is futile criticism, and not only futile but -eminently unfair. - -Here, of course, I exhibit still more contradictions, but through -contradictions we may conceivably gain more secure ground. When his -book is once opened, the author’s mouth is shut. (Wilde, I believe, -said that; and though for some peculiar reason it is today regarded as -suicidal to quote the often profound Wilde in any serious argument, -I risk the danger.) But when a dramatist’s play or a composer’s -symphony is opened, the author has only begun to open his mouth. What -results, an emotional art within an intellectual art, calls for a -critical theory within a critical theory. To this composite end, I -offer a suggestion: blend with the Goethe-Carlyle theory that of the -aforementioned Wilde, to wit, that beauty is uncriticizable, since -it has as many meanings as man has moods, since it is the symbol of -symbols, and since it reveals everything because it expresses nothing. -The trouble with criticism--again to pose a contradiction--is that, in -certain instances, it is often too cerebral. Feeling a great thrill of -beauty, it turns to its somewhat puzzled mind and is apprised that the -thrill which it has unquestionably enjoyed from the work of art might -conceivably be of pathological origin, a fremitus or vibration felt -upon percussion of a hydatoid tumour. - -The Goethe-Carlyle theory, properly rigid and unyielding so far as -emotional groundlings are concerned, may, I believe, at times safely -be chucked under the chin and offered a communication of gipsy ardour -by the critic whose emotions are the residuum of trial, test and -experience. - - -III - -Coquelin put it that the footlights exaggerate everything: they modify -the laws of space and of time; they put miles in a few square feet; -they make minutes appear to be hours. Of this exaggeration, dramatic -criticism--which is the branch of criticism of which I treat in -particular--has caught something. Of all the branches of criticism it -is intrinsically the least sober and the least accurately balanced. It -always reminds me somehow of the lash in the hands of Œacus, in “The -Frogs,” falling upon Bacchus and Xanthus to discover which of the two -is the divine, the latter meantime endeavouring to conceal the pain -that would betray their mortality by various transparent dodges. Drama -is a two-souled art: half divine, half clownish. Shakespeare is the -greatest dramatist who ever lived because he alone, of all dramatists, -most accurately sensed the mongrel nature of his art. Criticism of -drama, it follows, is similarly a two-souled art: half sober, half mad. -Drama is a deliberate intoxicant; dramatic criticism, aromatic spirits -of ammonia; the re-creation is never perfect; there is always a trace -of tipsiness left. Even the best dramatic criticism is always just a -little dramatic. It indulges, a trifle, in acting. It can never be -as impersonal, however much certain of its practitioners may try, as -criticism of painting or of sculpture or of literature. This is why the -best criticism of the theatre must inevitably be personal criticism. -The theatre itself is distinctly personal; its address is directly -personal. It holds the mirror not up to nature, but to the spectator’s -individual idea of nature. If it doesn’t, it fails. The spectator, if -he is a critic, merely holds up his own mirror to the drama’s mirror: a -reflection of the first reflection is the result. Dramatic criticism is -this second reflection. And so the best dramatic criticism has about it -a flavour of the unconscious, grotesque and unpremeditated. “When Lewes -was at his business,” Shaw has said, “he seldom remembered that he was -a gentleman or a scholar.” (Shaw was speaking of Lewes’ free use of -vulgarity and impudence whenever they happened to be the proper tools -for his job.) “In this he showed himself a true craftsman, intent on -making the measurements and analyses of his criticism as accurate, and -their expression as clear and vivid, as possible, instead of allowing -himself to be distracted by the vanity of playing the elegant man of -letters, or writing with perfect good taste, or hinting in every -line that he was above his work. In exacting all this from himself, -and taking his revenge by expressing his most laboured conclusions -with a levity that gave them the air of being the unpremeditated -whimsicalities of a man who had perversely taken to writing about the -theatre for the sake of the jest latent in his own outrageous unfitness -for it, Lewes rolled his stone up the hill quite in the modern manner -of Mr. Walkley, dissembling its huge weight, and apparently kicking it -at random hither and thither in pure wantonness.” - -Mr. Spingarn, in his exceptionally interesting, if somewhat overly -indignant, treatise on “Creative Criticism,” provides, it seems to me, -a particularly clear illustration of the manner in which the proponents -of the more modern theories of criticism imprison themselves in the -extravagance of their freedom. While liberating art from all the -old rules of criticism, they simultaneously confine criticism with -the new rules--or ghosts of rules--wherewith they free art. If each -work of art is a unit, a thing in itself, as is commonly agreed, -why should not each work of criticism be similarly a unit, a thing -in itself? If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual -expression, why should not criticism, in each and every such case, be -similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing -art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I -believe that it has been. I believe that there may be as many kinds of -criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound -analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, -sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of -criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules--or, at -least, none save those that are obvious. If Brahms’ scherzo in E flat -minor, op. 4, is an entity, a work in and of itself, why shouldn’t -Huneker’s criticism of it be regarded as an entity, a work in and -of itself? If there is in Huneker’s work inspiration from without, -so, too, is there in Brahms’: if Brahms may be held a unit in this -particular instance with no consideration of Chopin, why may not -Huneker with no consideration of Brahms? - -If this is pushing things pretty far, it is the Spingarns who have made -the pushing necessary. “Taste,” says Mr. Spingarn, “must reproduce the -work of art within itself in order to understand and judge it; and -at that moment æsthetic judgment becomes nothing more or less than -creative art itself.” This rings true. But granting the perfection of -the taste, why define and limit the critical creative art thus born of -reproduction? No sooner has a law been enunciated, writes Mr. Spingarn, -than it has been broken by an artist impatient or ignorant of its -restraints, and the critics have been obliged to explain away these -violations of their laws or gradually to change the laws themselves. -If art, he continues, is organic expression, and every work of art -is to be interrogated with the question, “What has it expressed, and -how completely?”, there is no place for the question whether it has -conformed to some convenient classification of critics or to some law -derived from this classification. Once again, truly put. But so, too, -no sooner have laws been enunciated than they have been broken by -critics impatient or ignorant of their restraints, and the critics of -critics have been obliged to explain away these violations of the laws, -or gradually to change the laws themselves. And so, too, have these -works of criticism provided no place for the question whether they have -conformed to some convenient classification of the critics of criticism -or to some law derived from this classification. - -“Criticism,” said Carlyle, his theories apart, “stands like an -interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired, between the -prophet and those who hear the melody of his words, and catch some -glimpse of their material meaning, but understand not their deeper -import.” This is the best definition that I know of. It defines without -defining; it gives into the keeping of the interpreter the hundred -languages of art and merely urges him, with whatever means may best and -properly suit his ends, to translate them clearly to those that do -not understand; it sets him free from the very shackles which Carlyle -himself, removing from art, wound in turn about him. - - - - -II. DRAMA AS AN ART - - - - -II. DRAMA AS AN ART - - -I - -If the best of criticism, in the familiar description of Anatole -France, lies in the adventure of a soul among masterpieces, the best of -drama may perhaps be described as the adventure of a masterpiece among -souls. Drama is fine or impoverished in the degree that it evokes from -such souls a fitting and noble reaction. - -Drama is, in essence, a democratic art in constant brave conflict with -aristocracy of intelligence, soul and emotion. When drama triumphs, -a masterpiece like “Hamlet” comes to life. When the conflict ends -in a draw, a drama half-way between greatness and littleness is the -result--a drama, say, such as “El Gran Galeoto.” When the struggle -ends in defeat, the result is a “Way Down East” or a “Lightnin’.” -This, obviously, is not to say that great drama may not be popular -drama, nor popular drama great drama, for I speak of drama here not -as this play or that, but as a specific art. And it is as a specific -art that it finds its test and trial, not in its own intrinsically -democratic soul, but in the extrinsic aristocratic soul that is taste, -and connoisseurship, and final judgment. Drama that has come to be -at once great and popular has ever first been given the imprimatur, -not of democratic souls, but of aristocratic. Shakespeare and Molière -triumphed over aristocracy of intelligence, soul and emotion before -that triumph was presently carried on into the domain of inferior -intelligence, soul and emotion. In our own day, the drama of Hauptmann, -Shaw and the American O’Neill has come into its popular own only after -it first achieved the imprimatur of what we may term the unpopular, or -undemocratic, theatres. Aristocracy cleared the democratic path for -Ibsen, as it cleared it, in so far as possible, for Rostand and Hugo -von Hofmannsthal. - -Great drama is the rainbow born when the sun of reflection and -understanding smiles anew upon an intelligence and emotion which that -drama has respectively shot with gleams of brilliant lightning and -drenched with the rain of brilliant tears. Great drama, like great -men and great women, is always just a little sad. Only idiots may be -completely happy. Reflection, sympathy, wisdom, gallant gentleness, -experience--the chords upon which great drama is played--these are -wistful chords. The commonplace urge that drama, to be truly great, -must uplift is, in the sense that the word uplift is used, childish. -The mission of great drama is not to make numskulls glad that they are -alive, but to make them speculate why they are permitted to be alive -at all. And since this is the mission of great drama--if its mission -may, indeed, be reduced to any phrase--it combines within itself, -together with this mystical and awe-struck appeal to the proletariat, -a direct and agreeable appeal to such persons as are, by reason of -their metaphysical perception and emotional culture, superior to and -contemptuous of the proletariat. Fine drama, in truth, is usually just -a trifle snobbish. It has no traffic with such souls as are readily -to be made to feel “uplifted” by spurious philosophical nostrums and -emotional sugar pills. Its business is with what the matchless Dryden -hailed “souls of the highest rank and truest understanding”: souls -who find a greater uplift in the noble depressions of Brahms’ first -trio, Bartolommeo’s Madonna della Misericordia, and Joseph Conrad’s -“Youth” than in the easy buoyancies of John Philip Sousa, Howard -Chandler Christy and Rupert Hughes. The aim of great drama is not to -make men happy with themselves as they are, but with themselves as -they might, yet alas cannot, be. As Gautier has it, “The aim of art is -not exact reproduction of nature, but creation, by means of forms and -colours, of a microcosm wherein may be produced dreams, sensations, and -ideas inspired by the aspect of the world.” If drama is irrevocably -a democratic art and uplift of the great masses of men its noblest -end, Mrs. Porter’s “Pollyanna” must endure as a work of dramatic art a -thousand times finer than Corneille’s “Polyeucte.” - -Drama has been strictly defined by the ritualists in a dozen different -ways. “Drama,” says one, “must be based on character, and the action -proceed from character.” “Drama,” stipulates another, “is not an -imitation of men, but of an action and of life: character is subsidiary -to action.” “Drama,” promulgates still another, “is the struggle of a -will against obstacles.” And so on, so on. Rules, rules and more rules. -Pigeon-holes upon pigeon-holes. Good drama is anything that interests -an intelligently emotional group of persons assembled together in an -illuminated hall. Molière, wise among dramatists, said as much, though -in somewhat more, and doubtless too, sweeping words. Throughout the -ages of drama there will be always Romanticists of one sort or another, -brave and splendid spirits, who will have to free themselves from the -definitions and limitations imposed upon them by the neo-Bossus and -Boileaus, and the small portion Voltaires, La Harpes and Marmontels. -Drama is struggle, a conflict of wills? Then what of “Ghosts”? Drama -is action? Then what of “Nachtasyl”? Drama is character? Then what of -“The Dream Play”? “A ‘character’ upon the stage,” wrote the author -of the last named drama, “has become a creature ready-made--a mere -mechanism that drives the man--I do not believe in these theatrical -‘characters.’” - -Of all the higher arts, drama is perhaps the simplest and easiest. -Its anatomy is composed of all the other arts, high and low, stripped -to their elementals. It is a synthesis of those portions of these -other arts that, being elemental, are most easily assimilable on the -part of the multitude. It is a snatch of music, a bit of painting, -a moment of dancing, a slice of sculpture, draped upon the skeleton -of literature. At its highest, it ranks with literature, but never -above it. One small notch below, and it ranks only with itself, in -its own isolated and generically peculiar field. Drama, indeed, is -dancing literature: a hybrid art. It is often purple and splendid; -it is often profoundly beautiful and profoundly moving. Yet, with -a direct appeal to the emotions as its first and encompassing aim, -it has never, even at its finest, been able to exercise the measure -of direct emotional appeal that is exercised, say, by Chopin’s C -sharp minor Nocturne, op. 27, No. 1, or by the soft romance of the -canvases of Palma Vecchio, or by Rodin’s superb “Eternal Spring,” or -by Zola’s “La Terre.” It may, at its finest as at its worst, of course -subjugate and triumph over inexperienced emotionalism, but the greatest -drama of Shakespeare himself has never, in the truthful confession -of cultivated emotionalism, influenced that emotionalism as has the -greatest literature, or the greatest music, or the greatest painting or -sculpture. The splendid music of “Romeo” or “Hamlet” is not so eloquent -and moving as that of “Tristan” or “Lohengrin”; no situation in the -whole of Hauptmann can strike in the heart so thrilling and profound -a chord of pity as a single line in Allegri’s obvious “Miserere.” The -greatest note of comedy in drama falls short of the note of comedy in -the “Coffee-Cantata” of Bach; the greatest note of ironic remorse -falls short of that in the scherzo in B minor of Chopin; the greatest -intellectual note falls short of that in the first and last movements -of the C minor symphony of Brahms. What play of Sudermann’s has the -direct appeal of “The Indian Lily”? What play made out of Hardy’s -“Tess,” however adroitly contrived, retains the powerful appeal of -the original piece of literature? To descend, what obvious thrill -melodrama, designed frankly for dollars, has--with all its painstaking -and deliberate intent--yet succeeded in provoking half the thrill and -shock of the obvious second chapter of Andreas Latzko’s equally obvious -“Men in War”? - -Art is an evocation of beautiful emotions: art is art in the degree -that it succeeds in this evocation: drama succeeds in an inferior -degree. Whatever emotion drama may succeed brilliantly in evoking, -another art succeeds in evoking more brilliantly. - - -II - -Although, of course, one speaks of drama here primarily in the sense -of acted drama, it is perhaps not necessary so strictly to confine -one’s self. For when the critic confines himself in his discussion -of drama to the acted drama, he regularly brings upon himself from -other critics--chiefly bookish fellows whose theatrical knowledge -is meagre--the very largely unwarranted embarrassment of arguments -anent “crowd psychology” and the like which, while they have little -or nothing to do with the case, none the less make a certain deep -impression upon his readers. (Readers of criticism become automatically -critics; with his first sentence, the critic challenges his -critic-reader’s sense of argument.) This constantly advanced contention -of “crowd psychology,” of which drama is supposed to be at once master -and slave, has small place in a consideration of drama, from whatever -sound point of view one elects to consider the latter. If “crowd -psychology” operates in the case of theatre drama, it operates also in -the case of concert-hall music. Yet no one so far as I know seriously -maintains that, in a criticism of music, this “crowd psychology” has -any place. - -I have once before pointed out that, even accepting the theory of -crowd psychology and its direct and indirect implications so far as -drama is concerned, it is as nonsensical to assume that one thousand -persons assembled together before a drama in a theatre are, by -reason of their constituting a crowd, any more likely to be moved -automatically than the same crowd of one thousand persons assembled -together before a painting in an art gallery. Furthermore, the theory -that collective intelligence and emotionalism are a more facile and -ingenuous intelligence and emotionalism, while it may hold full water -in the psychological laboratory, holds little in actual external -demonstration, particularly in any consideration of a crowd before one -of the arts. While it may be true that the Le Bon and Tarde theory -applies aptly to the collective psychology of a crowd at a prize-fight -or a bull-fight or a circus, one may be permitted severe doubts that -it holds equally true of a crowd in a theatre or in an art gallery -or in a concert hall. The tendency of such a latter group is not -æsthetically downward, but upward. And not only æsthetically, but -intellectually and emotionally. (I speak, of course, and with proper -relevance, of a crowd assembled to hear good drama or good music, or -to see good painting. The customary obscuring tactic of critics in -this situation is to argue out the principles of intelligent reaction -to good drama in terms of yokel reaction to bad drama. Analysis of -the principles of sound theatre drama and the reaction of a group of -eight hundred citizens of Marion, Ohio, to “The Two Orphans” somehow do -not seem to me to be especially apposite.) The fine drama or the fine -piece of music does not make its auditor part of a crowd; it removes -him, and every one else in the crowd, from the crowd, and makes him an -individual. The crowd ceases to exist as a crowd; it becomes a crowd -of units, of separate individuals. The dramas of Mr. Owen Davis make -crowds; the dramas of Shakespeare make individuals. - -The argument to the contrary always somewhat grotesquely assumes that -the crowd assembled at a fine play, and promptly susceptible to group -psychology, is a new crowd, one that has never attended a fine play -before. Such an assumption falls to pieces in two ways. Firstly, it -is beyond reason to believe that it is true in more than one instance -out of a hundred; and secondly it would not be true even if it were -true. For, granting that a crowd of one thousand persons were seeing -great drama for the first time in their lives, what reason is there -for believing that the majority of persons in the crowd who had never -seen great drama and didn’t know exactly what to make of it would be -swayed and influenced by the minority who had never seen great drama -but did know what to make of it? If this were true, no great drama -could ever possibly fail in the commercial theatre. Or, to test the -hypothesis further, take it the other way round. What reason is there -for believing that the majority in this crowd would be moved the one -way or the other, either by a minority that did understand the play, or -did not understand it? Or take it in another way still. What reason is -there for believing that the minority in this crowd who did know what -the drama was about would be persuaded emotionally by the majority who -did not know what the drama was about? - -Theories, and again theories. But the facts fail to support them. -Take the lowest type of crowd imaginable, one in which there is not -one cultured man in a thousand--the crowd, say, at a professional -American baseball game--and pack it into an American equivalent for -Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus. The play, let us say, is “Œdipus -Rex.” At the ball game, the crowd psychology of Le Bon operated to the -full. But what now? Would the crowd, in the theatre and before a great -drama, be the same crowd? Would it not be an entirely different crowd? -Would not its group psychology promptly and violently suffer a sudden -change? Whether out of curiosity, disgust, admiration, social shame -or what not, would it not rapidly segregate itself, spiritually or -physically, into various groups? What is the Le Bon theatrical view of -the crowd psychology that somehow didn’t come off during the initial -engagement of Barrie’s “Peter Pan” in Washington, D. C.? Or of the -crowd psychology that worked the other way round when Ibsen was first -played in London? Or of the crowd psychology that, operating regularly, -if artificially, at the New York premières, most often fails, for all -its high enthusiasm, to move either the minority or the majority in its -composition? - -The question of sound drama and the pack psychology of a congress -of groundlings is a famous one: it gets nowhere. Sound drama and -sound audiences are alone to be considered at one and the same time. -And, as I have noted, the tendency of willing, or even semi-willing, -auditors and spectators is in an upward direction, not a downward. No -intelligent spectator at a performance of “Ben Hur” has ever been made -to feel like throwing his hat into the air and cheering by the similar -actions of the mob spectators to the left and right of him. No ignoble -auditor of “The Laughter of the Gods” but has been made to feel, in -some part, the contagion of cultivated appreciation to _his_ left and -right. “I forget,” wrote Sarcey, in a consideration of the subject of -which we have been treating, “what tyrant it was of ancient Greece to -whom massacres were every-day affairs, but who wept copiously over the -misfortunes of a heroine in a tragedy. He was the audience; and for the -one evening clothed himself in the sentiments of the public.” A typical -example of sophisticated reasoning. How does Sarcey know that it was -not the rest of the audience--the crowd--that was influenced by this -repentant and copiously lachrymose individual, rather than that it was -this individual who was moved by the crowd? - -If fallacies perchance insinuate themselves into these opposing -contentions, it is a case of fallacy versus fallacy: my intent is not -so much to prove anything as to indicate the presence of holes in the -proofs of the other side. These holes seem to me to be numerous, and of -considerable circumference. A description of two of them may suffice to -suggest the rest. Take, as the first of these, the familiar Castelvetro -doctrine that, since a theatrical audience is not a select congress but -a motley crowd, the dramatist, ever conscious of the group psychology, -must inevitably avoid all themes and ideas unintelligible to such a -gathering. It may be true that a theatrical audience is not a select -congress, but why confine the argument to theatrical audiences and seek -thus to prove something of drama that may be proved as well--if one is -given to such idiosyncrasies--of music? What, as I have said before, -of opera and concert hall audiences? Consider the average audience -at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan, Carnegie Hall. Is it any way -culturally superior to the average audience at the St. James’s Theatre, -or the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, or the Plymouth--or even the Neighbourhood -Playhouse down in Grand Street? What of the audiences who attended -the original performances of Beethoven’s “Leonore” (“Fidelio”), -Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini,” the original performances of Wagner -in France and the performances of his “Der Fliegende Holländer” in -Germany, the operas of Händel in England in the years 1733-37, the -work of Rossini in Italy, the concerts of Chopin during his tour of -England and Scotland?... Again, as to the imperative necessity of the -dramatist’s avoidance of all themes and ideas unintelligible to a mob -audience, what of the success among such very audiences of--to name but -a few more recent profitably produced and locally readily recognizable -examples--Shaw’s “Getting Married,” Augustus Thomas’ “The Witching -Hour,” Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck,” Dunsany’s “The Laughter of the Gods,” -Barrie’s “Mary Rose,” Strindberg’s “The Father,” Synge’s “Playboy”?... -Surely it will be quickly allowed that however obvious the themes and -ideas of these plays may be to the few, they are hardly within the -ready intelligence of what the theorists picture as the imaginary mob -theatre audience. Fine drama is independent of all such theories: the -dramatist who subscribes to them should not figure in any treatise upon -drama as an art. - -A second illustration: the equivocation to the effect that drama, -being a democratic art, may not properly be evaluated in terms of -more limited, and aristocratic, taste. It seems to me, at least, an -idiotic assumption that drama is a more democratic art than music. All -great art is democratic in intention, if not in reward. Michelangelo, -Shakespeare, Wagner and Zola are democratic artists, and their art -democratic art. It is criticism of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Wagner -and Zola that is aristocratic. Criticism, not art, generically wears -the ermine and the purple. To appraise a democratic art in terms of -democracy is to attempt to effect a chemical reaction in nitrogen with -nitrogen. If drama is, critically, a democratic art since it is meant -not to be read by the few but to be played before the many, music must -be critically no less a democratic art. Yet the theorists conveniently -overlook this embarrassment. Nevertheless, if Shakespeare’s dramas -were designed for the heterogeneous ear, so, too, were the songs of -Schumann. No great artist has ever in his heart deliberately fashioned -his work for a remote and forgotten cellar, dark and stairless. He -fashions it, for all his doubts, in the hope of hospitable eyes and -ears, and in the hope of a sun to shine upon it. It is as ridiculous -to argue that because Shakespeare’s is a democratic art it must be -criticized in terms of democratic reaction to it as it would be to -argue that because the United States is a democracy the most acute -and comprehensive criticism of that democracy must lie in a native -democrat’s reaction to it. “To say that the theatre is for the people,” -says Gordon Craig, “is necessary. But to forget to add that part and -parcel of the people is the aristocracy, whether of birth or feeling, -is an omission. A man of the eighteenth century, dressed in silks, in -a fashionable loggia in the theatre at Versailles, looking as if he -did no work (as Voltaire in his youth may have looked), presents, in -essence, exactly the same picture as Walt Whitman in his rough gray -suit lounging in the Bowery, also looking as if he did no work.... One -the aristocrat, one the democrat: the two are identical.” - - -III - -“Convictions,” said Nietzsche, “are prisons.” Critical “theories,” with -negligible exception, seek to denude the arts of their splendid, gipsy -gauds and to force them instead to don so many duplicated black and -white striped uniforms. Of all the arts, drama has suffered most in -this regard. Its critics, from the time of Aristotle, have bound and -fettered it, and have then urged it impassionedly to soar. Yet, despite -its shackles, it has triumphed, and each triumph has been a derision -of one of its most famous and distinguished critics. It triumphed, -through Shakespeare, over Aristotle; it triumphed, through Molière, -over Castelvetro; it triumphed, through Lemercier, over Diderot; it -triumphed, through Lessing, over Voltaire; it triumphed, through -Ibsen, over Flaubert; it has triumphed, through Hauptmann, over Sarcey -and, through Schnitzler and Bernard Shaw, over Mr. Archer. The truth -perhaps is that drama is an art as flexible as the imaginations of its -audiences. It is no more to be bound by rules and theories than such -imaginations are to be bound by rules and theories. Who so all-wise -that he may say by what rules or set of rules living imaginations -and imaginations yet unborn are to be fanned into theatrical flame? -“Imagination,” Samuel Johnson’s words apply to auditor as to artist, -“a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations and -impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured to baffle the logician, -to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the inclosures of -regularity.” And further, “There is therefore scarcely any species -of writing of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are -its constituents; every new genius produces some innovation which, -when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of -foregoing authors had established.” - -Does the play interest, and whom? This seems to me to be the only -doctrine of dramatic criticism that is capable of supporting itself -soundly. First, does the play interest? In other words, how far has the -dramatist succeeded in expressing himself, and the materials before -him, intelligently, eloquently, symmetrically, beautifully? So much for -the criticism of the dramatist as an artist. In the second place, whom -does the play interest? Does it interest inferior persons, or does it -interest cultivated and artistically sensitive persons? So much for the -criticism of the artist as a dramatist. - -The major difficulty with critics of the drama has always been that, -having once positively enunciated their critical credos, they have -been constrained to devote their entire subsequent enterprise and -ingenuity to defending the fallacies therein. Since a considerable -number of these critics have been, and are, extraordinarily shrewd and -ingenious men, these defences of error have often been contrived with -such persuasive dexterity and reasonableness that they have endured -beyond the more sound doctrines of less deft critics, doctrines which, -being sound, have suffered the rebuffs that gaunt, grim logic, ever -unprepossessing and unhypnotic, suffers always. “I hope that I am -right; if I am not right, I am still right,” said Brunetière. “Mr. -William Archer is not only, like myself, a convinced, inflexible -determinist,” Henry Arthur Jones has written, “I am persuaded that -he is also, unlike myself, a consistent one. I am sure he takes care -that his practice agrees with his opinions--even when they are wrong.” -Dramatic criticism is an attempt to formulate rules of conduct for the -lovable, wayward, charming, wilful vagabond that is the drama. For the -drama is an art with a feather in its cap and an ironic smile upon its -lips, sauntering impudently over forbidden lawns and through closed -lanes into the hearts of those of us children of the world who have -never grown up. Beside literature, it is the Mother Goose of the arts: -a gorgeous and empurpled Mother Goose for the fireside of impressible -and romantic youth that, looking upward, leans ever hushed and -expectant at the knee of life. It is a fairy tale told realistically, -a true story told as romance. It is the lullaby of disillusion, the -chimes without the cathedral, the fears and hopes and dreams and -passions of those who cannot fully fear and hope and dream and flame of -themselves. - -“The drama must have reality,” so Mr. P. P. Howe in his engaging -volume of “Dramatic Portraits,” “but the first essential to our -understanding of an art is that we should not believe it to be actual -life. The spectator who shouts his warning and advice to the heroine -when the villain is approaching is, in the theatre, the only true -believer in the hand of God; and he is liable to find it in a drama -lower than the best.” The art of the drama is one which imposes -upon drama the obligation of depicting at once the inner processes -of life realistically, and the external aspects of life delusively. -Properly and sympathetically to appreciate drama, one must look upon -it synchronously with two different eyes: the one arguing against -the other as to the truth of what it sees, and triumphing over this -doubtful other with the full force of its sophistry. Again inevitably -to quote Coleridge, “Stage presentations are to produce a sort of -temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and -supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows -that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is. -Thus the true stage illusion as to a forest scene consists, not in the -mind’s judging it to be a forest, but in its remission of the judgment -that it is not a forest.” This obviously applies to drama as well as -to dramatic investiture. One never for a moment believes absolutely -that Mr. John Barrymore is Richard III; one merely agrees, for the sake -of Shakespeare, who has written the play, and Mr. Hopkins, who has -cast it, that Mr. John Barrymore is Richard III, that one may receive -the ocular, aural and mental sensations for which one has paid three -dollars and a half. Nor does one for a moment believe that Mr. Walter -Hampden, whom that very evening one has seen dividing a brobdingnagian -dish of goulash with Mr. Oliver Herford in the Player’s Club and -discussing the prospects of the White Sox, is actually speaking -extemporaneously the rare verbal embroideries of Shakespeare; or that -Miss Ethel Barrymore who is billed in front of Browne’s Chop House to -take a star part in the Actors’ Equity Association’s benefit, is really -the queen of a distant kingdom. - -The dramatist, in the theatre, is not a worker in actualities, but in -the essence of actualities that filters through the self-deception of -his spectators. There is no such thing as realism in the theatre: there -is only mimicry of realism. There is no such thing as romance in the -theatre: there is only mimicry of romance. There is no such thing as an -automatic dramatic susceptibility in a theatre audience: there is only -a volitional dramatic susceptibility. Thus, it is absurd to speak of -the drama holding the mirror up to nature; all that the drama can do -is to hold nature up to its own peculiar mirror which, like that in a -pleasure-park carousel, amusingly fattens up nature, or shrinks it, yet -does not at any time