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.