The Metropolitan Magazine
July 1904, Vol. XX No. IV, pp. 492-493
BY BENJAMIN DE CASSERES
Dramatic criticism is of three kinds: There is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he sees; there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he knows, and there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what it shouldn’t see or know. The first is impersonal; the second is egotistical; the third is atavistical. The first will tell you, for instance, what D’Annunzio says; the second will tell you what he ought to have said, and the third will tell you that he shouldn’t be allowed to say at all. The method of the first is inductive; the method of the second is deductive; the method of the third is assinine. The impersonal critic has brains, the personal critic has taste, and the eternally moral critic has billingsgate.
The greatest art is that which conceals its art, and the greatest critic is he who is not properly a critic. The impersonal play reviewer does not—cannot—judge a play by his own standard, for the simple reason that he has no standard; he has curiosity. Standards are intellectualized prejudices. The emotions are at war with the critical faculty, and the art of seeing life clearly is the art of etherizing the prejudices in the alembic brain cells. The perfect recorder of things seen must denude himself of personality. He must not only see into life, but see around it. He must quit the shallows of the I and get out into the mental open. To be impersonal is to be universal, and to be universal is to live the life of the race—to be a cheerful Man Friday to the adventurous buccaneers of art.
The ideal play-reviewer follows the Idea of the play before him; instead of superposing himself on the play, he drifts with it, and follows the mind of the playwright in its endless windings and gropings. Creator and critic blend, for both are aiming at the same thing; to see and record. The playwright has an idea and builds a play around it. The critic perceives the idea and records the virtues and defects of the workmanship.
Personally, as a mere man, in viewing “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” he may care nothing for the type of woman that Paula Tanqueray represents. In his daily life he avoids all that sort of thing. But as critic and artist he is intensely interested in Paula. Is such a woman capable of redemption through the love of a man like Aubrey Tanqueray? He catches at Pinero’s idea. His interest in the terribly human tragedy is hardly second to the author’s. He coldly follows the unfolding of incident and the unwinding of plot, and his enthusiasm rises as he sees with what contrivances the soul of this woman is beset. The shadows of an all-compassing fate creep in the windows and doors of Aubrey’s house; they slant across the floor, creep up to Paula’s boot heels and sends their tenebrious shafts to mingle with the engulfing darkness in which lies her withered heart.
Bravo! cries the impersonal recorder. The art of Paula’s slow damnation is supremely great. And the suicide is the end that justifies the play. Without that final act “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” would have been immoral—because it wouldn’t have been true. With the moral character of Paula or the ethics of suicide the true critic has nothing to do. The laws that produce the common garden weed are as beautiful and as ineffably mysterious in their development as the laws that round the petals on the rose or mould to sphericity the stars. Moral decadence, crime and sin have their laws; and the rhyming rot of a Madame Bovary or a Paula Tanqueray is as legitimate a subject of art as the moral beatification of a St. Augustine or a Madame De Mauve.
[493] Morality and immorality are two words that vex the ear of Time and fill the eyes with dust. Codes and cobwebs! Systems and slush! The bogey man has invaded the playwright’s realm and has frightened all but a few—a very, very few—of our dramatic reviewers. From the standpoint of impersonal criticism, there are no good or bad plays in the sense that the words good and bad are generally used. There is good or bad art; there is good or bad acting. A thing is good in so far as it fulfils the purpose for which it was designed; a thing—or play—is bad in so far as it falls short of its object. The Œdipus is a great play because the Sophoclean idea of Destiny is worked out as it has never been done since; the fact that Œdipus has to marry his mother in order to realize the idea is purely incidental and of slight moment. “The Christian” is a bad play because it shows us nothing of life, is incoherent, psychologically absurd, and should never be seen without first consulting the advance agent’s exposition of Mr. Caine’s purpose.
Scepticism and objectivity—What do I know? and what do I see?—these are the only mental attitudes compatible with the highest development of the critical faculty. Shakespeare evolved Hamlet and Iago, Richard III. and Cordelia with equal sympathy. The greatest artists of all time was the arch-sceptic of all time. Who tells us Shakespeare’s philosophy, his religion, his opinions, his standards, his ethics? He is as impalpable as one of his own ghosts. He had no proper and nominative self. He was more Man than a man. He believed in nothing and accepted all things. Falstaff has his place in the eternal order no less than Hamlet. Timon was a mood, Macbeth an opinion, and Prospero a reverie. Scepticism disbelieves in any one thing, but holds to an eternal necessity. And the great dramatic critic will approach his subject imbued with this spirit.
