It is not merely on account of its effects upon the audience, but on that of the actors themselves, that the theatre calls loudly for a strict critical regimen. An actor resigned to his own opinion, and committed to the unrestrained licentious exercise of his own judgment, if he be not one in a million, sinks into negligence, becomes wilful, and if, as is nine times in ten the case, he should obtain the casual applause of a few stupid and injudicious spectators, becomes headstrong, refractory, and incorrigibly hardened in error. If by means of the oversight of critical judges, or the false adjudication of applause, an actor insensibly slides into popularity, he is erected into a standard of taste, by those who have not seen better; instead of being himself tested by sound principles of criticism and estimated by comparison, with the best models, he becomes gradually absolved from submission to all authority, is held up as a criterion for determining the merit of other actors, and dubbed the Roscius of his little theatre by a number of confident pretenders who know just as much about dramatic character and acting, and on the very same grounds too, as the poor islander of St. Kilda did of architecture, when he sagaciously concluded that the great church of Glasgow was excavated out of a rock, because he had never before seen an edifice made of hewn stone and mortar. Thus not only a false taste is circulated among the youth at large, but the very fountain of taste is itself polluted. This is an evil which nothing but a well-regulated body of competent critical authority can prevent. In the prosecution of the intended work, an occasion will occur of pointing out eras during which, even in the great metropolitan seat of the English drama, the public taste suffered years of vitiation from defective models being at the head of the stage. Till Garrick, led on by Nature herself, introduced her school, the theatre presented a stage on which scarce a vestige of the human character as it really existed, was to be seen. But pompous monotony of speech held the highest praise, and “Declamation roared while Passion slept.”
Hitherto the theatre of Philadelphia has been too much resigned to the licentiousness of bold, and blind opinion. Men of letters, with which the city abounds, and who in every society are the natural guardians of the public taste and morals, seem to have deserted this important trust. Applause which ought to be measured out with scrupulous justice, correctness and precision, has been by admiring ignorance, poured forth in a torrent roar of uncouth and obstreperous glee on the buffoon, “the clown that says more than is set down for him,” and on “the robustious perriwig-pated fellow, who tears a passion all to rags,” while chaste merit and propriety have often gone unrewarded by a smile.
If critical judgment were a matter of physical force or numerical calculation, then indeed the roar of the multitude would be as conclusive in reason, as it too often is in practical effect; but criticism is a matter of intellectual estimate; and many acquirements go to the composition of a well-qualified dramatic critic, to any one of which, but a small number of the auditors of a play can, in the nature of things, have the smallest pretensions. If indeed any man under the assumption of the critic’s name should attempt dogmatically to impose his dictum as a law upon the public, he would deserve to be repelled with indignity and rebuke. All the genuine critic will attempt to do, is to hold out those lights, with which his own study, experience, and observation have supplied him, in order to enable the public to discern more clearly what in the play or the actor is worthy of censure or applause—of rejection or adoption. In the common operations of human life, every man is compelled by the necessity of his nature to take succedaneous aid from others. The mechanic in erecting the poorest building, or forming the most simple machine, is indebted for his means to the practical geometrician, and instrument maker, and the latter again, to the master of the science of mathematics. The practical surveyor or navigator finds it his interest to be governed by rules supplied by those whom study has furnished with the great elementary principles of science, and is contented to stand indebted to them for his means of determining, the area of his land, or the latitude and longitude at sea, without impugning the rights of those studious men who have given him the compendious rules and the tables by which he works. It is so with dramatic criticism. The legitimate source of judgment lies with those who have by deep study made themselves masters of the first principles of the science; and from them the people at large, who are too much otherwise and certainly better employed, to learn those principles, must be content to take the rules and laws by which they judge. The most infatuated self-devotee would be ashamed to contest this point, if he were at all apprised of the various acquirements requisite for forming an accurate judgment of the business of the theatre, interwoven, as the dramatic art is, with some of the highest departments of literature, and the multifarious operations of the human heart. The vainest being who cajoles himself into the notion that a man either unlettered or inexperienced can form a just judgment of a play and actors, must at once be convinced of his error by reflecting that “the drama is an exhibition of the real state of sublunary nature;” and that “to instruct life, and for that purpose to copy what passes in it, is the business of the stage.”