HIGHBROWS AND THEATER
567
backs as the dreary suburb or the city streets. The immoderate de–
gree to which today's theater is mongrel and vulgar is perhaps bal–
anced by today's fetishist and rigid highbrowism.
But it is not just this that disinclines the highbrow toward the
theater; it is equally-despite all its purism-something in the high–
brow approach that itself is impure. For, in an odd way, highbrow
touchstones have become in actual practice more often intellectual
than esthetic; more often critical than creative; more often concerned
with "significance" than with distinction, and with complex ambi–
valence than with fairly simple truth. The attitude I speak of is not
even so naturally intellectual as it is determinedly intellectualized. As
a result, how interesting-in a world of multiple symbols and simul–
taneous levels of meaning-can the theater, with its inevitable simpli–
fications, hope to be? In a world of close readings and minute analy–
ses, how rewarding is playgoing- where so much has to be taken on
the run-likely to seem?
If
it is the fault of the theater that it seizes
on what is topical in a spirit so much more journalistic than intellec–
tual, this in a sense is yet a function of the theater also. Ibsen, still
supreme for airing the social issues and problems of an era, was not
just asserting the artist's role; he was surely speaking for the publicist
and commentator as well, when he said it was his business to ask
questions, not provide answers; and even today very often, with con–
siderable vigor, the theater assembles the issues and puts the ques–
tions. But in dramatizing rather than documenting them, in con–
densing them into headlines rather than dissecting them with foot–
notes, in giving them an emotional charge rather than an intellectual
cogency, the virtues of its method are as abhorrent to the current
highbrow approach .as are the obvious and often truly horrifying vices.
In an age that too often sees art as excavation, an age for whom the
best-quality meat is apparently that which needs to be chewed the
longest, and for whom all sauces and seasonings are a form not of
piquancy but of taint, the theater may perhaps be as often cold–
shouldered for what is enticing about it as for what is repellent. F. L.
Lucas tells of a girl student at Cambridge who, when asked by her
tutor whether she had enjoyed
.a
book under discussion, answered:
"I don't read to enjoy; I read to evaluate."
If
her attitude is seldom
set forth in so monstrous an antithesis, it can boast all the same very
widespread favor.
