its mediums. What is often mistaken for the Puritanism of the critic
is actually the commercial Puritanism forced upon him by the owner and
publisher of the journal in which his writings appear, and upon which
he has to depend for a livelihood. Although this owner and publisher
is often not personally the Puritan, he is yet shrewdly aware that
the readers of his journal are, and out of this awareness he becomes
what may be termed a circulation blue-nose. Since circulation and
advertising revenue are twins, he must see to it that the sensibilities
of the former are not offended. And his circumspection, conveyed to
the critic by the copy reader or perhaps only sensed, brings about the
Puritan play-acting by the critic. This accounts to no little degree
for the hostile and uncritical reviews of even the most finished risqué
farces, and of the best efforts of American and European playwrights
to depict truthfully and fairly the more unpleasant phases of sex.
“I agree with you that this last naughty farce of Avery Hopwood’s is
awfully funny stuff,” a New York newspaper reviewer once said to me;
“I laughed at it until my ribs ached; but I don’t dare write as much.
One can’t praise such things in a paper with the kind of circulation
that ours has.” It is criticism bred from this commercial Puritanism
that has held back farce writing in America, and I venture to say much
serious dramatic writing as well. The best farce of a Guitry or a
Dieudonné, produced in America today without childish excisions, would
receive unfavourable notices from nine newspapers out of ten. The best
sex drama of a Porto-Riche or a Wedekind would suffer--indeed, already
has suffered--a similar fate. I predicted to Eugene O’Neill, the moment
I laid down the manuscript of his pathological play “Diff’rent,” the
exact manner in which, two months later, the axes fell upon him.
For one critic like Mr. J. Ranken Towse who is a Puritan by tradition
and training, there are a dozen who are Puritans by proxy. One can
no more imagine a dramatic critic on a newspaper owned by Mr. Cyrus
H. K. Curtis praising Schnitzler’s “Reigen” or Rip’s and Gignoux’s
“Scandale de Deauville” than one can imagine the same critic denouncing
“Ben Hur.” What thus holds true in journalistic criticism holds true
in precisely the same way in the criticism written by the majority
of college professors. I doubt that there is a college professor in
America today who, however much he admired a gay, reprobate farce like
“Le Rubicon” or “L’Illusioniste,” would dare state his admiration in
print. Puritan or no Puritan, it is professionally necessary for him to
comport himself as one. His university demands it, silently, sternly,
idiotically. He is the helpless victim of its æsthetic Ku Klux. Behind
any drama dealing unconventionally with sex, there hovers a spectre
that vaguely resembles Professor Scott Nearing. He sees it ... he
reflects ... he works up a safe indignation.
Dramatic criticism travels, in America, carefully laid tracks. Signal
lights, semaphores and one-legged old men with red flags are stationed
along the way to protect it at the crossings, to make it safe, and
to guard it from danger. It elaborately steams, pulls, puffs, chugs,
toots, whistles, grinds and rumbles for three hundred miles--and
brings up at something like Hinkletown, Pa. It is eager, but futile.
It is honest, but so is Dr. Frank Crane. It is fearless, but so is the
actor who plays the hero strapped to the papier-mâché buzz-saw. It is
constructive, but so is an embalmer. It is detached, but so is a man in
the Fiji Islands. It is sympathetic, but so is a quack prostatitician.
VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA
VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA
I
Dramatic criticism, at its best, is the adventure of an intelligence
among emotions. The chief end of drama is the enkindling of emotions;
the chief end of dramatic criticism is to rush into the burning
building and rescue the metaphysical weaklings who are wont to be
overcome by the first faint whiffs of smoke.
Dramatic criticism, in its common run, fails by virtue of its confusion
of unschooled emotion with experienced emotion. A dramatic critic who
has never been kissed may properly appreciate the readily assimilable
glories of “Romeo and Juliet,” but it is doubtful that he will be
able properly to appreciate the somewhat more evasive splendours of
“Liebelei.” The capability of a judge does not, of course, depend
upon his having himself once been in jail, nor does the capability
of a critic depend upon his having personally once experienced the
emotions of the dramatis personæ, but that critic is nevertheless the
most competent whose emotions the dramatis personæ do not so much
anticipatorily stir up as recollectively soothe.