[6] To understand this well, demands not only some book-learning, but that experience which, though books improve, they cannot impart, and which never can be attained by seclusion or solitary study, but must be derived from intercourse with men in all their forms of conduct, from converse with society, and from an attentive and accurate examination of that complex miscellany, the living world. To know the drama we must know men; and “if we would know men (says Rousseau) it is necessary that we should see them act.” It is equally necessary too that we should lift the veil which time has thrown over the past, and see how men have thought and acted through the lapse of ages upon the uniform principles of human passion, which ever have been and ever will be the same, and by that means distinguish that which is natural, innate and permanent in man, from that which is adventitious and acquired. He whose knowledge of the world is circumscribed within the narrow limits of one generation or one society can know man only as he appears in the superficial colouring and peculiar modification of personal habit, derived from the fashions, the modes, and the capricious changes of that time, and that society, while the great body of human nature remains buried from his sight. “The accidental compositions of heterogeneous modes (says the gigantic critic Johnson) are dissolved by the chance which combined them, but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities neither admits increase nor suffers decay.” And assuredly there was never an age in which man so masked his nature under modish innovations as he does in the present.
The works of the ancients, says a great writer, are the mines from which alone the treasures of true criticism are to be dug up—the pure sources of that penetration which enables us to distinguish legitimate excellence from spurious pretensions to it. He, therefore, who would get at the true principles of dramatic criticism ought to read the poetry and criticism of the two great ancient languages, and to have formed some acquaintance with those authors, whether ancient or modern, who have furnished the world with the great leading principles upon which dramatic poetry is constructed. Doctor Johnson has informed us that before the time of Dryden, the structure of dramatic poetry was not generally understood; and what was the consequence? “AUDIENCES,” continues the doctor, “APPLAUDED BY INSTINCT, AND POETS OFTEN PLEASED BY CHANCE.”[7]
Without calling in the aid of such high authority, no risk of contradiction can be incurred by asserting that he must be radically deficient in the requisites of a dramatic critic, who is not sufficiently versed in philological literature to discriminate between the various qualities of diction—to distinguish the language of the schools from that of the multitude—the polished diction of refinement from the coarse style of household colloquy—the splendid, figurative, and impressive combination of terms adapted to poetry, from those plain and familiar expressions suited to the sobriety of prose; and finally, to form a just estimate of a poet’s pretensions to that delicacy in the selection of words which constitutes what is called beauty in style. Nor is this all, he should be perfectly competent to form a judgment of the fable and its contrivance, to determine according to the canons of criticism laid down by the greatest professors of the art, whether the scheme of a piece be obscured by unnatural complexity or rendered jejune and uninteresting by extreme simplicity, and familiarity of design—whether description be bloated, or overcharged, or imagery misplaced or extravagant; and lastly, whether the performance be on the whole deficient in, or replete with moral institution.
The editors are free to confess that while they enumerate the requisites necessary to a critic, they tremble for their own incompetency. Labour however shall not be spared—-and they cherish the most sanguine hopes of supplying their general deficiency by candour and integrity; being determined while they endeavour with encouragement and applause to foster the rising genius and growing merit of the stage, to rescue it from the encroachment of sturdy incapacity, and while they sit in judgment for the security of the public taste, to be as far as the canons of dramatic criticism will allow, the strenuous advocates of the valuable man and unassuming actor—still keeping in sight that impressive truth contained in the motto: “He that applauds him who does not deserve praise, is endeavouring to deceive the public; he that hisses in malice or in sport is an oppressor and a robber.”
The editors have said thus much merely to explain their motives, and to smooth their way to the discharge of a task, in the performance of which they will necessarily be exposed to many invidious remarks from the misconceptions of presumptuous ignorance. Having done so they fearlessly commit the subject to the public judgment, and proceed to the execution of their duty.
[ DRAMATIC CENSOR.]
The Philadelphia Theatre opened on Monday the 20th of November, with