The Critic and the Drama

by George Jean Nathan

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.”