constant war between the impulse to give that rebellion objective
reality and a social pressure which puts a premium on submission. The
rebel, if he strikes out, at once collides with a solid wall, the bricks
of which are made up of the social assumption of his docility, and the
mortar of which is the frozen sentimentality of his own lost
yesterday—his fatuous assumption that what was once agreeable to him
would be always agreeable to him. Here we have the very essence of
comedy—a situation almost exactly parallel to that of the pompous old
gentleman who kicks a plug hat lying on the sidewalk, and stumps his toe
against the cobblestone within.
Under the whole of the conventional assumption reposes an assumption
even more foolish, to wit, that sexual choice is regulated by some
transcendental process, that a mysterious accuracy gets into it, that it
is limited by impenetrable powers, that there is for every man one
certain woman. This sentimentality not only underlies the theory of
marriage, but is also the chief apology for divorce. Nothing could be
more ridiculous. The truth is that marriages in Christendom are
determined, not by elective affinities, but by the most trivial
accidents, and that the issue of those accidents is relatively
unimportant. That is to say, a normal man could be happy with any one of
at least two dozen women of his acquaintance, and a man specially fitted
to accept the false assumptions of marriage could be happy with almost
any presentable woman of his race, class and age. He is married to Marie
instead of to Gladys because Marie definitely decided to marry him,
whereas Gladys vacillated between him and some other. And Marie decided
to marry him instead of some other, not because the impulse was
irresistibly stronger, but simply because the thing seemed more
feasible. In such choices, at least among women, there is often not even
any self-delusion. They see the facts clearly, and even if, later on,
they are swathed in sentimental trappings, the revelation is not
entirely obliterated.
Here we have comedy double distilled—a combat of pretensions, on the one
side, perhaps, risen to self-hallucination, but on the other side more
or less uneasily conscious and deliberate. This is the true soul of high
farce. This is something not to snuffle over but to roar at.
XVII. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
One thinks of Gordon Craig, not as a jester, but as a very serious and
even solemn fellow. For a dozen years past all the more sober dramatic
critics of America have approached him with the utmost politeness, and
to the gushing old maids and auto-intoxicated professors of the Drama
League of America he has stood for the last word in theatrical
æstheticism. Moreover, a good deal of this veneration has been deserved,
for Craig has done excellent work in the theater, and is a man of much
force and ingenuity and no little originality. Nevertheless, there must
be some flavor of low, barroom wit in him, some echo of Sir Toby Belch
and the Captain of Köpenick, for a year or so ago he shook up his
admirers with a joke most foul. Need I say that I refer to the notorious
Nathan affair? Imagine the scene: the campus Archers and Walkleys in
ponderous conclave, perhaps preparing their monthly cablegram of
devotion to Maeterlinck. Arrives now a messenger with dreadful news.
Gordon Craig, from his far-off Italian retreat, has issued a bull
praising Nathan! Which Nathan? George Jean, of course. What! The _Smart
Set_ scaramouche, the ribald fellow, the raffish mocker, with his praise
of Florenz Ziegfeld, his naughty enthusiasm for pretty legs, his
contumacious scoffing at Brieux, Belasco, Augustus Thomas, Mrs. Fiske?
Aye; even so. And what has Craig to say of him?... In brief, that he is
the _only_ American dramatic critic worth reading, that he knows far
more about the theater than all the honorary pallbearers of criticism
rolled together, that he is immeasurably the superior, in learning, in
sense, in shrewdness, in candor, in plausibility, in skill at writing,
of—
But names do not matter. Craig, in fact, did not bother to rehearse
them. He simply made a clean sweep of the board, and then deftly placed
the somewhat disconcerted Nathan in the center of the vacant space. It
was a sad day for the honest donkeys who, for half a decade, had been
laboriously establishing Craig’s authority in America, but it was a glad
day for Knopf, the publisher. Knopf, at the moment, had just issued
Nathan’s “The Popular Theater.” At once he rushed to a job printer in
Eighth avenue, ordered 100,000 copies of the Craig encomium, and flooded
the country with them. The result was amusing, and typical of the
republic. Nathan’s previous books, when praised at all, had been praised
faintly and with reservations. The fellow, it appeared, was too
spoofish; he lacked the sobriety and dignity necessary to a True Critic;
he was entertaining but not to be taken seriously. But now, with foreign
backing, and particularly English backing, he suddenly began to acquire
merit and even a certain vague solemnity—and “The Popular Theater” was
reviewed more lavishly and more favorably than I have ever seen any
other theater book reviewed, before or since. The phenomenon, as I say,
was typical. The childish mass of superstitions passing for civilized
opinion in America was turned inside out overnight by one authoritative
foreign voice. I have myself been a figure in the same familiar process.
