598
PARTISAN REVIEW
seldom out of Mr. Peacock's mind, of the distinction between Drama
and Theater.
In our time the argument for Theater against Drama (or Literature
or Poetry) has usually been an argument for philistinism against art.
In America it is an argument that has taken schools and departments of
drama by storm with the result that the noncommercial theater, estab–
lished a generation ago largely by artistic people, has gone to pieces.
Those who regret all this tend to be tricked by their opponents into
arguing for Drama (or Literature or Poetry) against Theater as such,
instead of against vulgar theatricality. Mr. Peacock is not
completely
tricked in this way. He realizes that plays which are "not theater" to the
philistines may yet be superb theater to other people. He contributes
the best essay to date on Eliot as a dramatist-that is, as one writing
for the specific conditions of a theater. Yet Mr. Peacock's commitment
on the antiphilistine side does seem to make him lean to the nontheatrical
(as not long ago, perhaps, it led Mr. Francis Fergusson to overrate
Joyce's
Exiles).
The pages on Henry James as a dramatic
novelist
read
like a sigh of relief after the pages on the problems of the playwright.
One feels that Mr. Peacock sympathizes with James's cry: "I
may
be
made for the Drama (God only knows!) but I am not made for the
theater!" He is willing to dwell on plays in which, as he puts it, "the
poet flies too much in the face of the spoken form." Goethe's
Tasso
and
I phigenie
he calls "royal dispensations to the theater . . . scarcely its
own fruits," and one wonders if this phrase does not also apply to some
of the plays of Grillparzer and Hebbel, Yeats and Hofmannsthal. Mr.
Peacock did well to bring these great artists back into dramatic criticism,
but he does not push his analysis far enough. He praises Grillparzer and
debunks Hebbel with a brilliance that, in its extreme brevity, is merely
tantalizing. He has no comment to make on Yeats' chronic fear of
theatrical conditions. His otherwise admirable introduction to Hofmanns–
thal's theater-so much more to the point than the German commentar–
ies-is too brief for a single mention of such major works as
Oedipus und
die Sphinx
or
Der Turm.
Nonetheless, though the thesis of
The Poet in the Theatre
is modish
rather than true, though the book is less a book than a sheaf of well–
written notes, I must end with congratulations. Mr. Peacock is a profes–
sor, and professors are doing more harm to the theater than anyone else
not actually paid to do so. He is a professor of German, and professors
of German-it is axiomatic-are not interested in literature. Yet he has
written one of the few thoughtful books, one of the few books on an
adult level, about the problem of literature and the theater. It should
be given to all young enthusiasts before the drama schools get them.
ERIC BENTLEY