All criticism is more or less a statement in terms of the present
of what one has viewed of the past through a delicate, modern
reducing-glass. Intelligence is made up, in large part, of dead
emotions; ignorance, of emotions that have lived on, deaf and dumb
and crippled, but ever smiling. The general admission that a dramatic
critic must be experienced in drama, literature, acting and theories
of production but not necessarily in emotions is somewhat difficult of
digestion. Such a critic may conceivably comprehend much of Sheridan,
Molière, Bernhardt and Yevreynoff, but a hundred searching and
admirable things like the beginning of “Anatol,” the middle of “Lonely
Lives” and the end of “The Case of Rebellious Susan” must inevitably
be without his ken, and baffle his efforts at sound penetration. I
do not here posture myself as one magnificently privy to all the
mysteries, but rather as one who, failing perhaps to be on very
intimate terms with them, detects and laments the deficiencies that
confound him. Experience, goeth the saw, is a wise master. But it is,
for the critic, an even wiser slave. A critic on the Marseilles _Petits
Pois_ may critically admire “La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan,” but it
takes an Anatole France critically to understand it.
The superficial quality of American emotions, sociological and
æsthetic, enjoyed by the great majority of American critics, operates
extensively against profundity in American criticism--in that of
literature and music no less than that of drama. American emotions,
speaking in the mass, where they are not the fixed and obvious emotions
ingenerate in most countries--such as love of home, family and country,
and so on--are one-syllable emotions, primary-colour emotions. The
polysyllabic and pastel emotions are looked on as dubious, even
degenerate. No man, for example, who, though absolutely faithful to
his wife, confessed openly that he had winked an eye at a ballet girl
could conceivably be elected to membership in the Union League Club.
The man who, after a cocktail, indiscreetly gave away the news that he
had felt a tear of joy in his eye when he heard the minuet of Mozart’s
G minor symphony or a tear of sadness when he looked upon Corot’s “La
Solitude,” would be promptly set down by the other members of the golf
club as a dipsomaniac who was doubtless taking narcotics on the side.
If a member of the Y. M. C. A. were to glance out of the window and
suddenly ejaculate, “My, what a beautiful girl!” the superintendent
would immediately grab him by the seat of the pantaloons and throw him
down the back stairs. And if a member of the American Legion were to
sniffle so much as once when the orchestra in the Luna Park dance hall
played “Wiener Blut,” a spy would seize him by the ear and hurry him
before the heads of the organization as a suspicious fellow, in all
probability of German blood.
The American is either ashamed of honest emotion or, if he is not
ashamed, is soon shamed into shame by his neighbours. He is profoundly
affected by any allusion to Mother, the Baby, or the Flag--the
invincible trinity of American dramatic hokum--and his reactions
thereto meet with the full favour of church and state; but he is
unmoved, he is silently forbidden to be moved, by a love that doesn’t
happen to fall into the proper pigeon-hole, by a work of great beauty
that doesn’t happen to preach a backwoods Methodist sermon, by sheer
loveliness, or majesty, or unadorned truth. And this corsetted emotion,
mincing, wasp-waisted and furtive, colours all native criticism.
It makes the dramatic critic ashamed of simple beauty, and forbids
him honestly to admire the mere loveliness of such exhibitions
as Ziegfeld’s. It makes him ashamed of passion, and forbids him
honestly to admire such excellent dramas as Georges de Porto-Riche’s
“Amoureuse.” It makes him ashamed of laughter, and forbids him to
chuckle at the little naughtinesses of Sacha Guitry and his own Avery
Hopwood. It makes him ashamed of truth, and forbids him to regard with
approbation such a play as “The Only Law.” The American drama must
therefore not create new emotions for him, but must hold the battered
old mirror up to his own. It must warm him not with new, splendid and
worldly emotions, but must satisfy him afresh as to the integrity and
higher merit of his own restricted parcel of emotions. It must abandon
all new, free concepts of love and life, of romance and adventure and
glory, and must reassure him--with appropriate quiver-music--that the
road to heaven is up Main Street and the road to hell down the Avenue
de l’Opéra.