All of my books up to “The American Language” were, in the main,
hostilely noticed. “A Book of Prefaces,” in particular, was manhandled
by the orthodox reviewers. Then, just before “The American Language” was
issued, the _Mercure de France_ printed an article commending “A Book of
Prefaces” in high, astounding terms. The consequence was that “The
American Language,” a far inferior work, was suddenly discovered to be
full of merit, and critics of the utmost respectability, who had ignored
all my former books, printed extremely friendly reviews of it....
But to return to Nathan. What deceived the Drama Leaguers and other such
imposing popinjays for so long, causing them to mistake him for a mere
sublimated Alan Dale, was his refusal to take imbecilities seriously,
his easy casualness and avoidance of pedagogics, his frank delight in
the theater as a show-shop—above all, his bellicose iconoclasm and
devastating wit. What Craig, an intelligent man, discerned underneath
was his extraordinary capacity for differentiating between sham and
reality, his catholic freedom from formulæ and prejudice, his
astonishing acquaintance with the literature of the practical theater,
his firm grounding in rational æsthetic theory—above all, his capacity
for making the thing he writes of interesting, his uncommon
craftsmanship. This craftsmanship had already got him a large audience;
he had been for half a dozen years, indeed, one of the most widely read
of American dramatic critics. But the traditional delusion that sagacity
and dullness are somehow identical had obscured the hard and accurate
thinking that made the show. What was so amusing seemed necessarily
superficial. It remained for Craig to show that this appearance of
superficiality was only an appearance, that the Nathan criticism was
well planned and soundly articulated, that at the heart of it there was
a sound theory of the theater, and of the literature of the theater no
less.
And what was that theory? You will find it nowhere put into a ready
formula, but the outlines of it must surely be familiar to any one who
has read “Another Book on the Theater,” “The Popular Theater” and “Mr.
George Jean Nathan Presents.” In brief, it is the doctrine preached with
so much ardor by Benedetto Croce and his disciple, Dr. J. E. Spingarn,
and by them borrowed from Goethe and Carlyle—the doctrine, to wit, that
every work of art is, at bottom, unique, and that it is the business of
the critic, not to label it and pigeon-hole it, but to seek for its
inner intent and content, and to value it according as that intent is
carried out and that content is valid and worth while. This is the
precise opposite of the academic critical attitude. The professor is
nothing if not a maker of card-indexes; he must classify or be damned.
His masterpiece is the dictum that “it is excellent, but it is not a
play.” Nathan has a far more intelligent and hospitable eye. His
criterion, elastic and undefined, is inimical only to the hollow, the
meretricious, the fraudulent. It bars out the play of flabby and
artificial sentiment. It bars out the cheap melodrama, however gaudily
set forth. It bars out the moony mush of the bad imitators of Ibsen and
Maeterlinck. It bars out all mere claptrap and sensation-monging. But it
lets in every play, however conceived or designed, that contains an
intelligible idea well worked out. It lets in every play by a dramatist
who is ingenious, and original, and genuinely amusing. And it lets in
every other sort of theatrical spectacle that has an honest aim, and
achieves that aim passably, and is presented frankly for what it is.
