Gilbert Seldes

“ We have to destroy the slander that the Italians were kept at digging ditches, the Yugoslavs in the mills, the Hungarians and Poles and Czechs in the mines and at the boilers, the Greeks at the fruit stands; we must destroy the great lie that all the "lesser races" whom Hitler now enslaves were first slaves to our economic system. We can begin by reading the roster of the great names, the men who came to America and were liberated from poverty and prejudice, and made themselves fame or wealth, and deserved well of the Republic, and were honored. ”

“ The French name which is and is not Charlie will serve for that figure on the screen, the created image which is, and at the same time is more than, Charlie Chaplin, and is less. Like every great artist in whatever medium, Charlie has created the mask of himself—many masks, in fact—and the first of these, the wanderer, came in the Keystone comedies. It was there that he first detached himself from life and began to live in another world, with a specific rhythm of his own, as if the pulse-beat in him changed and was twice or half as fast as that of those who surrounded him. ”

“ In the days when the runway was planked down the centre of every good theatre in America, this galvanic little figure, leaping and shouting—yet always essentially dancing and singing—upon it was the concentration of our national health and gaiety. In Row, Row, Row he would bounce up on the runway, propel himself by imaginary oars over the heads of the audience, draw equally imaginary slivers from his bottom, and infuse into the song something wild and roaring and insanely funny. ”

“ The flowering of freedom in the past hundred years has been less destructive to humanity than the attempted extension of slavery has been in the past decade; for when men create liberty, they destroy only what is already dead.
I have used the phrase "creating enough liberty"—as if the freedom of man were a commodity; and it is. So long as we think of it as a great abstraction, it will remain one; the moment we make liberty it becomes a reality; the Declaration of Independence made liberty, concretely, out of taxes and land and jury trials and muskets. Liberty, like love, has to be made ”

“ It is a great pleasure to come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserves its authority, to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and know that it is good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect yet associated with the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself—that is a different thing entirely. ”

“ In Jolson there is always one thing you can be sure of: that whatever he does he does at the highest possible pressure. I do not mean that one gets the sense of his effort, for his work is at times the easiest seeming, the most effortless in the world. Only he never saves up—for the next scene, or the next week, or the next show. His generosity is extravagant; he flings into a comic song or three-minute impersonation so much energy, violence, so much of the totality of one human being, that you feel it would suffice for a hundred others. ”

“ We may have to promise and to threaten, too; but mostly we will want to destroy the myth of America-Against-Europe by showing the reality of Europe-in-America; we will want to destroy the lie of an Anglo-Saxon America by letting all the voices be heard of an American America; we will want to destroy the rumor of a disunited America by uniting all the voices in one declaration of ultimate freedom—for Europe and for ourselves. ”

“ Miss Hilda Spong has been quite unintelligently criticized for over-acting. She is simply a perfect baroque, wholly in the tone of one side, the comic side, of the play. I have never seen Miss Le Gallienne play so well—although I wonder whether she does not err in the other extreme. It is all too tragic, too seriously conceived, too consciously the great young actress who can do second-rate poetic drama. She has a certain gift for comedy which she suppresses, in the interest not of the myth she creates, not of the character, but of herself. ”

“ We can do what Hitler and Lenin did, when they were starving and fanatic and obscure: we can work and wait and work again. We must not say that we are helpless in the face of international intrigue. We—not Churchill and Roosevelt—wrote the Atlantic Charter, and we can un-write it and write it over again; we the people, not Henry Cabot Lodge, crushed the League of Nations by our indifference; we, not Congressmen bribed by scrap-iron dealers, armed Japan by our greed, and we, all of us, let Hitler go ahead by our ignorance. ”

“ Of course, in America no one cares for revues except the unenlightened millions who pay to see them, so there is no one to rise and make lamentation over this state of affairs. For years we have laboured to perfect our revues—and the shuffling feet of a barbarian summon up an evil djinn to banish them. The serene smoothness of manœuvre which Mr Wayburn prepares for Mr Ziegfeld shrinks from the boards before the haphazard leaping of unstudied numbers; the sweet gravity of the dancers is forgotten for the barbarous rhythm of any half dozen darkies with a sense of syncopation innate in them. ”

“ It is a lie because our democracy was created by all these "order-loving" peoples; America is Anglo-Saxon only in its origin; the answer to Hitler is in what all the people of Europe have created here.
They have also annihilated the myth of race by which Hitler's Germany creates a propaganda of hatred. All the peoples of Europe have lived together in amity in America, all have intermarried. Nothing in America—not even its crimes—can be ascribed to one group, nation, or race. ”

“ Less than the bitterness of Penguin Island and the Histoire contemporaine would not have served for France; more than the laughter of Dooley would have been disproportionate and unmanly for us.
Satire is like parody in admitting the integrity of the subject; it is a pruning knife applied for the good of the tree; and irony is a dagger with corrosive poison at the tip. Satire is proper to America because essentially the satirist believes that life is all right, and that only the extravagances and frailties of American life, at the moment of writing, need correction or are subject to mockery. ”

“ After the era of normalcy, when the New Deal declared that one-third of a nation was ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished—and not pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty—the almost universal condition of man throughout the world—was not enough for America.
It is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark in this field is the expectation of success. We are the first large nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing wealth. ”

“ In the second place the lively arts which require little intellectual effort will more rapidly destroy the bogus than the major arts ever can. The close intimacy between high seriousness and high levity, the thing that brings together the extremes touching at the points of honesty and simplicity and intensity—will act like the convergence of two armies to squeeze out the bogus. And the moment we recognize in the lively arts our actual form of expression, we will derive from them the same satisfaction which people have always derived from an art which was relevant to their existence. ”

“ To them, the Germany of the Kaiser was undesirable, the Germany of Hitler unthinkable. Yet their countrymen, left behind, tolerated one and embraced the other with sickening adulation. It is as if America had drawn off the six million Germans capable of understanding and taking part in a democratic civilization, leaving the materials for Hitlerism behind.
In any case, the Germans in America have proved that Hitler lies to the Germans; they are neither a superior race nor a people incapable of self-government; they will not rule the world, nor be a nation of slaves. ”

“ We are the inheritors of a tradition that what is worth while must be dull; and as often as not we invert the maxim and pretend that what is dull is higher in quality, more serious, “greater art” in short than whatever is light and easy and gay. We suffer fools gladly if we can pretend they are mystics. And the fact that audiences at concerts and opera, spectators at classic dances and masques, are suffering, is the final damnation, for it means that these arts are failures. I do not found my belief on any theory that all the arts ought to be appreciated by all the people. ”

“ This was the revolution in which America led the way and it had astounding consequences. The American pioneer did not care for the land—in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. The European peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn, nourish him and his family; the American did not; he exhausted the soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. ”

“ Their appearance of ease is a delight; there is no strain, no swelling muscles, no visible exploitation of strength. The Hellenic philosopher who held that the arrow shot from the bow is never in motion, but at rest from second to second at the succeeding points of its trajectory, might have seen some ancient forerunners of these athletes, for each of their movements seems at once a sculptured rest and a passage into another pose. And that is precisely the quality which vaudeville and revue audiences care for, and in a groping way recognize as distinctive and fine. ”