Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents

>4/ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027048382 MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVII COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Ptdlisher, August, 1917 s PBINTED IN THB UKTTED STATES OT AMF.EICA An After-Piece of More or Less Critical Confidences and Memoirs Touching Lightly Upon the Various Some- things Which Go to Consti- tute What is Called the American Theatre CONTENTS The Philosophy of Philistia (^Salutatory) ii I The Hawkshavian Drama. 23 II The American Music Show. 43 III The Commercial Theatrical Misman- AGER. 53 IV Legend's End. 66 V The Follies of 1917, B. C. 86 VI Slapsticks and Rosemary. 94 VII Pantaloons A-Posture. 108 VIII The Black Art. 115 IX The Case for Bad Manners. 122 X The Vaudevilles. 133 XI A Few Pages of Destructive Dramatic Criticism. 140 XII Why Schmidt Left Home. 155 XIII The Dramatic Critic and the Undramatic Theatre. 170 XIV America's Most Intellectual Actress. 183 XV Myths of Momus. 205 XVI Realismus. 211 XVII Polish Versus Shine. 220 XVIII The Cut-Rate Mind and the Premium Seat. 228 XIX Mists of Delusion. 239 XX Curtain-Raisers and Hair-Raisers. 262 Contents XXI The Case of Mr. Winthrop Ames. 278 XXII A Clinical Report. 282 XXIII Audiences, Acting and Some Other Farces. 293 Stupidity as a Fine Art {Valedictory) 303 "The ideal critic is pictured by the crowd, now as a milestone 'standing upon the antique ivays,' now as a finger-post on the 'high priori' road. I have taken the less stately view of him as a vagabond, who accepts his impressions as they come, and changes his moods with his horizons. Hence, like other vagrom men, I have had an instinctive repugnance for the meth- ods of the Bench." —Arthur Bingham Walkley, mdcccxcii MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS THE PHILOSOPHY OF PHILISTIA {Salutatory) NOTHING is so essentially undramatic as clear thinking. Various attempts to de- vise serious drama out of the thoughtful figures of history — out, even, of reflective figures of the playwright's fancy — have for the most part rolled the stone of Sisyphus. A play with John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer or Renan for its central role would last out probably one evening in the theatre. The meditative man, when employed for purposes of the playhouse, must, if he would be used at all, be made the figure of farce in nubibus, as with Napoleon in " Sans Gene " and " The Man of Destiny," or the figure of cheap gilt- furniture comedy, as with Disraeli in the play of Louis N. Parker. For the needs of the stage, the thinker must be operated upon, his heart placed in his head, his mind placed in his bosom. It is, indeed, the first rule of the acting stage that the hero must not think out the drama to its conclusion but that, per 11 12 Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents contra, the drama must think out the hero to his conclusion. In plainer phrase, the central figure of a play must be influenced not from within, but from with- out. If, for example, one were to write a play with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche as the hero, the drama would needs be generated and carried on to its cli- macteric consummation not by that gentleman's energetic mind and philosophies, but rather by the objection to that energetic mind and philosophies on the part of the leading lady. There can be no sub- stantial thought in the drama of the stage. Such drama is created rather out of a contradiction and negation of thought: by proving either that the thought in point, while sound up to eleven o'clock, is then and finally impracticable if not, indeed, ridiculous (as in the instance of Mr. Shaw's Tan- ner) or that, while the thought may have been quite rational around quarter after ten o'clock in Act II, it had not yet at that time realized that its wife was in a family way or that its loved one was dying of tuberculosis, and so witnessed its own in- trinsic vacuity. Drama in its entirety consists in the surrender of accurate and judicious thinking to emotionalism: either to the emotions of its central figure or to the emotions of its second figure (symbolic of the mob emotion) operating upon that central figure and forcing him, breathless and beaten, to the wall. For the partial victory of an Undershaft or a Trigorin, The Philosophy of Philistia 13 there are the thousand routs of the Johannes Vocke- rats and Gabriel SchilUngs. The clock strikes eleven and the Jules Lemaitres of " Revoltee " and "L'Age Difficile," the Brieuxs of "La Foi," the Sudermanns of " Der Sturmgeselle Sokrates," an- aesthetize