Bear this theory in mind, and you have a clear explanation of Nathan’s
actual performances—first, his merciless lampooning of the trade-goods
of Broadway and the pifflings of the Drama League geniuses, and
secondly, his ardent championing of such widely diverse men as Avery
Hopwood, Florenz Ziegfeld, Ludwig Thoma, Lord Dunsany, Sasha Guitry,
Lothar Schmidt, Ferenz Molnar, Roberto Bracco and Gerhart Hauptmann, all
of whom have one thing in common: they are intelligent and full of ideas
and know their trade. In Europe, of course, there are many more such men
than in America, and some of the least of them are almost as good as our
best. That is why Nathan is forever announcing them and advocating the
presentation of their works—not because he favors foreignness for its
own sake, but because it is so often accompanied by sound achievement
and by stimulating example to our own artists. And that is why, when he
tackles the maudlin flubdub of the Broadway dons, he does it with the
weapons of comedy, and even of farce. Does an Augustus Thomas rise up
with his corn-doctor magic and Sunday-school platitudes, proving heavily
that love is mightier than the sword, that a pure heart will baffle the
electric chair, that the eye is quicker than the hand? Then Nathan
proceeds against him with a slapstick, and makes excellent practice upon
his pantaloons. Does a Belasco, thumb on forelock, posture before the
yeomanry as a Great Artist, the evidence being a large chromo of a
Childs’ restaurant, and a studio like a Madison avenue antique-shop?
Then Nathan flings a laugh at him and puts him in his place. And does
some fat rhinoceros of an actress, unearthing a smutty play by a
corn-fed Racine, loose its banal obscenities upon the vulgar in the name
of Sex Hygiene, presuming thus to teach a Great Lesson, and break the
Conspiracy of Silence, and carry on the Noble Work of Brieux and
company, and so save impatient flappers from the Moloch’s Sacrifice of
the Altar—does such a bumptious and preposterous baggage fill the
newspapers with her pishposh and the largest theater in Manhattan with
eager dunderheads? Then the ribald Jean has at her with a flour-sack
filled with the pollen of the _Ambrosia artemisiaefolia_, driving her
from the scene to the tune of her own unearthly sneezing.
Necessarily, he has to lay on with frequency. For one honest play,
honestly produced and honestly played, Broadway sees two dozen that are
simply so much green-goods. To devote serious exposition to the badness
of such stuff would be to descend to the donkeyish futility of William
Winter. Sometimes, indeed, even ridicule is not enough; there must be a
briefer and more dramatic display of the essential banality. Well, then,
why not recreate it in the manner of Croce—but touching up a line here,
a color there? The result is burlesque, but burlesque that is the most
searching and illuminating sort of criticism. Who will forget Nathan’s
demonstration that a platitudinous play by Thomas would be better if
played backward? A superb bravura piece, enormously beyond the talents
of any other American writer on the theater, it smashed the Thomas
legend with one stroke. In the little volume called “Bottoms Up” you
will find many other such annihilating waggeries. Nathan does not
denounce melodrama with a black cap upon his head, painfully
demonstrating its inferiority to the drama of Ibsen, Scribe and
Euripides; he simply sits down and writes a little melodrama so
extravagantly ludicrous that the whole genus collapses. And he does not
prove in four columns of a Sunday paper that French plays done into
American are spoiled; he simply shows the spoiling in six lines.
This method, of course, makes for broken heads; it outrages the feelings
of tender theatrical mountebanks; it provokes reprisals more or less
furtive and behind the door. The theater in America, as in most other
countries, is operated chiefly by bounders. Men so constantly associated
with actors tend to take on the qualities of the actor—his idiotic
vanity, his herculean stupidity, his chronic underrating of his betters.
The miasma spreads to dramatists and dramatic critics; the former drift
into charlatanry and the latter into a cowardly and disgusting
dishonesty. Amid such scenes a man of positive ideas, of civilized
tastes and of unshakable integrity is a stranger, and he must face all
the hostility that the lower orders of men display to strangers. There
is, so far as I know, no tripe-seller in Broadway who has not tried, at
one time or another, to dispose of Nathan by _attentat_. He has been
exposed to all the measures ordinarily effective against rebellious
reviewers, and, resisting them, he has been treated to special treatment
with infernal machines of novel and startling design. No writer for the
theater has been harder beset, and none has been less incommoded by the
onslaught. What is more, he has never made the slightest effort to
capitalize this drum-fire—the invariable device of lesser men. So far as
I am aware, and I have been in close association with him for ten years,
it has had not the slightest effect upon him whatsoever. A thoroughgoing
skeptic, with no trace in him of the messianic delusion, he has avoided
timorousness on the one hand and indignation on the other. No man could
be less a public martyr of the Metcalfe type; it would probably amuse
him vastly to hear it argued that his unbreakable independence (and
often somewhat high and mighty sniffishness) has been of any public
usefulness. I sometimes wonder what keeps such a man in the theater,
breathing bad air nightly, gaping at prancing imbeciles, sitting cheek
by jowl with cads. Perhaps there is, at bottom, a secret romanticism—a
lingering residuum of a boyish delight in pasteboard and spangles, gaudy
colors and soothing sounds, preposterous heroes and appetizing wenches.
