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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.”




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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. The transcriber is unable to ascertain what the missing
    word, if any, might be.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 63188 ***