their minds and deck their hearts with daisies. But, here I wander probably somewhat afield — afield from the popular stage. The logic of the popular stage is a logic " not of facts, but of sensations and sentiments." When Hamlet and lago, when Brand and Orgon spake truth or made to think, such thoughts were kept apart from the direct action of the drama and from the ears of such other characters as might interpose objection to them, in soliloquies and asides. The thoughts so spoken were mere pourboires tossed by dramatist to audience, mere refractory golden pen- nies — the literary man triumphing momentarily over the stage merchant. The imperturbable rai- sonneurs of such drama as Georg Hirschfeld's "At Home," Hartleben's " Education for Marriage," " Andreyev's " Savva," Wedekind's " Pandora's Box " — even such drama as Galsworthy's " Eldest Son or the Howard-Mizner "Only Law" (a play greatly underrated) — are not for the popular stalls. The heart must do the thinking in the mob drama. The mind of the stage protagonist must never be more alert, more deeply informed, more practised, than the mind of the average man who pays his two 14 Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents dollars for a chair in the auditorium. And I beg of my dear reader that he remember this when, upon concluding these remarks, he will feel himself moved to dispatch me a saucy letter on the dubiety of my designation of certain stage heroes as think- ers. I use the word, of course, but comparatively: I am charitable, for argument's sake, to the para- dox. Marivaux observed that he did not believe the playwright should be prohibited from thinking. The playwright, true enough, may not be prohibited from thinking — up to his last act; but woe to him, popularly speaking, if he keep his reason cool and clear to final falling curtain. I here allude, of course, to the maker of what the public knows as serious drama, that is to say drama, good or bad, purged of humour. This is why present day playwrights possessed of even half-way valid ideas seek to protect their box office revenues by giving their ideas a farcical garb — and even so, as witness the instance of Brieux and " Les Hannetons " (the idea of which is a haul from Flaubert) , frequently in the Anglo-Saxon theatre fail. Such playwrights ap- preciate that it is essential, if they would play with ideas in the theatre, first to impress the audience (by pretending the play is farce) with the notion that the ideas are ridiculous, thus gaining the audience's willingness to listen to opinions which the audience has not heard before, and thus also flattering the audience's ignorance by assuring it that the ideas 5 The Philosophy of Philts tia 1 are mere nonsense and with no foundation in philosophy or fact. This, as well known, is the method of Shaw. George Birmingham, in his excellent " John Regan," was less successful than his Irish colleague in captivating the yokelry for the reason that he permitted his farce to be slightly too logical atid so raised the yokelry's suspicions that, after all, there might be a grain of truth in his central idea. The same idea was used," several years before Bir- mingham employed it, in a farce manner more sus- ceptible of box-office hospitality by a Spanish dramatist. In order to avoid all danger of failure — even in more practised Berlin — Schmidt, having a good idea, wrote two entirely different endings to one of his farces and experimented publicly with both in order to determine which was the less in accord with dispassionate logic and hence more likely to charm trans-Channel and trans-Atlantic auditoriums were his play to be produced at a distance. When the thoughtful man is lifted onto the illu- minated platform, the cautious playmaker exercises a care sedulously to eliminate from the character all suspicion of the mind that has identified him in history. For the cautious playmaking fellow appreci- ates that " the conception of theatrical art as the ex- ploitation of popular superstition and ignorance, as the thrilling of poor bumpkins with ghosts and blood, exciting them with blows and stabs, duping them with tawdry affectations of rank and rhetoric, thriving parasitically on their moral diseases in- ;: 1 6 Mr. George Jean Nathan Presents stead of purging their souls and refining their senses it to this is the tradition that the theatre finds hard get away from." And so, the playmaker presents Cromwell (Charles Cartwright's " Colonel Crom- well") in terms of an ancestral Chauncey Olcott, Dante (Sardou's) in terms of a paleo-Laurence Hope, and Jesus Christ ("Ben Hur") as a spot- light.

Load more