Though there is a regrettable trace of snobbery in the statement,
it yet remains that--with half a dozen or so quickly recognizable
exceptions--the practitioners of dramatic criticism in America
are in the main a humbly-born, underpaid and dowdy-lived lot.
This was as true of them yesterday as it is today. And as Harlem,
delicatessen-store dinners, napkin-rings and the Subway are not,
perhaps, best conducive to a polished and suavely cosmopolitan
outlook on life and romance and enthralling beauty, we have had
a dramatic criticism pervaded by a vainglorious homeliness, by a
side-street æsthetic, and by not a little of the difficultly suppressed
rancour that human nature ever feels in the presence of admired yet
unachievable situations. Up to fifteen years ago, drama in America
was compelled critically to meet with, and adhere strictly to, the
standards of life, culture and romance as they obtained over on Mr.
William Winter’s Staten Island. Since Winter’s death, it has been
urged critically to abandon the standards of Staten Island and comply
instead with the eminently more sophisticated standards derived from
a four years’ study of Cicero, Stumpf and the Norwegian system of
communal elections at Harvard or Catawba College, combined with a two
weeks’ stay in Paris. For twenty years, Ibsen and Pinero suffered the
American critical scourge because they had not been born and brought
up in a town with a bust of Cotton Mather or William Cullen Bryant in
its public square, and did not think quite the same way about things
as Horace Greeley. For twenty years more, Porto-Riche and Frenchmen
like him will doubtless suffer similarly because, in a given situation,
they do not act precisely as Mr. Frank A. Munsey or Dr. Stuart Pratt
Sherman would; for twenty years more, Hauptmann and other Germans will
doubtless be viewed with a certain measure of condescension because
they have not enjoyed the same advantages as Professor Brander Matthews
in buying Liberty Bonds, at par.
American dramatic criticism is, and always has been, essentially
provincial. It began by mistaking any cheap melodrama like “The Charity
Ball” or “The Wife” which was camouflaged with a few pots of palms and
half a dozen dress suits for a study of American society. It progressed
by appraising as the dean of American dramatists and as the leading
American dramatic thinker a playwright who wrote such stuff as “All
over this great land thousands of trains run every day, starting and
arriving in punctual agreement because this is a woman’s world! The
great steamships, dependable almost as the sun--a million factories in
civilization--the countless looms and lathes of industry--the legions
of labour that weave the riches of the world--all--all move by the
mainspring of man’s faith in woman!” It has come to flower today in
denouncing what the best European critics have proclaimed to be the
finest example of American fantastic comedy on the profound ground that
“it is alien to American morality,” and in hailing as one of the most
acute studies of a certain typical phase of American life a comedy
filched substantially from the French.
The plush-covered provincialism of the native dramatic criticism,
operating in this wise against conscientious drama and sound
appreciation of conscientious drama, constantly betrays itself for
all the chintz hocus-pocus with which it seeks drolly to conceal
that provincialism. For all its easy incorporation of French phrases
laboriously culled from the back of Webster, its casually injected
allusions to the Überbrett’l, Stanislav Pshibuishevsky, the excellent
_cuissot de Chevreuil sauce poivrade_ to be had in the little
restaurant near the comfort station in the Place Pigalle, and the
bewitching eyes of the prima ballerina in the 1917 Y. M. C. A. show
at Epernay, it lets its mask fall whenever it is confronted in the
realistic flesh by one or another of the very things against which
it has postured its cosmopolitanism. Thus does the mask fall, and
reveal the old pair of suburban eyes, before the “indelicacy” of
French dramatic masterpieces, before the “polished wit” of British
polished witlessness, before the “stodginess” of the German master
depictions of stodgy German peasantry, before the “gloom” of Russian
dramatic photography, before the “sordidness” of “Countess Julie” and
the “wholesomeness” of “The Old Homestead.” Cosmopolitanism is a
heritage, not an acquisition. It may be born to a man in a wooden shack
in Hardin County, in Kentucky, or in a little cottage in Hampshire in
England, or in a garret of Paris, but, unless it is so born to him, a
thousand Cunard liners and Orient Expresses cannot bring it to him. All
criticism is geography of the mind and geometry of the heart. American
criticism suffers in that what æsthetic wanderlust its mind experiences
is confined to excursion trips, and in that what _x_ its heart seeks to
discover is an unknown quantity only to emotional sub-freshmen.
