Critics—Good and Bad

Showing That the Daily Stint, and the Personal Pronoun, Are Ruining Criticism in America

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

WILLIAM JAMES once said that much has been written about prayer, but few can explain why men and women pray—which is simply because they cannot help it. Much, probably too much, has been written about criticism, but few can explain why men and women criticise—which is simply because they cannot help it.

Criticism is an inevitable reaction of the cultivated mind to a work of art. The child or the savage may accept a story as reality, and react to it almost physically. The average reader may accept it as a fiction, but still give it naive belief, and react to it only emotionally. But the cultivated man gives it only so much belief as its truth to life, or its literary skill, entitles it to, and reacts to it not only emotionally but intellectually. He reacts with reflections and reservations. Those reflections and reservations, warmed by his emotional glow, are criticism.

If he is paid to have these reflections they become professional criticism. In such an event he begins to have them all over the place, so much so that he not infrequently becomes an unloved and unlovely person. "It is noteworthy," that excellent and charming dramatic critic, the late A. B. Walkley, once wrote, "that the word 'critic' has never been employed as a term of endearment." That is partly because many people unconsciously resent the air of authority which the professional critic too often assumes (even when he pretends to great humbleness), but still more because the critics themselves are forced, by their professionalism, into comment when they have actually very little to say; when, at any rate, they have felt no emotional glow, few reflections and many reservations. Their reaction to the work of art which is under consideration has been largely negative because it is a poor work of art. They have experienced no intellectual nor emotional excitement in its presence. They are moved to nothing but faultfinding. Under the circumstances, of course, they should keep still, but their profession does not permit them to keep still. Hence the production of endless play reviews and book reviews, appearing almost every day, which reviews are not criticism, which are either fault finding or irrelevant remarks by the critic, banalities, flippancies and even wearying parades of the personal pronoun.

WE may, of course, dismiss at once the oft heard sneer of the painters, actors and writers who say that "The critics are always those who have tried to paint (or act or write) and failed." Painters, actors, writers or musicians are seldom good critics. They are too interested in the technical process, and too narrow in their viewpoint. The critic reacts to the finished product. It isn't his job to teach the craft.

Aristotle settled this matter 2400 years ago, when he said that a pilot, not a carpenter, is the best judge of a rudder, and a guest, not a cook, the best judge of a dinner. The critic is the ideal spectator, or ideal consumer of a work of art, who, by reflecting it through the medium of his personality overcomes the inertia which so many of the human race feel toward art; shows his fellows how that play or picture can stir the emotions and rouse the spirit; and what elements in it are most lively, or significant, or most to be cherished. Your critic, in Arnold's phrase, "learns and propagates the best that has been thought and felt in the world." He is a kind of middleman who distributes the artist's product to the consumer, by showing, in his own person, how delightful can be its effects.

In a rough, simple way, that point is illustrated by the fact that you are more likely to go to a play, or read a book, if a friend whose judgment you trust, recommends it to you with glowing enthusiasm, than if you were to read a scholarly recommendation of it in a review.

It is so eviden* that your friend has had a good time!

HOWEVER, the "cultivated amateur", whom so many have held to be the ideal critic, will hardly do. You and I may rely on him if we know him; or at least be influenced by him. But criticism would not get very far on an amateur basis. There must be critical journals to which all of us can turn, there must be men and women ready to read all the books, see all the plays, in the hope of discovering gold. Moreover, when it comes to putting criticism into print, for many to read, the critic at once becomes a craftsman and an artist. He is just as much an artist as the author or painter about whose work he writes. It is merely his materials which are different. The painter records in paint his impression of a sunset or a portrait or a still life. The critic records in words, his impression of that painting, his emotions before it, the "feel", or effect, of the picture. Few amateurs can do this with sufficient skill to satisfy the needs of cultivated men. It is a task which requires as much craftsmanship as any other work of creation.

Therefore, professional critics are necessary and inevitable.

But the number of professional commentators on the arts and the number of true critics show a strange discrepancy. In America the first are as the sands of the sea. The second would, if gathered in convention, not overcrowd a New York drawing-room. Why is this so?

Why, for example, are so many of the dramatic critics more enamored of a "wisecrack" than of a dramatic masterpiece? Why should the actors and dramatists so constantly feel annoyed by them? Why should the alleged critics of the movies so often be females who burble ecstatically of Rod LaRocque or chronicle the presence of Adolph Zukor in a theatre box, but say so little that is illuminating about the pictures? Why should the commentators on literature for the so-called "intellectual" weeklies write so consistently for the intellectually weak? Why should the reviewers of books be, by turns, ponderous and dull, or toploftical and superior? Why should professional criticism have killed John Keats with a thunderous "This won't do!" or a sneering "You're only a cockney".