render it unrecognizable. One does not go to the -theatre to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in -which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and -entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright. Drama is the -surprising pulling of a perfectly obvious, every-day rabbit out of a -perfectly obvious, every-day silk hat. The spectator has seen thousands -of rabbits and thousands of silk hats, but he has never seen a silk hat -that had a rabbit concealed in it, and he is curious about it. - -But if drama is essentially mimetic, so also--as Professor Gilbert -Murray implies--is criticism essentially mimetic in that it is -representative of the work criticized. It is conceivable that one may -criticize Mr. Ziegfeld’s “Follies” in terms of the “Philoctetes” of -Theodectes--I myself have been guilty of even more exceptional feats; -it is not only conceivable, but of common occurrence, for certain of -our academic American critics to criticize the plays of Mr. Shaw in -terms of Scribe and Sardou, and with a perfectly straight face; but -criticism in general is a chameleon that takes on something of the -colour of the pattern upon which it imposes itself. There is drama -in Horace’s “Epistola ad Pisones,” a criticism of drama. There is -the spirit of comedy in Hazlitt’s essay “On the Comic Writers of the -Last Century.” Dryden’s “Essay on Dramatic Poesy” is poetry. There -is something of the music of Chopin in Huneker’s critical essays on -Chopin, and some of Mary Garden’s spectacular histrionism in his essay -on her acting. Walkley, criticizing “L’Enfant Prodigue,” uses the pen -of Pierrot. Criticism, more than drama with her mirror toward nature, -holds the mirror up to the nature of the work it criticizes. Its end -is the revivification of the passion of art which has been spent in -its behalf, but under the terms laid down by Plato. Its aim is to -reconstruct a great work of art on a diminutive scale, that eyes -which are not capable of gazing on high may have it within the reach -of their vision. Its aim is to play again all the full richness of -the artist’s emotional organ tones, in so far as is possible, on the -cold cerebral xylophone that is criticism’s deficient instrument. In -the accomplishment of these aims, it is bound by no laws that art is -not bound by. There is but one rule: there are no rules. Art laughs at -locksmiths. - -It has been a favourite diversion of critics since Aristotle’s day to -argue that drama is drama, whether one reads it from a printed page -or sees it enacted in a theatre. Great drama, they announce, is great -drama whether it ever be acted or not; “it speaks with the same voice -in solitude as in crowds”; and “all the more then”--again I quote Mr. -Spingarn--“will the drama itself ‘even apart from representation and -actors,’ as old Aristotle puts it, speak with its highest power to the -imagination fitted to understand and receive it.” Upon this point of -view much of the academic criticism of drama has been based. But may -we not well reply that, for all the fact that Shakespeare would still -be the greatest dramatist who ever lived had he never been played in -the theatre, so, too, would Bach still be the greatest composer who -ever lived had his compositions never been played at all? If drama is -not meant for actors, may we not also argue that music is not meant for -instruments? Are not such expedients less sound criticism than clever -evasion of sound criticism: a frolicsome and agreeable straddling -of the æsthetic see-saw? There is the printed drama--criticize it. -There is the same drama acted--criticize it. Why quibble? Sometimes, -as in the case of “Gioconda” and Duse, they are one. Well and good. -Sometimes, as in the case of “Chantecler” and Maude Adams, they are not -one. Well and good. But where, in either case, the confusion that the -critics lay such stress upon? These critics deal not with theories, -but with mere words. They take two dozen empty words and adroitly seek -therewith to fashion a fecund theory. The result is--words. “Words -which,” said Ruskin, “if they are not watched, will do deadly work -sometimes. There are masked words droning and skulking about us just -now ... (there never were so many, owing to the teaching of catechisms -and phrases at school instead of human meanings) ... there never were -creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, -never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words: they are the unjust -stewards of men’s ideas....” - - - - -III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE - - - - -III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE - - -I - -The theatre stands in relation to drama much as the art gallery -stands in relation to painting. Its aim is to set off drama in such -surroundings and in such light as to bring it within the comfortable -vision and agreeable scrutiny of the nomad public. To say that fine -drama may produce an equal effect read as acted may be true or not as -you choose, but so too a fine painting may produce an equal effect -beheld in one’s library as in the Uffizi. Art thrives--art leads to -art--on sympathy and a measure of general understanding. Otherwise, -of what use criticism? To divorce the theatre from a consideration of -drama as an art, to contend, as it has been contended from Aristotle’s -day to Corneille’s, and from Dryden’s and Lamb’s to our own, that -“the more lasting and noble design” of drama rests in a reading rather -than a seeing, may be, strictly, a logical æsthetic manœuvre, but -equally a logical æsthetic manœuvre would be a divorcement of canvas -from painting as an art. The theatre is the canvas of drama. The -printed drama is like a bubbling and sunlit spring, encountered only -by wanderers into the hills and awaiting the bottling process of the -theatre to carry its tonic waters far and wide among an expectant and -emotionally ill people. - -The criticism that nominates itself to hold drama and the theatre as -things apart is a criticism which, for all its probable integrity and -reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy, like a duchess in a play -by Mr. Sydney Grundy. Its æsthetic nose is elevated to such a degree -that it may no longer serve as a practical organ of earthly smell, -but merely as a quasi-wax feature to round out the symmetry of the -face. It is criticism in a stiff corset, erect, immobile, lordly--like -the Prussian lieutenant of yesterday, a striking figure, yet just a -little absurd. It is sound, but like many things that are sound in -æsthetics, it has its weak points, even its confounding points. For -they say that propaganda can have no place in art, and along comes a -Hauptmann and writes a “Weavers.” Or they say that art is form, and -along comes a Richard Strauss and composes two songs for baritone and -orchestra that set the critics to a mad chasing of their own tails. Or, -opposing criticism as an art, they say that “criticism is art in form, -but its content is judgment, which takes it out of the intuitional -world into the conceptual world”--and along comes an H. G. Wells with -his “The New Machiavelli” which, like criticism, is art in form and -its content judgment. To hold that the drama as an art may achieve -its highest end read by the individual and not acted in the theatre, -is to hold that music as an art may achieve its highest end played by -but one instrument and not by an orchestra. The theatre is the drama’s -orchestra: upon the wood of its boards and the wind of its puppets is -the melody of drama in all its full richness sounded. What if drama -is art and the theatre not art? What if “Hamlet” is art and electric -lights and cheese-cloth are not art? Schubert’s piano trio, op. 99, -is art, and a pianoforte is a mere wooden box containing a number of -little hammers that hit an equal number of steel and copper wires. -What if I can read a full imagination into “Romeo and Juliet” and thus -people it and make it live for me, without going to the theatre? So, -too, can I read a full melody into the manuscript of a song by Hugo -Wolf and thus make it sing for me, without going to a concert hall. But -why? Is there only one way to appreciate and enjoy art--and since when? -Wagner on a single violin is Wagner; Wagner on all the orchestra is -super-Wagner. To read a great drama is to play “Parsifal” on a cornet -and an oboe. - -The object of the theatre is not, as is habitually maintained, a -shrewd excitation of the imagination of a crowd, but rather a shrewd -relaxation of that imagination. It is a faulty axiom that holds the -greatest actor in the theatre to be an audience’s imagination, and -the adroit cultivation of the latter to be ever productive of large -financial return. As I have on more than one occasion pointed out from -available and acutely relevant statistics, the more a dramatist relies -upon the imagination, of an audience, the less the box-office reward -that is his. An audience fills a theatre auditorium not so eager to -perform with its imagination as to have its imagination performed -upon. This is not the paradox it may superficially seem to be. The -difference is the difference between a prompt commercial failure like -Molnar’s “Der Gardeofficier” (“Where Ignorance Is Bliss”) which asks -an audience to perform with its imagination and a great commercial -success like Barrie’s “Peter Pan” which performs upon the audience’s -imagination by supplying to it every detail of imagination, ready-made -and persuasively labelled. The theatre is not a place to which one -goes in search of the unexplored corners of one’s imagination; it is -a place to which one goes in repeated search of the familiar corners -of one’s imagination. The moment the dramatist works in the direction -of unfamiliar corners, he is lost. This, contradictorily enough, is -granted by the very critics who hold to the imagination fallacy which -I have just described. They unanimously agree that a dramatist’s most -successful cultivation of an audience lies in what they term, and -nicely, the mood of recognition, and in the same breath paradoxically -contend that sudden imaginative shock is a desideratum no less. - -In this pleasant remission of the active imagination lies one of the -secrets of the charm of the theatre. Nor is the theatre alone in -this. On even the higher plane of the authentic arts a measure of the -same phenomenon assists in what may perhaps not too far-fetchedly be -termed the negative stimulation of the spectator’s fancy. For all the -pretty and winning words to the contrary, no person capable of sound -introspection will admit that a beautiful painting like Giorgione’s -“The Concert” or a beautiful piece of sculpture like Pisano’s Perugian -fountain actually and literally stirs his imagination, and sets it -a-sail across hitherto uncharted æsthetic seas. What such a painting -or piece of sculpture does is to reach out and, with its overpowering -beauty, encompass and æsthetically fence in the antecedent wandering -and uncertain imagination of its spectator. As in the instance of -drama, it does not so much awaken a dormant imagination as soothe an -imagination already awake. Of all the arts, music alone remains a -telegrapher of unborn dreams. - -The theatre brings to the art of drama concrete movement, concrete -colour, and concrete final effectiveness: this, in all save a few minor -particulars. The art of drama suffers, true enough, when the theatre, -even at its finest, is challenged by it to produce the values intrinsic -in its ghost of a dead king, or in its battle on Bosworth Field, or in -its ship torn by the tempest, or in its fairy wood on midsummer night, -or in its approaching tread of doom of the gods of the mountain. But -for each such defeat it prospers doubly in the gifts that the theatre -brings to it. Such gifts as the leader Craig has brought to the -furtherance of the beauty of “Electra” and “Hamlet,” as Reinhardt and -his aides have brought to “Ariadne” and “Julius Cæsar,” as Golovine -and Appia and Bakst and Linnebach and half a dozen others have -brought to the classics that have called to them, are not small ones. -They have crystallized the glory of drama, have taken so many loose -jewels and given them substantial and appropriate settings which have -fittingly posed their radiance. To say that the reading imagination -of the average cultured man is superior in power of suggestion and -depiction to the imagination of the theatre is idiotically to say that -the reading imagination of every average cultured man is superior in -these powers to the combined theatrical imaginations of Gordon Craig, -Max Reinhardt and Eleanora Duse operating jointly upon the same play. -Even a commonplace imagination can successfully conjure up a landscape -more beautiful than any painted by Poussin or Gainsborough, or jewels -more opalescent than any painted by Rembrandt, or a woman’s dress more -luminous than any painted by Fortuny, or nymphs more beguiling than -any of Rubens’, yet who so foolish to say--as they are wont foolishly -to say of reading imagination and the drama--that such an imagination -is therefore superior to that of the artists? This, in essence, is -none the less the serious contention of those who decline to reconcile -themselves to the theatrically produced drama. This contention, reduced -to its skeleton, is that, since the vice-president of the Corn Exchange -Bank can picture the chamber in the outbuilding adjoining Gloster’s -castle more greatly to his satisfaction than Adolphe Appia can picture -it for him on the stage, the mental performance of the former is -therefore a finer artistic achievement than the stage performance of -the latter. - - -II - -The word imagination leads critics to queer antics. It is, perhaps, -the most manhandled word in our critical vocabulary. It is used -almost invariably in its literal meaning: no shades and shadows are -vouchsafed to it. Imagination, in good truth, is not the basis of art, -but an overtone. Many an inferior artist has a greater imagination -than many a superior artist. Maeterlinck’s imagination is much richer -than Hauptmann’s, Erik Satie’s is much richer than César Franck’s, -and I am not at all certain that Romain Rolland’s is not twice as -opulent as Thomas Hardy’s. Imagination is the slave of the true artist, -the master of the weak. The true artist beats imagination with the -cat-o’-nine-tails of his individual technic until it cries out in pain, -and this pain is the work of art which is born. The inferior craftsman -comfortably confounds imagination with the finished work, and so pets -and coddles it; and imagination’s resultant mincings and giggles he -then vaingloriously sets forth as resolute art. - -The theatre offers to supplement, embroider and enrich the imagination -of the reader of drama with the imaginations of the actor, the scene -designer, the musician, the costumer and the producing director. -Each of these, before he sets himself to his concrete task, has--like -the lay reader--sought the fruits of his own reading imagination. -The fruits of these five reading imaginations are then assembled, -carefully assorted, and the most worthy of them deftly burbanked. -The final staging of the drama is merely a staging of these best -fruits of the various reading imaginations. To say, against this, -that it is most often impossible to render a reading imagination into -satisfactory concrete forms is doubtless to say what is, strictly, -true. But art itself is at its highest merely an approach toward -limitless imagination and beauty. Æsthetics is a pilgrim on the road to -a Mecca that is ever just over the sky-line. Of how many great works -of art can one say, with complete and final conviction, that art in -this particular direction can conceivably go no farther? Is it not -conceivable that some super-Michelangelo will some day fashion an even -more perfect “Slave,” and some super-Shakespeare an even more beautiful -poetic drama? - -The detractors of the theatre are often expert in persuasive -half-truths and masters of dialectic sleight-of-hand. Their -performances are often so adroit that the spectator is quick to believe -that the trunk is really empty, yet the false bottom is there for -all its cunning concealment. Take, for example, George Moore, in the -preface to his last play, “The Coming of Gabrielle.” “The illusion -created by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting and short sentences -is in itself illusory,” he professes to believe, though why he numbers -the dramatist’s short sentences among the externals of the stage -is not quite clear. “The best performances of plays and operas are -witnessed at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was never so like Tristan at -night as he was in the afternoon when he sang the part in a short -jacket, a bowler hat and an umbrella in his hand. The chain armour and -the plumes that he wore at night were but a distraction, setting our -thoughts on periods, on the short swords in use in the ninth century in -Ireland or in Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of the ships -in which the lovers were voyaging, on the absurd night-dress which -is the convention that Isolde should appear in, a garment she never -wore and which we know to be make-believe. But the hat and feathers -that Isolde appears in when she rehearses the part are forgotten the -moment she sings; and if I had to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play -Hamlet or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate for a moment. The -moment he speaks he ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose the -illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince of Denmark and remember the -mummer.” Years ago, in a volume of critical essays given the title -“Another Book on the Theatre,” I took a boyish delight in setting off -precisely the same noisy firework just to hear the folks in the piazza -rocking-chairs let out a yell. These half-truths serve criticism as -sauce serves asparagus: they give tang to what is otherwise often -tasteless food. This is particularly true with criticism at its most -geometrical and profound, since such criticism, save in rare instances, -is not especially lively reading. But, nevertheless, the sauce is not -the asparagus. And when Mr. Moore (doubtless with his tongue in his -cheek) observes that he can much more readily imagine the lusty Frau -Tillie Pfirsich-Melba as Isolde in a pink and green ostrich feather hat -confected in some Friedrichstrasse atelier than in the customary stage -trappings, he allows, by implication, that he might even more readily -imagine the elephantine lady as the seductive Carmen if she had no -clothes on at all. - -This is the trouble with paradoxes. It is not that they prove too -little, as is believed of them, but that they prove altogether -too much. If the illusion created by stage externals is in itself -illusory, as Mr. Moore says, the complete deletion of all such stage -externals should be the best means for providing absolute illusion. -Yet the complete absence of illusion where this is the case is all too -familiar to any of us who have looked on such spectacles as “The Bath -of Phryne” and the like in the theatres of Paris. A prodigality of -stage externals does not contribute to disillusion, but to illusion. -These externals have become, through protracted usage, so familiar -that they are, so to speak, scarcely seen: they are taken by the eye -for granted. By way of proof, one need only consider two types of -Shakespearian production, one like that of Mr. Robert Mantell and one -like that lately employed for “Macbeth” by Mr. Arthur Hopkins. Where -the overladen stereotyped first production paradoxically fades out of -the picture for the spectator and leaves the path of illusion clear -for him, the superlatively simple second production, almost wholly -bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes his attention and -makes illusion impossible. It is true, of course, that all this may be -changed in time, when the deletion of externals by the new stagecraft -shall have become a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on of -externals is a convention at present. But, as things are today, these -externals are, negatively, the most positive contributors to illusion. - -It is the misfortune of the theatre that critics have almost always -approached it, and entered it, with a defiant and challenging air. I -have, during the eighteen years of my active critical service, met -with and come to know at least fifty professional critics in America, -in England and on the Continent, and among all this number there -have been but four who have approached the theatre enthusiastically -prejudiced in its favour--two of them asses. But between the one large -group that has been critically hostile and the other smaller group -that has been uncritically effervescent, I have encountered no sign -of calm and reasoned compromise, no sign of frank and intelligent -willingness to regard each and every theatre as a unit, and so to be -appraised, instead of lumping together good and bad theatres alike -and labelling the heterogeneous mass “the theatre.” There is no such -thing as “the theatre.” There is this theatre, that theatre, and still -that other theatre. Each is a unit. To talk of “the theatre” is to -talk of the Greek theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the modern -theatre in one breath, or to speak simultaneously of the Grosses -Schauspielhaus of Max Reinhardt and the Eltinge Theatre of Mr. A. -H. Woods. “The theatre,” of course, has certain more or less minor -constant and enduring conventions--at least, so it seems as far as we -now can tell--but so, too, has chirography, yet we do not speak of “the -chirography.” There are some theatres--I use the word in its proper -restricted sense--that glorify drama and enhance its beauty; there are -others that vitiate drama. But so also are there some men who write -fine drama, and others who debase drama to mere fodder for witlings.... -The Shakespeare of the theatre of Gordon Craig is vivid and brilliant -beauty. Call it art or not art as you will--what does a label matter? -The Molière of the theatre of Alexander Golovine is suggestive and -exquisite enchantment. Call it art or not art as you will--what does -a label matter? The Wagner of the opera house of Ludwig Sievert is -triumphant and rapturous splendour. Call it anything you like--and -again, what does a label matter? There are too many labels in the -world. - - - - -IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING - - - - -IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING - - -I - -“When Mr. Nathan says that acting is not an art, of course he is -talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after witnessing a performance -by the great Duse?” So, the estimable actor, Mr. Arnold Daly. Whether -acting is or is not an art, it is not my concern at the moment to -consider, yet I quote the _riposte_ of Mr. Daly as perhaps typical of -those who set themselves as defenders of the yea theory. It seems to -me that if this is a satisfactory _touche_ no less satisfactory should -be some such like rejoinder as: “When Mr. Nathan says that acting _is_ -an art, of course he is talking arrant rot--who could doubt it, after -witnessing a performance by Mr. Corse Payton.” - -If an authentic art is anything which may properly be founded upon an -exceptionally brilliant performance, then, by virtue of the Reverend -Doctor Ernest M. Stires’ brilliant performance in it, is pulpiteering -an art, and, on the strength of Miss Bird Millman’s brilliant -performance in it, is tight-rope walking an art no less. Superficially -a mere dialectic monkey-trick, this is yet perhaps not so absurd as it -may seem, for if Duse’s art lies in the fact that she breathes life and -dynamic effect into the written word of the artist D’Annunzio, Stires’ -lies in the more substantial fact that he breathes life and dynamic -effect into the word of the somewhat greater, and more evasive artist, -God. And Miss Millman, too, brings to her quasi-art, movement, colour, -rhythm, beauty and--one may even say--a sense of fantastic character, -since the effect she contrives is less that of a dumpy little woman -in a short white skirt pirouetting on a taut wire than of an unreal -creature, half bird, half woman, out of some forgotten fable. - -The circumstance that Duse is an artist who happens to be an actress -does not make acting an art any more than the circumstance that Villon -was an artist who happened to be a burglar or that Paderewski is an -artist who happens to be a politician makes burglary and politics arts. -Duse is an artist first, and an actress second: one need only look into -her very great share in the creation of the dramas bearing the name of -D’Annunzio to reconcile one’s self--if not too stubborn, at least in -part--to this point of view. So, also, were Clairon, Rachel and Jane -Hading artists apart from histrionism, and so too, is Sarah Bernhardt: -who can fail to detect the creative artist in the “Mémoires” of the -first named, for instance, or, in the case of the last named, in the -fertile impulses of her essays in sculpture, painting and dramatic -literature? It is a curious thing that, in all the pronouncements of -acting as an art, the names chosen by the advocates as representative -carriers of the æsthetic banner are those of actors and actresses who -have most often offered evidence of artistic passion in fields separate -and apart from their histrionic endeavours. Lemaître, Salvini, Rachel, -Talma, Coquelin, Betterton, Garrick, Fanny Kemble, the Bancrofts, -Irving, Tree, and on down--far down--the line to Ditrichstein, Sothern, -Marie Tempest, Guitry, Gemier and the brothers Barrymore--all give -testimony, in writing, painting, musicianship, poetry and dramatic -authorship to æsthetic impulses other than acting. Since acting itself -as an art is open to question, the merit or demerit of the performances -produced from the æsthetic impulses in point is not an issue: the fact -seems to be that it has been the artist who has become the actor rather -than the actor who has become the artist. - -The actor, as I have on another occasion hazarded, is the child of the -miscegenation of an art and a trade: of the drama and the theatre. -Since acting must appeal to the many--this is obviously its only -reason for being, for acting is primarily a filter through which drama -may be lucidly distilled for heterogeneous theatre-goers--it must, -logically, be popular or perish. Surely no authentic art can rest or -thrive upon such a premise. The great actors and actresses, unlike -great fashioners in other arts, have invariably been favourites of the -crowd, and it is doubtless a too charitable hypothesis to assume that -this crowd has ever been gifted with critical insight beyond cavil. If, -therefore, the actor or actress who can sway great crowds is strictly -to be termed an artist, why may we not also, by strict definition, -similarly term as exponents of an authentic art others who can likewise -sway the same crowds: a great politician like Roosevelt, say, or a -great lecturer like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian -like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out these paradox shock-troops to clear -the way for the more sober infantry.) - -I have said that I have no intention to argue for or against acting as -an art yet, for all the circumstance that the case for the prosecution -has long seemed the soundest and the most eloquent, there are still -sporadic instances of imaginative histrionism that give one reason -to ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently come to the more -penetrating critic that what has on such occasions passed for an -art has in reality been merely a reflected art: the art of drama -interpreted not with the imagination of the actor but, more precisely, -_with the imagination of the dramatist_. In other words, that actor -or actress is the most competent and effective whose imagination is -successful in meeting literally, and translating, the imagination of -the dramatist which has created the rôle played by the particular actor -or actress. To name the actor’s imagination in such a case a creative -imagination is a rather wistful procedure, for it does not create but -merely duplicates. Surely no advocate of acting as a creative art -would be so bold as to contend that any actor, however great, has ever -brought creative imagination to the already full and superb creative -imagination of Shakespeare. This would be, on an actor’s part, the -sheerest impudence. The greatest actor is simply he who is best fitted -by figure, voice, training and intelligence not to invade and annul the -power of the rôle which a great dramatist has imagined and created. -Duse and D’Annunzio were, so to speak, spiritually and physically -one: hence the unmatched perfection of the former’s histrionism in the -latter’s rôles. To see Duse is, save one admit one’s self critically -to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical art doubts and the -convictions of such as Mr. Daly. - -It is, of course, the common habit of the prejudiced critic to -overlook, in the estimate of acting as an art, the few admirable -exponents of acting and to take into convenient consideration only the -enormous majority of incompetents. But to argue that acting is not an -art simply because a thousand Edmund Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give -no evidence that it is an art is to argue that sculpture is not an art -simply because a thousand fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris -busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding give no evidence in a like -direction. Yet the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent -actors as well as bad actors establishes acting as an art no more than -the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers -as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes the playing of the -cuckoo-whistle as an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison to what -appears to be an absurdity, it is because by such absurdities, or -elementals, is the status of acting in the field of the arts most -sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt’s ever-haunting cry of the -heart in “Izeyl” is a peg, however slight, upon which may be hung a -strand of the theory that maintains acting as an art, so too, by the -strict canon of dialectics, is Mr. Ruben Katz’s ever-haunting cry of -the cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral -Symphony. - -If acting is an art, the proofs thus far offered are not only -unconvincing but fundamentally, on the score of logic, not a little -droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If criticism is an art (thus -a familiar contention), why is not acting also an art, since both are -concerned with re-creating works of art? But the artist’s work offered -up to the critic is a challenge, whereas the dramatist’s work offered -up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism is war, whether in behalf of -æsthetic friend or against æsthetic foe; acting is agreement, peace. -The critic re-creates, in terms of his own personality, the work of -another and often emphatically different and antagonistic personality. -The actor re-creates, in terms of a dramatist’s concordantly imagined -personality, his own personality: the result is less re-creation -than non-re-creation. In other words, the less the actor creates or -re-creates and the more he remains simply an adaptable tool in the -hands of the dramatist, the better actor he is. The actor’s state is -thus what may be termed one of active impassivity. Originality and -independence, save within the narrowest of limits, are denied him. -He is a literal translator of a work of art, not an independently -imaginative and speculative interpreter, as the critic is. The -dramatist’s work of art does not say to him, as to the critic, “Here I -am! What do you, out of all your experience, taste and training, think -of me?” It says to him, instead and peremptorily, “Here I am! Think -of me exactly as I am, and adapt all of your experience, taste and -training to the interpretation of me exactly as I am!” - -Brushing aside the theory that the true artist is the actor who can -transform his voice, his manner, his character; who will disappear -behind his part instead of imposing himself on it and adding himself to -it--a simple feat, since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli and -Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean actors, are true histrionic -artists--Mr. Walkley, in his essay on “The English Actor of Today,” -bravely takes up the defence from what he regards as a more difficult -approach. “In the art of acting as in any other art,” he says, “the -first requisite is life. The actor’s part is a series of speeches and -stage directions, mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be raised -somehow from the dead. If the actor disappears behind it, there is -nothing left but a Golgotha.” Here is indeed gay news! Hamlet, Iago, -Romeo, Shylock--mere “cold print,” inert Shakespearian masses that, -in order to live, have to be raised somehow from the dead by members -of the Lambs’ Club! It is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly -takes to cover after launching this torpedo, and devotes the balance -of his interesting comments to a prudent and circumspect _pas seul_ on -the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter. For no sooner has -he described the majestic drama of Shakespeare as “mere cold print, an -inert mass that has to be raised somehow from the dead,” than he seems -suddenly, and not without a touch of horror, to realize that he has -ridiculously made of Shakespeare a mere blank canvas and pot of paint -for the use of this or that actor whom he has named, by implication and -with magnificent liberalness, a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble -for the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined Mercié. - - -II - -Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable art takes its key -from Rémond de Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman whose -pragmatic critical credo was, “If it makes me feel, it is art.” -While it may be reasonable that a purely emotional art may aptly be -criticized according to the degree of emotional reaction which it -induces, it is the quality of emotion resident in the critic that -offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion. A perfectly -attuned and sound emotional equipment--an emotional equipment of -absolute pitch, so to speak--is a rare thing, even among critics of -brilliant intelligence, taste, imagination and experience. Goethe, -Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention only five, were -physio-psychological units of dubious emotional structure, if we may -trust the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of their critical -dramatic writing may be accepted without qualm, a distinct measure of -distrust would attach itself to any critical estimate of acting which -they might have written or actually did write. - -There are, obviously, more or less definite standards whereby we -may estimate critical writings of such men as these so far as those -criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe as the cerebral -or semi-cerebral arts, but there are no standards, even remotely -determinable or exact, whereby we may appraise such of their -criticisms as deal with the directly and wholly emotional art of -acting. It is perhaps not too far a cry to assume that had Mr. William -Archer’s father been murdered shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr. -Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Mr. Archer would have been moved to believe -Mr. Forbes-Robertson on even greater actor-artist than he