D’Annunzio, Sudermann, and Rostand are three contemporaneous playwrights who bear slight relation to one another. Because of this vey diversity, this total unlikeness in their manner and matter, there can be no comparison instituted. There is room for all three. Each is great in his own sphere. D’Annunzio, the psychologist of the abnormal mood and poet of the tumbling wood; Sudermann, introspective, brooding on the human dissonance, trying to draw the talons of the social vulture from the quivering flesh of womankind; Rostand, evangel of the new Romanticism that seeks to cleanse the storm-tossed human in the lustral waters of its healing art—are all modelled after their kind, and what they lack of perfection is what they lack of capacity for it. Opinion cannot add to or subtract from their genius.
Deductive criticism is the art of “butting in.” It reposes upon the playwright standards of taste and methods of workmanship which he utterly rejects. It believes truth to be imbedded in an opinion, a cult, a mode of thinking, a system. It lays down the rule that all men should stand five feet ten in their stocking feet and the man who doesn’t come up to the mark is not one of the elect. When the deductive critic is not frozen and ice-bound in fanatical adherence to one idea or one kind of play or one playwright, he is successively attached to various models, and his enthusiasms will run from Frank Harvey to Maeterlinck. At a certain period in his life “The Wages of Sin” will be the absolute standard by which he will judge all plays. Later in the course of his mental pirouetting he will take up “The Sign of the Cross,” and declare that when the stage does not buttress the pulpit it must be shunned. In time he sloughs off the “Sign of the Cross” stage of his development and comes out a flat-footed Belasco and De Mille disciple. The social drama is the thing after all. But the flat insipidities of the drawing-room drama soon wear on him, and he goes in for symbolism, lets his hair grow long, talks leit-motiv and declares “Pelléas and Mélisande” is the greatest play of the age. Being now over seven, he reads Ibsen and Sudermann. His goal is in sight. He becomes the world-shattering revolutionist, and goes around bellowing for “the sun.”
This sort of thing is bad enough in all conscience. But what shall we say of the third class of critic—the man who sets himself up as a moral censor, and after seeing all the sex plays to surfeiting advises the public to stay away from them and instead go to see “Kit Carson,” and “Cumberland, ’61”?
Who was it defined Mrs. Grundy as a moral code tempered by a mental vacuum? Hammerschlacht?
Notes
Summarized versions of this essay have appeared with various headings in other publications.
Three Kinds of Dramatic Criticism
Public Opinion
June 23, 1904, Vol. 36, p. 785-786
The Impersonal, the Egotistical, and the Atavistical—Benjamin De Casseres in the July Metropolitan Magazine, New York
Dramatic criticism is of three kinds: There is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he sees; there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he knows, and there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what it shouldn’t see or know. The first is impersonal; the second is egotistical; the third is atavistical. The first will tell you, for instance, what D’Annunzio says; the second will tell you what he ought to have said, and the third will tell you that he shouldn’t be allowed to say at all. The method of the first is inductive; the method of the second is deductive; the method of the third is assinine. The impersonal critic has brains, the personal critic has taste, and the eternally moral critic has billingsgate.
The ideal play-reviewer follows the idea of the play before him; instead of superposing himself on the play, he drifts with it, and follows the mind of the playwright in its endless windings and gropings. Creator and critic blend, for both are aiming at the same thing; to see and record. The playwright has an idea and builds a play around it. The critic perceives the idea and records the virtues and defects of the workmanship. Morality and immorality are two words that vex the ear of time and fill the eyes with dust. Codes and cobwebs! Systems and slush! The bogey man has invaded the playwright’s realm and has frightened all but a few—a very, very few—of our dramatic reviewers. From the standpoint of impersonal criticism, there are no good or bad plays in the sense that the words good and bad are generally used. There is good or bad art; there is good or bad acting. A thing is good in so far as it fulfils the purpose for which it was designed; a thing—or play—is bad in so far as it falls short of its object. The Œdipus is a great play because the Sophoclean idea of destiny is worked out as it has never been done since; the fact that Œdipus has to marry his mother in order to realize the idea is purely incidental and of slight moment. “The Christian” is a bad play because it shows us nothing of life, is incoherent, psychologically absurd, and should never be seen without first consulting the advance agent’s exposition of Mr. Caine’s purpose.
