Criticism!

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 928, 22 March 1930, Page 25

Criticism!

Propaganda for Art SHOULD BE USED TEMPERATELY Although criticism is generally assumed to be fault-finding and censure, it is in a broader sense propaganda for the arts. It recognises, by its very existence, the value of the art criticised, and the logical assumption is that those who criticise are votaries of the art they are judging, and want to see it in sound artistic health, uncontaminated by* the charlatans, says a New York writer. The noble art of praising is their strongest weapon. It should be used temperately; for most encounters the flat of the sword is sufficient. But •when the time is ripe, the noble art of praising stirs the battalions on both sides.

What the physicists would call the time-lag keeps the drama two years behind literature. Wi have yet a year or two of gentlemanly torpor before the drama begins to break up as literature is doing. But one of the distinctions between literature and drama is that no matters of intellectual principle are involved except as minor commentaries upon the play of the moment. In the theatre you must take what you can get from any quarter. Consider how vain it would be to search for any philosophical principle or intellectual trend in the most interesting plays of the last decade: "The, First Year,’* "Six Characters in Search of an Author,” "What Price Glory/’ "'The Show-Off,” "The Adding Machine,” "Young Woodley/* “Processional,” "The Dybbuk,” "The Bast of Mrs. Cheyney/’ "Broadway/* "Porgy/* "Escape,” "In Abraham’s Bosom,” “The Plough and the Stars,” "Paris Bound,” "Saturday’s Children/* "The Royal Family/* “Strange Interlude/* "Street Scene,’* "Journey’s End.” Whenever the merry-go-round of the theatre whirls around an interesting play, every constant theatregoer wants to see it at once. His enjoyment is not much tempered nor liis judgment impaired by privately believing that the universe is dual or plural or that man is the master of the machine. Certainly he does not expect the drama to proceed in a logical ■direction. If a critic started applying the yardstick of philosophy to the regular fare of the theatre, he w'ould soon find himself with a stick but no play. After a time even a critic sees through a windmill.

Not that dramatic criticism has been without its dogmatists. Jonson and Dryden laid down rules. Dr. Johnson heaped up a very mountain range of rules that yanked Shakespeare this way and that until, after a fashion, he fitted; that condemned imagination ("a licentious and vagrant faculty”) because it burst the neat enclosures of regularity, and that looked upon clowning with ponderous suspicion. As soon as Brunetiere laid dow'ii a few rules, William Archer disputed them; and no sooner had he disputed them than Henry Arthur Jones rose to dispute his disputations. You have no sooner got a few rules in good order than a butcher’s son or an upholsterer’s son comes in from the provinces and proceeds to entertain the world out of hand. Although every one, including Jonson, agreed that Jonson knew more about the art of drama than Shakespeare, his university knowledge was no match for the intuition of genius. The scholars of his own university recognised that. One of them said as much in "The Scourge”: "Few of the university pen plays well; they smell too much of that writer, Ovid, and that writer. Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Juppiter. Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye, and Ben Jonson, too.” After the fray was over, Jonson was man enough to admit it. Bland as Swinburne’s remark may seem to me, it contains as reasonable a principle for criticism as any. "The noble art of praising” is the art of greatest practical use; and the regrets that pursue a critic through life are not of the bad plays he neglected to damn, but of the good plays that, through some astigmatism or excess of caution, he failed to praise. In all departments of life the yea-sayers are *he interesting fellows. Archer is remembered because he championed Ibsen. Now that Huneker is dead, it may be time for the Gradgrinds to tally up his sins, to dwell upon his weakness for European dissenters, his lack of discrimination among idols and his tempestuous facility for making them all sound alike in his prose, so that Ibsen was interchangeable with Whitman as a personality. • In view of the size of his canvas aad the vividness of his pigments, the wonder was that he made no greater mistakes. Even if he did make errors, there are those who can forgive him. What an interesting fellow he was! How many melomaniacs, iconoclasts, supermen, ivory apes, unicorns and steeplejacks —to use the coloured words he loved —might have been neglected if Huneker had not pitched those eruptive sentences into the air!