believed him -under the existing circumstances, or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius, -the Danish journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a victim of -syphilis when he reviewed August Lindberg’s “Oswald,” he would have -looked on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive exponent of -histrionism. Nothing is more æsthetically and artistically dubious -and insecure than the appraisal of acting; for it is based upon the -quicksands of varying human emotionalism, and of aural and visual -prejudice. Were I, for example, one hundred times more proficient -a critic of drama and life than I am, my criticism of acting would -none the less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I would remain -constitutionally anæsthetic to a Juliet, however otherwise talented, -who had piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all his histrionic -power, presented to the vision a pair of knock-knees. This, I well -appreciate, is the kind of critical writing that is promptly set down -as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as I am concerned and I daresay -that it is, in one direction or another, the truth so far as the -majority of critics are concerned. - -The most that may be said of the soundness of this or that laudatory -criticism of an actor’s performance is that the performance in point -has met exactly--or very nearly--the particular critic’s personal -notion of how he, as a human being, would have cried, laughed and -otherwise comported himself were he an actor and were he in the actor’s -rôle. The opposite, or denunciatory, phase of such criticism holds a -similar truth. If this is not true, by what standards _can_ the critic -estimate the actor’s performance? By the standards of the actors who -have preceded this actor in the playing of the rôle, you say? What if -the rôle is a new one, a peculiar and novel one, that has not been -played before? Again, you say that the rôle may be in an alien drama -and that the actor may be an alien, both rôle and performance being -foreign to the emotional equipment of the critic. But basic emotions, -the foundation of drama, are universal. Still again, what of such -dramas as “Œdipus Rex,” what of such rôles--this with a triumphant -chuckle on your part? I return the chuckle, and bid you read the -criticisms that have been written of the actors who have played in -these rôles! Invariably the actors have been treated in precisely the -same terms and by the same standards as if they were playing, not in -the drama of the fifth century before Christ, but in “Fedora,” “The -Face in the Moonlight” or “The Count of Monte Cristo.” - -One cannot imagine sound criticism applying to any authentic art the -standard of actor criticism that I have noted. Criticism, true enough, -is always more or less personal, but, in its operation upon the -authentic arts, its personality is ever like a new bottle into which -the vintage wine of art has been poured. Criticism of the authentic -arts is the result of the impact of a particular art upon a particular -critical personality. Criticism of the dubious art of acting is the -result of the impact of a particular critical personality upon this -or that instance of acting. But if this is even remotely true, you -inquire ironically, what of such an excellent instance of acting as -Mimi Aguglia’s “Salome”; how in God’s name may the critic appraise that -performance in the manner set down, i. e., in terms of himself were he -a stage performer? Well, for all the surface humours of the question, -that is actually more or less the way in which he does appraise it. -The actor or actress, unlike the artist in more authentic fields, -may never interpret emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the critic: -the interpretation must be a reflection, more or less stereotyped, -of the critic’s repertoire of emotions. Thus, where art is original -expression, acting is merely the audible expression of a silent -expression. In another phrase, expression in acting is predicated upon, -and limited by, the expression of the critic. It is, therefore, a -mere duplication of expression. And what holds true in the case of the -critic so far as acting is concerned obviously holds doubly true in the -case of the uncritical public. - -Re-reading the celebrated critiques of acting, I come to the conclusion -that the word “art” has almost uniformly been applied to acting by -critics who, thinking that they had perhaps belaboured the subject a -trifle too severely, were disposed graciously to throw it a sop. As -good an illustration as any may be had from Lewes, certainly a friend -of acting if ever there was one. Thus Lewes: - - “The truth is, we exaggerate the talent of an actor because we judge - only from the effect he produces, without inquiring too curiously - into the means. But, while the painter has nothing but his canvas and - the author has nothing but white paper and printers’ ink with which - to produce his effects, the actor has all other arts as handmaids; - the poet labours for him, creates his part, gives him his eloquence, - his music, his imagery, his tenderness, his pathos, his sublimity; - the scene-painter aids him; the costumes, the lights, the music, all - the fascination of the stage--all subserve the actor’s effects; - these raise him upon a pedestal; remove them, and what is he? He who - can make a stage mob bend and sway with his eloquence, what could he - do with a real mob, no poet by to prompt him? He who can charm us - with the stateliest imagery of a noble mind, when robed in the sables - of Hamlet, or in the toga of Coriolanus, what can he do in coat and - trousers on the world’s stage? Rub off the paint, and the eyes are - no longer brilliant! Reduce the actor to his intrinsic value, and - then weigh him with the rivals whom he surpasses in reputation and - fortune.... If my estimate of the intrinsic value of acting is lower - than seems generally current, it is from no desire to disparage _an - art_ I have always loved; but, etc., etc.” - -You will find the same dido in most of the essays on acting: a -protracted series of cuffs and slaps terminating in a gentle -non-sequitur kiss. - -Acting at its finest is, however, often a confusing hypnosis; it is not -to be wondered at that, fresh from its spell, the critic has mistaken -it for a more exalted something than it intrinsically is. The flame -and fire of a Duse, the haunt and magic of a Bernhardt, the powerful -stage sense of creation of a Moissi--these are not a little befuddling. -And, under their serpent-like charm, it is not incomprehensible that -the critic should confound effect and cause. Yet acting, even of the -highest order, is intrinsically akin to the legerdemain of a Hermann or -a Kellar with a Shakespeare or a Molière as an assistant to hand over, -as the moment bids, the necessary pack of cards or bowl of goldfish. -It is trickery raised to its most exalted level: a combination of -experience, intelligence and great charm, not revivifying something -cold and dead, but releasing something quick and alive from the prison -of the printed page. - -The actor who contends in favour of his creative art that he must -experience within him the feeling of the dramatist, that he must -actually persuade himself to feel his rôle with all its turning -smiles and tears, speaks nonsense. So, too, must the auditor, yet who -would term the auditor a creative artist? The actor who contends in -favour of his creative art the exact opposite, that he is, to wit, -a creative artist since he must theatrically create the dramatist’s -moods, illusions and emotions without feeling them himself, also speaks -nonsense. For so, too, in such a case as “Electra,” or “Ghosts,” or “No -More Blondes,” must the auditor, yet who, again, would term the latter -a creative artist? The actor who contends in favour of his creative -art that two accomplished actors often “create” the same rôle in an -entirely different manner, speaks nonsense yet again. For what is not -creation in the first place does not become creation merely because it -is multiplied by two. The actor who further contends in behalf of his -creative art that if effective acting were the mere trickery that some -maintain it to be, any person ordinarily gifted should be able, after a -little experiment, to give an effective stage performance, speaks truer -than he knows. Some of the most remarkable performances on the stage -of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin have been given by just such persons. -And there are numerous other instances. If acting is an art--and -I do not say that it may not be--it at least, as an art, ill bears -cross-examination of even the most superficial nature. - - -III - -Acting is perhaps less an art than the deceptive echo of an art. It -is drama’s exalted halloo come back to drama from the walls of the -surrounding amphitheatre. Criticism of acting too often mistakes -the echo for the original voice. Although the analogy wears motley, -criticism of this kind operates in much the same manner as if it were -to contend that an approximately exact and beautiful Ben Ali Haggin -_tableau vivant_ reproduction of, say, Velasquez’s “The Spinners,” was -creative art in the sense that the original is creative art. Acting is -to the art of the drama much what these so-called living pictures are -to the art of painting. If acting is to be termed an art, it is, like -the living picture, a freak art, an art with belladonna in its eyes and -ever, even at its highest, a bit grotesque. - -In his defence of acting as an art equal to that of poetry and -literature, Henry Irving has observed, “It has been said that acting -is unworthy because it represents feigned emotions, but this censure -would apply with equal force to poet or novelist.” But would it? The -poet and the novelist may feign emotions, but it is their own active -imaginations which feign them. The actor merely feigns passively the -emotions which the imagination of the poet has actively feigned; if -there is feigning, the actor merely parrots it. If there is feigned -emotion in, say, the second stanza of Swinburne’s “Rococo,” and I -mount an illuminated platform and recite the stanza very eloquently -and impressively, am I precisely feigning the emotion of it or am I -merely feigning the emotion that the great imagination of Swinburne has -feigned? Feigned or unfeigned, the emotions of the poet come ready-made -to the heart and lips of the actor. - -Continues Irving further: “It is the actor who gives body to -the ideas of the highest dramatic literature--fire, force, and -sensibility, without which they would remain for most people mere -airy abstractions.” What one engages here is the peculiar logic that -acting is an art since it popularizes dramatic literature and makes it -intelligible to a majority of dunderheads! - -One more quotation from this actor’s defence, and we may pass on. “The -actor’s work is absolutely concrete,” he challenges. “He is brought -in every phase of his work into direct comparison with existing -things.... Not only must his dress be suitable to the part which he -assumes, but his bearing must not be in any way antagonistic to the -spirit of the time in which the play is fixed. The free bearing of -the sixteenth century is distinct from the artificial one of the -seventeenth, the mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless one -of the nineteenth.... The voice must be modulated to the vogue of the -time. The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age is different from -that of a mail-clad one--nay, the armour of a period ruled in real life -the poise and bearing of the body; and all this must be reproduced on -the stage.... _It cannot therefore be seriously put forward in the -face of such manifold requirements that no Art is required for the -representation of suitable action!_” The italics are those of one -who experiences some difficulty in persuading himself that if Art is -required for such things as these--dress, carriage, modulation of voice -and carrying a sword--Art, strictly speaking, is no less required in -the matter of going to a Quat’-z-Arts costume ball. - -Acting is perhaps best to be criticized not as art but as colourful -and impressive artifice. Miss Margaret Anglin’s Joan of Arc is a -more or less admirable example of acting not because it is art but -because it is a shrewd, vivid and beguiling synthesis of various -intrinsically spurious dodges: black tights to make stout Anglo-Saxon -limbs appear Gallicly slender, a telescoping of words containing the -sound of _s_ to conceal a personal defect in the structure of the -upper lip, a manœuvring of the central action up stage to emphasize, -through a familiar trick of the theatre, the sympathetic frailty of -the character which the actress herself physically lacks, two intakes -of breath before a shout of defiance that the effect of the ring of -the directly antecedent shout on the part of one of the inquisitors -may be diminished.... An effective acting performance is like a great -explosion; and as T N T is made from nitric acid, which is in turn made -from such nitrates as potassium nitrate or saltpeter, which are in turn -derived from the salts of decomposed guano, so is a great explosion -of histrionism similarly made and derived from numerous--and not -infrequently ludicrous and even vulgar--basic elements. - -The ill-balanced species of criticism which appraises an histrionic -performance as art on the sole ground of the hypnotic effect it -produces, with no inquiry into the means whereby that effect is -produced, might analogously, were it to pursue this logic, appraise -similarly as art the performance of an adept literal hypnotist. And -with logic perhaps much more sound. For if acting as an art is to be -appraised in the degree of the effect it imparts to, and induces in, -the auditor-spectator, surely--if there is any sense at all in such -a method of estimate--may certain other such performances as I have -suggested be similarly appraised. Criticism rests upon a foundation of -logic; whatever it may deal with--æsthetics, emotions, what not--it -cannot remove itself entirely from that foundation. Thus, if Mr. John -Barrymore is an artist because, by identifying the heart and mind -of his auditor-spectator with some such character as Fedya and by -suggesting directly that character’s tragic dégringolade, he can make -the auditor-spectator pity and cry, so too an artist--by the rigid -canon of æsthetic criticism--was Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who is said to -have been able to do the same thing. - -What I attempt here is no facile paradox, but a _reductio ad absurdum_ -designed to show up the fallacy of the prevailing method of actor -criticism. In criticism of the established arts, there is no such antic -deportment. The critic never confuses the stimulations of jazz music -with those of sound music, nor the stimulations of open melodrama -with those of more profound drama. From each of these he receives -stimulations of a kind: some superficial, some deep. But he inquires, -in each instance, into the means whereby the various stimulations were -vouchsafed to him. While he recognizes the fact that the sudden and -unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Secret Service” produces in -him a sensation of shock as great as the sudden and unexpected shooting -off of a revolver in “Hedda Gabler,” he does not therefore promptly, -and with no further reasoning, conclude that the two sensations are of -an æsthetic piece. Nor does he assume that, since the nervous effect -of the fall to death in “The Green Goddess” and of the fall to death -in “The Master Builder” affect him immediately in much the same way, -both sensations are accordingly produced by sound artistic means. -Nor, yet again, does he confuse the quality--nor the springs of that -quality--of the mood of wistful pathos with which “Poor Butterfly” and -“Porgi, Amor” inspire him. But this confusion persists as part and -parcel of the bulk of the criticism of acting. For one Hazlitt, or -Lamb, or Lewes, or Anatole France who retains, or has retained, his -clear discernment before the acted drama, there are, and have been, a -number tenfold who have confounded the wonders of the phonograph with -the wonders of Josef Haydn. - - - - -V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM - - - - -V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM - - -I - -Arthur Bingham Walkley begins one of the best books ever written on -the subject thus: “It is not to be gainsaid that the word criticism -has gradually acquired a certain connotation of contempt.... Every -one who expresses opinions, however imbecile, in print calls himself -a ‘critic.’ The greater the ignoramus, the greater the likelihood of -his posing as a ‘critic.’” An excellent book, as I have said, with a -wealth of sharp talk in it, but Mr. Walkley seems to me to err somewhat -in his preliminary assumption. Criticism has acquired a connotation -of contempt less because it is practised by a majority of ignoramuses -than because it is accepted at full face value by an infinitely greater -majority of ignoramuses. It is not the mob that curls a lip--the mob -accepts the lesser ignoramus at his own estimate of himself; it is the -lonely and negligible minority man who, pausing musefully in the field -that is the world, contemplates the jackasses eating the daisies. - -No man is so contemptuous of criticism as the well-stocked critic, -just as there is no man so contemptuous of clothes as the man with -the well-stocked wardrobe. It is as impossible to imagine a critic -like Shaw not chuckling derisively at criticism as it is to imagine -a regular subscriber to the _Weekly Review_ not swallowing it whole. -The experienced critic, being on the inside, is in a position to look -into the heads of the less experienced, and to see the wheels go round. -He is privy to all their monkeyshines, since he is privy to his own. -Having graduated from quackery, he now smilingly regards others still -at the trade of seriously advancing sure cures for æsthetic baldness, -cancer, acne and trifacial neuralgia. And while the yokels rub in -the lotions and swallow the pills, he permits himself a small, but -eminently sardonic, hiccup. - -It is commonly believed that the first virtue of a critic is honesty. -As a matter of fact, in four cases out of five, honesty is the last -virtue of a critic. As criticism is practised in America, honesty -presents itself as the leading fault. There is altogether too much -honesty. The greater the blockhead, the more honest he is. And as a -consequence the criticism of these blockheads, founded upon their -honest convictions, is worthless. There is some hope for an imbecile -if he is dishonest, but none if he is resolute in sticking to his -idiocies. If the average American critic were to cease writing what he -honestly believes and dishonestly set down what he doesn’t believe, the -bulk of the native criticism would gain some common sense and take on -much of the sound value that it presently lacks. Honesty is a toy for -first-rate men; when lesser men seek to play with it and lick off the -paint, they come down with colic. - -It is further maintained that enthusiasm is a supplementary desideratum -in a critic, that unless he is possessed of enthusiasm he cannot -impart a warm love for fine things to his reader. Surely this, too, -is nonsense. Enthusiasm is a virtue not in the critic, but in the -critic’s reader. And such desired enthusiasm can be directly generated -by enthusiasm no more than a glyceryl nitrate explosion can be -generated by sulfuric acid. Enthusiasm may be made so contagious as to -elect a man president of the United States or to raise an army large -enough to win a world war, but it has never yet been made sufficiently -contagious to persuade one American out of a hundred thousand that -Michelangelo’s David of the Signoria is a better piece of work than -the Barnard statue of Lincoln. Enthusiasm is an attribute of the -uncritical, the defectively educated: stump speakers, clergymen, young -girls, opera-goers, Socialists, Italians, such like. And not only an -attribute, but a weapon. But the cultivated and experienced man has -as little use for enthusiasm as for indignation. He appreciates that -while it may convert a pack of ignoble doodles, it can’t convert any -one worth converting. The latter must be persuaded, not inflamed. He -realizes that where a double brass band playing “Columbia, the Gem -of the Ocean” may leave a civilized Englishman cold to the virtues of -the United States, proof that the United States has the best bathroom -plumbing in the world may warm him up a bit. The sound critic is not a -cheer leader, but a referee. Art is hot, criticism cold. Aristotle’s -criticism of Euripides is as placid and reserved as Mr. William -Archer’s criticism of the latest drama at the St. James’s Theatre; -Brunetière is as calm over his likes as Mr. H. T. Parker of the Boston -_Transcript_. There is no more enthusiasm in Lessing than there is -indignation in Walkley. Hazlitt, at a hundred degrees emotional -Fahrenheit, remains critically cool as a cucumber. To find enthusiasm, -you will have to read the New York _Times_. - -Enthusiasm, in short, is the endowment of immaturity. The greater the -critic, the greater his disinclination to communicate æsthetic heat. -Such communication savours of propaganda and, however worthy that -propaganda, he will have naught to do with its trafficking. If the -ability to possess and communicate enthusiasm is the mark of the true -critic, then the theatrical page of the New York _Journal_ is the -greatest critical literature in America. - -A third contention has it that aloofness and detachment are no less -valuable to the dramatic critic than honesty and enthusiasm. Unless I -am seriously mistaken, also bosh. Dramatic criticism is fundamentally -the critic’s art of appraising himself in terms of various forms of -drama. Or, as I some time ago put it, the only sound dramatic critic is -the one who reports less the impression that this or that play makes -upon him than the impression he makes upon this or that play. Of all -the forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is essentially, and perhaps -correctly, the most personal. Tell me what a dramatic critic eats and -drinks, how far north of Ninetieth Street he lives, what he considers -a pleasant evening when he is not in the theatre, and what kind of -lingerie his wife wears, and I’ll tell you with very few misses what -kind of critic he is. I’ll tell you whether he is fit to appreciate -Schnitzler, or whether he is fit only for Augustus Thomas. I’ll tell -you in advance what he will think about, and how he will react to, -Hauptmann, Sacha Guitry or George V. Hobart. I’ll tell you whether -he is the sort that makes a great to-do when his eagle eye spots Sir -Nigel Waterhouse, M.P., in Act II fingering a copy of the Philadelphia -_Public Ledger_ instead of the London _Times_, and whether he is the -sort that writes “Mr. John Cort has staged the play in his customary -lavish manner” when the rise of the curtain discloses to him a room -elaborately decorated in the latest Macy mode. To talk about the value -of detachment in a dramatic critic is to talk about the value of -detachment in a Swiss mountain guide. The criticism is the man; the man -the criticism. - -Of all forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is the most purely -biological. Were the genii to put the mind of Max Beerbohm into the -head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse, and vice versa, their criticisms would -still remain exactly as they are. But, on the contrary, were the head -of Mr. J. Ranken Towse to be placed on the body of Max Beerbohm, and -vice versa, their criticisms would take on points of view diametrically -opposed to their present. Max would begin admiring the Rev. Dr. Charles -Rann Kennedy and Towse would promptly proceed to put on his glasses -to get a better view of the girl on the end. Every book of dramatic -criticism--every single piece of dramatic criticism--is a searching, -illuminating autobiography. The dramatic critic performs a clinic -upon himself every time he takes his pen in his hand. He may try, as -Walkley puts it, to substitute for the capital I’s “nouns of multitude -signifying many,” or some of those well-worn stereotypes--“It is -thought,” “one may be pardoned for hinting,” “will any one deny?” etc., -etc.--by which criticism keeps up the pretence that it is not a man but -a corporation, but he fools no one. - -To ask the dramatic critic to keep himself out of his criticism, -to detach himself, is thus a trifle like asking an actor to keep -himself out of his rôle. Dramatic critics and actors are much alike. -The only essential difference is that the actor does his acting on a -platform. But, platform or no platform, the actor and the dramatic -critic best serve their rôles when they filter them through their own -personalities. A dramatic critic who is told to keep his personality -out of his criticism is in the position of an actor who, being -physically and temperamentally like Mr. John Barrymore, is peremptorily -directed by a producer to stick a sofa pillow under his belt, put on -six extra heel-lifts, acquire a whiskey voice and play Falstaff like -the late Sir Herbert Tree. The best dramatic critics from the time of -Quintus Horatius Flaccus (_vide_ the “Epistola”) have sunk their vivid -personalities into their work right up to the knees. Not only have they -described the adventures of their souls among masterpieces, but the -adventures of their kidneys, spleens and _cæca_ as well. Each has held -the mirror of drama up to his own nature, with all its idiosyncrasies. -And in it have been sharply reflected not the cut and dried features -of the professor, but the vital features of a red-alive man. The other -critics have merely held up the mirror to these red-alive men, and have -reflected not themselves but the latter. Then, in their vainglory, they -have looked again into the hand-glass and have mistaken the reflection -of the parrot for an eagle. - -A third rubber-stamp: the critic must have sympathy. As properly -contend that a surgeon must have sympathy. The word is misused. What -the critic must have is not sympathy, which in its common usage -bespeaks a measure of sentimental concern, but interest. If a dramatic -critic, for example, has sympathy for an actress he can no more -criticize her with poise than a surgeon can operate on his own wife. -The critic may on occasion have sympathy as the judge in a court of law -may on occasion have it, but if he is a fair critic, or a fair judge, -he can’t do anything about it, however much he would like to. Between -the fair defendant in the lace baby collar and a soft heart, Article -X, Section 123, Page 416, absurdly interposes itself. (In example, -being a human being with a human being’s weaknesses before a critic, I -would often rather praise a lovely one when she is bad than an unlovely -one when she is good--and, alas, I fear that I sometimes do--but in -the general run I try to remember my business and behave myself. It -isn’t always easy. But I do my best, and angels and Lewes could do no -more.) The word sympathy is further mishandled, as in the similar case -of the word enthusiasm. What a critic should have is not, as is common, -sympathy and enthusiasm _before_ the fact, but _after_ it. The critic -who enters a theatre bubblingly certain that he is going to have a good -time is no critic. The critic is he who leaves a theatre cheerfully -certain that he _has_ had a good time. Sympathy and enthusiasm, unless -they are _ex post facto_, are precisely like prevenient prejudice and -hostility. Sympathy has no more preliminary place in the equipment of a -critic than in the equipment of an ambulance driver or a manufacturer -of bird cages. It is the caboose of criticism, not the engine. - -The trouble with dramatic criticism in America, speaking generally, -is that where it is not frankly reportorial it too often seeks to -exhibit a personality when there exists no personality to exhibit. -Himself perhaps conscious of this lack, the critic indulges in heroic -makeshifts to inject into his writings a note of individuality, and the -only individuality that comes out of his perspirations is of a piece -with that of the bearded lady or the dog-faced boy. Individuality of -this freak species is the bane of the native criticism. The college -professor who, having nothing to say, tries to give his criticism -an august air by figuratively attaching to it a pair of whiskers -and horn glasses, the suburban college professor who sedulously -practises an aloofness from the madding crowd that his soul longs -to be part of, the college professor who postures as a man of the -world, the newspaper reporter who postures as a college professor, the -journalist who performs in terms of Art between the Saks and Gimbel -advertisements--these and others like them are the sad comedians in -the tragical crew. In their heavy attempts to live up to their fancy -dress costumes, in their laborious efforts to conceal their humdrum -personalities in the uncomfortable gauds of Petruchio and Gobbo, they -betray themselves even to the bus boys. The same performer cannot -occupy the rôles of Polonius and Hamlet, even in a tank town troupe. - -No less damaging to American dramatic criticism is the dominant -notion that criticism, to be valuable, must be constructive. That -is, that it must, as the phrase has it, “build up” rather than “tear -down.” As a result of this conviction we have an endless repertoire -of architectonic advice from critics wholly without the structural -faculty, advice which, were it followed, would produce a drama twice -as poor as that which they criticize. Obsessed with the idea that they -must be constructive, the critics know no lengths to which they will -not go in their sweat to dredge up cures of one sort or another. They -constructively point out that Shaw’s plays would be better plays if -Shaw understood the punctual technique of Pinero, thus destroying a -“Cæsar and Cleopatra” to construct a “Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” They -constructively point out the trashy aspect of some Samuel Shipman’s -“Friendly Enemies,” suggest more serious enterprises to him, and get -the poor soul to write a “The Unwritten Chapter” which is ten times as -bad. They are not content to be critics; they must also be playwrights. -They stand in mortal fear of the old recrimination, “He who can, does; -he who can’t, criticizes,” not pausing to realize that the names of -Mr. Octavus Roy Cohen and Matthew Arnold may be taken as somewhat -confounding respective examples. They note with some irritation that -the critic for the Wentzville, Mo., _Beacon_ is a destructive critic, -but are conveniently ignorant of the fact--which may conceivably prove -something more--that so was George Farquhar. If destructive criticism, -in their meaning, is criticism which pulls down without building up in -return, three-fourths of the best dramatic criticism written since -the time of Boileau, fully filling the definition, is worthless. One -can’t cure a yellow fever patient by pointing out to him that he should -have caught the measles. One can’t improve the sanitary condition of a -neighbourhood merely by giving the outhouse a different coat of paint. -The foe of destructive criticism is the pro-German of American art. - -Our native criticism suffers further from the commercial Puritanism of -its mediums. What is often mistaken for the Puritanism of the critic -is actually the commercial Puritanism forced upon him by the owner and -publisher of the journal in which his writings appear, and upon which -he has to depend for a livelihood. Although this owner and publisher -is often not personally the Puritan, he is yet shrewdly aware that -the readers of his journal are, and out of this awareness he becomes -what may be termed a circulation blue-nose. Since circulation and -advertising revenue are twins, he must see to it that the sensibilities -of the former are not offended. And his circumspection, conveyed to -the critic by the copy reader or perhaps only sensed, brings about the -Puritan play-acting by the critic. This accounts to no little degree -for the hostile and uncritical reviews of even the most finished risqué -farces, and of the best efforts of American and European playwrights -to depict truthfully and fairly the more unpleasant phases of sex. -“I agree with you that this last naughty farce of Avery Hopwood’s is -awfully funny stuff,” a New York newspaper reviewer once said to me; -“I laughed at it until my ribs ached; but I don’t dare write as much. -One can’t praise such things in a paper with the kind of circulation -that ours has.” It is criticism bred from this commercial Puritanism -that has held back farce writing in America, and I venture to say much -serious dramatic writing as well. The best farce of a Guitry or a -Dieudonné, produced in America today without childish excisions, would -receive unfavourable notices from nine newspapers out of ten. The best -sex drama of a Porto-Riche or a Wedekind would suffer--indeed, already -has suffered--a similar fate. I predicted to Eugene O’Neill, the moment -I laid down the manuscript of his pathological play “Diff’rent,” the -exact manner in which, two months later, the axes fell upon him. - -For one critic like Mr. J. Ranken Towse who is a Puritan by tradition -and training, there are a dozen who are Puritans by proxy. One can -no more imagine a dramatic critic on a newspaper owned by Mr. Cyrus -H. K. Curtis praising Schnitzler’s “Reigen” or Rip’s and Gignoux’s -“Scandale de Deauville” than one can imagine the same critic denouncing -“Ben Hur.” What thus holds true in journalistic criticism holds true -in precisely the same way in the criticism written by the majority -of college professors. I doubt that there is a college professor in -America today who, however much he admired a gay, reprobate farce like -“Le Rubicon” or “L’Illusioniste,” would dare state his admiration in -print. Puritan or no Puritan, it is professionally necessary for him to -comport himself as one. His university demands it, silently, sternly, -idiotically. He is the helpless victim of its æsthetic Ku Klux. Behind -any drama dealing unconventionally with sex, there hovers a spectre -that vaguely resembles Professor Scott Nearing. He sees it ... he -reflects ... he works up a safe indignation. - -Dramatic criticism travels, in America, carefully laid tracks. Signal -lights, semaphores and one-legged old men with red flags are stationed -along the way to protect it at the crossings, to make it safe, and -to guard it from danger. It elaborately steams, pulls, puffs, chugs, -toots, whistles, grinds and rumbles for three hundred miles--and -brings up at something like Hinkletown, Pa. It is eager, but futile. -It is honest, but so is Dr. Frank Crane. It is fearless, but so is the -actor who plays the hero strapped to the papier-mâché buzz-saw. It is -constructive, but so is an embalmer. It is detached, but so is a man in -the Fiji Islands. It is sympathetic, but so is a quack prostatitician. - - - - -VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA - - - - -VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA - - -I - -Dramatic criticism, at its best, is the adventure of an intelligence -among emotions. The chief end of drama is the enkindling of emotions; -the chief end of dramatic criticism is to rush into the burning -building and rescue the metaphysical weaklings who are wont to be -overcome by the first faint whiffs of smoke. - -Dramatic criticism, in its common run, fails by virtue of its confusion -of unschooled emotion with experienced emotion. A dramatic critic who -has never been kissed may properly appreciate the readily assimilable -glories of “Romeo