Appraising the Arts

An Ungentle Inquiry Into Some of the First Necessities of the Practice of Criticism

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

NO critic can discuss the state of contemporary critics and escape an accusation that he has fouled his nest-egg. It is considered treachery, scab ethics, bad business altogether. I remember how a certain celebrated play reviewer was almost hurled out of a theatre lobby by a loyally horrified showman, only for having indulged in an exposure of the shortcomings of some fellow critics. That was a generous gesture of the showman's but it was absurd. The cognoscenti should keep open court and not closed shop.

This inquiry will concern only newspaper criticism. There are many—not all of them hurt and enraged victims of the press, either— who claim that there is no such thing as newspaper criticism; that the review' flung over the typewriter bars in that celebrative half-hour when the play is done or the last note of the recital struck has no human chance to be anything but a more or less happy report. And reports are not criticisms. But for purposes of a kindly debate, take it for granted that criticisms are possible in the most hurried newspapers. Then realize the circulation of those newspapers, and the consequent influence the opinions of their critics can exert.

I mean the critics of the several arts, of the drama, music, the films, painting. I put the last of these last because they are exceptional in several particulars. They need not work at a mill-race speed. They are seldom trick writers. They seem generally—even to those who know more than they do about their subject—to know a great deal. They are—may I repeat?—exceptional.

THE motion pictures offer surely the finest X yeoman service any critic can give. The things, wise or foolish, truly contributive or merely distracting, which have been written about music, art, literature, the drama, for the last twenty centuries, are still unwritten about the movies. The chance of writing them has appealed to too few. The traffic of covering the weekly pictures in the biggest city moviehouses has been left to the semaphores of a wholly mechanical system of praising and swanking, hurrahing and ha-ha-ing, with scarcely a hint that Mother Earth is in the birth-throes of a new art and needs expert mid wiling.

Of any critic of any art, omniscience is not even to be suspected. Of a newspaper critic, whose life of daily pieces prohibits him one quarter the amount of studying he may wish he had done before he ever began, deep knowledge of his own subject—of even that one subject—will perhaps be too much to ask. But why impose upon any art (especially upon an art which is still lonely for the tenets and advices of knowing and helpful enthusiasts) the sick prattle of persons who have no true, abiding interest in it?

You will often hear book reviewers satirized as unpublished poets, music critics explained as voiceless singers or hangdog composers. These biographies are meant for obloquy, but there are compliments wrapped up in them, just the same. For your book reviewer has, at any rate, whetted his grouch on the grindstone of letters, your music critic has loved and not altogether lost his music. What such compliment can you conjure up for the average motion picture critic? Few of them, if any, have even had the satisfaction of dismissal from a film studio. Perhaps the next generation of them will lie made up of discarded movie stars and dissipated scenario-writers, who will at least retain a grim, protective fondness for their subject.

A FEW months ago 1 had the honour of an introduction to a bright young man who bad just been engaged to review the motion pictures for one of the country's largest newspapers. I had the bad taste to ask him an impulsive and most natural question:

"Where do you hail from?"

"Oh, been around," he replied, mistaking the affability of my interest. He glared all the more at the next remark with which I strove to keep the conversation gentle:

"Have you seen many movies?"

"Five in my whole life."

"Why, don't you like them?"

"God, no, I despise them."

Mind you, I often agree with the young man, and, for this and that reason known to reviewers of the spoken drama, happen to applaud his opinion of the movies. That is a prejudice I am entitled to, both privately and professionally. But I went away wondering what demon of a circumstance had driven this perfectly nice young person to make a profession of criticising an art he despised. And what dearth of more congenial material could have induced the managing editor who hired him not to inquire whether this future commentator was the least bit interested in his subject.

You see, I am not insisting for an instant that he shall have seen five hundred pictures instead of five. I am simply wistful over his disgust with the five. You might just as well have taken the student who could never go hack to medical school after the disgust of his first autopsy and told him he was then and there a full-fledged surgeon.