Scepticism and objectivity—What do I know? and what do I see?—these are the only mental attitudes compatible with the highest development of the critical faculty. Shakespeare evolved Hamlet and Iago, Richard III and Cordelia with equal sympathy. The greatest artists of all time was the arch-sceptic of all time. Who tells us Shakespeare’s philosophy, his religion, his opinions, his standards, his ethics? He is as impalpable as one of his own ghosts. He had no proper and nominative self. He was more man than a man. He believed in nothing and accepted all things. Falstaff has his place in the eternal order no less than Hamlet. Timon was a mood, Macbeth an opinion, and Prospero a reverie. Scepticism disbelieves in any one thing, but holds to an eternal necessity. And the great dramatic critic will approach his subject imbued with this spirit. D’Annunzio, Sudermann, and Rostand are three contemporaneous playwrights who bear slight relation to one another. Because of this vey diversity, this total unlikeness in their manner and matter, there can be no comparison instituted. D’Annunzio, the psychologist of the abnormal mood and poet of the tumbling wood; Sudermann, introspective, brooding on the human dissonance; Rostand, evangel of the new romanticism—are all modeled after their kind, and what they lack of perfection is what they lack of capacity for it.
Deductive criticism is the art of “butting in.” It reposes upon the playwright standards of taste and methods of workmanship which he utterly rejects. It believes truth to be imbedded in an opinion, a cult, a mode of thinking, a system. It lays down the rule that all men should stand five feet ten in their stocking feet and the man who doesn’t come up to the mark is not one of the elect. When the deductive critic is not frozen and ice-bound in fanatical adherence to one idea or one kind of play or one playwright, he is successively attached to various models, and his enthusiasms will run from Frank Harvey to Maeterlinck. This sort of thing is bad enough in all conscience. But what shall we say of the third class of critic—the man who sets himself up as a moral censor, and after seeing all the sex plays to surfeiting advises the public to stay away from them and instead go to see “Kit Carson,” and “Cumberland, ’61”? Who was it defined Mrs. Grundy as a moral code tempered by a mental vacuum?
Three Phases of Dramatic Criticism
The Literary Digest
July 30, 1904, Vol. XXIX No. 5, 132-133
Three Phases of Dramatic Criticism.—Mr. Benjamin de Casseres classifies dramatic criticism under three heads. Of the critics representing these different phases of criticism he says: “There is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he sees; there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he knows; and there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what it shouldn’t see or know. Carrying his definition further, eh writes (The Metropolitan Magazine, July):
“The first is impersonal; the second is egotistical; the third is atavistical. The first will tell you, for instance, what D’Annunzio says; the second will tell you what he ought to have said, and the third will tell you that he shouldn’t be allowed to say at all. The method of the first is inductive; the method of the second is deductive; the method of the third is asinine. The impersonal critic has brains, the personal critic has taste, and the eternally moral critic has billingsgate.”
The ideal critic, according to this writer, belongs to the first-mentioned class. On this point we read:
“The greatest art is that which conceals its art, and the greatest critic is he who is not properly a critic. The impersonal play reviewer does not—can not—judge a play by his own standard, for [133] the simple reason that he has no standard; he has curiosity. Standards are intellectualized prejudices. The emotions are at war with the critical faculty, and the art of seeing life clearly is the art of etherizing the prejudices in the alembic brain-cells. The perfect recorder of things seen must denude himself of personality. He must not only see into life, but see around it. He must quit the shallows of the I and get out into the mental open. To be impersonal is to be universal, and to be universal is to have the life of the race—to be a cheerful Man Friday to the adventurous buccaneers of art.”
Types of Dramatic Critics
St. Louis Republic
June 25, 1904, p. 6
(unattributed)
Dramatic criticism is of three kinds: There is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he sees; there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what he knows, and there is the critic who goes to the theater to tell the public what it shouldn’t see or know. The first is impersonal; the second is egotistical; the third is atavistical. The first will tell you, for instance, what D’Annunzio says; the second will tell you what he ought to have said, and the third will tell you that he shouldn’t be allowed to say at all. The method of the first is inductive; the method of the second is deductive; the method of the third is asinine. The impersonal critic has brains, the personal critic has taste and the eternally moral critic has billingsgate.