and Juliet,” but it is doubtful that he will be -able properly to appreciate the somewhat more evasive splendours of -“Liebelei.” The capability of a judge does not, of course, depend -upon his having himself once been in jail, nor does the capability -of a critic depend upon his having personally once experienced the -emotions of the dramatis personæ, but that critic is nevertheless the -most competent whose emotions the dramatis personæ do not so much -anticipatorily stir up as recollectively soothe. - -All criticism is more or less a statement in terms of the present -of what one has viewed of the past through a delicate, modern -reducing-glass. Intelligence is made up, in large part, of dead -emotions; ignorance, of emotions that have lived on, deaf and dumb -and crippled, but ever smiling. The general admission that a dramatic -critic must be experienced in drama, literature, acting and theories -of production but not necessarily in emotions is somewhat difficult of -digestion. Such a critic may conceivably comprehend much of Sheridan, -Molière, Bernhardt and Yevreynoff, but a hundred searching and -admirable things like the beginning of “Anatol,” the middle of “Lonely -Lives” and the end of “The Case of Rebellious Susan” must inevitably -be without his ken, and baffle his efforts at sound penetration. I -do not here posture myself as one magnificently privy to all the -mysteries, but rather as one who, failing perhaps to be on very -intimate terms with them, detects and laments the deficiencies that -confound him. Experience, goeth the saw, is a wise master. But it is, -for the critic, an even wiser slave. A critic on the Marseilles _Petits -Pois_ may critically admire “La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan,” but it -takes an Anatole France critically to understand it. - -The superficial quality of American emotions, sociological and -æsthetic, enjoyed by the great majority of American critics, operates -extensively against profundity in American criticism--in that of -literature and music no less than that of drama. American emotions, -speaking in the mass, where they are not the fixed and obvious emotions -ingenerate in most countries--such as love of home, family and country, -and so on--are one-syllable emotions, primary-colour emotions. The -polysyllabic and pastel emotions are looked on as dubious, even -degenerate. No man, for example, who, though absolutely faithful to -his wife, confessed openly that he had winked an eye at a ballet girl -could conceivably be elected to membership in the Union League Club. -The man who, after a cocktail, indiscreetly gave away the news that he -had felt a tear of joy in his eye when he heard the minuet of Mozart’s -G minor symphony or a tear of sadness when he looked upon Corot’s “La -Solitude,” would be promptly set down by the other members of the golf -club as a dipsomaniac who was doubtless taking narcotics on the side. -If a member of the Y. M. C. A. were to glance out of the window and -suddenly ejaculate, “My, what a beautiful girl!” the superintendent -would immediately grab him by the seat of the pantaloons and throw him -down the back stairs. And if a member of the American Legion were to -sniffle so much as once when the orchestra in the Luna Park dance hall -played “Wiener Blut,” a spy would seize him by the ear and hurry him -before the heads of the organization as a suspicious fellow, in all -probability of German blood. - -The American is either ashamed of honest emotion or, if he is not -ashamed, is soon shamed into shame by his neighbours. He is profoundly -affected by any allusion to Mother, the Baby, or the Flag--the -invincible trinity of American dramatic hokum--and his reactions -thereto meet with the full favour of church and state; but he is -unmoved, he is silently forbidden to be moved, by a love that doesn’t -happen to fall into the proper pigeon-hole, by a work of great beauty -that doesn’t happen to preach a backwoods Methodist sermon, by sheer -loveliness, or majesty, or unadorned truth. And this corsetted emotion, -mincing, wasp-waisted and furtive, colours all native criticism. -It makes the dramatic critic ashamed of simple beauty, and forbids -him honestly to admire the mere loveliness of such exhibitions -as Ziegfeld’s. It makes him ashamed of passion, and forbids him -honestly to admire such excellent dramas as Georges de Porto-Riche’s -“Amoureuse.” It makes him ashamed of laughter, and forbids him to -chuckle at the little naughtinesses of Sacha Guitry and his own Avery -Hopwood. It makes him ashamed of truth, and forbids him to regard with -approbation such a play as “The Only Law.” The American drama must -therefore not create new emotions for him, but must hold the battered -old mirror up to his own. It must warm him not with new, splendid and -worldly emotions, but must satisfy him afresh as to the integrity and -higher merit of his own restricted parcel of emotions. It must abandon -all new, free concepts of love and life, of romance and adventure and -glory, and must reassure him--with appropriate quiver-music--that the -road to heaven is up Main Street and the road to hell down the Avenue -de l’Opéra. - -Though there is a regrettable trace of snobbery in the statement, -it yet remains that--with half a dozen or so quickly recognizable -exceptions--the practitioners of dramatic criticism in America -are in the main a humbly-born, underpaid and dowdy-lived lot. -This was as true of them yesterday as it is today. And as Harlem, -delicatessen-store dinners, napkin-rings and the Subway are not, -perhaps, best conducive to a polished and suavely cosmopolitan -outlook on life and romance and enthralling beauty, we have had -a dramatic criticism pervaded by a vainglorious homeliness, by a -side-street æsthetic, and by not a little of the difficultly suppressed -rancour that human nature ever feels in the presence of admired yet -unachievable situations. Up to fifteen years ago, drama in America -was compelled critically to meet with, and adhere strictly to, the -standards of life, culture and romance as they obtained over on Mr. -William Winter’s Staten Island. Since Winter’s death, it has been -urged critically to abandon the standards of Staten Island and comply -instead with the eminently more sophisticated standards derived from -a four years’ study of Cicero, Stumpf and the Norwegian system of -communal elections at Harvard or Catawba College, combined with a two -weeks’ stay in Paris. For twenty years, Ibsen and Pinero suffered the -American critical scourge because they had not been born and brought -up in a town with a bust of Cotton Mather or William Cullen Bryant in -its public square, and did not think quite the same way about things -as Horace Greeley. For twenty years more, Porto-Riche and Frenchmen -like him will doubtless suffer similarly because, in a given situation, -they do not act precisely as Mr. Frank A. Munsey or Dr. Stuart Pratt -Sherman would; for twenty years more, Hauptmann and other Germans will -doubtless be viewed with a certain measure of condescension because -they have not enjoyed the same advantages as Professor Brander Matthews -in buying Liberty Bonds, at par. - -American dramatic criticism is, and always has been, essentially -provincial. It began by mistaking any cheap melodrama like “The Charity -Ball” or “The Wife” which was camouflaged with a few pots of palms and -half a dozen dress suits for a study of American society. It progressed -by appraising as the dean of American dramatists and as the leading -American dramatic thinker a playwright who wrote such stuff as “All -over this great land thousands of trains run every day, starting and -arriving in punctual agreement because this is a woman’s world! The -great steamships, dependable almost as the sun--a million factories in -civilization--the countless looms and lathes of industry--the legions -of labour that weave the riches of the world--all--all move by the -mainspring of man’s faith in woman!” It has come to flower today in -denouncing what the best European critics have proclaimed to be the -finest example of American fantastic comedy on the profound ground that -“it is alien to American morality,” and in hailing as one of the most -acute studies of a certain typical phase of American life a comedy -filched substantially from the French. - -The plush-covered provincialism of the native dramatic criticism, -operating in this wise against conscientious drama and sound -appreciation of conscientious drama, constantly betrays itself for -all the chintz hocus-pocus with which it seeks drolly to conceal -that provincialism. For all its easy incorporation of French phrases -laboriously culled from the back of Webster, its casually injected -allusions to the Überbrett’l, Stanislav Pshibuishevsky, the excellent -_cuissot de Chevreuil sauce poivrade_ to be had in the little -restaurant near the comfort station in the Place Pigalle, and the -bewitching eyes of the prima ballerina in the 1917 Y. M. C. A. show -at Epernay, it lets its mask fall whenever it is confronted in the -realistic flesh by one or another of the very things against which -it has postured its cosmopolitanism. Thus does the mask fall, and -reveal the old pair of suburban eyes, before the “indelicacy” of -French dramatic masterpieces, before the “polished wit” of British -polished witlessness, before the “stodginess” of the German master -depictions of stodgy German peasantry, before the “gloom” of Russian -dramatic photography, before the “sordidness” of “Countess Julie” and -the “wholesomeness” of “The Old Homestead.” Cosmopolitanism is a -heritage, not an acquisition. It may be born to a man in a wooden shack -in Hardin County, in Kentucky, or in a little cottage in Hampshire in -England, or in a garret of Paris, but, unless it is so born to him, a -thousand Cunard liners and Orient Expresses cannot bring it to him. All -criticism is geography of the mind and geometry of the heart. American -criticism suffers in that what æsthetic wanderlust its mind experiences -is confined to excursion trips, and in that what _x_ its heart seeks to -discover is an unknown quantity only to emotional sub-freshmen. - -Criticism is personal, or it is nothing. Talk to me of impersonal -criticism, and I’ll talk to you of impersonal sitz-bathing. Impersonal -criticism is the dodge of the critic without personality. Some men -marry their brother’s widow; some earn a livelihood imitating George -M. Cohan; some write impersonal criticism. Show me how I can soundly -criticize Mrs. Fiske as Hannele without commenting on the mature aspect -of the lady’s _stentopgia_, and I shall begin to believe that there -may be something in the impersonal theory. Show me how I can soundly -criticize the drama of Wedekind without analyzing Wedekind, the man, -and I shall believe in the theory to the full. It is maintained by the -apostles of the theory that the dramatic critic is in the position -of a judge in the court of law: that his concern, like that of the -latter, is merely with the evidence presented to him, not with the -personalities of those who submit the evidence. Nothing could be more -idiotic. The judge who does not take into consideration, for example, -that--whatever the nature of the evidence--the average Italian, or -negro, or Armenian before him is in all probability lying like the -devil is no more equipped to be a sound judge than the dramatic critic -who, for all the stage evidence, fails to take into consideration that -Strindberg personally was a lunatic, that Pinero, while treating of -British impulses and character, is himself of ineradicable Portuguese -mind and blood, that the inspiration of D’Annunzio came not from a -woman out of life but from a woman out of the greenroom, and that Shaw -is a legal virgin. - -Just as dramatic criticism, as it is practised in America, is Mason-jar -criticism--criticism, that is, obsessed by a fixed determination to put -each thing it encounters into an air-tight bottle and to label it--so -is this dramatic criticism itself in turn subjected to the bottling -and labelling process. A piece of criticism, however penetrating, that -is not couched in the language of the commencement address of the -president of Millsaps College, and that fails to include a mention of -the Elizabethan theatre and a quotation from Victor Hugo’s “Hernani,” -is labelled “journalistic.” A criticism that elects to make its points -with humour rather than without humour is labelled “flippant.” A -criticism that shows a wide knowledge of everything but the subject -in hand is labelled “scholarly.” One that, however empty, prefixes -every name with a Mr. and somewhere in it discloses the fact that the -critic is sixty-five years old is labelled “dignified.” One that is -full of hard common sense from beginning to end but is guilty of wit -is derogatorily labelled “an imitation of Bernard Shaw.” One that says -an utterly worthless play is an utterly worthless play, and then shuts -up, is labelled “destructive”; while one that points out that the same -play would be a much better play if Hauptmann or De Curel had written -it is labelled “constructive and informing.” And so it goes. With the -result that dramatic criticism in America is a dead art language. Like -Mr. William Jennings Bryan, it has been criticized to death. - -The American mania for being on the popular side has wrapped its -tentacles around the American criticism of the theatre. The American -critic, either because his job depends upon it or because he -appreciates that _kudos_ in this country, as in no other, is a gift -of the mob, sedulously plays safe. A sheep, he seeks the comfortable -support of other sheep. It means freedom from alarums, a guaranteed pay -envelope at the end of the week, dignity in the eyes of the community, -an eventual election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters -and, when he reaches three score years and ten and his trousers have -become thin in the seat, a benefit in the Century Theatre with a bill -made up of all the eminent soft-shoe dancers and fat tragediennes -upon whom he has lavished praise. This, in America, is the respected -critic. If we had among us today a Shaw, or a Walkley, or a Boissard, -or a Bahr, or a Julius Bab, he would be regarded as not quite nice. -Certainly the Drama League would not invite him to appear before it. -Certainly he would never be invited to sit between Prof. Richard -Burton and Prof. William Lyon Phelps at the gala banquet to Mr. D. -W. Griffith. Certainly, if his writings got into the paid prints at -all, there would be a discreet editor’s note at the top to the effect -that “the publication of an article does not necessarily imply that it -represents the ideas of this publication or of its editors.” - -Criticism in America must follow the bell-cow. The bell-cow is personal -cowardice, artistic cowardice, neighbourhood cowardice, or the even -cheaper cowardice of the daily and--to a much lesser degree--periodical -press. Up to within a few years ago it was out of the question for -a dramatic critic to write honestly of the productions of David -Belasco and still keep his job. One of the leading New York evening -newspapers peremptorily discharged its reviewer for daring to do so; -another New York newspaper sternly instructed its reviewer not to -make the same mistake twice under the penalty of being cashiered; a -leading periodical packed off its reviewer for the offence. One of -the most talented critics in New York was several years ago summarily -discharged by the newspaper that employed him because he wrote an -honest criticism of a very bad play by an obscure playwright named -Jules Eckert Goodman. Another conscientious critic, daring mob opinion -at about the same time--he wrote, as I recall, something to the effect -that the late Charles Frohman’s productions were often very shoddy -things--was charily transferred the next day to another post on the -newspaper’s staff. I myself, ploughing my familiar modest critical -course, have, indeed, been made not personally unaware of the native -editorial horror of critical opinions which are not shared by the Night -School curricula, the inmates of the Actors’ Home, the Independent -Order of B’nai B’rith, the United Commercial Travelers of America, and -the Moose. Some years ago, a criticism of Hall Caine and of his play -“Margaret Schiller,” which ventured the opinion that the M. Caine was -perhaps not one of the greatest of modern geniuses, so frightened the -editors of the Philadelphia _North American_ and the Cleveland _Leader_ -that I doubt they have yet recovered from the fear of the consequences -of printing the review. - -The ruling ethic of the American press so far as the theatre is -concerned is one of unctuous _laissez faire_. “If you can’t praise, -don’t dispraise,” is the editorial injunction to the reviewer. The -theatre in America is a great business--greater even than the -department store--and a great business should be treated with proper -respect. What if the reviewer does not admire “The Key to Heaven”? It -played to more than _twelve thousand dollars_ last week; it _must_ -be good. The theatre must be helped, and the way to help it is -uninterruptedly to speak well of it. Fine drama? Art? A newspaper has -no concern with fine drama and art; the public is not interested in -such things. A newspaper’s concern is primarily with news. But is not -dramatic swindling, the selling of spurious wares at high prices, news? -Is not an attempt to corrupt the future of the theatre as an honourable -institution and an honourable business also news, news not so very -much less interesting, perhaps, than the three column account of an -ex-Follies girl’s adulteries? The reviewer, for his impertinence, is -assigned henceforth to cover the Jefferson Market police court. - -The key-note of the American journalistic attitude toward the theatre -is a stagnant optimism. Dramatic art and the red-haired copy boy are -the two stock jokes of the American newspaper office. Here and there -one encounters a reviewer who, through either the forcefulness or -the amiability of his personality, is successful for a short time in -evading the editorial shackles--there are a few such still extant -as I write. But soon or late the rattle of the chains is heard and -the reviewer that was is no more. He is an American, and must suffer -the penalty that an American who aspires to cultured viewpoint and -defiant love of beauty must ever suffer. For--so George Santayana, -late professor of philosophy in Harvard University, in “Character and -Opinion in the United States”--“the luckless American who is drawn -to poetic subtlety, pious retreats, or gay passions, nevertheless -has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform, -and prosperity dinned into his ears: every door is open in this -direction and shut in the other; so that he either folds up his heart -and withers in a corner--in remote places you sometimes find such a -solitary gaunt idealist--or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or -Montmartre to save his soul--or perhaps not to save it.” - - - - - * * * * * * - - - - -Transcriber’s note: - - Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. - - Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. - - On page 83, second sentence, after the word So, it appears that a word - is missing. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at <a -href="http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you are not -located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this ebook.</p> -<p>Title: The Critic and the Drama</p> -<p>Author: George Jean Nathan</p> -<p>Release Date: September 12, 2020 [eBook #63188]</p> -<p>Language: English</p> -<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p> -<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA***</p> -<p> </p> -<h4 class="pgx" title="">E-text prepared by David E. Brown<br /> - and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br /> - (<a href="http://www.pgdp.net">http://www.pgdp.net</a>)<br /> - from page images generously made available by<br /> - Internet Archive<br /> - (<a href="https://archive.org">https://archive.org</a>)</h4> -<p> </p> -<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;margin: 0 auto;" cellpadding="10"> - <tr> - <td valign="top"> - Note: - </td> - <td> - Images of the original pages are available through - Internet Archive. See - <a href="https://archive.org/details/criticdrama00nath"> - https://archive.org/details/criticdrama00nath</a> - </td> - </tr> -</table> -<p> </p> -<hr class="pgx" /> -<p> </p> -<p> </p> -<p> </p> -<p> </p> - -<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" width="50%" alt="" /></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h1>THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA</h1> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<p class="center"><span class="u"><span class="large"><i>THE BOOKS OF GEORGE JEAN NATHAN</i></span></span></p> -</div> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center"><i>The Theatre</i></div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">COMEDIANS ALL</div> -<div class="verse">THE POPULAR THEATRE</div> -<div class="verse">MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS</div> -<div class="verse">ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE</div> -<div class="verse">THE THEATRE, THE DRAMA, THE GIRLS</div> -<div class="verse">THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center"><i>Satire</i></div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE</div> -<div class="verse">BOTTOMS UP</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center"><i>Plays</i></div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">THE ETERNAL MYSTERY</div> -<div class="verse">HELIOGABALUS (<i>in collaboration with H. L. Mencken</i>)</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center"><i>Philosophy</i></div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">THE AMERICAN CREDO: A CONTRIBUTION TOWARD</div> -<div class="indent">THE INTERPRETATION OF THE NATIONAL MIND</div> -<div class="indent">(<i>in collaboration with H. L. Mencken</i>)</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center"><i>Travel and Reminiscence</i></div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">EUROPE AFTER 8:15 (<i>in collaboration with H. L. Mencken</i>)</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> -<div class="chapter"> -<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="" /></div></div> - -<hr class="tb" /> -<div class="titlepage"> - -<p><span class="xxlarge">THE · CRITIC · AND<br /> -THE · DRAMA</span></p> - -<p><span class="xlarge">BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN</span></p> - -<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_titlelogo.jpg" alt="" /></div> - -<p>New York<span class="gap"><span class="large">ALFRED · A · KNOPF</span></span><span class="gap">Mcmxxii</span></p> -</div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY<br /> -ALFRED A. KNOPF, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span><br /> -<br /> -<i>Published January, 1922</i><br /> -<br /> -<br /> -<i>Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.<br /> -Paper (Warren’s) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y.<br /> -Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York, N. Y.</i></p> - - -<p class="center">MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - -<p class="center"> -WITH HIS PERMISSION<br /> -<span class="smcap">To</span> EDWARD GORDON CRAIG<br /> -THE FIRST ÆSTHETICIAN OF THE THEATRE</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<h2 class="nobreak">CONTENTS</h2> -</div> - - - -<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" summary="table"> - -<tr><td class="tdr"><span class="small">CHAPTER</span></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="tdr">I.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Aesthetic Jurisprudence</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_3"> 3</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="tdr">II.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Drama as an Art</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_29"> 29</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="tdr">III.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The Place of the Theatre</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63"> 63</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="tdr">IV.</td><td> <span class="smcap">The Place of Acting</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_83"> 83</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="tdr">V.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Dramatic Criticism</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_113"> 113</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="tdr">VI.</td><td> <span class="smcap">Dramatic Criticism in America </span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_133"> 133</a></td></tr> -</table> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> - -<p><i>Of all the arts and half-arts—perhaps -even above that of acting—is the art of -criticism founded most greatly upon -vanity. All criticism is, at bottom, an -effort on the part of its practitioner to -show off himself and his art at the expense -of the artist and the art which he -criticizes. The heavy modesty practised -by certain critics is but a recognition of, -and self-conscious attempt to diminish, -the fundamental and ineradicable vainglory -of criticism. The great critics are -those who, recognizing the intrinsic, permanent -and indeclinable egotism of the -critical art, make no senseless effort to -conceal it. The absurd critics are those -who attempt to conceal it and, in the -attempt, make their art and themselves -doubly absurd.</i></p></div> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1"></a>[1]</span> -<p class="ph2">I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE</p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2"></a>[2]</span></p> -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span> -<h2 class="nobreak">I. AESTHETIC JURISPRUDENCE</h2> -</div> - - -<h3>I</h3> - -<p class="drop-cap2">ART is a reaching out into the ugliness -of the world for vagrant beauty and -the imprisoning of it in a tangible -dream. Criticism is the dream book. All art -is a kind of subconscious madness expressed in -terms of sanity; criticism is essential to the -interpretation of its mysteries, for about -everything truly beautiful there is ever something -mysterious and disconcerting. Beauty -is not always immediately recognizable as -beauty; what often passes for beauty is mere -infatuation; living beauty is like a love that -has outlasted the middle-years of life, and has -met triumphantly the test of time, and faith, -and cynic meditation. For beauty is a sleep-walker -in the endless corridors of the wakeful -world, uncertain, groping, and not a little -strange. And criticism is its tender guide.</p> - -<p>Art is a partnership between the artist and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4"></a>[4]</span> -the artist-critic. The former creates; the -latter re-creates. Without criticism, art -would of course still be art, and so with its -windows walled in and with its lights extinguished -would the Louvre still be the Louvre. -Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of -art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in -which art might otherwise rest only vaguely -discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.</p> - -<p>Criticism, at its best, is a great, tall candle -on the altar of art; at its worst, which is to say -in its general run, a campaign torch flaring red -in behalf of æsthetic ward-heelers. This campaign -torch motif in criticism, with its -drunken enthusiasm and raucous hollering -born of ignorance, together with what may be -called the Prince Albert motif, with its sober, -statue-like reserve born of ignorance that, being -well-mannered, is not so bumptious as the -other, has contributed largely to the common -estimate of criticism as a profession but -slightly more exalted than Second Avenue -auctioneering if somewhat less than Fifth. -Yet criticism is itself an art. It might,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span> -indeed, be well defined as an art within an art, -since every work of art is the result of a struggle -between the heart that is the artist himself -and his mind that is the critic. Once his work -is done, the artist’s mind, tired from the bitterness -of the struggle, takes the form of a second -artist, puts on this second artist’s strange hat, -coat and checkered trousers, and goes forth -with refreshed vigour to gossip abroad how -much of the first artist’s work was the result -of its original splendid vitality and how much -the result of its gradually diminished vitality -and sad weariness. The wrangling that -occurs at times between art and criticism is, -at bottom, merely a fraternal discord, one in -which Cain and Abel belabour each other with -stuffed clubs. Criticism is often most sympathetic -when it is apparently most cruel: the -propounder of the sternest, hardest philosophy -that the civilized world has known never failed -sentimentally to kiss and embrace his sister, -Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Nietzsche, every -night at bed-time. “It is not possible,” Cabell -has written, “to draw inspiration from a woman’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6"></a>[6]</span> -beauty unless you comprehend how easy -it would be to murder her.” And—“Only -those who have firmness may be really tender-hearted,” -said Rochefoucauld. One may -sometimes even throw mud to tonic purpose. -Consider Karlsbad.</p> - -<p>Art is the haven wherein the disillusioned -may find illusion. Truth is no part of art. -Nor is the mission of art simple beauty, as the -text books tell us. The mission of art is the -magnification of simple beauty to proportions -so heroic as to be almost overpowering. Art -is a gross exaggeration of natural beauty: -there was never a woman so beautiful as the -Venus di Milo, or a man so beautiful as the -Apollo Belvedere of the Vatican, or a sky so -beautiful as Monet’s, or human speech so beautiful -as Shakespeare’s, or the song of a nightingale -so beautiful as Ludwig van Beethoven’s. -But as art is a process of magnification, so -criticism is a process of reduction. Its purpose -is the reducing of the magnifications of -art to the basic classic and æsthetic principles, -and the subsequent announcement thereof in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span> -terms proportioned to the artist’s interplay of -fundamental skill and overtopping imagination.</p> - -<p>The most general fault of criticism lies in a -confusion of its own internal processes with -those of art: it is in the habit of regarding the -business of art as a reduction of life to its -essence of beauty, and the business of criticism -as an expansion of that essence to its -fullest flow. The opposite is more reasonable. -Art is a beautiful, swollen lie; criticism, a cold -compress. The concern of art is with beauty; -the concern of criticism is with truth. And -truth and beauty, despite the Sunday School, -are often strangers. This confusion of the -business of art and that of criticism has given -birth to the so-called “contagious,” or inspirational, -criticism, than which nothing is more -mongrel and absurd. Criticism is designed to -state facts—charmingly, gracefully, if possible—but -still facts. It is not designed to exhort, -enlist, convert. This is the business not of -the critic, but of those readers of the critic -whom the facts succeed in convincing and galvanizing.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8"></a>[8]</span> -Contagious criticism is merely a -vainglorious critic’s essay at popularity: facts -heated up to a degree where they melt into -caressing nothingness.</p> - -<p>But if this “criticism with a glow” is not to -be given countenance, even less is to be suffered -the criticism that, in its effort at a fastidious -and elegant reserve, leans so far backward -that it freezes its ears. This species of criticism -fails not only to enkindle the reader, but -fails also—and this is more important—to enkindle -the critic himself. The ideal critic is -perhaps much like a Thermos bottle: full of -warmth, he suggests the presence of the heat -within him without radiating it. This inner -warmth is essential to a critic. But this inner -warmth, where it exists, is automatically -chilled and banished from a critic by a -protracted indulgence in excessive critical -reserve. Just as the professional frown -assumed by a much photographed public magnifico -often becomes stubbornly fixed upon his -hitherto gentle brow, so does the prolonged -spurious constraint of a critic in due time<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span> -psychologically hoist him on his own petard. -A writer’s work does not grow more and more -like him; a writer grows more and more like -his work. The best writing that a man produces -is always just a little superior to himself. -There never was a literary artist who did not -appreciate the difficulty of keeping up to the -pace of his writings. A writer is dominated -by the standard of his own writings; he is a -slave <i>in transitu</i>, lashed, tormented, and miserable. -The weak and inferior literary artist, -such a critic as the one alluded to, soon -becomes the helpless victim of his own writings: -like a vampire of his own creation they -turn upon him and suck from him the warm -blood that was erstwhile his. A pose in time -becomes natural: a man with a good left eye -cannot affect a monocle for years without -eventually coming to need it. A critic cannot -write ice without becoming in time himself -at least partly frosted.</p> - -<p>Paraphrasing Pascal, to little minds all -things are great. Great art is in constant -conflict with the awe of little minds. Art is<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span> -something like a wonderful trapeze performer -swinging high above the heads of the bewildered -multitude and nervous lest it be made -to lose its balance and to slip by the periodic -sudden loud marvellings of the folks below. -The little mind and its little criticism are the -flattering foes of sound art. Such art -demands for its training and triumph the -countless preliminary body blows of muscular -criticism guided by a muscular mind. Art -and the artist cannot be developed by mere -back-slapping. If art, according to Beulé, is -the intervention of the human mind in the -elements furnished by experience, criticism is -the intervention of the human mind in the -elements furnished by æsthetic passion. Art -and the artist are ever youthful lovers; criticism -is their chaperon.</p> - - -<h3>II</h3> - -<p>I do not believe finally in this or that -“theory” of criticism. There are as many -sound and apt species of criticism as there<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span> -are works to be criticized. To say that art -must be criticized only after this formula or -after that, is to say that art must be contrived -only out of this formula or out of that. As -every work of art is an entity, a thing in itself, -so is every piece of criticism an entity, a thing -in itself. That “Thus Spake Zarathustra” -must inevitably be criticized by the canons of -the identical “theory” with which one criticizes -“Tristan and Isolde” is surely difficult of -reasoning.