Today, Anatole France's definition of criticism as "the adventure of a soul among masterpieces" is generally accepted. The critic, theoretically, no longer sits in judgment and pronounces sentence. (When an actor played Hamlet once in New York because, as he explained it, he wanted a "verdict" on his art, William Winter wrote, very simply—and adequately—"Murder in the first degree".)

Nowadays the critic, theoretically, yields himself to play or book or picture, and then records his sensations. From that record, we gain an idea of what the work is like, what its qualities are. The critic comes to the new work with all his prejudices and preconceptions wiped from his mind, and yields himself to it gladly; the measure of what the work does to him being the measure of its artistic value.

Theoretically. But how many critics, professional or amateur, come to a work of art free of all prejudices and preconceptions? H. L. Mencken reads greatness into Babbitt because of his own prejudices against the Rotarians. His criticism is quite as biased as that of the lady who threw Main Street out of the window, after reading fifty pages of it, because, as she declared, she had to meet too many bores in real life to spend her time in reading about them. How many dramatic critics, prejudiced by the custom of their age, can yield themselves without discomfort to a play in verse? How many critics of music, reared on Mozart and Beethoven, can honestly yield themselves to Antheil in order to discover if there is anything important in his music?

ALL of which, being interpreted, means that the ideal critic is a rare bird, and that, under even the best of conditions, there will always be ten good artists to one good critic; for the more prejudiced the artist is, the more passionately he throws himself into his work. That is good for art, but fatal for criticism.

However, most professional critics do not work under the best of conditions. They work under the worst. They have to write, whether they have been adventuring among masterpieces or only among inanities; they have to invent adventures. That, it seems to me, is the greatest obstacle to true criticism in America today—that, and the fact that so many people are set to the task of commenting on art before their souls are ready for adventures in art, or their knowledge sufficient for intelligent reflection.

Heywood Broun, when a dramatic critic, once called a certain player, "the worst actor in the world", and the actor sued him for libel. Broun, of course, may have been right, though the remark was the type of criticism which killed Keats, and which Broun himself would, in more thoughtful moment, have condemned. Presently he had occasion to review another play in which this actor appeared.

(Continued on page 116)

(Continued from page 77)

His readers, naturally, looked to see what he would say. "Mr.—," he wrote, "was not up to his usual standard." There was a minority of only one on Broadway who did not laugh at this.

Broun, of course, was largely driven to such an expedient because he was reviewing a play and production that didn't deserve any extended comment. Had his soul been moved by a masterpiece, as it was when he first saw The Weavers, he would never have bothered to turn upon a poor, secondrate, struggling actor and rend him in twain, in order to make laughter on the Rialto. His criticism would have been readable, not because of the flippant "cracks" but because of its sincerity, its emotional glow, its depth of reflection.

Consider the vast number of plays which a New York critic is forced to witness and write about in a winter! Most of them are as alike as two peas, and wholly devoid of artistic value. The bored and satiated critics, to be readable, are driven (after seeing these plays) into captious expressions of their ennui, or jabs at the actors, or the exploitation of their own egos. If they could only keep from writing anything and go home, all would be well. But they can't. By some idiotic quirk of the newspaper owner's mind, any play at a Broadway theatre deserves to be "criticised." No critic is going to be dull if he can help it. Dullness is the unpardonable sin in all art, even in criticism. So the poor devil does the best he can in order to be readable, with nothing at all to write about.

Now a few critics can do that, and not be offensive. A. B. Walkley could. So, supremely, could Max Beerbohm. But the gift is not given to most of the children of men. Shaw, to be sure, wrote about many piffling plays for the Saturday Review. But Shaw, most readable of critics, was also one of the poorest. He placed Jones above Wilde, because Jones' ideas were more "serious"—i. e. Jones had some of Shaw's own passion for reform. Shaw used every play as an excuse to preach his reforms of the drama and society. But that is a dangerous precedent to follow, and indicates a temperament at the opposite pole from the sympathetic catholicity of the "ideal spectator." Shaw was a first rate example of why the strikingly original and forceful creative artist so often makes a poor critic.

In almost all cases, significant criticism, which has been of enduring value to any of the arts, has come from men who were not under the pressure of writing whether they had anything to say or not; who wrote nothing when they were bored but wrote long and well when they were stirred to enthusiasm or deep reflection. Above all they strove to be interesting, not by the parade of cleverness or their own personalities, but by the skill and charm with which they rendered back to the reader the beauties they were criticising.