But more likely it is a sense of humor—the zest of a man to whom life is
a spectacle that never grows dull—a show infinitely surprising, amusing,
buffoonish, vulgar, obscene. The theater, when all is said and done, is
not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously
exaggerated. Its emotions are ten times as powerful as those of reality,
its ideas are twenty times as idiotic as those of real men, its lights
and colors and sounds are forty times as blinding and deafening as those
of nature, its people are grotesque burlesques of every one we know.
Here is diversion for a cynic. And here, it may be, is the explanation
of Nathan’s fidelity.
Whatever the cause of his enchantment, it seems to be lasting. To a man
so fertile in ideas and so facile in putting them into words there is a
constant temptation to make experiments, to plunge into strange waters,
to seek self-expression in ever-widening circles. And yet, at the brink
of forty years, Nathan remains faithful to the theater; of his half
dozen books, only one does not deal with it, and that one is a very
small one. In four or five years he has scarcely written of aught else.
I doubt that anything properly describable as enthusiasm is at the
bottom of this assiduity; perhaps the right word is curiosity. He is
interested mainly, not in the staple fare of the playhouse, but in what
might be called its fancy goods—in its endless stream of new men, its
restless innovations, the radical overhauling that it has been
undergoing in our time. I do not recall, in any of his books or
articles, a single paragraph appraising the classics of the stage, or
more than a brief note or two on their interpretation. His attention is
always turned in a quite opposite direction. He is intensely interested
in novelty of whatever sort, if it be only free from sham. Such
experimentalists as Max Reinhardt, George Bernard Shaw, Sasha Guitry and
the daring nobodies of the Grand Guignol, such divergent originals as
Dunsany, Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan and Schnitzler, have enlisted his
eager partisanship. He saw something new to our theater in the farces of
Hopwood before any one else saw it; he was quick to welcome the novel
points of view of Eleanor Gates and Clare Kummer; he at once rescued
what was sound in the Little Theatre movement from what was mere
attitudinizing and pseudo-intellectuality. In the view of Broadway, an
exigent and even malignant fellow, wielding a pen dipped in _aqua
fortis_, he is actually amiable to the last degree, and constantly
announces pearls in the fodder of the swine. Is the new play in
Forty-second Street a serious work of art, as the press-agents and the
newspaper reviewers say? Then so are your grandmother’s false teeth! Is
Maeterlinck a Great Thinker? Then so is Dr. Frank Crane! Is Belasco a
profound artist? Then so is the man who designs the ceilings of hotel
dining rooms! But let us not weep too soon. In the play around the
corner there is a clever scene. Next door, amid sickening dullness,
there are two buffoons who could be worse: one clouts the other with a
_Blutwurst_ filled with mayonnaise. And a block away there is a girl in
the second row with a very charming twist of the _vastus medialis_. Let
us sniff the roses and forget the thorns!
What this attitude chiefly wars with, even above cheapness,
meretriciousness and banality, is the fatuous effort to turn the
theater, a place of amusement, into a sort of outhouse to the academic
grove—the Maeterlinck-Brieux-Barker complex. No critic in America, and
none in England save perhaps Walkley, has combated this movement more
vigorously than Nathan. He is under no illusion as to the functions and
limitations of the stage. He knows, with Victor Hugo, that the best it
can do, in the domain of ideas, is to “turn thoughts into food for the
crowd,” and he knows that only the simplest and shakiest ideas may
undergo that transformation. Coming upon the scene at the height of the
Ibsen mania of half a generation ago, he ranged himself against its
windy pretenses from the start. He saw at once the high merit of Ibsen
as a dramatic craftsman and welcomed him as a reformer of dramatic
technique, but he also saw how platitudinous was the ideational content
of his plays and announced the fact in terms highly offensive to the
Ibsenites.... But the Ibsenites have vanished and Nathan remains. He has
survived, too, the Brieux hubbub. He has lived to preach the funeral
sermon of the Belasco legend. He has himself sworded Maeterlinck and
Granville Barker. He has done frightful execution upon many a poor mime.
