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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.”