Drama critic

“ Art thrives—art leads to art—on sympathy and a measure of general understanding. Otherwise, of what use criticism? To divorce the theatre from a consideration of drama as an art, to contend, as it has been contended from Aristotle’s day to Corneille’s, and from Dryden’s and Lamb’s to our own, [64] that “the more lasting and noble design” of drama rests in a reading rather than a seeing, may be, strictly, a logical æsthetic manœuvre, but equally a logical æsthetic manœuvre would be a divorcement of canvas from painting as an art. The theatre is the canvas of drama. ”

“ Acting is perhaps less an art than the deceptive echo of an art. It is drama’s exalted halloo come back to drama from the walls of the surrounding amphitheatre. Criticism of acting too often mistakes the echo for the original voice. ”

“ The actor or actress, unlike the artist in more authentic fields, may never interpret emotion in a manner unfamiliar to the critic: the interpretation must be a reflection, more or less stereotyped, of the critic’s repertoire of emotions. Thus, where art is original expression, acting is merely the audible expression of a silent expression. ”

“ Criticism of drama, it follows, is similarly a two-souled art: half sober, half mad. Drama is a deliberate intoxicant; dramatic criticism, aromatic spirits of ammonia; the re-creation is never perfect; there is always a trace of tipsiness left. Even the best dramatic criticism is always just a little dramatic. It indulges, a trifle, in acting. It can never be as impersonal, however much certain of its practitioners may try, as criticism of painting or of sculpture or of literature. This is why the best criticism of [21] the theatre must inevitably be personal criticism. ”

“ Why should the drama be logical when life is not? A drama should contain four principal elements, amongst which neither logic nor realism finds a place; and these elements are—Beauty, Mystery, Passion, and Imagination. The drama, he is convinced, is returning now to the mysterious and imaginative side of human life.
And if the critic press too hard upon the author of The Masqueraders, he has recourse for his defence—and quite rightly—to the great name which is worth ten thousand arguments. ”

“ I have said that I have no intention to argue for or against acting as an art yet, for all the circumstance that the case for the prosecution has long seemed the soundest and the most eloquent, there are still sporadic instances of imaginative histrionism that give one reason to ponder. But, pondering, it has subsequently come to the more penetrating critic that what has on such occasions passed for an art has in [88] reality been merely a reflected art: the art of drama interpreted not with the imagination of the actor but, more precisely, with the imagination of the dramatist. ”

“ The actor who contends in favour of his creative art that he must experience within him the feeling of the dramatist, that he must actually persuade himself to feel his rôle with all its turning smiles and tears, speaks nonsense. So, too, must the auditor, yet who would term the auditor a creative artist? The actor who contends in favour of his creative [102] art the exact opposite, that he is, to wit, a creative artist since he must theatrically create the dramatist’s moods, illusions and emotions without feeling them himself, also speaks nonsense. ”

“ But the criticism of dramatic literature which is also creation, is possible only when the critical faculty is applied to the masterpieces of dramatic literature; and nobody knows better than the play-reviewer that masterpieces of dramatic literature do not present themselves frequently and that they cannot be acclaimed as masterpieces until they have stood the test of time. And this is why a critic-creator would be a little out of place on the staff of a newspaper, daily or weekly, whether he was assigned to deal with the drama or with literature at large. ”

“ The spectator who shouts his warning and advice to the heroine when the villain is approaching is, in the theatre, the only true believer in the hand of God; and he is liable to find it in a drama lower than the best.” The art of the drama is one which imposes upon drama the obligation of depicting at once the inner processes of life realistically, and the external aspects of life delusively. ”

“ Since acting must appeal to the many—this is obviously its only reason for being, for acting is primarily a filter through which drama may be lucidly distilled for heterogeneous theatre-goers—it must, logically, be popular or perish. Surely no authentic art can rest or thrive upon such a premise. The great actors and actresses, unlike [87] great fashioners in other arts, have invariably been favourites of the crowd, and it is doubtless a too charitable hypothesis to assume that this crowd has ever been gifted with critical insight beyond cavil. ”

“ Of all the forms of criticism, dramatic criticism is essentially, and perhaps correctly, the most personal. Tell me what a dramatic critic eats and drinks, how far north of Ninetieth Street he lives, what he considers a pleasant evening when he is not in the theatre, and what kind of lingerie his wife wears, and I’ll tell you [119] with very few misses what kind of critic he is. ”

“ For when the critic confines himself in his discussion of drama to the acted drama, he regularly brings upon himself from other critics—chiefly bookish fellows whose theatrical knowledge is meagre—the very largely unwarranted embarrassment of arguments anent “crowd psychology” and the like which, while they have little or nothing to do with the case, none the less make a certain deep impression upon his readers. (Readers of criticism become automatically critics; with his first sentence, the critic challenges his critic-reader’s sense of argument.) ”

“ Surely it will be quickly allowed that however obvious the themes and ideas of these plays may be to the few, they are hardly within the ready intelligence of what the theorists picture as the imaginary [46] mob theatre audience. Fine drama is independent of all such theories: the dramatist who subscribes to them should not figure in any treatise upon drama as an art. ”