Criticism is personal, or it is nothing. Talk to me of impersonal
criticism, and I’ll talk to you of impersonal sitz-bathing. Impersonal
criticism is the dodge of the critic without personality. Some men
marry their brother’s widow; some earn a livelihood imitating George
M. Cohan; some write impersonal criticism. Show me how I can soundly
criticize Mrs. Fiske as Hannele without commenting on the mature aspect
of the lady’s _stentopgia_, and I shall begin to believe that there
may be something in the impersonal theory. Show me how I can soundly
criticize the drama of Wedekind without analyzing Wedekind, the man,
and I shall believe in the theory to the full. It is maintained by the
apostles of the theory that the dramatic critic is in the position
of a judge in the court of law: that his concern, like that of the
latter, is merely with the evidence presented to him, not with the
personalities of those who submit the evidence. Nothing could be more
idiotic. The judge who does not take into consideration, for example,
that--whatever the nature of the evidence--the average Italian, or
negro, or Armenian before him is in all probability lying like the
devil is no more equipped to be a sound judge than the dramatic critic
who, for all the stage evidence, fails to take into consideration that
Strindberg personally was a lunatic, that Pinero, while treating of
British impulses and character, is himself of ineradicable Portuguese
mind and blood, that the inspiration of D’Annunzio came not from a
woman out of life but from a woman out of the greenroom, and that Shaw
is a legal virgin.
Just as dramatic criticism, as it is practised in America, is Mason-jar
criticism--criticism, that is, obsessed by a fixed determination to put
each thing it encounters into an air-tight bottle and to label it--so
is this dramatic criticism itself in turn subjected to the bottling
and labelling process. A piece of criticism, however penetrating, that
is not couched in the language of the commencement address of the
president of Millsaps College, and that fails to include a mention of
the Elizabethan theatre and a quotation from Victor Hugo’s “Hernani,”
is labelled “journalistic.” A criticism that elects to make its points
with humour rather than without humour is labelled “flippant.” A
criticism that shows a wide knowledge of everything but the subject
in hand is labelled “scholarly.” One that, however empty, prefixes
every name with a Mr. and somewhere in it discloses the fact that the
critic is sixty-five years old is labelled “dignified.” One that is
full of hard common sense from beginning to end but is guilty of wit
is derogatorily labelled “an imitation of Bernard Shaw.” One that says
an utterly worthless play is an utterly worthless play, and then shuts
up, is labelled “destructive”; while one that points out that the same
play would be a much better play if Hauptmann or De Curel had written
it is labelled “constructive and informing.” And so it goes. With the
result that dramatic criticism in America is a dead art language. Like
Mr. William Jennings Bryan, it has been criticized to death.
The American mania for being on the popular side has wrapped its
tentacles around the American criticism of the theatre. The American
critic, either because his job depends upon it or because he
appreciates that _kudos_ in this country, as in no other, is a gift
of the mob, sedulously plays safe. A sheep, he seeks the comfortable
support of other sheep. It means freedom from alarums, a guaranteed pay
envelope at the end of the week, dignity in the eyes of the community,
an eventual election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters
and, when he reaches three score years and ten and his trousers have
become thin in the seat, a benefit in the Century Theatre with a bill
made up of all the eminent soft-shoe dancers and fat tragediennes
upon whom he has lavished praise. This, in America, is the respected
critic. If we had among us today a Shaw, or a Walkley, or a Boissard,
or a Bahr, or a Julius Bab, he would be regarded as not quite nice.
Certainly the Drama League would not invite him to appear before it.
