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.