The Critic And the Drama

an equal effect read as acted may be true or not as you choose, but so too a fine painting may produce an equal effect beheld in one's library as in the Uffizi. Art thrives?art leads to art?on sympathy and a measure of general understanding. Otherwise, of what use criticism? To divorce the theatre from a consideration of drama as an art, to contend, as it has been contended from Aristotle's day to Corneille's, and from Dryden's and Lamb's to our own, that "the more lasting and noble design" of drama rests in a reading rather than a seeing, may be, strictly, a logical aesthetic manoeuvre, but equally a logical aesthetic manoeuvre would be a divorcement of canvas from painting as an art. The theatre is the canvas of drama. The printed drama is like a bubbling and sunlit spring, encountered only by wanderers into the hills and awaiting the bottling process of the theatre to carry its tonic waters far and wide among an expectant and emotionally ill people. The criticism that nominates itself to hold drama and the theatre as things apart is a criticism which, for all its probable integrity and reason, suffers from an excessive aristocracy, like a duchess in a play by Mr. Sydney Grundy. Its aesthetic nose is elevated to such a degree that it may no longer serve as a practical organ of earthly smell, but merely as a quasi-wax feature to round out the symmetry of the face. It is criticism in a stiff corset, erect, immobile, lordly?like the Prussian lieutenant of yesterda... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.