The necessary task of the book-reviewer or of the play-reviewer, is not
criticism of the creative kind, since for that he is always likely to
lack material. His task is humbler even if it is honorable; it is to
report upon the novelties of the day, and to inform the readers of the
newspaper as to the nature and the merits of these novelties. His work
is essentially reporting, even if it is reporting of a special kind,
calling for special qualifications. The connection of the drama with the
show business is intimate, and it always has been. In the long history
of the theater there is no period without its successful pieces, the
appeal of which was mainly sensuous--to the eye and to the ear, rather
than to the emotions and to the intellect. While the drama is an art,
and perhaps the loftiest of the arts, the show business is a trade. This
is no new thing--altho ignorant idealists often declare it so to be, and
altho it may make itself a little more obvious at one time than at
another. What confronts us is the condition of things as they are, not
the theory of things as they might be.
There would be occupation for a dramatic critic, who was also a creator,
only if our theaters were presenting in rapid succession a sequence of
masterpieces, tragedies of austere power, comedies of searching satire,
social dramas of piercing suggestion. But this is not the case now here
in the United States in the twentieth century; and it never has been the
case anywhere or anywhen, not even in Weimar when Goethe dominated the
ducal theater. In our playhouses we are proffered our choice of
Shakspere and Ibsen, Pinero and Hauptmann, Henry Arthur Jones and
Augustus Thomas, Barrie and Gillette, Sardou and George M. Cohan; and at
the same time we are invited to choose between 'Trilby' and the
'Celebrated Case,' melodramas and farces, summer song-shows and
ultra-contemporary reviews, alleged comic operas and terpsichorean
spectacles. Most of these latter exhibitions do not demand or deserve
criticism of any kind; but they need to be reported upon like any other
item in the news of the day.
If this is the case, it might as well be recognized frankly. There is
always advantage in seeing things as they are, in fronting the facts and
in looking them squarely in the face. Sooner or later some one of those
who are in charge of our metropolitan newspapers will perceive the
possibility of a change of method. He will charge one of his staff with
the supervision of the theatrical news, the announcements of new plays,
and the personal gossip about the players; and he will authorize this
editor to send competent reporters to all first performances, directed
to report upon them as they would report upon any other event of
immediate interest. He would warn these reporters that they were
strictly to consider themselves as reporters, and that they were,
therefore, to refrain from explicit criticism. He would so select his
men that a melodrama should be dealt with by a reporter who liked a good
melodrama, and that a summer song-show should be described by a reporter
who could find pleasure in inoffensive and amusing spectacle. If this
policy should be adopted, and announced clearly and emphatically,
probably most of the occasions for quarrel between managers and editors
would disappear; and the immense majority of the readers of the daily
paper would be supplied with exactly the information they would prefer.
Then, for the benefit of the smaller number who are really interested in
the drama as a serious art, the editor-in-chief might avail himself of
the fact that the Sunday issue, while it is still a newspaper containing
the news of the preceding twenty-four hours, is also a magazine, to be
read in more leisurely fashion, and therefore at liberty to treat timely
topics with a larger freedom. Here space could be found for genuine
dramatic criticism by the most competent expert available. This dramatic
critic should have nothing whatever to do with the news of the theaters,
or with the first-night play-reviewing. He should not be tired and bored
by having to go to the theater half a dozen times a week, and by being
forced to analyze plays which do not reward analysis. He would be
expected to select out of the current performances that one which
promised to be most worthy of careful consideration, and he would feel
himself free to discuss this at such length as it might seem to him to
deserve. To him also should be intrusted the more significant of the new
books upon the history of the theater, and upon the art of the drama. In
the summer (and also whenever at any other season there might be a
dearth of inspiring topics), this dramatic critic would not be expected
to contribute, since he should never be called upon to make bricks
without straw.
Even in New York this method is not as new as it may seem, and more than
one metropolitan daily has approximated to it, altho no one of them has
completely detached the dramatic critic from the play-reviewer and from
the supervisor of theatrical gossip. And it has long been adopted in
certain of the Paris newspapers. In the _Temps_, for example, when
Sarcey was its dramatic critic, there was a daily column of theatrical
announcements and of brief reports upon first-night performances; and
with this department of the news of the theaters Sarcey had nothing to
do, and for it he had no responsibility. Then in the ample space
specially reserved for him in the issue of every Sunday afternoon, he
dealt with the dramatic themes that seemed to him worth while. If a play
appeared to demand prolonged study, he might go to see it two, or even
three times, before he undertook to formulate his opinion; and on
occasion he would carry over his detailed discussion of a very important
drama into the article of the following Sunday. On the other hand, if
no recent play seemed to him to deserve his continued attention, he
would devote himself to one of the recent books about the theater or to
a detailed discussion of the proper interpretation of one of the
classics of the French drama kept constantly in the repertory of the
Comedie-Francaise.