</p> - -<p>To the Goethe-Carlyle doctrine that the -critic’s duty lies alone in discerning the artist’s -aim, his point of view and, finally, his execution -of the task before him, it is easy enough -to subscribe, but certainly this is not a “theory” -of criticism so much as it is a foundation for -a theory. To advance it as a theory, full-grown, -full-fledged and flapping, as it has been -advanced by the Italian Croce and his admirers, -is to publish the preface to a book without -the book itself. Accepted as a theory complete -in itself, it fails by virtue of its several undeveloped -intrinsic problems, chief among<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span> -which is its neglect to consider the undeniable -fact that, though each work of art is indubitably -an entity and so to be considered, there -is yet in creative art what may be termed an -æsthetic genealogy that bears heavily upon -comprehensive criticism and that renders the -artist’s aim, his point of view and his execution -of the task before him susceptible to a -criticism predicated in a measure upon the -work of the sound artist who has just preceded -him.</p> - -<p>The Goethe-Carlyle hypothesis is a little too -liberal. It calls for qualifications. It gives -the artist too much ground, and the critic too -little. To discern the artist’s aim, to discern -the artist’s point of view, are phrases that -require an amount of plumbing, and not a -few foot-notes. It is entirely possible, for -example, that the immediate point of view of -an artist be faulty, yet the execution of his -immediate task exceedingly fine. If carefully -planned triumph in art is an entity, so also -may be undesigned triumph. I do not say -that any such latter phenomenon is usual, but<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span> -it is conceivable, and hence may be employed -as a test of the critical hypothesis in point. -Unschooled, without aim or point of view in -the sense of this hypothesis, Schumann’s compositions -at the age of eleven for chorus and -orchestra offer the quasi-theory some resistance. -The question of the comparative merit -of these compositions and the artist’s subsequent -work may not strictly be brought into -the argument, since the point at issue is merely -a theory and since theory is properly to be -tested by theory.</p> - -<p>Intent and achievement are not necessarily -twins. I have always perversely thought it -likely that there is often a greater degree of -accident in fine art than one is permitted to -believe. The aim and point of view of a -bad artist are often admirable; the execution -of a fine artist may sometimes be founded upon -a point of view that is, from an apparently -sound critical estimate, at striking odds with -it. One of the finest performances in all modern -dramatic writing, upon its critical reception -as such, came as a great surprise to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span> -writer who almost unwittingly had achieved -it. Art is often unconscious of itself. Shakespeare, -writing popular plays to order, wrote -the greatest plays that dramatic art has -known. Mark Twain, in a disgusted moment, -threw off a practical joke, and it turned out to -be literature.</p> - -<p>A strict adherence to the principles enunciated -in the Goethe-Carlyle theory would -result in a confinement of art for all the theory’s -bold aim in exactly the opposite direction. -For all the critic may accurately say, -the aim and point of view of, say, Richard -Strauss in “Don Quixote” and “A Hero’s -Life,” may be imperfect, yet the one critical -fact persists that the executions are remarkably -fine. All things considered, it were perhaps -better that the critical theory under -discussion, if it be accepted at all, be turned -end foremost: that the artist’s execution of -the task before him be considered either apart -from his aim and point of view, or that it be -considered first, and then—with not too much -insistence upon them—his point of view and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span> -his aim. This would seem to be a more logical -æsthetic and critical order. Tolstoi, with a -sound, intelligent and technically perfect aim -and point of view composed second-rate -drama. So, too, Maeterlinck. Synge, by his -own admissions adjudged critically and dramatically -guilty on both counts, composed one -of the truly first-rate dramas of the Anglo-Saxon -stage.</p> - -<p>In its very effort to avoid pigeon-holing, -the Goethe-Carlyle theory pigeon-holes itself. -In its commendable essay at catholicity, it is -like a garter so elastic that it fails to hold itself -up. That there may not be contradictions in -the contentions here set forth, I am not sure. -But I advance no fixed, definite theory of my -own; I advance merely contradictions of certain -of the phases of the theories held by -others, and contradictions are ever in the habit -of begetting contradictions. Yet such contradictions -are in themselves apposite and -soundly critical, since any theory susceptible -of contradictions must itself be contradictory -and insecure. If I suggest any theory on my<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span> -part it is a variable one: a theory that, in this -instance, is one thing and in that, another. -Criticism, as I see it—and I share the common -opinion—is simply a sensitive, experienced and -thoroughbred artist’s effort to interpret, in -terms of æsthetic doctrine and his own peculiar -soul, the work of another artist reciprocally -to that artist and thus, as with a reflecting -mirror, to his public. But to state merely -what criticism is, is not to state the doctrine -of its application. And herein, as I see it, is -where the theorists fail to cover full ground. -The anatomy of criticism is composed not of -one theory, but of a theory—more or less generally -agreed upon—upon which are reared in -turn other theories that are not so generally -agreed upon. The Goethe-Carlyle theory is -thus like a three-story building on which the -constructor has left off work after finishing -only the first story. What certain aspects of -these other stories may be like, I have already -tried to suggest.</p> - -<p>I have said that, if I have any theory of my -own, it is a theory susceptible in practice of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span> -numerous surface changes. These surface -changes often disturb in a measure this or that -phase of what lies at the bottom. Thus, -speaking as a critic of the theatre, I find it -impossible to reconcile myself to criticizing -acting and drama from the vantage point of -the same theory, say, for example, the Goethe-Carlyle -theory. This theory fits criticism of -drama much better than it fits criticism of acting, -just as it fits criticism of painting and -sculpture much more snugly than criticism of -music. The means whereby the emotions are -directly affected, and soundly affected, may -at times be critically meretricious, yet the -accomplishment itself may be, paradoxically, -artistic. Perhaps the finest acting performance -of our generation is Bernhardt’s Camille: -its final effect is tremendous: yet the means -whereby it is contrived are obviously inartistic. -Again, “King Lear,” searched into with critical -chill, is artistically a poor instance of play-making, -yet its effect is precisely the effect -striven for. Surely, in cases like these, criticism -founded strictly upon an inflexible theory<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span> -is futile criticism, and not only futile but -eminently unfair.</p> - -<p>Here, of course, I exhibit still more contradictions, -but through contradictions we may -conceivably gain more secure ground. When -his book is once opened, the author’s mouth is -shut. (Wilde, I believe, said that; and though -for some peculiar reason it is today regarded -as suicidal to quote the often profound Wilde -in any serious argument, I risk the danger.) -But when a dramatist’s play or a composer’s -symphony is opened, the author has only -begun to open his mouth. What results, an -emotional art within an intellectual art, calls -for a critical theory within a critical theory. -To this composite end, I offer a suggestion: -blend with the Goethe-Carlyle theory that of -the aforementioned Wilde, to wit, that beauty -is uncriticizable, since it has as many meanings -as man has moods, since it is the symbol of -symbols, and since it reveals everything -because it expresses nothing. The trouble -with criticism—again to pose a contradiction—is -that, in certain instances, it is often too cerebral.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span> -Feeling a great thrill of beauty, it -turns to its somewhat puzzled mind and is -apprised that the thrill which it has unquestionably -enjoyed from the work of art might -conceivably be of pathological origin, a fremitus -or vibration felt upon percussion of a -hydatoid tumour.</p> - -<p>The Goethe-Carlyle theory, properly rigid -and unyielding so far as emotional groundlings -are concerned, may, I believe, at times safely -be chucked under the chin and offered a communication -of gipsy ardour by the critic whose -emotions are the residuum of trial, test and -experience.</p> - - -<h3>III</h3> - -<p>Coquelin put it that the footlights exaggerate -everything: they modify the laws of -space and of time; they put miles in a few -square feet; they make minutes appear to be -hours. Of this exaggeration, dramatic criticism—which -is the branch of criticism of which -I treat in particular—has caught something.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span> -Of all the branches of criticism it is intrinsically -the least sober and the least accurately -balanced. It always reminds me somehow of -the lash in the hands of Œacus, in “The -Frogs,” falling upon Bacchus and Xanthus -to discover which of the two is the divine, the -latter meantime endeavouring to conceal the -pain that would betray their mortality by various -transparent dodges. Drama is a two-souled -art: half divine, half clownish. Shakespeare -is the greatest dramatist who ever lived -because he alone, of all dramatists, most accurately -sensed the mongrel nature of his art. -Criticism of drama, it follows, is similarly a -two-souled art: half sober, half mad. Drama -is a deliberate intoxicant; dramatic criticism, -aromatic spirits of ammonia; the re-creation is -never perfect; there is always a trace of tipsiness -left. Even the best dramatic criticism is -always just a little dramatic. It indulges, a -trifle, in acting. It can never be as impersonal, -however much certain of its practitioners may -try, as criticism of painting or of sculpture or -of literature. This is why the best criticism of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span> -the theatre must inevitably be personal criticism. -The theatre itself is distinctly personal; -its address is directly personal. It holds the -mirror not up to nature, but to the spectator’s -individual idea of nature. If it doesn’t, it -fails. The spectator, if he is a critic, merely -holds up his own mirror to the drama’s mirror: -a reflection of the first reflection is the result. -Dramatic criticism is this second reflection. -And so the best dramatic criticism has about -it a flavour of the unconscious, grotesque and -unpremeditated. “When Lewes was at his -business,” Shaw has said, “he seldom remembered -that he was a gentleman or a scholar.” -(Shaw was speaking of Lewes’ free use of -vulgarity and impudence whenever they happened -to be the proper tools for his job.) “In -this he showed himself a true craftsman, intent -on making the measurements and analyses -of his criticism as accurate, and their expression -as clear and vivid, as possible, instead -of allowing himself to be distracted by the -vanity of playing the elegant man of letters, -or writing with perfect good taste, or hinting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span> -in every line that he was above his work. In -exacting all this from himself, and taking his -revenge by expressing his most laboured conclusions -with a levity that gave them the air -of being the unpremeditated whimsicalities of -a man who had perversely taken to writing -about the theatre for the sake of the jest -latent in his own outrageous unfitness for it, -Lewes rolled his stone up the hill quite in the -modern manner of Mr. Walkley, dissembling -its huge weight, and apparently kicking it at -random hither and thither in pure wantonness.”</p> - -<p>Mr. Spingarn, in his exceptionally interesting, -if somewhat overly indignant, treatise on -“Creative Criticism,” provides, it seems to me, -a particularly clear illustration of the manner -in which the proponents of the more modern -theories of criticism imprison themselves in -the extravagance of their freedom. While -liberating art from all the old rules of criticism, -they simultaneously confine criticism -with the new rules—or ghosts of rules—wherewith -they free art. If each work of art is a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span> -unit, a thing in itself, as is commonly agreed, -why should not each work of criticism be -similarly a unit, a thing in itself? If art is, -in each and every case, a matter of individual -expression, why should not criticism, in each -and every such case, be similarly and relevantly -a matter of individual expression? In -freeing art of definitions, has not criticism -been too severely defined? I believe that it -has been. I believe that there may be as many -kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art. -I believe that there may be sound analytical, -sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, -sound destructive, sound constructive, -and other sound species of criticism. -If art knows no rules, criticism knows no -rules—or, at least, none save those that are -obvious. If Brahms’ scherzo in E flat minor, -op. 4, is an entity, a work in and of itself, -why shouldn’t Huneker’s criticism of it be -regarded as an entity, a work in and of itself? -If there is in Huneker’s work inspiration from -without, so, too, is there in Brahms’: if Brahms -may be held a unit in this particular instance<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span> -with no consideration of Chopin, why may not -Huneker with no consideration of Brahms?</p> - -<p>If this is pushing things pretty far, it is -the Spingarns who have made the pushing necessary. -“Taste,” says Mr. Spingarn, “must -reproduce the work of art within itself in -order to understand and judge it; and at that -moment æsthetic judgment becomes nothing -more or less than creative art itself.” This -rings true. But granting the perfection of -the taste, why define and limit the critical -creative art thus born of reproduction? No -sooner has a law been enunciated, writes Mr. -Spingarn, than it has been broken by an artist -impatient or ignorant of its restraints, and the -critics have been obliged to explain away these -violations of their laws or gradually to change -the laws themselves. If art, he continues, is -organic expression, and every work of art is -to be interrogated with the question, “What -has it expressed, and how completely?”, there -is no place for the question whether it has -conformed to some convenient classification of -critics or to some law derived from this classification.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span> -Once again, truly put. But so, -too, no sooner have laws been enunciated than -they have been broken by critics impatient or -ignorant of their restraints, and the critics of -critics have been obliged to explain away these -violations of the laws, or gradually to change -the laws themselves. And so, too, have these -works of criticism provided no place for the -question whether they have conformed to some -convenient classification of the critics of criticism -or to some law derived from this classification.</p> - -<p>“Criticism,” said Carlyle, his theories apart, -“stands like an interpreter between the inspired -and the uninspired, between the prophet -and those who hear the melody of his words, -and catch some glimpse of their material meaning, -but understand not their deeper import.” -This is the best definition that I know of. -It defines without defining; it gives into the -keeping of the interpreter the hundred languages -of art and merely urges him, with -whatever means may best and properly suit -his ends, to translate them clearly to those<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span> -that do not understand; it sets him free from -the very shackles which Carlyle himself, removing -from art, wound in turn about him.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span> -<p class="ph2">II. DRAMA AS AN ART</p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span></p> -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span> -<h2 class="nobreak">II. DRAMA AS AN ART</h2> -</div> - - -<h3>I</h3> - -<p class="drop-cap">IF the best of criticism, in the familiar -description of Anatole France, lies in -the adventure of a soul among masterpieces, -the best of drama may perhaps be -described as the adventure of a masterpiece -among souls. Drama is fine or impoverished -in the degree that it evokes from such souls a -fitting and noble reaction.</p> - -<p>Drama is, in essence, a democratic art in -constant brave conflict with aristocracy of intelligence, -soul and emotion. When drama -triumphs, a masterpiece like “Hamlet” comes -to life. When the conflict ends in a draw, a -drama half-way between greatness and littleness -is the result—a drama, say, such as “El -Gran Galeoto.” When the struggle ends in -defeat, the result is a “Way Down East” or a -“Lightnin’.” This, obviously, is not to say<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span> -that great drama may not be popular drama, -nor popular drama great drama, for I speak of -drama here not as this play or that, but as a -specific art. And it is as a specific art that it -finds its test and trial, not in its own intrinsically -democratic soul, but in the extrinsic aristocratic -soul that is taste, and connoisseurship, -and final judgment. Drama that has come to -be at once great and popular has ever first been -given the imprimatur, not of democratic souls, -but of aristocratic. Shakespeare and Molière -triumphed over aristocracy of intelligence, soul -and emotion before that triumph was presently -carried on into the domain of inferior intelligence, -soul and emotion. In our own day, the -drama of Hauptmann, Shaw and the American -O’Neill has come into its popular own only -after it first achieved the imprimatur of what -we may term the unpopular, or undemocratic, -theatres. Aristocracy cleared the democratic -path for Ibsen, as it cleared it, in so far as -possible, for Rostand and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.</p> - -<p>Great drama is the rainbow born when the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span> -sun of reflection and understanding smiles -anew upon an intelligence and emotion which -that drama has respectively shot with gleams -of brilliant lightning and drenched with the -rain of brilliant tears. Great drama, like -great men and great women, is always just a -little sad. Only idiots may be completely -happy. Reflection, sympathy, wisdom, gallant -gentleness, experience—the chords upon -which great drama is played—these are wistful -chords. The commonplace urge that drama, -to be truly great, must uplift is, in the sense -that the word uplift is used, childish. The -mission of great drama is not to make numskulls -glad that they are alive, but to make -them speculate why they are permitted to be -alive at all. And since this is the mission of -great drama—if its mission may, indeed, be reduced -to any phrase—it combines within itself, -together with this mystical and awe-struck appeal -to the proletariat, a direct and agreeable -appeal to such persons as are, by reason of -their metaphysical perception and emotional -culture, superior to and contemptuous of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span> -proletariat. Fine drama, in truth, is usually -just a trifle snobbish. It has no traffic with -such souls as are readily to be made to feel -“uplifted” by spurious philosophical nostrums -and emotional sugar pills. Its business is with -what the matchless Dryden hailed “souls of -the highest rank and truest understanding”: -souls who find a greater uplift in the noble depressions -of Brahms’ first trio, Bartolommeo’s -Madonna della Misericordia, and Joseph Conrad’s -“Youth” than in the easy buoyancies of -John Philip Sousa, Howard Chandler Christy -and Rupert Hughes. The aim of great drama -is not to make men happy with themselves as -they are, but with themselves as they might, -yet alas cannot, be. As Gautier has it, “The -aim of art is not exact reproduction of nature, -but creation, by means of forms and colours, of -a microcosm wherein may be produced dreams, -sensations, and ideas inspired by the aspect of -the world.” If drama is irrevocably a democratic -art and uplift of the great masses of men -its noblest end, Mrs. Porter’s “Pollyanna” -must endure as a work of dramatic art a thousand<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span> -times finer than Corneille’s “Polyeucte.”</p> - -<p>Drama has been strictly defined by the ritualists -in a dozen different ways. “Drama,” -says one, “must be based on character, and the -action proceed from character.” “Drama,” -stipulates another, “is not an imitation of men, -but of an action and of life: character is subsidiary -to action.” “Drama,” promulgates still -another, “is the struggle of a will against obstacles.” -And so on, so on. Rules, rules and -more rules. Pigeon-holes upon pigeon-holes. -Good drama is anything that interests an intelligently -emotional group of persons assembled -together in an illuminated hall. Molière, -wise among dramatists, said as much, -though in somewhat more, and doubtless too, -sweeping words. Throughout the ages of -drama there will be always Romanticists of -one sort or another, brave and splendid spirits, -who will have to free themselves from the definitions -and limitations imposed upon them by -the neo-Bossus and Boileaus, and the small -portion Voltaires, La Harpes and Marmontels. -Drama is struggle, a conflict of wills?<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span> -Then what of “Ghosts”? Drama is action? -Then what of “Nachtasyl”? Drama is character? -Then what of “The Dream Play”? “A -‘character’ upon the stage,” wrote the author -of the last named drama, “has become a creature -ready-made—a mere mechanism that -drives the man—I do not believe in these theatrical -‘characters.’”</p> - -<p>Of all the higher arts, drama is perhaps the -simplest and easiest. Its anatomy is composed -of all the other arts, high and low, stripped -to their elementals. It is a synthesis of -those portions of these other arts that, being -elemental, are most easily assimilable on the -part of the multitude. It is a snatch of music, -a bit of painting, a moment of dancing, a slice -of sculpture, draped upon the skeleton of -literature. At its highest, it ranks with literature, -but never above it. One small notch -below, and it ranks only with itself, in its -own isolated and generically peculiar field. -Drama, indeed, is dancing literature: a hybrid -art. It is often purple and splendid; it is -often profoundly beautiful and profoundly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span> -moving. Yet, with a direct appeal to the emotions -as its first and encompassing aim, it has -never, even at its finest, been able to exercise -the measure of direct emotional appeal that is -exercised, say, by Chopin’s C sharp minor -Nocturne, op. 27, No. 1, or by the soft romance -of the canvases of Palma Vecchio, or by -Rodin’s superb “Eternal Spring,” or by Zola’s -“La Terre.” It may, at its finest as at its -worst, of course subjugate and triumph over -inexperienced emotionalism, but the greatest -drama of Shakespeare himself has never, in the -truthful confession of cultivated emotionalism, -influenced that emotionalism as has the -greatest literature, or the greatest music, or -the greatest painting or sculpture. The -splendid music of “Romeo” or “Hamlet” is -not so eloquent and moving as that of -“Tristan” or “Lohengrin”; no situation in -the whole of Hauptmann can strike in the -heart so thrilling and profound a chord of pity -as a single line in Allegri’s obvious “Miserere.” -The greatest note of comedy in drama falls -short of the note of comedy in the “Coffee-Cantata”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span> -of Bach; the greatest note of ironic -remorse falls short of that in the scherzo in B -minor of Chopin; the greatest intellectual note -falls short of that in the first and last movements -of the C minor symphony of Brahms. -What play of Sudermann’s has the direct appeal -of “The Indian Lily”? What play made -out of Hardy’s “Tess,” however adroitly contrived, -retains the powerful appeal of the original -piece of literature? To descend, what -obvious thrill melodrama, designed frankly for -dollars, has—with all its painstaking and deliberate -intent—yet succeeded in provoking -half the thrill and shock of the obvious second -chapter of Andreas Latzko’s equally obvious -“Men in War”?</p> - -<p>Art is an evocation of beautiful emotions: -art is art in the degree that it succeeds in this -evocation: drama succeeds in an inferior degree. -Whatever emotion drama may succeed -brilliantly in evoking, another art succeeds in -evoking more brilliantly.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span></p> - - -<h3>II</h3> - -<p>Although, of course, one speaks of drama -here primarily in the sense of acted drama, it -is perhaps not necessary so strictly to confine -one’s self. For when the critic confines himself -in his discussion of drama to the acted -drama, he regularly brings upon himself from -other critics—chiefly bookish fellows whose -theatrical knowledge is meagre—the very -largely unwarranted embarrassment of arguments -anent “crowd psychology” and the like -which, while they have little or nothing to do -with the case, none the less make a certain -deep impression upon his readers. (Readers -of criticism become automatically critics; with -his first sentence, the critic challenges his critic-reader’s -sense of argument.) This constantly -advanced contention of “crowd psychology,” -of which drama is supposed to be at once master -and slave, has small place in a consideration -of drama, from whatever sound point of -view one elects to consider the latter. If -“crowd psychology” operates in the case of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span> -theatre drama, it operates also in the case of -concert-hall music. Yet no one so far as I -know seriously maintains that, in a criticism of -music, this “crowd psychology” has any place.</p> - -<p>I have once before pointed out that, even -accepting the theory of crowd psychology and -its direct and indirect implications so far as -drama is concerned, it is as nonsensical to assume -that one thousand persons assembled together -before a drama in a theatre are, by reason -of their constituting a crowd, any more -likely to be moved automatically than the same -crowd of one thousand persons assembled together -before a painting in an art gallery. -Furthermore, the theory that collective intelligence -and emotionalism are a more facile and -ingenuous intelligence and emotionalism, while -it may hold full water in the psychological -laboratory, holds little in actual external demonstration, -particularly in any consideration -of a crowd before one of the arts. While it -may be true that the Le Bon and Tarde theory -applies aptly to the collective psychology -of a crowd at a prize-fight or a bull-fight or<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span> -a circus, one may be permitted severe doubts -that it holds equally true of a crowd in a -theatre or in an art gallery or in a concert hall. -The tendency of such a latter group is not -æsthetically downward, but upward. And -not only æsthetically, but intellectually and -emotionally. (I speak, of course, and with -proper relevance, of a crowd assembled to hear -good drama or good music, or to see good -painting. The customary obscuring tactic of -critics in this situation is to argue out the principles -of intelligent reaction to good drama in -terms of yokel reaction to bad drama. Analysis -of the principles of sound theatre drama -and the reaction of a group of eight hundred -citizens of Marion, Ohio, to “The Two Orphans” -somehow do not seem to me to be -especially apposite.) The fine drama or the -fine piece of music does not make its auditor -part of a crowd; it removes him, and every -one else in the crowd, from the crowd, and -makes him an individual. The crowd ceases -to exist as a crowd; it becomes a crowd of -units, of separate individuals. The dramas of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span> -Mr. Owen Davis make crowds; the dramas -of Shakespeare make individuals.</p> - -<p>The argument to the contrary always somewhat -grotesquely assumes that the crowd assembled -at a fine play, and promptly susceptible -to group psychology, is a new crowd, -one that has never attended a fine play before. -Such an assumption falls to pieces in two ways. -Firstly, it is beyond reason to believe that it -is true in more than one instance out of a -hundred; and secondly it would not be true -even if it were true. For, granting that a -crowd of one thousand persons were seeing -great drama for the first time in their lives, -what reason is there for believing that the -majority of persons in the crowd who had -never seen great drama and didn’t know -exactly what to make of it would be swayed -and influenced by the minority who had never -seen great drama but did know what to make -of it? If this were true, no great drama could -ever possibly fail in the commercial theatre. -Or, to test the hypothesis further, take it the -other way round. What reason is there for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span> -believing that the majority in this crowd would -be moved the one way or the other, either by -a minority that did understand the play, or did -not understand it? Or take it in another way -still. What reason is there for believing that -the minority in this crowd who did know what -the drama was about would be persuaded -emotionally by the majority who did not know -what the drama was about?</p> - -<p>Theories, and again theories. But the facts -fail to support them. Take the lowest type of -crowd imaginable, one in which there is not -one cultured man in a thousand—the crowd, -say, at a professional American baseball game—and -pack it into an American equivalent for -Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus. The -play, let us say, is “Œdipus Rex.” At the -ball game, the crowd psychology of Le Bon -operated to the full. But what now? Would -the crowd, in the theatre and before a great -drama, be the same crowd? Would it not be -an entirely different crowd? Would not its -group psychology promptly and violently suffer -a sudden change? Whether out of curiosity,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span> -disgust, admiration, social shame or what -not, would it not rapidly segregate itself, -spiritually or physically, into various groups? -What is the Le Bon theatrical view of the -crowd psychology that somehow didn’t come -off during the initial engagement of Barrie’s -“Peter Pan” in Washington, D. C.? Or of -the crowd psychology that worked the other -way round when Ibsen was first played in London? -Or of the crowd psychology that, operating -regularly, if artificially, at the New -York premières, most often fails, for all its -high enthusiasm, to move either the minority -or the majority in its composition?</p> - -<p>The question of sound drama and the pack -psychology of a congress of groundlings is a -famous one: it gets nowhere. Sound drama -and sound audiences are alone to be considered -at one and the same time. And, as I have -noted, the tendency of willing, or even semi-willing, -auditors and spectators is in an upward -direction, not a downward. No intelligent -spectator at a performance of “Ben Hur” -has ever been made to feel like throwing his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span> -hat into the air and cheering by the similar -actions of the mob spectators to the left and -right of him. No ignoble auditor of “The -Laughter of the Gods” but has been made to -feel, in some part, the contagion of cultivated -appreciation to <i>his</i> left and right. “I forget,” -wrote Sarcey, in a consideration of the subject -of which we have been treating, “what -tyrant it was of ancient Greece to whom massacres -were every-day affairs, but who wept -copiously over the misfortunes of a heroine in -a tragedy. He was the audience; and for the -one evening clothed himself in the sentiments -of the public.” A typical example of sophisticated -reasoning. How does Sarcey know -that it was not the rest of the audience—the -crowd—that was influenced by this repentant -and copiously lachrymose individual, rather -than that it was this individual who was moved -by the crowd?</p> - -<p>If fallacies perchance insinuate themselves -into these opposing contentions, it is a case of -fallacy versus fallacy: my intent is not so much -to prove anything as to indicate the presence<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span> -of holes in the proofs of the other side. These -holes seem to me to be numerous, and of considerable -circumference. A description of two -of them may suffice to suggest the rest. Take, -as the first of these, the familiar Castelvetro -doctrine that, since a theatrical audience is not -a select congress but a motley crowd, the dramatist, -ever conscious of the group psychology, -must inevitably avoid all themes and ideas unintelligible -to such a gathering. It may be -true that a theatrical audience is not a select -congress, but why confine the argument to -theatrical audiences and seek thus to prove -something of drama that may be proved as -well—if one is given to such idiosyncrasies—of -music? What, as I have said before, of -opera and concert hall audiences? Consider -the average audience at Covent Garden, the -Metropolitan, Carnegie Hall. Is it any way -culturally superior to the average audience at -the St. James’s Theatre, or the Théâtre de -l’Oeuvre, or the Plymouth—or even the Neighbourhood -Playhouse down in Grand Street? -What of the audiences who attended the original<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span> -performances of Beethoven’s “Leonore” -(“Fidelio”), Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini,” -the original performances of Wagner in -France and the performances of his “Der Fliegende -Holländer” in Germany, the operas of -Händel in England in the years 1733-37, the -work of Rossini in Italy, the concerts of -Chopin during his tour of England and Scotland?... -Again, as to the imperative necessity -of the dramatist’s avoidance of all -themes and ideas unintelligible to a mob audience, -what of the success among such very -audiences of—to name but a few more recent -profitably produced and locally readily recognizable -examples—Shaw’s “Getting Married,” -Augustus Thomas’ “The Witching -Hour,” Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck,” Dunsany’s -“The Laughter of the Gods,” Barrie’s “Mary -Rose,” Strindberg’s “The Father,” Synge’s -“Playboy”?... Surely it will be quickly -allowed that however obvious the themes and -ideas of these plays may be to the few, they -are hardly within the ready intelligence of -what the theorists picture as the imaginary<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span> -mob theatre audience. Fine drama is independent -of all such theories: the dramatist -who subscribes to them should not figure in any -treatise upon drama as an art.