Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/138



T happens frequently enough that events of capital importance tell us more about the onlooker than about the principals, and this is particularly true when the onlookers have not the heroic stature, or the fineness of texture, to bear the impact of a great event. Such happenings are rare enough in the theatre in New York; and the spectacle of the critics crumpling up, as if they had collided with art instead of observing it, has always seemed to me pathetically easy to understand. Even so, the following lines by Mr Alexander Woollcott seem inadequately explained:

"It is probable that a play with the infantile plot of 'Oedipus' would be tittered into limbo if Samuel Shipman had the hardihood to write it in 1924. One can imagine that even in its own time the dramatic critics of Athens muttered sullenly about the long arm of coincidence. And that the Acropolis Evening Gazette not only spoke severely of the piling of agony on agony, but asked rhetorically what Master Sophocles expected his fellow citizens to think of a play based on a man's marriage to his own mother."

We were quite properly given to feel that the return of Duse to America was in itself significant; even had she stepped not once upon the stage, the presence here of a figure so incorruptible, of a genius so fully realized, of a human being so restless and struggling and indomitable, would have been inspiring. What remained, when these things had been deeply felt, was to understand that the whole art of acting and a goodly portion of the art of the theatre were in question when she did take the stage. Mr Broun felt pathetically out of it because he could not fall under her spell, felt that many who claimed that they did were bluffing, and determined to tell the truth and shame the devil. It was extremely refreshing, but it failed to illuminate. And Mr Stark Young, long under the spell, felt it again, but left us with the feeling that ten minutes of Bernard Shaw's cold analysis told us more about Duse and acting and life, and was, perversely, more poetic in its desperate halt before the miracle of Duse in the Nineties.

It is a pity that neither those who have the religion of the theatre