1
MEANWHILE, with summer coming on, Felix had wondered what an assistant dramatic editor would find to do. He learned from Hawkins that the management traditionally continued the Saturday dramatic department through the season, though in a restricted space. Later, in anticipation of the opening of the theatrical season, he could print the news of what New York and London held in prospect for the Chicago public. And for the present a column or two once a week could be furbished up somehow—the how of it being left entirely to Felix’s own discretion and ingenuity.
“Interviews—clip-stuff from the London weeklies of last winter—anything to keep going,” said Hawkins, cleaning up his desk and going home on a formal leave of absence for the summer to rewrite his play—which, it appeared, had impressed a New York manager and only needed to be “strengthened” in its second act.
Felix, according to his arrangement with Willie Smith, was to write “something light,” every day if possible, for the editorial page; and that done, nobody cared what he put in the Saturday “Plays and Acting” column. With Hawkins away, he felt that he had a free hand. And the fact that there were no new plays to criticize did not matter much, for the kind of criticism that Felix liked to write subsisted quite as well on familiar plays that everybody had seen as upon brand-new ones—better, perhaps.
Felix was rather humble about the kind of dramatic criticism he wrote; though that humility merely concealed, from himself and others, a fierce egotistic pride. For his attitude toward plays was different from that of any other dramatic critic whose work he had ever seen. It was, in a sense, not a “critical” attitude at all. Perhaps that was why his commentaries had been so well received, by the management and the readers of the Chronicle. It was at least an agreeable novelty. But Felix knew quite well that he did not have either the experience or the knowledge necessary to do the job in the usual way. Truth to tell, he both stood in awe of, and despised, the usual way.... The regular critics were always telling you whether a play was good or bad, and why, and assessing expertly the merits of various bits of acting. Old Jennison, “the dean,” as he was sometimes called, “of the critical fraternity,” could remember the way Somebody had played Hamlet, and how Miss Somebody Else had done the “great scene” in “Camille,” and he told you all about it apropos of the latest play. This, doubtless, was real criticism, but of a kind Felix could not aspire to, for he had never seen Anybody in Anything. On the other hand, Hawkins was gravely an enthusiast for modernity, as represented by Ibsen and Shaw, and took occasion to point out the duty of American drama to bestir itself and deal with the problems of the time. Then, of course, there was a third kind of criticism, for which Felix had little respect—the enthusiastic pounding of drums outside the tent of some favourite actor or actress. And there was a fourth kind, for which Felix had no respect at all, but to which he sometimes feared his own work belonged—the smart-aleck kind of criticism.
He confessedly did not know very much about the art of acting, and could not even say that some part was played “in a masterly manner,” let alone tell the poor devil of an actor how he should have played it. He was, as a matter of fact, not interested in the technique of acting, but only in the effects produced. And, though he was a little ashamed of it, he could not really feel that the stage had any “duties,” either to modern problems or anything else. He still got a childlike thrill out of the fantasies enacted behind the footlights—at least for the first few moments after the curtain went up. And then, as that magic vanished for him, and he became bored by the dull spectacle and unconvincing dialogue on the stage, he became interested in the audience, for whom evidently this magic still persisted. He wondered why, and tried to see the play with their eyes, to find the things in it that held them, if not breathless, at least coughless, for minutes at a time. What emotions were those that were so touched by the cheap tears and tawdry heroisms of “The Witching Hour” and “The Third Degree”? Why was it that they liked to see the heroine in distress, the hero unjustly accused? Felix set himself the task of proving that he knew why they liked these things—and he described the commonplace predicaments and familiar crises of current drama in terms which conveyed to his own mind some real emotional excitement, with only a touch or two of humorous satire as he resumed his own proper character as a philosophic observer. He found that he could translate the most absurd plot into something authentically interesting to himself—as if the worst play in the world were, after all, only a good play badly conceived. And in this mood, seeing bad plays through the eyes of an audience to whom they were interesting, he too became interested. He discovered some at least of the secrets of that wish-world of the theatre, in which what happens is what we want to happen: and, only when conscience pinches too hard, and reminds us that crime must be punished and virtue rewarded, what ought to happen—but not at all, no, never, a place where things happen as they do in everyday life! A strange world of pseudo-realities, elaborately persuading us at the outset that it is the same world of houses and streets as ours, inhabited by people like ourselves, wearing the same clothes and talking the same talk, ruled by the same eternal laws of probability—and then making come true for us for an hour our wildest, silliest, loveliest, most impossible dreams!