</p> - -<p>A second illustration: the equivocation to -the effect that drama, being a democratic art, -may not properly be evaluated in terms of -more limited, and aristocratic, taste. It seems -to me, at least, an idiotic assumption that -drama is a more democratic art than music. -All great art is democratic in intention, if -not in reward. Michelangelo, Shakespeare, -Wagner and Zola are democratic artists, and -their art democratic art. It is criticism of -Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Wagner and Zola -that is aristocratic. Criticism, not art, generically -wears the ermine and the purple. To -appraise a democratic art in terms of democracy -is to attempt to effect a chemical reaction -in nitrogen with nitrogen. If drama is, -critically, a democratic art since it is meant -not to be read by the few but to be played before -the many, music must be critically no less -a democratic art. Yet the theorists conveniently<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span> -overlook this embarrassment. Nevertheless, -if Shakespeare’s dramas were designed -for the heterogeneous ear, so, too, were the -songs of Schumann. No great artist has ever -in his heart deliberately fashioned his work for -a remote and forgotten cellar, dark and stairless. -He fashions it, for all his doubts, in the -hope of hospitable eyes and ears, and in the -hope of a sun to shine upon it. It is as ridiculous -to argue that because Shakespeare’s is -a democratic art it must be criticized in terms -of democratic reaction to it as it would be to argue -that because the United States is a democracy -the most acute and comprehensive criticism -of that democracy must lie in a native -democrat’s reaction to it. “To say that the -theatre is for the people,” says Gordon Craig, -“is necessary. But to forget to add that part -and parcel of the people is the aristocracy, -whether of birth or feeling, is an omission. A -man of the eighteenth century, dressed in silks, -in a fashionable loggia in the theatre at Versailles, -looking as if he did no work (as Voltaire -in his youth may have looked), presents,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span> -in essence, exactly the same picture as Walt -Whitman in his rough gray suit lounging in -the Bowery, also looking as if he did no work.... -One the aristocrat, one the democrat: the -two are identical.”</p> - - -<h3>III</h3> - -<p>“Convictions,” said Nietzsche, “are prisons.” -Critical “theories,” with negligible exception, -seek to denude the arts of their splendid, gipsy -gauds and to force them instead to don so -many duplicated black and white striped uniforms. -Of all the arts, drama has suffered -most in this regard. Its critics, from the time -of Aristotle, have bound and fettered it, and -have then urged it impassionedly to soar. -Yet, despite its shackles, it has triumphed, and -each triumph has been a derision of one of its -most famous and distinguished critics. It -triumphed, through Shakespeare, over Aristotle; -it triumphed, through Molière, over Castelvetro; -it triumphed, through Lemercier, -over Diderot; it triumphed, through Lessing,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span> -over Voltaire; it triumphed, through Ibsen, -over Flaubert; it has triumphed, through -Hauptmann, over Sarcey and, through -Schnitzler and Bernard Shaw, over Mr. -Archer. The truth perhaps is that drama is -an art as flexible as the imaginations of its -audiences. It is no more to be bound by rules -and theories than such imaginations are to be -bound by rules and theories. Who so all-wise -that he may say by what rules or set of -rules living imaginations and imaginations yet -unborn are to be fanned into theatrical flame? -“Imagination,” Samuel Johnson’s words apply -to auditor as to artist, “a licentious and vagrant -faculty, unsusceptible of limitations and -impatient of restraint, has always endeavoured -to baffle the logician, to perplex the -confines of distinction, and burst the inclosures -of regularity.” And further, “There is therefore -scarcely any species of writing of which -we can tell what is its essence, and what are -its constituents; every new genius produces -some innovation which, when invented and -approved, subverts the rules which the practice<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span> -of foregoing authors had established.”</p> - -<p>Does the play interest, and whom? This -seems to me to be the only doctrine of dramatic -criticism that is capable of supporting itself -soundly. First, does the play interest? In -other words, how far has the dramatist succeeded -in expressing himself, and the materials -before him, intelligently, eloquently, symmetrically, -beautifully? So much for the criticism -of the dramatist as an artist. In the -second place, whom does the play interest? -Does it interest inferior persons, or does it -interest cultivated and artistically sensitive -persons? So much for the criticism of the -artist as a dramatist.</p> - -<p>The major difficulty with critics of the -drama has always been that, having once positively -enunciated their critical credos, they -have been constrained to devote their entire -subsequent enterprise and ingenuity to defending -the fallacies therein. Since a considerable -number of these critics have been, and are, -extraordinarily shrewd and ingenious men, -these defences of error have often been contrived<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span> -with such persuasive dexterity and reasonableness -that they have endured beyond the -more sound doctrines of less deft critics, doctrines -which, being sound, have suffered the -rebuffs that gaunt, grim logic, ever unprepossessing -and unhypnotic, suffers always. “I -hope that I am right; if I am not right, I am -still right,” said Brunetière. “Mr. William -Archer is not only, like myself, a convinced, -inflexible determinist,” Henry Arthur Jones -has written, “I am persuaded that he is also, -unlike myself, a consistent one. I am sure he -takes care that his practice agrees with his -opinions—even when they are wrong.” Dramatic -criticism is an attempt to formulate rules -of conduct for the lovable, wayward, charming, -wilful vagabond that is the drama. For the -drama is an art with a feather in its cap and -an ironic smile upon its lips, sauntering impudently -over forbidden lawns and through -closed lanes into the hearts of those of us -children of the world who have never grown -up. Beside literature, it is the Mother Goose -of the arts: a gorgeous and empurpled Mother<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span> -Goose for the fireside of impressible and romantic -youth that, looking upward, leans ever -hushed and expectant at the knee of life. It -is a fairy tale told realistically, a true story -told as romance. It is the lullaby of disillusion, -the chimes without the cathedral, the -fears and hopes and dreams and passions of -those who cannot fully fear and hope and -dream and flame of themselves.</p> - -<p>“The drama must have reality,” so Mr. P. -P. Howe in his engaging volume of “Dramatic -Portraits,” “but the first essential to our -understanding of an art is that we should not -believe it to be actual life. The spectator who -shouts his warning and advice to the heroine -when the villain is approaching is, in the theatre, -the only true believer in the hand of God; -and he is liable to find it in a drama lower than -the best.” The art of the drama is one which -imposes upon drama the obligation of depicting -at once the inner processes of life realistically, -and the external aspects of life delusively. -Properly and sympathetically to appreciate -drama, one must look upon it synchronously<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span> -with two different eyes: the one arguing -against the other as to the truth of what it -sees, and triumphing over this doubtful other -with the full force of its sophistry. Again inevitably -to quote Coleridge, “Stage presentations -are to produce a sort of temporary half-faith, -which the spectator encourages in himself -and supports by a voluntary contribution -on his own part, because he knows that it is -at all times in his power to see the thing as it -really is. Thus the true stage illusion as to a -forest scene consists, not in the mind’s judging -it to be a forest, but in its remission of the -judgment that it is not a forest.” This obviously -applies to drama as well as to dramatic -investiture. One never for a moment -believes absolutely that Mr. John Barrymore -is Richard III; one merely agrees, for the -sake of Shakespeare, who has written the play, -and Mr. Hopkins, who has cast it, that Mr. -John Barrymore is Richard III, that one may -receive the ocular, aural and mental sensations -for which one has paid three dollars and -a half. Nor does one for a moment believe<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span> -that Mr. Walter Hampden, whom that very -evening one has seen dividing a brobdingnagian -dish of goulash with Mr. Oliver Herford -in the Player’s Club and discussing the prospects -of the White Sox, is actually speaking -extemporaneously the rare verbal embroideries -of Shakespeare; or that Miss Ethel Barrymore -who is billed in front of Browne’s Chop -House to take a star part in the Actors’ -Equity Association’s benefit, is really the -queen of a distant kingdom.</p> - -<p>The dramatist, in the theatre, is not a -worker in actualities, but in the essence of actualities -that filters through the self-deception -of his spectators. There is no such thing -as realism in the theatre: there is only mimicry -of realism. There is no such thing as -romance in the theatre: there is only mimicry -of romance. There is no such thing as -an automatic dramatic susceptibility in a theatre -audience: there is only a volitional dramatic -susceptibility. Thus, it is absurd to -speak of the drama holding the mirror up to -nature; all that the drama can do is to hold<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span> -nature up to its own peculiar mirror which, -like that in a pleasure-park carousel, amusingly -fattens up nature, or shrinks it, yet does -not at any time render it unrecognizable. -One does not go to the theatre to see life and -nature; one goes to see the particular way in -which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, -imaginative and entertaining man -who happens, in turn, to be a playwright. -Drama is the surprising pulling of a perfectly -obvious, every-day rabbit out of a perfectly -obvious, every-day silk hat. The spectator has -seen thousands of rabbits and thousands of -silk hats, but he has never seen a silk hat that -had a rabbit concealed in it, and he is curious -about it.</p> - -<p>But if drama is essentially mimetic, so also—as -Professor Gilbert Murray implies—is -criticism essentially mimetic in that it is representative -of the work criticized. It is conceivable -that one may criticize Mr. Ziegfeld’s -“Follies” in terms of the “Philoctetes” of -Theodectes—I myself have been guilty of -even more exceptional feats; it is not only<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span> -conceivable, but of common occurrence, for -certain of our academic American critics to -criticize the plays of Mr. Shaw in terms of -Scribe and Sardou, and with a perfectly -straight face; but criticism in general is a -chameleon that takes on something of the -colour of the pattern upon which it imposes -itself. There is drama in Horace’s “Epistola -ad Pisones,” a criticism of drama. There -is the spirit of comedy in Hazlitt’s essay “On -the Comic Writers of the Last Century.” -Dryden’s “Essay on Dramatic Poesy” is -poetry. There is something of the music -of Chopin in Huneker’s critical essays on -Chopin, and some of Mary Garden’s spectacular -histrionism in his essay on her acting. -Walkley, criticizing “L’Enfant Prodigue,” -uses the pen of Pierrot. Criticism, more than -drama with her mirror toward nature, holds -the mirror up to the nature of the work it -criticizes. Its end is the revivification of the -passion of art which has been spent in its behalf, -but under the terms laid down by Plato. -Its aim is to reconstruct a great work of art<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span> -on a diminutive scale, that eyes which are not -capable of gazing on high may have it within -the reach of their vision. Its aim is to play -again all the full richness of the artist’s emotional -organ tones, in so far as is possible, on -the cold cerebral xylophone that is criticism’s -deficient instrument. In the accomplishment -of these aims, it is bound by no laws that art -is not bound by. There is but one rule: there -are no rules. Art laughs at locksmiths.</p> - -<p>It has been a favourite diversion of critics -since Aristotle’s day to argue that drama is -drama, whether one reads it from a printed -page or sees it enacted in a theatre. Great -drama, they announce, is great drama whether -it ever be acted or not; “it speaks with the -same voice in solitude as in crowds”; and “all -the more then”—again I quote Mr. Spingarn—“will -the drama itself ‘even apart from representation -and actors,’ as old Aristotle puts -it, speak with its highest power to the imagination -fitted to understand and receive -it.” Upon this point of view much of the -academic criticism of drama has been based.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span> -But may we not well reply that, for all -the fact that Shakespeare would still be the -greatest dramatist who ever lived had he -never been played in the theatre, so, too, -would Bach still be the greatest composer who -ever lived had his compositions never been -played at all? If drama is not meant for actors, -may we not also argue that music is not -meant for instruments? Are not such expedients -less sound criticism than clever evasion -of sound criticism: a frolicsome and agreeable -straddling of the æsthetic see-saw? There is -the printed drama—criticize it. There is the -same drama acted—criticize it. Why quibble? -Sometimes, as in the case of “Gioconda” -and Duse, they are one. Well and -good. Sometimes, as in the case of “Chantecler” -and Maude Adams, they are not one. -Well and good. But where, in either case, -the confusion that the critics lay such stress -upon? These critics deal not with theories, -but with mere words. They take two dozen -empty words and adroitly seek therewith to -fashion a fecund theory. The result is—words.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span> -“Words which,” said Ruskin, “if -they are not watched, will do deadly work -sometimes. There are masked words droning -and skulking about us just now ... (there -never were so many, owing to the teaching -of catechisms and phrases at school instead of -human meanings) ... there never were creatures -of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists -so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, -as these masked words: they are the unjust -stewards of men’s ideas....”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span></p> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span> -<p class="ph2">III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE</p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span></p> -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span> -<h2 class="nobreak">III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE</h2> -</div> - - -<h3>I</h3> - -<p class="drop-cap">THE theatre stands in relation to drama -much as the art gallery stands in relation -to painting. Its aim is to set off -drama in such surroundings and in such light -as to bring it within the comfortable vision and -agreeable scrutiny of the nomad public. To -say that fine drama may produce an equal effect -read as acted may be true or not as you -choose, but so too a fine painting may produce -an equal effect beheld in one’s library as in -the Uffizi. Art thrives—art leads to art—on -sympathy and a measure of general understanding. -Otherwise, of what use criticism? -To divorce the theatre from a consideration -of drama as an art, to contend, as it has been -contended from Aristotle’s day to Corneille’s, -and from Dryden’s and Lamb’s to our own,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span> -that “the more lasting and noble design” of -drama rests in a reading rather than a seeing, -may be, strictly, a logical æsthetic manœuvre, -but equally a logical æsthetic manœuvre -would be a divorcement of canvas from painting -as an art. The theatre is the canvas of -drama. The printed drama is like a bubbling -and sunlit spring, encountered only by wanderers -into the hills and awaiting the bottling -process of the theatre to carry its tonic waters -far and wide among an expectant and emotionally -ill people.</p> - -<p>The criticism that nominates itself to hold -drama and the theatre as things apart is a -criticism which, for all its probable integrity -and reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy, -like a duchess in a play by Mr. Sydney -Grundy. Its æsthetic nose is elevated to such -a degree that it may no longer serve as a practical -organ of earthly smell, but merely as a -quasi-wax feature to round out the symmetry -of the face. It is criticism in a stiff corset, -erect, immobile, lordly—like the Prussian lieutenant -of yesterday, a striking figure, yet just<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span> -a little absurd. It is sound, but like many -things that are sound in æsthetics, it has its -weak points, even its confounding points. For -they say that propaganda can have no place in -art, and along comes a Hauptmann and writes -a “Weavers.” Or they say that art is form, -and along comes a Richard Strauss and composes -two songs for baritone and orchestra -that set the critics to a mad chasing of their -own tails. Or, opposing criticism as an art, -they say that “criticism is art in form, but its -content is judgment, which takes it out of the -intuitional world into the conceptual world”—and -along comes an H. G. Wells with his -“The New Machiavelli” which, like criticism, -is art in form and its content judgment. To -hold that the drama as an art may achieve its -highest end read by the individual and not -acted in the theatre, is to hold that music as -an art may achieve its highest end played by -but one instrument and not by an orchestra. -The theatre is the drama’s orchestra: upon the -wood of its boards and the wind of its puppets -is the melody of drama in all its full richness<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span> -sounded. What if drama is art and the -theatre not art? What if “Hamlet” is art -and electric lights and cheese-cloth are not -art? Schubert’s piano trio, op. 99, is art, and -a pianoforte is a mere wooden box containing -a number of little hammers that hit an equal -number of steel and copper wires. What if -I can read a full imagination into “Romeo and -Juliet” and thus people it and make it live for -me, without going to the theatre? So, too, -can I read a full melody into the manuscript of -a song by Hugo Wolf and thus make it sing -for me, without going to a concert hall. But -why? Is there only one way to appreciate -and enjoy art—and since when? Wagner on -a single violin is Wagner; Wagner on all the -orchestra is super-Wagner. To read a great -drama is to play “Parsifal” on a cornet and -an oboe.</p> - -<p>The object of the theatre is not, as is habitually -maintained, a shrewd excitation of the -imagination of a crowd, but rather a shrewd -relaxation of that imagination. It is a faulty -axiom that holds the greatest actor in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span> -theatre to be an audience’s imagination, and -the adroit cultivation of the latter to be ever -productive of large financial return. As I -have on more than one occasion pointed out -from available and acutely relevant statistics, -the more a dramatist relies upon the imagination, -of an audience, the less the box-office -reward that is his. An audience fills a theatre -auditorium not so eager to perform with its -imagination as to have its imagination performed -upon. This is not the paradox it may -superficially seem to be. The difference is -the difference between a prompt commercial -failure like Molnar’s “Der Gardeofficier” -(“Where Ignorance Is Bliss”) which asks an -audience to perform with its imagination and -a great commercial success like Barrie’s -“Peter Pan” which performs upon the audience’s -imagination by supplying to it every -detail of imagination, ready-made and persuasively -labelled. The theatre is not a place to -which one goes in search of the unexplored -corners of one’s imagination; it is a place to -which one goes in repeated search of the familiar<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span> -corners of one’s imagination. The moment -the dramatist works in the direction of -unfamiliar corners, he is lost. This, contradictorily -enough, is granted by the very critics -who hold to the imagination fallacy which I -have just described. They unanimously agree -that a dramatist’s most successful cultivation -of an audience lies in what they term, and -nicely, the mood of recognition, and in the -same breath paradoxically contend that sudden -imaginative shock is a desideratum no less.</p> - -<p>In this pleasant remission of the active imagination -lies one of the secrets of the charm -of the theatre. Nor is the theatre alone in -this. On even the higher plane of the authentic -arts a measure of the same phenomenon -assists in what may perhaps not too far-fetchedly -be termed the negative stimulation of the -spectator’s fancy. For all the pretty and -winning words to the contrary, no person capable -of sound introspection will admit that a -beautiful painting like Giorgione’s “The Concert” -or a beautiful piece of sculpture like -Pisano’s Perugian fountain actually and literally<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span> -stirs his imagination, and sets it a-sail -across hitherto uncharted æsthetic seas. What -such a painting or piece of sculpture does is to -reach out and, with its overpowering beauty, -encompass and æsthetically fence in the antecedent -wandering and uncertain imagination -of its spectator. As in the instance of drama, -it does not so much awaken a dormant imagination -as soothe an imagination already awake. -Of all the arts, music alone remains a telegrapher -of unborn dreams.</p> - -<p>The theatre brings to the art of drama concrete -movement, concrete colour, and concrete -final effectiveness: this, in all save a few minor -particulars. The art of drama suffers, true -enough, when the theatre, even at its finest, -is challenged by it to produce the values intrinsic -in its ghost of a dead king, or in its battle -on Bosworth Field, or in its ship torn by the -tempest, or in its fairy wood on midsummer -night, or in its approaching tread of doom of -the gods of the mountain. But for each such -defeat it prospers doubly in the gifts that the -theatre brings to it. Such gifts as the leader<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span> -Craig has brought to the furtherance of the -beauty of “Electra” and “Hamlet,” as Reinhardt -and his aides have brought to “Ariadne” -and “Julius Cæsar,” as Golovine and Appia -and Bakst and Linnebach and half a dozen -others have brought to the classics that have -called to them, are not small ones. They have -crystallized the glory of drama, have taken so -many loose jewels and given them substantial -and appropriate settings which have fittingly -posed their radiance. To say that the reading -imagination of the average cultured man is -superior in power of suggestion and depiction -to the imagination of the theatre is idiotically -to say that the reading imagination of every -average cultured man is superior in these powers -to the combined theatrical imaginations of -Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt and Eleanora -Duse operating jointly upon the same play. -Even a commonplace imagination can successfully -conjure up a landscape more beautiful -than any painted by Poussin or Gainsborough, -or jewels more opalescent than any painted by -Rembrandt, or a woman’s dress more luminous<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span> -than any painted by Fortuny, or nymphs -more beguiling than any of Rubens’, yet who -so foolish to say—as they are wont foolishly to -say of reading imagination and the drama—that -such an imagination is therefore superior -to that of the artists? This, in essence, is -none the less the serious contention of those -who decline to reconcile themselves to the -theatrically produced drama. This contention, -reduced to its skeleton, is that, since the -vice-president of the Corn Exchange Bank -can picture the chamber in the outbuilding adjoining -Gloster’s castle more greatly to his -satisfaction than Adolphe Appia can picture -it for him on the stage, the mental performance -of the former is therefore a finer artistic -achievement than the stage performance of -the latter.</p> - - -<h3>II</h3> - -<p>The word imagination leads critics to queer -antics. It is, perhaps, the most manhandled -word in our critical vocabulary. It is used<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span> -almost invariably in its literal meaning: no -shades and shadows are vouchsafed to it. -Imagination, in good truth, is not the basis of -art, but an overtone. Many an inferior artist -has a greater imagination than many a superior -artist. Maeterlinck’s imagination is much -richer than Hauptmann’s, Erik Satie’s is -much richer than César Franck’s, and I am -not at all certain that Romain Rolland’s is not -twice as opulent as Thomas Hardy’s. Imagination -is the slave of the true artist, the master -of the weak. The true artist beats imagination -with the cat-o’-nine-tails of his individual -technic until it cries out in pain, and this pain -is the work of art which is born. The inferior -craftsman comfortably confounds imagination -with the finished work, and so pets and -coddles it; and imagination’s resultant mincings -and giggles he then vaingloriously sets -forth as resolute art.</p> - -<p>The theatre offers to supplement, embroider -and enrich the imagination of the reader of -drama with the imaginations of the actor, the -scene designer, the musician, the costumer and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span> -the producing director. Each of these, before -he sets himself to his concrete task, has—like -the lay reader—sought the fruits of his own -reading imagination. The fruits of these five -reading imaginations are then assembled, -carefully assorted, and the most worthy of -them deftly burbanked. The final staging of -the drama is merely a staging of these best -fruits of the various reading imaginations. -To say, against this, that it is most often impossible -to render a reading imagination into -satisfactory concrete forms is doubtless to say -what is, strictly, true. But art itself is at its -highest merely an approach toward limitless -imagination and beauty. Æsthetics is a pilgrim -on the road to a Mecca that is ever just -over the sky-line. Of how many great works -of art can one say, with complete and final -conviction, that art in this particular direction -can conceivably go no farther? Is it not -conceivable that some super-Michelangelo -will some day fashion an even more perfect -“Slave,” and some super-Shakespeare an even -more beautiful poetic drama?</p> - - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span>The detractors of the theatre are often expert -in persuasive half-truths and masters of -dialectic sleight-of-hand. Their performances -are often so adroit that the spectator is -quick to believe that the trunk is really empty, -yet the false bottom is there for all its cunning -concealment. Take, for example, George -Moore, in the preface to his last play, “The -Coming of Gabrielle.” “The illusion created -by externals, scenes, costumes, lighting and -short sentences is in itself illusory,” he professes -to believe, though why he numbers the -dramatist’s short sentences among the externals -of the stage is not quite clear. “The best -performances of plays and operas are witnessed -at rehearsals. Jean de Reszke was -never so like Tristan at night as he was in the -afternoon when he sang the part in a short -jacket, a bowler hat and an umbrella in his -hand. The chain armour and the plumes that -he wore at night were but a distraction, setting -our thoughts on periods, on the short swords -in use in the ninth century in Ireland or in -Cornwall, on the comfort or the discomfort of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span> -the ships in which the lovers were voyaging, -on the absurd night-dress which is the convention -that Isolde should appear in, a garment -she never wore and which we know to be make-believe. -But the hat and feathers that Isolde -appears in when she rehearses the part are -forgotten the moment she sings; and if I had -to choose to see Forbes-Robertson play Hamlet -or rehearse Hamlet, I should not hesitate -for a moment. The moment he speaks he -ceases to be a modern man, but in black hose -the illusion ceases, for we forget the Prince -of Denmark and remember the mummer.” -Years ago, in a volume of critical essays given -the title “Another Book on the Theatre,” I -took a boyish delight in setting off precisely -the same noisy firework just to hear the folks -in the piazza rocking-chairs let out a yell. -These half-truths serve criticism as sauce -serves asparagus: they give tang to what is -otherwise often tasteless food. This is particularly -true with criticism at its most geometrical -and profound, since such criticism, save -in rare instances, is not especially lively reading.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span> -But, nevertheless, the sauce is not the -asparagus. And when Mr. Moore (doubtless -with his tongue in his cheek) observes that -he can much more readily imagine the lusty -Frau Tillie Pfirsich-Melba as Isolde in a pink -and green ostrich feather hat confected in -some Friedrichstrasse atelier than in the customary -stage trappings, he allows, by implication, -that he might even more readily imagine -the elephantine lady as the seductive Carmen -if she had no clothes on at all.</p> - -<p>This is the trouble with paradoxes. It is -not that they prove too little, as is believed -of them, but that they prove altogether too -much. If the illusion created by stage externals -is in itself illusory, as Mr. Moore says, the -complete deletion of all such stage externals -should be the best means for providing absolute -illusion. Yet the complete absence of illusion -where this is the case is all too familiar -to any of us who have looked on such spectacles -as “The Bath of Phryne” and the like in -the theatres of Paris. A prodigality of stage -externals does not contribute to disillusion,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span> -but to illusion. These externals have become, -through protracted usage, so familiar that -they are, so to speak, scarcely seen: they are -taken by the eye for granted. By way of -proof, one need only consider two types of -Shakespearian production, one like that of -Mr. Robert Mantell and one like that lately -employed for “Macbeth” by Mr. Arthur -Hopkins. Where the overladen stereotyped -first production paradoxically fades out of the -picture for the spectator and leaves the path -of illusion clear for him, the superlatively -simple second production, almost wholly -bereft of familiar externals, arrests and fixes -his attention and makes illusion impossible. -It is true, of course, that all this may be -changed in time, when the deletion of externals -by the new stagecraft shall have become -a convention of the theatre as the heavy laying-on -of externals is a convention at present. -But, as things are today, these externals are, -negatively, the most positive contributors to -illusion.</p> - -<p>It is the misfortune of the theatre that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span> -critics have almost always approached it, and -entered it, with a defiant and challenging air. -I have, during the eighteen years of my active -critical service, met with and come to know at -least fifty professional critics in America, in -England and on the Continent, and among all -this number there have been but four who have -approached the theatre enthusiastically prejudiced -in its favour—two of them asses. -But between the one large group that has been -critically hostile and the other smaller group -that has been uncritically effervescent, I have -encountered no sign of calm and reasoned -compromise, no sign of frank and intelligent -willingness to regard each and every theatre -as a unit, and so to be appraised, instead of -lumping together good and bad theatres alike -and labelling the heterogeneous mass “the -theatre.” There is no such thing as “the -theatre.” There is this theatre, that theatre, -and still that other theatre. Each is a unit. -To talk of “the theatre” is to talk of the Greek -theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the modern -theatre in one breath, or to speak simultaneously<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span> -of the Grosses Schauspielhaus of -Max Reinhardt and the Eltinge Theatre of -Mr. A. H. Woods. “The theatre,” of course, -has certain more or less minor constant and -enduring conventions—at least, so it seems as -far as we now can tell—but so, too, has chirography, -yet we do not speak of “the chirography.” -There are some theatres—I use the -word in its proper restricted sense—that -glorify drama and enhance its beauty; there -are others that vitiate drama. But so also are -there some men who write fine drama, and -others who debase drama to mere fodder for -witlings.... The Shakespeare of the theatre -of Gordon Craig is vivid and brilliant beauty. -Call it art or not art as you will—what does a -label matter? The Molière of the theatre of -Alexander Golovine is suggestive and exquisite -enchantment. Call it art or not art as -you will—what does a label matter? The -Wagner of the opera house of Ludwig Sievert -is triumphant and rapturous splendour. Call -it anything you like—and again, what does a -label matter? There are too many labels in -the world.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span></p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span> - -<p class="ph2">IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING</p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span></p> -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span> -<h2 class="nobreak">IV. THE PLACE OF ACTING</h2> -</div> - - -<h3>I</h3> - -<p class="drop-cap">“WHEN Mr. Nathan says that acting -is not an art, of course he is talking -arrant rot—who could doubt it, -after witnessing a performance by the great -Duse?” So, the estimable actor, Mr. Arnold -Daly. Whether acting is or is not an art, it -is not my concern at the moment to consider, -yet I quote the <i>riposte</i> of Mr. Daly as perhaps -typical of those who set themselves as defenders -of the yea theory. It seems to me that -if this is a satisfactory <i>touche</i> no less satisfactory -should be some such like rejoinder as: -“When Mr. Nathan says that acting <i>is</i> an art, -of course he is talking arrant rot—who could -doubt it, after witnessing a performance by -Mr. Corse Payton.”</p> - -<p>If an authentic art is anything which may -properly be founded upon an exceptionally<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span> -brilliant performance, then, by virtue of the -Reverend Doctor Ernest M. Stires’ brilliant -performance in it, is pulpiteering an art, and, -on the strength of Miss Bird Millman’s brilliant -performance in it, is tight-rope walking -an art no less. Superficially a mere dialectic -monkey-trick, this is yet perhaps not so absurd -as it may seem, for if Duse’s art lies in the -fact that she breathes life and dynamic effect -into the written word of the artist D’Annunzio, -Stires’ lies in the more substantial fact -that he breathes life and dynamic effect into -the word of the somewhat greater, and more -evasive artist, God. And Miss Millman, too, -brings to her quasi-art, movement, colour, -rhythm, beauty and—one may even say—a -sense of fantastic character, since the effect -she contrives is less that of a dumpy little -woman in a short white skirt pirouetting on a -taut wire than of an unreal creature, half bird, -half woman, out of some forgotten fable.