George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken in 1947. Photo: Irving Penn.
I’ve had the opportunity to mention both George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) and H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) in a few posts here lately, and it is perhaps worth remembering just how much these two men contributed to the American stage at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nathan’s championship of both Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill helped clear the stage for the discovery of these two dramatists by a wider public, and it is probably only dimly remembered that Mencken’s very first book was a volume of drama criticism — the first American book about the plays of George Bernard Shaw, published in 1905. It is still a vigorous and entertaining read.
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” they say. (At least, the French ones do.) Thanks to Google Books, Mencken’s George Bernard Shaw: His Plays and several volumes of Nathan’s criticism are now available to scholar and layman alike, after mouldering for years in the stacks of university libraries, and it is a delight, if that’s the word, to find that better men and women have been there before us in considering the state of drama criticism in America. Nathan’s 1922 book The Critic and the Drama remains particularly timely. On the assessment of intent in drama criticism? Nathan, pages 11-12:
To the Goethe-Carlyle doctrine that the critic’s duty lies alone in discerning the artist’s aim, his point of view and, finally, his execution of the task before him, it is easy enough to subscribe, but certainly this is not a “theory” of criticism so much as it is a foundation for a theory. To advance it as a theory, fullgrown, full-fledged and flapping, as it has been advanced by the Italian Croce and his admirers, is to publish the preface to a book without the book itself. Accepted as a theory complete in itself, it fails by virtue of its several undeveloped intrinsic problems, chief among which is its neglect to consider the undeniable fact that, though each work of art is indubitably an entity and so to be considered, there is yet in creative art what may be termed an aesthetic genealogy that bears heavily upon comprehensive criticism and that renders the artist’s aim, his point of view and his execution of the task before him susceptible to a criticism predicated in a measure upon the work of the sound artist who has just preceded him.
The Goethe-Carlyle hypothesis is a little too liberal. It calls for qualifications. It gives the artist too much ground, and the critic too little. To discern the artist’s aim, to discern the artist’s point of view, are phrases that require an amount of plumbing, and not a few foot-notes. It is entirely possible, for example, that the immediate point of view of an artist be faulty, yet the execution of his immediate task exceedingly fine. If carefully planned triumph in art is an entity, so also may be undesigned triumph. I do not say that any such latter phenomenon is usual, but it is conceivable, and hence may be employed as a test of the critical hypothesis in point. Unschooled, without aim or point of view in the sense of this hypothesis, Schumann’s compositions at the age of eleven for chorus and orchestra offer the quasi-theory some resistance. The question of the comparative merit of these compositions and the artist’s subsequent work may not strictly be brought into the argument, since the point at issue is merely a theory and since theory is properly to be tested by theory.
Intent and achievement are not necessarily twins. I have always perversely thought it likely that there is often a greater degree of accident in fine art than one is permitted to believe. The aim and point of view of a bad artist are often admirable; the execution of a fine artist may sometimes be founded upon a point of view that is, from an apparently sound critical estimate, at striking odds with it. …
On drama criticism in America generally:
The American mania for being on the popular side has wrapped its tentacles around the American criticism of the theatre. The American critic, either because his job depends upon it or because he appreciates that kudos in this country, as in no other, is a gift of the mob, sedulously plays safe. A sheep, he seeks the comfortable support of other sheep. It means freedom from alarums, a guaranteed pay envelope at the end of the week, dignity in the eyes of the community, an eventual election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and, when he reaches three score years and ten and his trousers have become thin in the seat, a benefit in the Century Theatre with a bill made up of all the eminent soft-shoe dancers and fat tragediennes upon whom he has lavished praise. This, in America, is the respected critic. If we had among us today a Shaw, or a Walkley, or a Boissard, or a Bahr, or a Julius Bab, he would be regarded as not quite nice. Certainly the Drama League would not invite him to appear before it. … Certainly, if his writings got into the paid prints at all, there would be a discreet editor’s note at the top to the effect that “the publication of an article does not necessarily imply that it represents the ideas of this publication or of its editors.”
Not that Nathan doesn’t have it in for critics of all stripes:
Of all the arts and half-arts — perhaps even above that of acting — is the art of criticism founded most greatly upon vanity. All criticism is, at bottom, an effort on the part of its practitioner to show off himself and his art at the expense of the artist and the art which he criticizes. The heavy modesty practised by certain critics is but a recognition of, and self-conscious attempt to diminish, the fundamental and ineradicable vainglory of criticism. The great critics are those who, recognizing the intrinsic, permanent and indeclinable egotism of the critical art, make no senseless effort to conceal it. The absurd critics are those who attempt to conceal it and, in the attempt, make their art and themselves doubly absurd.
Google Books also has a version of Nathan’s earlier The Popular Theatre from 1918.