412
PARTISAN REVIEW
tardiness is doubly unfortunate in an art of the present moment like the
theater, we cannot be surprised at it. Surprise should rather be re–
served for the fact that there is genius in the offing at all.
If
the history
of economics goes slump: boom, slump: boom, the history of play–
writing, one is tempted to say, goes slump slump slump. The dramatic
critic is not called upon to explain why at any given moment there are
no great playwrights. Empirical reasoning would more probably lead
him
to argue that there could never be a great playwright, just as
empirical reasoning would lead a moralist to argue that there could
never be a saint. You are not surprised to find money changers in the
temple; the surprising sight is Christ with a whip. You are amazed at
Shakespeare and Ibsen; Thomas Dekker and Henry Arthur Jones you
take for granted.
However--or rather, consequently-it is much more with the
Dekkers and Joneses that we must be concerned. They, if anyone, are
our regular standbys; their presence is not just an occasional blessing,
it is something we require; it belongs to the minimum demands of
theater. In a world of 2,000,000,000 inhabitants, it is fair to assume that
there are always thousands of them. This means that
if
we can justly
complain of a dearth of plays, we are not so much protesting that very
little genius exists as implying that talent, though it exists, is being
deflected into other channels. The Dekkers and Joneses exist but are
not writing plays.
So much the better for them. It is all too likely that the artistic im–
pulse-the dramatic impulse particularly---can best find satisfaction to–
day outside the arts altogether. There is the drama of science; and
even the drama of politics need not be contemptible. Among our young
people I find the artistic temperament, characterized by moral sensi–
bility, vital energy, and emotional flexibility, in undergraduates who will
be
chemists, lawyers, and doctors, more than in graduate students who
will be professionally preoccupied with the arts. Those in whom the
need for literary expression is irrepressible write fiction or poetry, in
either of which modes they can work unbullied by boobs, and in one
of which they might even make a living. (Sometimes I think all our
poetic and fictional talent today is dramatic talent scared away by the
mediocrity of the theater. Certainly, if Mr. Hemingway or Robert Penn
Warren could devote ten years to theatrical work they could write even
the best of our playwrights off the stage.)
Nor can anyone pretend that TV and the movies attract only the
less gifted. The time has gone by, if it ever existed, when the average
fIlm
is
inferior to the average play. Indeed certain stage forms have