</p> - -<p>The circumstance that Duse is an artist -who happens to be an actress does not make -acting an art any more than the circumstance<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span> -that Villon was an artist who happened to be -a burglar or that Paderewski is an artist who -happens to be a politician makes burglary and -politics arts. Duse is an artist first, and an -actress second: one need only look into her -very great share in the creation of the dramas -bearing the name of D’Annunzio to reconcile -one’s self—if not too stubborn, at least in part—to -this point of view. So, also, were -Clairon, Rachel and Jane Hading artists -apart from histrionism, and so too, is Sarah -Bernhardt: who can fail to detect the creative -artist in the “Mémoires” of the first named, for -instance, or, in the case of the last named, in -the fertile impulses of her essays in sculpture, -painting and dramatic literature? It is a curious -thing that, in all the pronouncements of -acting as an art, the names chosen by the advocates -as representative carriers of the æsthetic -banner are those of actors and actresses who -have most often offered evidence of artistic -passion in fields separate and apart from their -histrionic endeavours. Lemaître, Salvini, -Rachel, Talma, Coquelin, Betterton, Garrick,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span> -Fanny Kemble, the Bancrofts, Irving, Tree, -and on down—far down—the line to Ditrichstein, -Sothern, Marie Tempest, Guitry, -Gemier and the brothers Barrymore—all give -testimony, in writing, painting, musicianship, -poetry and dramatic authorship to æsthetic -impulses other than acting. Since acting -itself as an art is open to question, the merit or -demerit of the performances produced from -the æsthetic impulses in point is not an issue: -the fact seems to be that it has been the artist -who has become the actor rather than the actor -who has become the artist.</p> - -<p>The actor, as I have on another occasion -hazarded, is the child of the miscegenation of -an art and a trade: of the drama and the -theatre. Since acting must appeal to the -many—this is obviously its only reason for being, -for acting is primarily a filter through -which drama may be lucidly distilled for -heterogeneous theatre-goers—it must, logically, -be popular or perish. Surely no authentic -art can rest or thrive upon such a premise. -The great actors and actresses, unlike<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span> -great fashioners in other arts, have invariably -been favourites of the crowd, and it is doubtless -a too charitable hypothesis to assume that -this crowd has ever been gifted with critical -insight beyond cavil. If, therefore, the actor -or actress who can sway great crowds is -strictly to be termed an artist, why may we not -also, by strict definition, similarly term as exponents -of an authentic art others who can -likewise sway the same crowds: a great politician -like Roosevelt, say, or a great lecturer -like Ingersoll, or a successful practical theologian -like Billy Sunday? (Let us send out -these paradox shock-troops to clear the way -for the more sober infantry.)</p> - -<p>I have said that I have no intention to argue -for or against acting as an art yet, for all the -circumstance that the case for the prosecution -has long seemed the soundest and the most -eloquent, there are still sporadic instances of -imaginative histrionism that give one reason to -ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently -come to the more penetrating critic that what -has on such occasions passed for an art has in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span> -reality been merely a reflected art: the art of -drama interpreted not with the imagination -of the actor but, more precisely, <i>with the imagination -of the dramatist</i>. In other words, -that actor or actress is the most competent and -effective whose imagination is successful in -meeting literally, and translating, the imagination -of the dramatist which has created the -rôle played by the particular actor or actress. -To name the actor’s imagination in such a case -a creative imagination is a rather wistful procedure, -for it does not create but merely duplicates. -Surely no advocate of acting as a creative -art would be so bold as to contend that -any actor, however great, has ever brought -creative imagination to the already full and -superb creative imagination of Shakespeare. -This would be, on an actor’s part, the sheerest -impudence. The greatest actor is simply he -who is best fitted by figure, voice, training -and intelligence not to invade and annul the -power of the rôle which a great dramatist has -imagined and created. Duse and D’Annunzio -were, so to speak, spiritually and physically<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span> -one: hence the unmatched perfection of -the former’s histrionism in the latter’s rôles. -To see Duse is, save one admit one’s self -critically to the facts, therefore to suffer theoretical -art doubts and the convictions of such -as Mr. Daly.</p> - -<p>It is, of course, the common habit of the -prejudiced critic to overlook, in the estimate -of acting as an art, the few admirable exponents -of acting and to take into convenient -consideration only the enormous majority of -incompetents. But to argue that acting is -not an art simply because a thousand Edmund -Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give no evidence -that it is an art is to argue that sculpture -is not an art simply because a thousand -fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris -busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding -give no evidence in a like direction. Yet the -circumstance that there are admittedly excellent -actors as well as bad actors establishes acting -as an art no more than the circumstance -that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers -as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span> -the playing of the cuckoo-whistle as -an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison -to what appears to be an absurdity, it is because -by such absurdities, or elementals, is the -status of acting in the field of the arts most -sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt’s -ever-haunting cry of the heart in “Izeyl” is a -peg, however slight, upon which may be hung -a strand of the theory that maintains acting as -an art, so too, by the strict canon of dialectics, -is Mr. Ruben Katz’s ever-haunting cry of the -cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of -Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.</p> - -<p>If acting is an art, the proofs thus far -offered are not only unconvincing but fundamentally, -on the score of logic, not a little -droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If -criticism is an art (thus a familiar contention), -why is not acting also an art, since both are -concerned with re-creating works of art? But -the artist’s work offered up to the critic is a -challenge, whereas the dramatist’s work -offered up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism -is war, whether in behalf of æsthetic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span> -friend or against æsthetic foe; acting is agreement, -peace. The critic re-creates, in terms -of his own personality, the work of another -and often emphatically different and antagonistic -personality. The actor re-creates, in -terms of a dramatist’s concordantly imagined -personality, his own personality: the result -is less re-creation than non-re-creation. In -other words, the less the actor creates or re-creates -and the more he remains simply an -adaptable tool in the hands of the dramatist, -the better actor he is. The actor’s state is -thus what may be termed one of active impassivity. -Originality and independence, save -within the narrowest of limits, are denied him. -He is a literal translator of a work of art, not -an independently imaginative and speculative -interpreter, as the critic is. The dramatist’s -work of art does not say to him, as to the critic, -“Here I am! What do you, out of all your -experience, taste and training, think of me?” -It says to him, instead and peremptorily, -“Here I am! Think of me exactly as I am, -and adapt all of your experience, taste and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span> -training to the interpretation of me exactly as -I am!”</p> - -<p>Brushing aside the theory that the true -artist is the actor who can transform his voice, -his manner, his character; who will disappear -behind his part instead of imposing himself -on it and adding himself to it—a simple feat, -since by such a definition the Messrs. Fregoli -and Henri De Vries, amazing vaudeville protean -actors, are true histrionic artists—Mr. -Walkley, in his essay on “The English Actor -of Today,” bravely takes up the defence from -what he regards as a more difficult approach. -“In the art of acting as in any other art,” he -says, “the first requisite is life. The actor’s -part is a series of speeches and stage directions, -mere cold print, an inert mass that has to be -raised somehow from the dead. If the actor -disappears behind it, there is nothing left but -a Golgotha.” Here is indeed gay news! -Hamlet, Iago, Romeo, Shylock—mere “cold -print,” inert Shakespearian masses that, in -order to live, have to be raised somehow from -the dead by members of the Lambs’ Club! It<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span> -is only fair to add that Mr. Walkley quickly -takes to cover after launching this torpedo, -and devotes the balance of his interesting comments -to a prudent and circumspect <i>pas seul</i> -on the very middle of the controversial teeter-tawter. -For no sooner has he described the -majestic drama of Shakespeare as “mere cold -print, an inert mass that has to be raised somehow -from the dead,” than he seems suddenly, -and not without a touch of horror, to realize -that he has ridiculously made of Shakespeare a -mere blank canvas and pot of paint for the use -of this or that actor whom he has named, by -implication and with magnificent liberalness, -a Raphael, or a mere slab of cold marble for -the sculpturing skill of some socked and buskined -Mercié.</p> - - -<h3>II</h3> - -<p>Modern evaluation of acting as an unquestionable -art takes its key from Rémond de -Sainte-Albine, the girlishly ebullient Frenchman -whose pragmatic critical credo was, “If -it makes me feel, it is art.” While it may be -reasonable that a purely emotional art may<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span> -aptly be criticized according to the degree of -emotional reaction which it induces, it is the -quality of emotion resident in the critic that -offers that reasonableness a considerable confusion. -A perfectly attuned and sound emotional -equipment—an emotional equipment of -absolute pitch, so to speak—is a rare thing, -even among critics of brilliant intelligence, -taste, imagination and experience. Goethe, -Carlyle, Hazlitt, Dryden, Lessing, to mention -only five, were physio-psychological units of -dubious emotional structure, if we may trust -the intimate chronicles. Thus, where much of -their critical dramatic writing may be accepted -without qualm, a distinct measure of distrust -would attach itself to any critical estimate of -acting which they might have written or actually -did write.</p> - -<p>There are, obviously, more or less definite -standards whereby we may estimate critical -writings of such men as these so far as those -criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe -as the cerebral or semi-cerebral arts, but -there are no standards, even remotely determinable -or exact, whereby we may appraise<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span> -such of their criticisms as deal with the directly -and wholly emotional art of acting. It is perhaps -not too far a cry to assume that had Mr. -William Archer’s father been murdered -shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr. -Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Mr. Archer -would have been moved to believe Mr. Forbes-Robertson -on even greater actor-artist than he -believed him under the existing circumstances, -or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius, the Danish -journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a -victim of syphilis when he reviewed August -Lindberg’s “Oswald,” he would have looked -on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive -exponent of histrionism. Nothing is more -æsthetically and artistically dubious and insecure -than the appraisal of acting; for it is -based upon the quicksands of varying human -emotionalism, and of aural and visual prejudice. -Were I, for example, one hundred times -more proficient a critic of drama and life than -I am, my criticism of acting would none the -less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I -would remain constitutionally anæsthetic to a -Juliet, however otherwise talented, who had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span> -piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all -his histrionic power, presented to the vision a -pair of knock-knees. This, I well appreciate, -is the kind of critical writing that is promptly -set down as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as -I am concerned and I daresay that it is, in one -direction or another, the truth so far as the -majority of critics are concerned.</p> - -<p>The most that may be said of the soundness -of this or that laudatory criticism of an actor’s -performance is that the performance in point -has met exactly—or very nearly—the particular -critic’s personal notion of how he, as a -human being, would have cried, laughed and -otherwise comported himself were he an actor -and were he in the actor’s rôle. The opposite, -or denunciatory, phase of such criticism holds -a similar truth. If this is not true, by what -standards <i>can</i> the critic estimate the actor’s -performance? By the standards of the actors -who have preceded this actor in the playing -of the rôle, you say? What if the rôle is a -new one, a peculiar and novel one, that has -not been played before? Again, you say that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span> -the rôle may be in an alien drama and that -the actor may be an alien, both rôle and -performance being foreign to the emotional -equipment of the critic. But basic emotions, -the foundation of drama, are universal. -Still again, what of such dramas as “Œdipus -Rex,” what of such rôles—this with a triumphant -chuckle on your part? I return the -chuckle, and bid you read the criticisms that -have been written of the actors who have -played in these rôles! Invariably the actors -have been treated in precisely the same terms -and by the same standards as if they were -playing, not in the drama of the fifth century -before Christ, but in “Fedora,” “The Face in -the Moonlight” or “The Count of Monte -Cristo.”</p> - -<p>One cannot imagine sound criticism applying -to any authentic art the standard of actor -criticism that I have noted. Criticism, true -enough, is always more or less personal, but, -in its operation upon the authentic arts, its -personality is ever like a new bottle into which -the vintage wine of art has been poured.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span> -Criticism of the authentic arts is the result of -the impact of a particular art upon a particular -critical personality. Criticism of the dubious -art of acting is the result of the impact of -a particular critical personality upon this or -that instance of acting. But if this is even remotely -true, you inquire ironically, what of -such an excellent instance of acting as Mimi -Aguglia’s “Salome”; how in God’s name may -the critic appraise that performance in the -manner set down, i. e., in terms of himself -were he a stage performer? Well, for all the -surface humours of the question, that is actually -more or less the way in which he does -appraise it. The actor or actress, unlike the -artist in more authentic fields, may never interpret -emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the -critic: the interpretation must be a reflection, -more or less stereotyped, of the critic’s repertoire -of emotions. Thus, where art is original -expression, acting is merely the audible expression -of a silent expression. In another -phrase, expression in acting is predicated -upon, and limited by, the expression of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span> -critic. It is, therefore, a mere duplication of -expression. And what holds true in the case -of the critic so far as acting is concerned obviously -holds doubly true in the case of the uncritical -public.</p> - -<p>Re-reading the celebrated critiques of acting, -I come to the conclusion that the word -“art” has almost uniformly been applied to -acting by critics who, thinking that they had -perhaps belaboured the subject a trifle too -severely, were disposed graciously to throw it -a sop. As good an illustration as any may be -had from Lewes, certainly a friend of acting -if ever there was one. Thus Lewes:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>“The truth is, we exaggerate the talent of an -actor because we judge only from the effect he -produces, without inquiring too curiously into the -means. But, while the painter has nothing but his -canvas and the author has nothing but white paper -and printers’ ink with which to produce his effects, -the actor has all other arts as handmaids; the -poet labours for him, creates his part, gives him -his eloquence, his music, his imagery, his tenderness, -his pathos, his sublimity; the scene-painter aids -him; the costumes, the lights, the music, all the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span> -fascination of the stage—all subserve the actor’s -effects; these raise him upon a pedestal; remove -them, and what is he? He who can make a stage -mob bend and sway with his eloquence, what could -he do with a real mob, no poet by to prompt -him? He who can charm us with the stateliest -imagery of a noble mind, when robed in the sables -of Hamlet, or in the toga of Coriolanus, what can -he do in coat and trousers on the world’s stage? -Rub off the paint, and the eyes are no longer -brilliant! Reduce the actor to his intrinsic value, -and then weigh him with the rivals whom he surpasses -in reputation and fortune.... If my -estimate of the intrinsic value of acting is lower -than seems generally current, it is from no desire -to disparage <i>an art</i> I have always loved; but, -etc., etc.”</p></div> - -<p>You will find the same dido in most of the -essays on acting: a protracted series of cuffs -and slaps terminating in a gentle non-sequitur -kiss.</p> - -<p>Acting at its finest is, however, often a confusing -hypnosis; it is not to be wondered at -that, fresh from its spell, the critic has mistaken -it for a more exalted something than it -intrinsically is. The flame and fire of a Duse,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span> -the haunt and magic of a Bernhardt, the powerful -stage sense of creation of a Moissi—these -are not a little befuddling. And, under -their serpent-like charm, it is not incomprehensible -that the critic should confound effect -and cause. Yet acting, even of the highest -order, is intrinsically akin to the legerdemain -of a Hermann or a Kellar with a Shakespeare -or a Molière as an assistant to hand over, as -the moment bids, the necessary pack of cards -or bowl of goldfish. It is trickery raised to its -most exalted level: a combination of experience, -intelligence and great charm, not revivifying -something cold and dead, but releasing -something quick and alive from the prison -of the printed page.</p> - -<p>The actor who contends in favour of his -creative art that he must experience within -him the feeling of the dramatist, that he must -actually persuade himself to feel his rôle with -all its turning smiles and tears, speaks nonsense. -So, too, must the auditor, yet who -would term the auditor a creative artist? The -actor who contends in favour of his creative<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span> -art the exact opposite, that he is, to wit, a -creative artist since he must theatrically create -the dramatist’s moods, illusions and emotions -without feeling them himself, also speaks nonsense. -For so, too, in such a case as “Electra,” -or “Ghosts,” or “No More Blondes,” -must the auditor, yet who, again, would term -the latter a creative artist? The actor who -contends in favour of his creative art that two -accomplished actors often “create” the same -rôle in an entirely different manner, speaks -nonsense yet again. For what is not creation -in the first place does not become creation -merely because it is multiplied by two. The -actor who further contends in behalf of his -creative art that if effective acting were the -mere trickery that some maintain it to be, any -person ordinarily gifted should be able, after -a little experiment, to give an effective stage -performance, speaks truer than he knows. -Some of the most remarkable performances -on the stage of the Abbey Theatre of Dublin -have been given by just such persons. And<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span> -there are numerous other instances. If acting -is an art—and I do not say that it may -not be—it at least, as an art, ill bears cross-examination -of even the most superficial nature.</p> - - -<h3>III</h3> - -<p>Acting is perhaps less an art than the deceptive -echo of an art. It is drama’s exalted -halloo come back to drama from the walls of -the surrounding amphitheatre. Criticism of -acting too often mistakes the echo for the -original voice. Although the analogy wears -motley, criticism of this kind operates in much -the same manner as if it were to contend that -an approximately exact and beautiful Ben Ali -Haggin <i>tableau vivant</i> reproduction of, say, -Velasquez’s “The Spinners,” was creative art -in the sense that the original is creative art. -Acting is to the art of the drama much what -these so-called living pictures are to the art -of painting. If acting is to be termed an art,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span> -it is, like the living picture, a freak art, an art -with belladonna in its eyes and ever, even at -its highest, a bit grotesque.</p> - -<p>In his defence of acting as an art equal to -that of poetry and literature, Henry Irving -has observed, “It has been said that acting is -unworthy because it represents feigned emotions, -but this censure would apply with equal -force to poet or novelist.” But would it? -The poet and the novelist may feign emotions, -but it is their own active imaginations which -feign them. The actor merely feigns passively -the emotions which the imagination of -the poet has actively feigned; if there is feigning, -the actor merely parrots it. If there is -feigned emotion in, say, the second stanza of -Swinburne’s “Rococo,” and I mount an illuminated -platform and recite the stanza very -eloquently and impressively, am I precisely -feigning the emotion of it or am I merely -feigning the emotion that the great imagination -of Swinburne has feigned? Feigned or -unfeigned, the emotions of the poet come -ready-made to the heart and lips of the actor.</p> - - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span>Continues Irving further: “It is the actor -who gives body to the ideas of the highest -dramatic literature—fire, force, and sensibility, -without which they would remain for -most people mere airy abstractions.” What -one engages here is the peculiar logic that acting -is an art since it popularizes dramatic -literature and makes it intelligible to a majority -of dunderheads!</p> - -<p>One more quotation from this actor’s defence, -and we may pass on. “The actor’s -work is absolutely concrete,” he challenges. -“He is brought in every phase of his work into -direct comparison with existing things.... -Not only must his dress be suitable to the part -which he assumes, but his bearing must not be -in any way antagonistic to the spirit of the -time in which the play is fixed. The free -bearing of the sixteenth century is distinct -from the artificial one of the seventeenth, the -mannered one of the eighteenth, and the careless -one of the nineteenth.... The voice -must be modulated to the vogue of the time. -The habitual action of a rapier-bearing age<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span> -is different from that of a mail-clad one—nay, -the armour of a period ruled in real life the -poise and bearing of the body; and all this -must be reproduced on the stage.... <i>It cannot -therefore be seriously put forward in the -face of such manifold requirements that no -Art is required for the representation of suitable -action!</i>” The italics are those of one who -experiences some difficulty in persuading himself -that if Art is required for such things as -these—dress, carriage, modulation of voice -and carrying a sword—Art, strictly speaking, -is no less required in the matter of going to a -Quat’-z-Arts costume ball.</p> - -<p>Acting is perhaps best to be criticized not -as art but as colourful and impressive artifice. -Miss Margaret Anglin’s Joan of Arc is -a more or less admirable example of acting not -because it is art but because it is a shrewd, -vivid and beguiling synthesis of various intrinsically -spurious dodges: black tights to -make stout Anglo-Saxon limbs appear Gallicly -slender, a telescoping of words containing -the sound of <i>s</i> to conceal a personal defect<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span> -in the structure of the upper lip, a manœuvring -of the central action up stage to emphasize, -through a familiar trick of the theatre, the -sympathetic frailty of the character which the -actress herself physically lacks, two intakes of -breath before a shout of defiance that the effect -of the ring of the directly antecedent -shout on the part of one of the inquisitors may -be diminished.... An effective acting performance -is like a great explosion; and as -T N T is made from nitric acid, which is in -turn made from such nitrates as potassium -nitrate or saltpeter, which are in turn derived -from the salts of decomposed guano, so is a -great explosion of histrionism similarly made -and derived from numerous—and not infrequently -ludicrous and even vulgar—basic -elements.</p> - -<p>The ill-balanced species of criticism which -appraises an histrionic performance as art on -the sole ground of the hypnotic effect it produces, -with no inquiry into the means whereby -that effect is produced, might analogously, -were it to pursue this logic, appraise similarly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span> -as art the performance of an adept literal hypnotist. -And with logic perhaps much more -sound. For if acting as an art is to be appraised -in the degree of the effect it imparts -to, and induces in, the auditor-spectator, -surely—if there is any sense at all in such a -method of estimate—may certain other such -performances as I have suggested be similarly -appraised. Criticism rests upon a foundation -of logic; whatever it may deal with—æsthetics, -emotions, what not—it cannot remove itself -entirely from that foundation. Thus, if Mr. -John Barrymore is an artist because, by identifying -the heart and mind of his auditor-spectator -with some such character as Fedya and -by suggesting directly that character’s tragic -dégringolade, he can make the auditor-spectator -pity and cry, so too an artist—by the -rigid canon of æsthetic criticism—was Friedrich -Anton Mesmer, who is said to have been -able to do the same thing.</p> - -<p>What I attempt here is no facile paradox, -but a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> designed to show -up the fallacy of the prevailing method of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span> -actor criticism. In criticism of the established -arts, there is no such antic deportment. The -critic never confuses the stimulations of jazz -music with those of sound music, nor the stimulations -of open melodrama with those of -more profound drama. From each of these -he receives stimulations of a kind: some superficial, -some deep. But he inquires, in each instance, -into the means whereby the various -stimulations were vouchsafed to him. While -he recognizes the fact that the sudden and unexpected -shooting off of a revolver in “Secret -Service” produces in him a sensation of shock -as great as the sudden and unexpected shooting -off of a revolver in “Hedda Gabler,” he -does not therefore promptly, and with no -further reasoning, conclude that the two sensations -are of an æsthetic piece. Nor does he -assume that, since the nervous effect of the -fall to death in “The Green Goddess” and of -the fall to death in “The Master Builder” affect -him immediately in much the same way, -both sensations are accordingly produced by -sound artistic means. Nor, yet again, does he<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span> -confuse the quality—nor the springs of that -quality—of the mood of wistful pathos with -which “Poor Butterfly” and “Porgi, Amor” -inspire him. But this confusion persists as -part and parcel of the bulk of the criticism of -acting. For one Hazlitt, or Lamb, or Lewes, -or Anatole France who retains, or has retained, -his clear discernment before the acted drama, -there are, and have been, a number tenfold -who have confounded the wonders of the phonograph -with the wonders of Josef Haydn.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span> - -<p class="ph2">V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM</p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span></p> -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span> -<h2 class="nobreak">V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM</h2> -</div> - - -<h3>I</h3> - -<p class="drop-cap2">ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY -begins one of the best books ever written -on the subject thus: “It is not to be -gainsaid that the word criticism has gradually -acquired a certain connotation of contempt.... -Every one who expresses opinions, however -imbecile, in print calls himself a ‘critic.’ -The greater the ignoramus, the greater the -likelihood of his posing as a ‘critic.’” An excellent -book, as I have said, with a wealth of -sharp talk in it, but Mr. Walkley seems to me -to err somewhat in his preliminary assumption. -Criticism has acquired a connotation of contempt -less because it is practised by a majority -of ignoramuses than because it is accepted -at full face value by an infinitely greater majority -of ignoramuses. It is not the mob that -curls a lip—the mob accepts the lesser ignoramus<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span> -at his own estimate of himself; it is the -lonely and negligible minority man who, pausing -musefully in the field that is the world, -contemplates the jackasses eating the daisies.</p> - -<p>No man is so contemptuous of criticism as -the well-stocked critic, just as there is no man -so contemptuous of clothes as the man with the -well-stocked wardrobe. It is as impossible to -imagine a critic like Shaw not chuckling derisively -at criticism as it is to imagine a regular -subscriber to the <i>Weekly Review</i> not swallowing -it whole. The experienced critic, being -on the inside, is in a position to look into -the heads of the less experienced, and to see -the wheels go round. He is privy to all their -monkeyshines, since he is privy to his own. -Having graduated from quackery, he now -smilingly regards others still at the trade of -seriously advancing sure cures for æsthetic -baldness, cancer, acne and trifacial neuralgia. -And while the yokels rub in the lotions and -swallow the pills, he permits himself a small, -but eminently sardonic, hiccup.</p> - -<p>It is commonly believed that the first virtue<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span> -of a critic is honesty. As a matter of fact, -in four cases out of five, honesty is the last -virtue of a critic. As criticism is practised in -America, honesty presents itself as the leading -fault. There is altogether too much honesty. -The greater the blockhead, the more -honest he is. And as a consequence the criticism -of these blockheads, founded upon their -honest convictions, is worthless. There is -some hope for an imbecile if he is dishonest, -but none if he is resolute in sticking to his -idiocies. If the average American critic were -to cease writing what he honestly believes and -dishonestly set down what he doesn’t believe, -the bulk of the native criticism would gain -some common sense and take on much of the -sound value that it presently lacks. Honesty -is a toy for first-rate men; when lesser -men seek to play with it and lick off the paint, -they come down with colic.</p> - -<p>It is further maintained that enthusiasm is -a supplementary desideratum in a critic, that -unless he is possessed of enthusiasm he cannot -impart a warm love for fine things to his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span> -reader. Surely this, too, is nonsense. Enthusiasm -is a virtue not in the critic, but in -the critic’s reader. And such desired enthusiasm -can be directly generated by enthusiasm -no more than a glyceryl nitrate explosion can -be generated by sulfuric acid. Enthusiasm -may be made so contagious as to elect a man -president of the United States or to raise an -army large enough to win a world war, but -it has never yet been made sufficiently contagious -to persuade one American out of a hundred -thousand that Michelangelo’s David of -the Signoria is a better piece of work than the -Barnard statue of Lincoln. Enthusiasm is -an attribute of the uncritical, the defectively -educated: stump speakers, clergymen, young -girls, opera-goers, Socialists, Italians, such -like. And not only an attribute, but a -weapon. But the cultivated and experienced -man has as little use for enthusiasm as for indignation. -He appreciates that while it may -convert a pack of ignoble doodles, it can’t convert -any one worth converting. The latter -must be persuaded, not inflamed. He realizes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span> -that where a double brass band playing -“Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” may leave -a civilized Englishman cold to the virtues of -the United States, proof that the United -States has the best bathroom plumbing in the -world may warm him up a bit. The sound -critic is not a cheer leader, but a referee. Art -is hot, criticism cold. Aristotle’s criticism of -Euripides is as placid and reserved as Mr. -William Archer’s criticism of the latest -drama at the St. James’s Theatre; Brunetière -is as calm over his likes as Mr. H. T. -Parker of the Boston <i>Transcript</i>. There is -no more enthusiasm in Lessing than there is -indignation in Walkley. Hazlitt, at a hundred -degrees emotional Fahrenheit, remains -critically cool as a cucumber. To find enthusiasm, -you will have to read the New York -<i>Times</i>.</p> - -<p>Enthusiasm, in short, is the endowment of -immaturity. The greater the critic, the -greater his disinclination to communicate -æsthetic heat. Such communication savours -of propaganda and, however worthy that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span> -propaganda, he will have naught to do with its -trafficking. If the ability to possess and communicate -enthusiasm is the mark of the true -critic, then the theatrical page of the New -York <i>Journal</i> is the greatest critical literature -in America.