It may be that a critic can grow wise only at the expense of the art he criticizes. But it should not have to bargain for his first enthusiasms, too. Quite possibly my nice young man will come in time to see good in the films, to hold out hopes for their ennobling, and even to dictate for their betterment. But he will be overcoming his native repugnance after how many months of smart remarks and contemptuous ignorance? The public prints are no place in which to educate one's self.

Enthusiasm for his subject would be, you might imagine, a characteristic so expected of a critic that it needs no mention. On the contrary, one New York newspaper finds it suitable to advertise its dramatic critic as a singular lover of the theatre—as so indefatigable a devotee that he will attend performances even when he does not have to. It may be that his case is as rare as that advertisement implies, and that the rest of us, after so and so many years of first-nights, can no longer thrill to the fact of a new play. If that is true, then the rest of us deserve expulsion from the theatre. We are then only in its way.

It was the privileged fate of the late James Huneker to write daily about the drama for a year and a half. At the end of that time, he quit. He had helped in the introduction to America of Ibsen, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann— and then, fearful of turning into a routine-er, he quit. He went back to arts he loved the more-—and a more honest move no man has ever made.

Love of an art does not entail a whooping in praise of every second-rate, simply passable example of it. On the contrary, the ballyhoo type of critic is bound to be as much a nuisance as a nonentity. The hack who praises everything is merely piling Pelion on asininily, and would do his topic a gracious benefit by retiring into the manufacture of advertising slogans and Christmas card jingles.

In the beginning of a career as critic—and a career of a sort it can be made—it is right and wholesome that enthusiasms should carry one up to a crest of writing. The sheer pleasure of daily attendance on an art of which one is proud, on which one has pitched his faith, merits expression. An old music critic was giving his own history—and that of every music critic worth his Attic salt: "For the first year everything is wonderful. For the next five years everything is terrible. For the thirty years thereafter everything is—well, what is really is!"

BUT that year of first flush . . . how can it be possible to the man who misses the exhilaration of coming out to the bout well armed with knowledge, with fresh authority and genuine care for the game? 1 hesitate to give this complaint an autobiographical twist, but I could tell of a well-meaning young aspirant who became a music critic before he could read a score, spot a false note or define an arpeggio. The first two years of his life as an arbiter of the performances of world-famous artists he spent all his spare time—and half his salary, loo—in shamefaced and anonymous attendance at music schools, trying to justify the impertinence of his position. Meanwhile, he wrote all around the subject of music, quite as humbly and literarily as he could, and never on it. How, in all conscience, could he?

He had, as I remember him, a layman's love of music. That was a foolish insufficiency. He needed a musician's love of it—not a piano-teacher's nor a cellist's, but a truly musicianly aesthete's. His ignorance had long since ceased to be blissful to him. He even, for the sake of disciplining his half-cockedness, studied the clarinet, suffered a hideous home life and blew almost every hair out of his head. At the end of nine years, having lived with music night and day, he probably began to know it. But by then, too, lie knew how little he knew, and that was that.

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The intelligent amateur is a safe member of any critical discussion, I suppose. Safe, that is, to the newspaper which sponsors him. His amateur standing is so usually assuring of lightness of opinion, readableness, a general appeal. The specialist carries a chip on his eyeglasses, and the expert is under suspicion, before he utters a word, of being a bore. The voice of authority, even when it is phrasing witticisms, is taken for the voice of the terribly jocular schoolmaster. When vast knowledge knocks of the door, humanity, so it appears. makes a bee-line for the window.

So let's consign the dream of great and contributive critics to the millennium—to a time such sections of the newspaper will he read for something beside amusement. But leave 11s, then, reliance on this one prime requisite: that a critic shall have proved his love for, his interest in, the art he professes to criticize. Let 11s, by the grace of the public and the taste of the editors-in-chief, have more plausible and helpful interpreters of the films than nice young gentlemen who have witnessed six movies.

For the arts are ever young, and ever yearning for strong adorers. Love 'em—and only then may you damn 'em.