568
PARTISAN REVIEW
Certainly most literary highbrows did enjoy the theater once, in
days when Evaluation's shadow failed to intrude on every aspect of
enjoyment, and when there flourished a greater catholicity, and even
eccentricity, of taste. (In those days, highbrows themselves were more
likely referred to as "civilized," or as people of sensibility.) And per–
haps their feet were on firmer ground, even if they breathed a less
rarefied air, when they would have set Moliere above a dramatization
of
The Trial;
perhaps they boasted opener esthetic pores if not quite
such patrician blood when they would have preferred a Molnar trifle
or a new George Kelly comedy or an evening with Ina Claire to read–
ing five new critiques on Melville. With current highbrow culture
there e.'{ist'5 a kind of pre-Copernican cosmology in which the world
comes to seem more flat than round, with all "civilization" clustered
about a figurative Mediterranean; and even though most of the the–
ater's regions are unhappily Bad Lands, that does not justify their
remaining unknown and unexplored. For much, after all, of what
is suspect about the theater is also natural to it. The remark that is
said to have been made to Shaw, "What you don't like about the
theater is that it is theatrical" is something that all of us who are
essentially literary in our responses and sensibilities must cry
touche
to. Certainly we do right to distrust the demagogue that often lurks
inside the dramatist, but is it not, a little, the pedagogue inside us
that proves distrustful? Intellectuals inevitably and rightly reflect on
what they have seen or heard or read, and nowhere can one have
more troubling and mistrustful afterthoughts about emotional con–
currence than with plays. So often it was not the play that moved
us, but only the performance; it was not the motive that convinced
us, but only the playwright's skillfully timed use of it.
It
is the es–
sence of the theater to stifle reflection under the stress of emotion;
hence afterthoughts will emerge in the most trampling and retributive
form, extinguishing flames with cerebral ice water.
At such times one can only, as with oratory or band music, ac–
knowledge what is unscrupulously seductive and set plus against
minus-the degree to which a superb performance compensates for
a suspect play; the degree to which theatricality must be accepted
as a natural enemy of truth, or Sarah Bernhardt as incompatible with
cerebration. And there is the somewhat different question that pre–
sents itself in any medium, in every art, of how far we must put up