</p> - -<p>A third contention has it that aloofness and -detachment are no less valuable to the dramatic -critic than honesty and enthusiasm. -Unless I am seriously mistaken, also bosh. -Dramatic criticism is fundamentally the critic’s -art of appraising himself in terms of various -forms of drama. Or, as I some time ago -put it, the only sound dramatic critic is the -one who reports less the impression that this -or that play makes upon him than the impression -he makes upon this or that play. Of all -the forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is -essentially, and perhaps correctly, the most -personal. Tell me what a dramatic critic eats -and drinks, how far north of Ninetieth Street -he lives, what he considers a pleasant evening -when he is not in the theatre, and what kind -of lingerie his wife wears, and I’ll tell you<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span> -with very few misses what kind of critic he is. -I’ll tell you whether he is fit to appreciate -Schnitzler, or whether he is fit only for Augustus -Thomas. I’ll tell you in advance what -he will think about, and how he will react to, -Hauptmann, Sacha Guitry or George V. -Hobart. I’ll tell you whether he is the sort -that makes a great to-do when his eagle eye -spots Sir Nigel Waterhouse, M.P., in Act II -fingering a copy of the Philadelphia <i>Public -Ledger</i> instead of the London <i>Times</i>, and -whether he is the sort that writes “Mr. John -Cort has staged the play in his customary -lavish manner” when the rise of the curtain -discloses to him a room elaborately decorated -in the latest Macy mode. To talk about the -value of detachment in a dramatic critic is to -talk about the value of detachment in a -Swiss mountain guide. The criticism is the -man; the man the criticism.</p> - -<p>Of all forms of criticism, dramatic criticism -is the most purely biological. Were the -genii to put the mind of Max Beerbohm into -the head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse, and vice<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span> -versa, their criticisms would still remain exactly -as they are. But, on the contrary, were -the head of Mr. J. Ranken Towse to be placed -on the body of Max Beerbohm, and vice versa, -their criticisms would take on points of view -diametrically opposed to their present. Max -would begin admiring the Rev. Dr. Charles -Rann Kennedy and Towse would promptly -proceed to put on his glasses to get a better -view of the girl on the end. Every book of -dramatic criticism—every single piece of -dramatic criticism—is a searching, illuminating -autobiography. The dramatic critic performs -a clinic upon himself every time he takes -his pen in his hand. He may try, as Walkley -puts it, to substitute for the capital I’s “nouns -of multitude signifying many,” or some of -those well-worn stereotypes—“It is thought,” -“one may be pardoned for hinting,” “will any -one deny?” etc., etc.—by which criticism keeps -up the pretence that it is not a man but a corporation, -but he fools no one.</p> - -<p>To ask the dramatic critic to keep himself -out of his criticism, to detach himself, is thus<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span> -a trifle like asking an actor to keep himself out -of his rôle. Dramatic critics and actors are -much alike. The only essential difference is -that the actor does his acting on a platform. -But, platform or no platform, the actor and -the dramatic critic best serve their rôles when -they filter them through their own personalities. -A dramatic critic who is told to keep -his personality out of his criticism is in the -position of an actor who, being physically and -temperamentally like Mr. John Barrymore, is -peremptorily directed by a producer to stick -a sofa pillow under his belt, put on six extra -heel-lifts, acquire a whiskey voice and play -Falstaff like the late Sir Herbert Tree. The -best dramatic critics from the time of Quintus -Horatius Flaccus (<i>vide</i> the “Epistola”) have -sunk their vivid personalities into their work -right up to the knees. Not only have they described -the adventures of their souls among -masterpieces, but the adventures of their kidneys, -spleens and <i>cæca</i> as well. Each has held -the mirror of drama up to his own nature, -with all its idiosyncrasies. And in it have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span> -been sharply reflected not the cut and dried -features of the professor, but the vital features -of a red-alive man. The other critics -have merely held up the mirror to these -red-alive men, and have reflected not themselves -but the latter. Then, in their vainglory, -they have looked again into the hand-glass -and have mistaken the reflection of the -parrot for an eagle.</p> - -<p>A third rubber-stamp: the critic must have -sympathy. As properly contend that a surgeon -must have sympathy. The word is misused. -What the critic must have is not sympathy, -which in its common usage bespeaks a -measure of sentimental concern, but interest. -If a dramatic critic, for example, has sympathy -for an actress he can no more criticize -her with poise than a surgeon can operate on -his own wife. The critic may on occasion -have sympathy as the judge in a court of law -may on occasion have it, but if he is a fair -critic, or a fair judge, he can’t do anything -about it, however much he would like to. Between -the fair defendant in the lace baby collar<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span> -and a soft heart, Article X, Section 123, Page -416, absurdly interposes itself. (In example, -being a human being with a human being’s -weaknesses before a critic, I would often rather -praise a lovely one when she is bad than an -unlovely one when she is good—and, alas, I -fear that I sometimes do—but in the general -run I try to remember my business and behave -myself. It isn’t always easy. But I do my -best, and angels and Lewes could do no -more.) The word sympathy is further mishandled, -as in the similar case of the word -enthusiasm. What a critic should have is not, -as is common, sympathy and enthusiasm -<i>before</i> the fact, but <i>after</i> it. The critic who -enters a theatre bubblingly certain that he is -going to have a good time is no critic. The -critic is he who leaves a theatre cheerfully -certain that he <i>has</i> had a good time. Sympathy -and enthusiasm, unless they are <i>ex post -facto</i>, are precisely like prevenient prejudice -and hostility. Sympathy has no more preliminary -place in the equipment of a critic than -in the equipment of an ambulance driver or a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span> -manufacturer of bird cages. It is the caboose -of criticism, not the engine.</p> - -<p>The trouble with dramatic criticism in -America, speaking generally, is that where it -is not frankly reportorial it too often seeks to -exhibit a personality when there exists no personality -to exhibit. Himself perhaps conscious -of this lack, the critic indulges in heroic -makeshifts to inject into his writings a note of -individuality, and the only individuality that -comes out of his perspirations is of a piece -with that of the bearded lady or the dog-faced -boy. Individuality of this freak species -is the bane of the native criticism. The college -professor who, having nothing to say, tries -to give his criticism an august air by figuratively -attaching to it a pair of whiskers and -horn glasses, the suburban college professor -who sedulously practises an aloofness from the -madding crowd that his soul longs to be part -of, the college professor who postures as a -man of the world, the newspaper reporter who -postures as a college professor, the journalist -who performs in terms of Art between the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span> -Saks and Gimbel advertisements—these and -others like them are the sad comedians in the -tragical crew. In their heavy attempts to -live up to their fancy dress costumes, in their -laborious efforts to conceal their humdrum -personalities in the uncomfortable gauds of -Petruchio and Gobbo, they betray themselves -even to the bus boys. The same performer -cannot occupy the rôles of Polonius and Hamlet, -even in a tank town troupe.</p> - -<p>No less damaging to American dramatic -criticism is the dominant notion that criticism, -to be valuable, must be constructive. That is, -that it must, as the phrase has it, “build up” -rather than “tear down.” As a result of this -conviction we have an endless repertoire of -architectonic advice from critics wholly without -the structural faculty, advice which, were -it followed, would produce a drama twice as -poor as that which they criticize. Obsessed -with the idea that they must be constructive, -the critics know no lengths to which they will -not go in their sweat to dredge up cures of -one sort or another. They constructively<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span> -point out that Shaw’s plays would be better -plays if Shaw understood the punctual technique -of Pinero, thus destroying a “Cæsar and -Cleopatra” to construct a “Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” -They constructively point out the -trashy aspect of some Samuel Shipman’s -“Friendly Enemies,” suggest more serious enterprises -to him, and get the poor soul to write -a “The Unwritten Chapter” which is ten -times as bad. They are not content to be -critics; they must also be playwrights. They -stand in mortal fear of the old recrimination, -“He who can, does; he who can’t, criticizes,” -not pausing to realize that the names of Mr. -Octavus Roy Cohen and Matthew Arnold may -be taken as somewhat confounding respective -examples. They note with some irritation that -the critic for the Wentzville, Mo., <i>Beacon</i> is a -destructive critic, but are conveniently ignorant -of the fact—which may conceivably prove -something more—that so was George Farquhar. -If destructive criticism, in their meaning, -is criticism which pulls down without -building up in return, three-fourths of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span> -best dramatic criticism written since the time -of Boileau, fully filling the definition, is -worthless. One can’t cure a yellow fever patient -by pointing out to him that he should -have caught the measles. One can’t improve -the sanitary condition of a neighbourhood -merely by giving the outhouse a different coat -of paint. The foe of destructive criticism is -the pro-German of American art.</p> - -<p>Our native criticism suffers further from -the commercial Puritanism of its mediums. -What is often mistaken for the Puritanism of -the critic is actually the commercial Puritanism -forced upon him by the owner and publisher -of the journal in which his writings appear, -and upon which he has to depend for a -livelihood. Although this owner and publisher -is often not personally the Puritan, he -is yet shrewdly aware that the readers of his -journal are, and out of this awareness he becomes -what may be termed a circulation blue-nose. -Since circulation and advertising revenue -are twins, he must see to it that the sensibilities -of the former are not offended. And<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span> -his circumspection, conveyed to the critic by -the copy reader or perhaps only sensed, brings -about the Puritan play-acting by the critic. -This accounts to no little degree for the hostile -and uncritical reviews of even the most -finished risqué farces, and of the best efforts -of American and European playwrights to -depict truthfully and fairly the more unpleasant -phases of sex. “I agree with you that -this last naughty farce of Avery Hopwood’s -is awfully funny stuff,” a New York newspaper -reviewer once said to me; “I laughed -at it until my ribs ached; but I don’t dare -write as much. One can’t praise such things -in a paper with the kind of circulation that -ours has.” It is criticism bred from this commercial -Puritanism that has held back farce -writing in America, and I venture to say -much serious dramatic writing as well. The -best farce of a Guitry or a Dieudonné, -produced in America today without childish -excisions, would receive unfavourable notices -from nine newspapers out of ten. The best -sex drama of a Porto-Riche or a Wedekind<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span> -would suffer—indeed, already has suffered—a -similar fate. I predicted to Eugene -O’Neill, the moment I laid down the manuscript -of his pathological play “Diff’rent,” the -exact manner in which, two months later, the -axes fell upon him.</p> - -<p>For one critic like Mr. J. Ranken Towse -who is a Puritan by tradition and training, -there are a dozen who are Puritans by proxy. -One can no more imagine a dramatic critic on -a newspaper owned by Mr. Cyrus H. K. Curtis -praising Schnitzler’s “Reigen” or Rip’s and -Gignoux’s “Scandale de Deauville” than one -can imagine the same critic denouncing “Ben -Hur.” What thus holds true in journalistic -criticism holds true in precisely the same way -in the criticism written by the majority of -college professors. I doubt that there is a -college professor in America today who, however -much he admired a gay, reprobate farce -like “Le Rubicon” or “L’Illusioniste,” would -dare state his admiration in print. Puritan -or no Puritan, it is professionally necessary -for him to comport himself as one. His university<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span> -demands it, silently, sternly, idiotically. -He is the helpless victim of its æsthetic -Ku Klux. Behind any drama dealing -unconventionally with sex, there hovers a -spectre that vaguely resembles Professor -Scott Nearing. He sees it ... he reflects -... he works up a safe indignation.</p> - -<p>Dramatic criticism travels, in America, -carefully laid tracks. Signal lights, semaphores -and one-legged old men with red flags -are stationed along the way to protect it at -the crossings, to make it safe, and to guard it -from danger. It elaborately steams, pulls, -puffs, chugs, toots, whistles, grinds and rumbles -for three hundred miles—and brings up at -something like Hinkletown, Pa. It is eager, -but futile. It is honest, but so is Dr. Frank -Crane. It is fearless, but so is the actor who -plays the hero strapped to the papier-mâché -buzz-saw. It is constructive, but so is an embalmer. -It is detached, but so is a man in the -Fiji Islands. It is sympathetic, but so is a -quack prostatitician.</p> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span> - -<p class="ph2">VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN -AMERICA</p> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span></p> -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span> -<h2 class="nobreak">VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN -AMERICA</h2> -</div> - - -<h3>I</h3> - -<p class="drop-cap">DRAMATIC criticism, at its best, is -the adventure of an intelligence -among emotions. The chief end -of drama is the enkindling of emotions; the -chief end of dramatic criticism is to rush into -the burning building and rescue the metaphysical -weaklings who are wont to be overcome -by the first faint whiffs of smoke.</p> - -<p>Dramatic criticism, in its common run, -fails by virtue of its confusion of unschooled -emotion with experienced emotion. A dramatic -critic who has never been kissed may -properly appreciate the readily assimilable -glories of “Romeo and Juliet,” but it is doubtful -that he will be able properly to appreciate -the somewhat more evasive splendours of -“Liebelei.” The capability of a judge does<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span> -not, of course, depend upon his having himself -once been in jail, nor does the capability -of a critic depend upon his having personally -once experienced the emotions of the dramatis -personæ, but that critic is nevertheless the -most competent whose emotions the dramatis -personæ do not so much anticipatorily stir up -as recollectively soothe.</p> - -<p>All criticism is more or less a statement in -terms of the present of what one has viewed -of the past through a delicate, modern reducing-glass. -Intelligence is made up, in large -part, of dead emotions; ignorance, of emotions -that have lived on, deaf and dumb and -crippled, but ever smiling. The general admission -that a dramatic critic must be experienced -in drama, literature, acting and theories -of production but not necessarily in emotions -is somewhat difficult of digestion. Such a -critic may conceivably comprehend much of -Sheridan, Molière, Bernhardt and Yevreynoff, -but a hundred searching and admirable -things like the beginning of “Anatol,” the -middle of “Lonely Lives” and the end of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span> -“The Case of Rebellious Susan” must inevitably -be without his ken, and baffle his efforts at -sound penetration. I do not here posture -myself as one magnificently privy to all the -mysteries, but rather as one who, failing perhaps -to be on very intimate terms with them, -detects and laments the deficiencies that confound -him. Experience, goeth the saw, is a -wise master. But it is, for the critic, an even -wiser slave. A critic on the Marseilles <i>Petits -Pois</i> may critically admire “La Dernière Nuit -de Don Juan,” but it takes an Anatole France -critically to understand it.</p> - -<p>The superficial quality of American emotions, -sociological and æsthetic, enjoyed by the -great majority of American critics, operates -extensively against profundity in American -criticism—in that of literature and music no -less than that of drama. American emotions, -speaking in the mass, where they are not the -fixed and obvious emotions ingenerate in most -countries—such as love of home, family and -country, and so on—are one-syllable emotions, -primary-colour emotions. The polysyllabic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span> -and pastel emotions are looked on as dubious, -even degenerate. No man, for example, who, -though absolutely faithful to his wife, confessed -openly that he had winked an eye at a -ballet girl could conceivably be elected to -membership in the Union League Club. The -man who, after a cocktail, indiscreetly gave -away the news that he had felt a tear of joy -in his eye when he heard the minuet of Mozart’s -G minor symphony or a tear of sadness -when he looked upon Corot’s “La Solitude,” -would be promptly set down by the other -members of the golf club as a dipsomaniac -who was doubtless taking narcotics on the -side. If a member of the Y. M. C. A. were -to glance out of the window and suddenly -ejaculate, “My, what a beautiful girl!” the -superintendent would immediately grab him -by the seat of the pantaloons and throw him -down the back stairs. And if a member of -the American Legion were to sniffle so much -as once when the orchestra in the Luna Park -dance hall played “Wiener Blut,” a spy -would seize him by the ear and hurry him before<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span> -the heads of the organization as a suspicious -fellow, in all probability of German -blood.</p> - -<p>The American is either ashamed of honest -emotion or, if he is not ashamed, is soon -shamed into shame by his neighbours. He is -profoundly affected by any allusion to Mother, -the Baby, or the Flag—the invincible trinity -of American dramatic hokum—and his reactions -thereto meet with the full favour of -church and state; but he is unmoved, he is -silently forbidden to be moved, by a love that -doesn’t happen to fall into the proper pigeon-hole, -by a work of great beauty that doesn’t -happen to preach a backwoods Methodist sermon, -by sheer loveliness, or majesty, or unadorned -truth. And this corsetted emotion, -mincing, wasp-waisted and furtive, colours -all native criticism. It makes the dramatic -critic ashamed of simple beauty, and forbids -him honestly to admire the mere loveliness of -such exhibitions as Ziegfeld’s. It makes him -ashamed of passion, and forbids him honestly -to admire such excellent dramas as Georges de<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span> -Porto-Riche’s “Amoureuse.” It makes him -ashamed of laughter, and forbids him to -chuckle at the little naughtinesses of Sacha -Guitry and his own Avery Hopwood. It -makes him ashamed of truth, and forbids him -to regard with approbation such a play as -“The Only Law.” The American drama -must therefore not create new emotions for -him, but must hold the battered old mirror up -to his own. It must warm him not with new, -splendid and worldly emotions, but must satisfy -him afresh as to the integrity and higher -merit of his own restricted parcel of emotions. -It must abandon all new, free concepts of -love and life, of romance and adventure and -glory, and must reassure him—with appropriate -quiver-music—that the road to heaven -is up Main Street and the road to hell down -the Avenue de l’Opéra.</p> - -<p>Though there is a regrettable trace of snobbery -in the statement, it yet remains that—with -half a dozen or so quickly recognizable -exceptions—the practitioners of dramatic criticism -in America are in the main a humbly-born,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span> -underpaid and dowdy-lived lot. This -was as true of them yesterday as it is today. -And as Harlem, delicatessen-store dinners, -napkin-rings and the Subway are not, perhaps, -best conducive to a polished and suavely -cosmopolitan outlook on life and romance and -enthralling beauty, we have had a dramatic -criticism pervaded by a vainglorious homeliness, -by a side-street æsthetic, and by not a -little of the difficultly suppressed rancour that -human nature ever feels in the presence of admired -yet unachievable situations. Up to -fifteen years ago, drama in America was compelled -critically to meet with, and adhere -strictly to, the standards of life, culture and -romance as they obtained over on Mr. William -Winter’s Staten Island. Since Winter’s -death, it has been urged critically to abandon -the standards of Staten Island and comply -instead with the eminently more sophisticated -standards derived from a four years’ study of -Cicero, Stumpf and the Norwegian system of -communal elections at Harvard or Catawba -College, combined with a two weeks’ stay in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span> -Paris. For twenty years, Ibsen and Pinero -suffered the American critical scourge because -they had not been born and brought up -in a town with a bust of Cotton Mather or -William Cullen Bryant in its public square, -and did not think quite the same way about -things as Horace Greeley. For twenty years -more, Porto-Riche and Frenchmen like him -will doubtless suffer similarly because, in a -given situation, they do not act precisely as -Mr. Frank A. Munsey or Dr. Stuart Pratt -Sherman would; for twenty years more, -Hauptmann and other Germans will doubtless -be viewed with a certain measure of condescension -because they have not enjoyed the -same advantages as Professor Brander Matthews -in buying Liberty Bonds, at par.</p> - -<p>American dramatic criticism is, and always -has been, essentially provincial. It began by -mistaking any cheap melodrama like “The -Charity Ball” or “The Wife” which was camouflaged -with a few pots of palms and half a -dozen dress suits for a study of American society. -It progressed by appraising as the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span> -dean of American dramatists and as the leading -American dramatic thinker a playwright -who wrote such stuff as “All over this great -land thousands of trains run every day, starting -and arriving in punctual agreement because -this is a woman’s world! The great -steamships, dependable almost as the sun—a -million factories in civilization—the countless -looms and lathes of industry—the legions of -labour that weave the riches of the world—all—all -move by the mainspring of man’s faith -in woman!” It has come to flower today in -denouncing what the best European critics -have proclaimed to be the finest example of -American fantastic comedy on the profound -ground that “it is alien to American morality,” -and in hailing as one of the most acute -studies of a certain typical phase of American -life a comedy filched substantially from the -French.</p> - -<p>The plush-covered provincialism of the native -dramatic criticism, operating in this wise -against conscientious drama and sound appreciation -of conscientious drama, constantly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span> -betrays itself for all the chintz hocus-pocus -with which it seeks drolly to conceal that provincialism. -For all its easy incorporation of -French phrases laboriously culled from the -back of Webster, its casually injected allusions -to the Überbrett’l, Stanislav Pshibuishevsky, -the excellent <i>cuissot de Chevreuil -sauce poivrade</i> to be had in the little restaurant -near the comfort station in the Place Pigalle, -and the bewitching eyes of the prima ballerina -in the 1917 Y. M. C. A. show at Epernay, it -lets its mask fall whenever it is confronted in -the realistic flesh by one or another of the very -things against which it has postured its cosmopolitanism. -Thus does the mask fall, and -reveal the old pair of suburban eyes, before -the “indelicacy” of French dramatic masterpieces, -before the “polished wit” of British -polished witlessness, before the “stodginess” -of the German master depictions of stodgy -German peasantry, before the “gloom” of -Russian dramatic photography, before the -“sordidness” of “Countess Julie” and the -“wholesomeness” of “The Old Homestead.”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span> -Cosmopolitanism is a heritage, not an acquisition. -It may be born to a man in a wooden -shack in Hardin County, in Kentucky, or in -a little cottage in Hampshire in England, or -in a garret of Paris, but, unless it is so born -to him, a thousand Cunard liners and Orient -Expresses cannot bring it to him. All criticism -is geography of the mind and geometry -of the heart. American criticism suffers in -that what æsthetic wanderlust its mind experiences -is confined to excursion trips, and in -that what <i>x</i> its heart seeks to discover is an -unknown quantity only to emotional sub-freshmen.</p> - -<p>Criticism is personal, or it is nothing. Talk -to me of impersonal criticism, and I’ll talk to -you of impersonal sitz-bathing. Impersonal -criticism is the dodge of the critic without personality. -Some men marry their brother’s -widow; some earn a livelihood imitating -George M. Cohan; some write impersonal -criticism. Show me how I can soundly criticize -Mrs. Fiske as Hannele without commenting -on the mature aspect of the lady’s <i>stentopgia</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span> -and I shall begin to believe that there may -be something in the impersonal theory. Show -me how I can soundly criticize the drama of -Wedekind without analyzing Wedekind, the -man, and I shall believe in the theory to the -full. It is maintained by the apostles of the -theory that the dramatic critic is in the position -of a judge in the court of law: that his -concern, like that of the latter, is merely with -the evidence presented to him, not with the -personalities of those who submit the evidence. -Nothing could be more idiotic. The judge -who does not take into consideration, for example, -that—whatever the nature of the evidence—the -average Italian, or negro, or Armenian -before him is in all probability lying -like the devil is no more equipped to be a -sound judge than the dramatic critic who, for -all the stage evidence, fails to take into consideration -that Strindberg personally was a -lunatic, that Pinero, while treating of British -impulses and character, is himself of ineradicable -Portuguese mind and blood, that the inspiration -of D’Annunzio came not from a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span> -woman out of life but from a woman out of -the greenroom, and that Shaw is a legal virgin.</p> - -<p>Just as dramatic criticism, as it is practised -in America, is Mason-jar criticism—criticism, -that is, obsessed by a fixed determination to -put each thing it encounters into an air-tight -bottle and to label it—so is this dramatic criticism -itself in turn subjected to the bottling -and labelling process. A piece of criticism, -however penetrating, that is not couched in the -language of the commencement address of the -president of Millsaps College, and that fails -to include a mention of the Elizabethan theatre -and a quotation from Victor Hugo’s “Hernani,” -is labelled “journalistic.” A criticism -that elects to make its points with humour -rather than without humour is labelled “flippant.” -A criticism that shows a wide knowledge -of everything but the subject in hand -is labelled “scholarly.” One that, however -empty, prefixes every name with a Mr. and -somewhere in it discloses the fact that the -critic is sixty-five years old is labelled “dignified.” -One that is full of hard common sense<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span> -from beginning to end but is guilty of wit is -derogatorily labelled “an imitation of Bernard -Shaw.” One that says an utterly worthless -play is an utterly worthless play, and then -shuts up, is labelled “destructive”; while one -that points out that the same play would be a -much better play if Hauptmann or De Curel -had written it is labelled “constructive and informing.” -And so it goes. With the result -that dramatic criticism in America is a dead -art language. Like Mr. William Jennings -Bryan, it has been criticized to death.</p> - -<p>The American mania for being on the popular -side has wrapped its tentacles around -the American criticism of the theatre. The -American critic, either because his job depends -upon it or because he appreciates that -<i>kudos</i> in this country, as in no other, is a gift -of the mob, sedulously plays safe. A sheep, -he seeks the comfortable support of other -sheep. It means freedom from alarums, a -guaranteed pay envelope at the end of the -week, dignity in the eyes of the community, -an eventual election to the National Institute<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span> -of Arts and Letters and, when he reaches -three score years and ten and his trousers have -become thin in the seat, a benefit in the Century -Theatre with a bill made up of all -the eminent soft-shoe dancers and fat tragediennes -upon whom he has lavished praise. -This, in America, is the respected critic. If -we had among us today a Shaw, or a Walkley, -or a Boissard, or a Bahr, or a Julius Bab, -he would be regarded as not quite nice. -Certainly the Drama League would not invite -him to appear before it. Certainly he would -never be invited to sit between Prof. Richard -Burton and Prof. William Lyon Phelps at the -gala banquet to Mr. D. W. Griffith. Certainly, -if his writings got into the paid prints -at all, there would be a discreet editor’s note -at the top to the effect that “the publication of -an article does not necessarily imply that it -represents the ideas of this publication or of -its editors.”</p> - -<p>Criticism in America must follow the bell-cow. -The bell-cow is personal cowardice, artistic -cowardice, neighbourhood cowardice, or<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span> -the even cheaper cowardice of the daily and—to -a much lesser degree—periodical press. -Up to within a few years ago it was out of -the question for a dramatic critic to write -honestly of the productions of David Belasco -and still keep his job. One of the leading -New York evening newspapers peremptorily -discharged its reviewer for daring to do so; -another New York newspaper sternly instructed -its reviewer not to make the same -mistake twice under the penalty of being cashiered; -a leading periodical packed off its reviewer -for the offence. One of the most talented -critics in New York was several years -ago summarily discharged by the newspaper -that employed him because he wrote an honest -criticism of a very bad play by an obscure -playwright named Jules Eckert Goodman. -Another conscientious critic, daring mob opinion -at about the same time—he wrote, as I -recall, something to the effect that the late -Charles Frohman’s productions were often -very shoddy things—was charily transferred<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span> -the next day to another post on the newspaper’s -staff. I myself, ploughing my familiar -modest critical course, have, indeed, been -made not personally unaware of the native -editorial horror of critical opinions which are -not shared by the Night School curricula, the -inmates of the Actors’ Home, the Independent -Order of B’nai B’rith, the United Commercial -Travelers of America, and the Moose. -Some years ago, a criticism of Hall Caine and -of his play “Margaret Schiller,” which ventured -the opinion that the M. Caine was perhaps -not one of the greatest of modern geniuses, -so frightened the editors of the Philadelphia -<i>North American</i> and the Cleveland -<i>Leader</i> that I doubt they have yet recovered -from the fear of the consequences of printing -the review.</p> - -<p>The ruling ethic of the American press so -far as the theatre is concerned is one of unctuous -<i>laissez faire</i>. “If you can’t praise, -don’t dispraise,” is the editorial injunction to -the reviewer. The theatre in America is a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span> -great business—greater even than the department -store—and a great business should be -treated with proper respect. What if the -reviewer does not admire “The Key to -Heaven”? It played to more than <i>twelve -thousand dollars</i> last week; it <i>must</i> be good. -The theatre must be helped, and the way to -help it is uninterruptedly to speak well of it. -Fine drama? Art? A newspaper has no -concern with fine drama and art; the public is -not interested in such things. A newspaper’s -concern is primarily with news. But is not -dramatic swindling, the selling of spurious -wares at high prices, news? Is not an attempt -to corrupt the future of the theatre as -an honourable institution and an honourable -business also news, news not so very much less -interesting, perhaps, than the three column account -of an ex-Follies girl’s adulteries? The -reviewer, for his impertinence, is assigned -henceforth to cover the Jefferson Market -police court.</p> - -<p>The key-note of the American journalistic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span> -attitude toward the theatre is a stagnant -optimism. Dramatic art and the red-haired -copy boy are the two stock jokes of the -American newspaper office. Here and there -one encounters a reviewer who, through -either the forcefulness or the amiability of his -personality, is successful for a short time in -evading the editorial shackles—there are a few -such still extant as I write. But soon or late -the rattle of the chains is heard and the reviewer -that was is no more. He is an American, -and must suffer the penalty that an -American who aspires to cultured viewpoint -and defiant love of beauty must ever suffer. -For—so George Santayana, late professor of -philosophy in Harvard University, in “Character -and Opinion in the United States”—“the -luckless American who is drawn to poetic -subtlety, pious retreats, or gay passions, -nevertheless has the categorical excellence of -work, growth, enterprise, reform, and prosperity -dinned into his ears: every door is open -in this direction and shut in the other; so that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span> -he either folds up his heart and withers in a -corner—in remote places you sometimes find -such a solitary gaunt idealist—or else he flies -to Oxford or Florence or Montmartre to save -his soul—or perhaps not to save it.”</p> - - -<p> </p> -<hr class="chap" /> -<p> </p> -<p> </p> - -<div class="transnote"> -<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:</p> - - -<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p> - -<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p> - -<p>On page 83, second sentence, after the word So, it appears that a word is missing. 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