“ And the difficulty would be increased by the fact that the dramatic critic needs an understanding of three different arts, the art of acting, the art of literature, and the art of the drama—of play-making as distinct from literature. ”

“ What he tells his readers about a new play is first the truth. This in effect you or I could do as well as he does: it was a good play. The modern critic, 176however, goes beyond that in his influence upon the theater by insisting upon an increasingly higher standard both in writing and in acting, and by pointing out the virtues or the defects in the performance, instructing his public in what may fairly be expected of the modern drama. Naturally there are bad critics, just as there are bad writers and bad actors, and the bad ones do harm, just as the bad actors and bad writers do. ”

“ Yet it is solely by the adoption of this method that we can hope to provide the opportunity for the appearance of the true dramatic critic, who can fit himself for his finer work only by being set free from the necessity of doing work quite unworthy of him, altho necessary to the newspaper itself. And the development of a group of dramatic critics of a higher type than can be found to-day—except possibly in a scant half-dozen dailies and weeklies and monthlies—is a condition precedent to the development of our drama. ”

“ The criticism that nominates itself to hold drama and the theatre as things apart is a criticism which, for all its probable integrity and reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy, like a duchess in a play by Mr. ”

“ Few developments in the last decade have been so startling and important as the wide-reaching improvement that has been made in the standards of the American stage, and there have been numerous indications that the drama—not only the closet, but the acting drama—is again coming into its own as a form of literature to be read. ”

“ In tragedy, passion or intensity sweeps all before it, and when I say passion, I mean the passion of pathos as well as wrath or revenge. These are the supreme elements of the actor's art, which cannot be taught by any system, however just, and to which all education is but tributary.
Now all that can be said of the necessity of a close regard for nature in acting applies with equal or greater force to the presentation of plays. You want, above all things, to have a truthful picture which shall appeal to the eye without distracting the imagination from the purpose of the drama. ”

“ Likewise, on a larger scale, the layman habitually fails to distinguish between a mere theatric entertainment and a genuine drama. A genuine drama always reveals through its imagined struggle of contesting wills some eternal truth of human life, and illuminates some real phases of human character. But a theatric entertainment may present merely a deftly fabricated struggle between puppets, wherein the art of the actor is given momentary exercise. ”

“ I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value—certainly no large value. ”

“ The music halls provide for the feasting of the eye; melodrama and farce have attracted and retain an enormous mass of clients; the literary drama and Comedy have secured their own homes, to which one looks only for artistic emotions and refined amusements.
In these are to be found that highest rank of actors and actresses whose rise in fortune, talent, and esteem I have described. ”

“ In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall. ”

“ Does it state its problem clearly, so that everyone can comprehend it, develop its angle absorbingly, and end, not merely stop, with complete satisfaction? Could one little scene be added, or even one little passage be left out, without marring the whole? Is it true to life—truer than life? If it is all this, it is good drama.
Good drama is therefore more than plot. It is more than story plus characters, dialogue, acting, costumes, scenery—it is more than them all combined. ”

“ Not only do such critics as the anonymous writer from whom quotation has been made, persist in thinking of the literary merit of the drama as "exquisite prose" and "splendid verse,"—in other words as an added grace, applied externally,—but they also seem to believe that all plays possessing what they would regard as "literary merit" stand in a class apart. They are looking for a literary drama which shall be different from the popular drama. Apparently they expect to be able to recognize a literary play at first sight—and probably by its excess of applied ornament. ”

“ A dramatist who shall accept the formula which has been found satisfactory by his immediate contemporaries, and who shall succeed in making all the acts of his play interesting alike to the crowd, to the women, and to the thinkers, will be very likely to achieve literary merit without striving for it specifically.
For we cannot repeat too often that in the drama "literary merit" is a by-product,—as it is in oratory also. And we cannot assert too emphatically that the drama has an independent existence—that it does not lie wholly within the domain of literature. ”

“ Those critics, therefore, have no ground to stand on who belittle the importance of the modern social drama and regard it as an arbitrary phase of art devised, for business reasons merely, by a handful of clever playwrights. ”

“ The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. ”

“ So long as the dramatists were not hampered by demands from the audience to have its social, political, or æsthetic fancies humoured, and from the actor to have his egotism flattered, the drama flourished as an art as well as a business. ”

“ In contrast to such a definite view, which is based upon the essential character of dramatic poetry itself, it is a feature of modern notions on the subject, particularly so among ourselves, to regard the organization of drama with a view to its theatrical reproduction as unessential and subsidiary, although as a fact all dramatic authors, even when they adopt this attitude of indifference and contempt, entertain the wish and hope to see their compositions on the stage. ”

“ For the vitality of the drama primarily depends not upon the talent of its interpreters but on that of its creators, and a new image or new transposition of life in a form appropriate to the theatre is more important than the perfection of the human instrument by which it is “made flesh.” If criticism, then, has of late years and on the whole been able to devote more attention to the play than to the playing, I suggest to our veteran that the fact is a healthy sign for our drama. It shows that there have been plays to criticise and that criticism has done its duty. ”