Even in those days I was a meek and quiet and extremely reasonable man so I merely smiled and bent over the railing and touched the gentleman with the dirty collar on the shoulder and whispered softly: “Excuse me, but there is a message for you outside.” After some persuasion I convinced the gentleman that “some one outside” was asking for him and he followed me willingly enough to the front door. The theater, luckily, was what used to be called an “upstairs house” and twenty-five or thirty steps led gently down to the street. As we approached the head of this stairway, still smiling I drew back my arm and hit the astonished critic a snappy uppercut that tumbled him all the way to the sidewalk, then returned to my pleasant duty of listening to my own words.
This story was noised abroad during the next fifteen or twenty years and was once used by Alexander Woollcott in an article; used, as I recall it, by him to explain some favorable notice he had written of one of my plays.
In justice to myself, however, I must pause here to say that I have been called worse things than the man with the dirty collar called me by many critics who are still alive and healthy. As a matter of fact I honestly think that critics in the end are rarely unfair, and very seldom wrong. It is an absurdity to say that they ever make or break a play. A good play is a very sturdy and very important force in itself, of far more importance than the opinion of any critic, and in the end it lives or dies because it’s good or because it isn’t. Critics can, and have, made a bad play live for a short time, but they never killed a good one—and what’s more, they never wanted to. I have never been an especial pet of dramatic critics, my somewhat spectacular career not exactly fitting with their idea of the proper dignity of a dramatist. Yet whenever I have written a really fine play they have been quick and generous in their praise of it. So I have always felt they had a perfect right to go after me tooth and nail upon the more frequent occasions when I have stubbed my toe.
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CHAPTER III ◆ THEN AND NOW
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Dramatic criticism, like all of the other arts having to do with our theater, has changed, and like the others the change of the last few years has been for the better. When I first came to New York, William Winter was by far the outstanding critic, and his opinions were eagerly waited for and had great influence. I doubt if any critic of to-day is his equal in some ways, yet the best men of to-day have, I think, a far greater influence upon the actual writing of plays. In William Winter’s time the Shakespearian tradition was strong and the plays of modern writers were of secondary importance. Acting then was more important than play writing, while to-day the dramatist is the important figure in almost every production.
I do not in the least mean that acting to-day is any less vital than it used to be, but the standard of acting and of directing is very much higher. Very few first class producers who are fortunate enough to secure a good play are bunglers enough not to take full advantage of it and we have grown to expect adequate performances and take them quite as a matter of course. Even ten years ago there were a number of stars who were sure of some business no matter what play they might appear in, but I think it is a fair statement that to-day no actor alive can do any business at all unless the play is satisfactory. In any case it was the dramatist and not the actor who was responsible for the birth of the new type of drama in America, and when the writer threw into the discard the romantic, the heroic and the sentimental, the actor was forced to change his method. Booth and Jefferson could have played in a modern reticent play, because they were, in their day, outstanding in the quiet and normal method they used, but most of the great actors of our theater would have been lost if they had been deprived of their grand passions and their carefully developed heroics. Of course these men and women played in the accepted tradition of their time, and their talents would have been trained to-day in a different direction. We miss the diction of the good actor of the old school and his beautifully trained voice, and his thorough grasp of all the details of his business, but the characterizations of to-day are far nearer to real life and far less set and conventional than they were under the old system. When I first went into the theater, an actor would be handed a part and told that it was, let us say, “a Sir Francis Levinson.” He would play it that way, and usually play it very well, but frequently in a rather tryingly cut and dried manner.
Directing, too, has become very much more important than it used to be, at least in the sense that there are more good directors, although among the list of men whom I consider to have been the best directors I have ever known, several were of the theater of years ago. Augustin Daly was a master; no man of to-day is any better; for years his company was quite justly the pride of America. A. M. Palmer was a man of taste and shrewd knowledge of the theater. He was the first man I ever worked with and one of the best. Palmer was a man of great cultivation and in his appearance amazingly different from any of our managers to-day. He was a very dignified little man who wore a brand of whiskers now quite obsolete, and his manner always seemed to me to be more suited to the pulpit than to the stage. He was, I am sure, both a worthy and a deeply religious man, and it was his custom at the end of the last rehearsal to stand on the stage, surrounded by his company, and raise his hands in an attitude of benediction and say: “Ladies and gentlemen—now we are in the hands of God.” I recall an occasion when he rather spoiled the effect of this pious observation by turning to the stage electrician and continuing in the same breath: “And for God’s sake don’t you forget that first act light cue again.”
A. M. Palmer.
“The first man I ever worked with and one of the best.”
(From the Messmore Kendall Collection)