And meanwhile, breasting the murky tide of professorial buncombe, of
solemn pontificating, of Richard-Burtonism, Clayton-Hamiltonism and
other such decaying forms of William-Winterism, he has rescued dramatic
criticism among us from its exile with theology, embalming and
obstetrics, and given it a place among what Nietzsche called the gay
sciences, along with war, fiddle-playing and laparotomy. He has made it
amusing, stimulating, challenging, even, at times, a bit startling. And
to the business, artfully concealed, he has brought a sound and thorough
acquaintance with the heavy work of the pioneers, Lessing, Schlegel,
Hazlitt, Lewes _et al_—and an even wider acquaintance, lavishly
displayed, with every nook and corner of the current theatrical scene
across the water. And to discharge this extraordinarily copious mass of
information he has hauled and battered the English language into new and
often astounding forms, and when English has failed he has helped it out
with French, German, Italian, American, Swedish, Russian, Turkish,
Latin, Sanskrit and Old Church Slavic, and with algebraic symbols,
chemical formulæ, musical notation and the signs of the Zodiac....
This manner, of course, is not without its perils. A man so inordinately
articulate is bound to succumb, now and then, to the seductions of mere
virtuosity. The average writer, and particularly the average critic of
the drama, does well if he gets a single new and racy phrase into an
essay; Nathan does well if he dilutes his inventions with enough
commonplaces to enable the average reader to understand his discourse at
all. He carries the avoidance of the _cliché_ to the length of an _idée
fixe_. It would be difficult, in all his books, to find a dozen of the
usual rubber stamps of criticism; I daresay it would kill him, or, at
all events, bring him down with cholera morbus, to discover that he had
called a play “convincing” or found “authority” in the snorting of an
English actor-manager. At best, this incessant flight from the obvious
makes for a piquant and arresting style, a procession of fantastic and
often highly pungent neologisms—in brief, for Nathanism. At worst, it
becomes artificiality, pedantry, obscurity. I cite an example from an
essay on Eleanor Gates’ “The Poor Little Rich Girl,” prefaced to the
printed play:
As against the not unhallow symbolic strut and gasconade of such
over-pæaned pieces as, let us for example say, “The Blue Bird” of
Maeterlinck, so simple and unaffected a bit of stage writing as
this—of school dramatic intrinsically the same—cajoles the more
honest heart and satisfies more plausibly and fully those of us
whose thumbs are ever being pulled professionally for a native
stage less smeared with the snobberies of empty, albeit
high-sounding, nomenclatures from overseas.
Fancy that, Hedda!—and in praise of a “simple and unaffected bit of
stage writing”! I denounced it at the time, _circa_ 1916, and perhaps
with some effect. At all events, I seem to notice a gradual
disentanglement of the parts of speech. The old florid invention is
still there; one encounters startling coinages in even the most casual
of reviews; the thing still flashes and glitters; the tune is yet upon
the E string. But underneath I hear a more sober rhythm than of old. The
fellow, in fact, takes on a sedater habit, both in style and in point of
view. Without abandoning anything essential, without making the
slightest concession to the orthodox opinion that he so magnificently
disdains, he yet begins to yield to the middle years. The mere shocking
of the stupid is no longer as charming as it used to be. What he now
offers is rather more _gemütlich_; sometimes it even verges upon the
instructive.... But I doubt that Nathan will ever become a professor,
even if he enjoys the hideously prolonged senility of a William Winter.
He will be full of surprises to the end. With his last gasp he will make
a phrase to flabbergast a dolt.
XVIII. PORTRAIT OF AN IMMORTAL SOUL