Certainly he would never be invited to sit between Prof. Richard
Burton and Prof. William Lyon Phelps at the gala banquet to Mr. D.
W. Griffith. Certainly, if his writings got into the paid prints at
all, there would be a discreet editor’s note at the top to the effect
that “the publication of an article does not necessarily imply that it
represents the ideas of this publication or of its editors.”
Criticism in America must follow the bell-cow. The bell-cow is personal
cowardice, artistic cowardice, neighbourhood cowardice, or the even
cheaper cowardice of the daily and--to a much lesser degree--periodical
press. Up to within a few years ago it was out of the question for
a dramatic critic to write honestly of the productions of David
Belasco and still keep his job. One of the leading New York evening
newspapers peremptorily discharged its reviewer for daring to do so;
another New York newspaper sternly instructed its reviewer not to
make the same mistake twice under the penalty of being cashiered; a
leading periodical packed off its reviewer for the offence. One of
the most talented critics in New York was several years ago summarily
discharged by the newspaper that employed him because he wrote an
honest criticism of a very bad play by an obscure playwright named
Jules Eckert Goodman. Another conscientious critic, daring mob opinion
at about the same time--he wrote, as I recall, something to the effect
that the late Charles Frohman’s productions were often very shoddy
things--was charily transferred the next day to another post on the
newspaper’s staff. I myself, ploughing my familiar modest critical
course, have, indeed, been made not personally unaware of the native
editorial horror of critical opinions which are not shared by the Night
School curricula, the inmates of the Actors’ Home, the Independent
Order of B’nai B’rith, the United Commercial Travelers of America, and
the Moose. Some years ago, a criticism of Hall Caine and of his play
“Margaret Schiller,” which ventured the opinion that the M. Caine was
perhaps not one of the greatest of modern geniuses, so frightened the
editors of the Philadelphia _North American_ and the Cleveland _Leader_
that I doubt they have yet recovered from the fear of the consequences
of printing the review.
The ruling ethic of the American press so far as the theatre is
concerned is one of unctuous _laissez faire_. “If you can’t praise,
don’t dispraise,” is the editorial injunction to the reviewer. The
theatre in America is a great business--greater even than the
department store--and a great business should be treated with proper
respect. What if the reviewer does not admire “The Key to Heaven”? It
played to more than _twelve thousand dollars_ last week; it _must_
be good. The theatre must be helped, and the way to help it is
uninterruptedly to speak well of it. Fine drama? Art? A newspaper has
no concern with fine drama and art; the public is not interested in
such things. A newspaper’s concern is primarily with news. But is not
dramatic swindling, the selling of spurious wares at high prices, news?
Is not an attempt to corrupt the future of the theatre as an honourable
institution and an honourable business also news, news not so very
much less interesting, perhaps, than the three column account of an
ex-Follies girl’s adulteries? The reviewer, for his impertinence, is
assigned henceforth to cover the Jefferson Market police court.
The key-note of the American journalistic attitude toward the theatre
is a stagnant optimism. Dramatic art and the red-haired copy boy are
the two stock jokes of the American newspaper office. Here and there
one encounters a reviewer who, through either the forcefulness or
the amiability of his personality, is successful for a short time in
evading the editorial shackles--there are a few such still extant
as I write. But soon or late the rattle of the chains is heard and
the reviewer that was is no more. He is an American, and must suffer
the penalty that an American who aspires to cultured viewpoint and
defiant love of beauty must ever suffer. For--so George Santayana,
late professor of philosophy in Harvard University, in “Character and
Opinion in the United States”--“the luckless American who is drawn
to poetic subtlety, pious retreats, or gay passions, nevertheless
has the categorical excellence of work, growth, enterprise, reform,
and prosperity dinned into his ears: every door is open in this
direction and shut in the other; so that he either folds up his heart
and withers in a corner--in remote places you sometimes find such a
solitary gaunt idealist--or else he flies to Oxford or Florence or
Montmartre to save his soul--or perhaps not to save it.”
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
On page 83, second sentence, after the word So, it appears that a word
is missing. The transcriber is unable to ascertain what the missing
word, if any, might be.