566
PARTISAN REVIEW
essence, the high merit, of stage drama. Again, of all visual effects
in the arts, great acting is perhaps the most immediately compelling:
not holding us, like painting and sculpture, in any trance of mystery
or wonder; but rather in a vise of taut feeling or excitement, a vise
that often owes something to demagoguery as well as adroitness. And
in the same way the theater has its wide nets to spread, its great
powers to exert, for laughter, from low clowning to high comedy.
Even intellectuals not the slightest bit stage-struck have always found
a peculiar pleasure in the stage; and all the more, at times, because
what commonly made it inferior to other arts made it unique as well;
all the more because it traded subtle persuasions for smashing blows,
or disdained the lancet for the broadsword. In the 'twenties-when,
for young highbrows, not only were the Hemingways and Faulk–
ners emerging, but Joyce, Proust, Lawrence, Eliot, the later Yeats
were new and academically quite unsanctified--the very richness of
literature somehow enhanced the shallower appeal, the livelier enjoy–
ment of the stage. The stage itself, to be sure, was far more promis–
ing; but so were the 'twenties far more adventurous and unself–
conscious, not always comically fearful of mistaking sheep for goats,
not obsessed with labels and laboratory tests.
What I suspect has done something to separate highbrows from
the theater- not to the extent that it could have done so single–
handed, but certainly as
it
could have done so in concert with the
theater's own grave deficiencies--is the prevailing nature, today, of
highbrowism itself. And what today is peculiar to it seems less a mat–
ter of response than of approach; has less to do with the rightness of
its judgments than with its intense concern for being right. Never–
it must certainly be said in defense of such an approach-have high–
brows been more called upon to expose and on occasion excoriate the
incursions of middlebrow taste, the infiltrations of solemn
Kitsch,
the
adulterations of popularized sociology and psychoanalysis. But never,
either, have highbrows seemed so humorlessly rigid in their distinc–
tions--being not just purists but panicky segregationists, acting as
though there weren't goat's blood along with sheep's in half the im–
mortals-in Dickens and Jane Austen, Defoe and George Eliot,
Richardson, Dr. Johnson, Tennyson, Frost*; or as though, in the end,
the ivory tower and the walled town had not as measurable draw-
*
And how many of these were, not so very long ago, being outlawed or
depreciated!
