Mr. George Jean Nathan comes from the "Mother, look at George!" school of criticism, and is now enjoying a post-graduate course of "Oh, Mr. Nathan, you do say things!" As a professional dramatic critic he has been saying things for years, and this book is a collection of his best bits. Evidently he is a person of some consequence in America just now. "Much is made of the fact that I often leave the theatre in the middle of the second act of a play," he tells us. Under this stimulus he writes (and who would not?) with a buoyant swagger which is delightful, but which may lose some of its buoyancy when the fact that he has left the theatre in the middle of the second act is made much of no longer. Meanwhile, he is sufficiently exciting. When he says: "The lesser British playwrights . . . such playwrights as A. A. Milne, for example. . . . The net impression that one takes away from their exhibits is of having been present at a dinner-party whereat all the exceptionally dull guests have endeavoured to be assiduously amusing"—when he says this, he may give more pleasure to my friends than to me; but I do not leave the theatre. I stay to the end, and am rewarded a hundred pages later by the most charming piece of ingenuousness imaginable. He is telling us that, during the last year, he has met personally eleven men whose work he had criticized: four sound artists whom he had praised, seven incompetents whom he had damned. "When I met the seven incompetents I found them agreeable and amiable men, interesting to talk with and extremely companionable." But as for the four sound artists, "I could scarcely bear them. They were devoid of social grace; they were stupid; they were as heavy as lead; they were bores." It is a fascinating picture. Mr. Nathan and the seven amiable second-raters getting on charmingly together. . . . Mr. Nathan, the smile from his last good thing still on his lips, moving confidently across to the four first-raters. .. . I must not spoil it by a word of comment. Let us leave it there, with all its delightful implications.

Professor Brander Matthews' book takes us into a different atmosphere. Playwrights on Playmaking is a collection of essays which should be read by every critic of the theatre who is also interested in the theatre. With Professor Matthews the play is the thing, even if Mr. Nathan is feeling for his hat. With Mr. Nathan, Mr. Nathan is the thing, even if the play is so good that nobody but Mr. Nathan goes to it. "If I were appointed official dramatic censor," says Mr. Nathan, "I should, with negligible exception, promptly shut down every play that was doing more than 3,000 dollars a week." Molière, whom Professor Matthews quotes, thought differently: "I am willing to trust the decision of the multitude; and I hold it as difficult to combat a work which the public approves as to defend one which it condemns." The Professor agrees. 'The eternally dominating element in the theatre is the audience," he says. If the dramatist cannot win the approval of the playhouse crowd, he should write, not plays, but novels. The printed play is nothing. "To judge a play by reading it is like judging a picture by a photograph." The dramatist must please, not the play-readers, but the playgoers, "and if they render a verdict against him he has no appeal to posterity. It is a matter of record that a play which failed to please the public in its author's lifetime never succeeded later in establishing itself on the stage."

Professor Matthews, you see, is quite definite about it, and he has Molière and others behind him. We cannot just say "Rubbish!" in the Nathan manner. We cannot content ourselves with a comparison of Strife with Tons of Money, or Heartbreak House with Chu Chin Chow. We shall have to examine the matter. Now, the first thing to be noted is that play-writing is not an art alone, but also a craft. I suppose that the difference between an art and a craft is this: that an art is something personal to the artist, whereas a craft is inevitably a collaboration. A sonnet is complete in itself; that Wordsworth wrote it is all that matters. But a chair wants not only Chippendale to make it, but a collaborator to sit in it. If, in his lifetime, humanity had suddenly become two sizes broader in the beam, and three sizes shorter in the leg, Chippendale's chairs would have taken on a different beauty; but Keats would not have changed by a word his "Ode to a Nightingale." Indeed, we may almost say that a chair would not be a beautiful thing at all if mankind had been so constructed that we could never sit down; in other words, that it is only beautiful because it is useful. As another writer has suggested, the reason why a castle is beautiful, and a castellated mansion an abomination, is that the ancient castle was built for use and the modern castellation was only built for ornament. Left to himself a craftsman is without inspiration.

A dramatist is both artist and craftsman. He is a stage-craftsman by reason of the fact that he collaborates with the public. To put it vulgarly, every play is a bluff. Things didn't happen so, and couldn't happen so, but the dramatist is going to bluff the audience into believing (for three hours anyway) that things did happen so. The manner of his bluff depends upon the attitude to the stage of the contemporary audience; the intelligence of the people; the conventions of the period; and so forth. That is to say, it is dictated to him by his collaborators, the playgoers. Suppose that a dramatist wishes the audience to know what his hero's thoughts are in a certain crisis. If the conventions of his time allow of soliloquy, he makes his hero soliloquize. A soliloquy is neither good art nor bad art in itself; it is merely good craftsmanship or bad craftsmanship according to whether the audience is prepared or unwilling to accept it. But it is bad art if the speech, as thought, is untrue to character. On the modern stage soliloquy is unacceptable by the audience. A modern dramatist, then, has to find some other way in which to get his hero's thoughts across the footlights. Perhaps he makes him, under the stress of great emotion, burst out with them in the presence of other of the characters. It does not follow that the dramatist conceives his hero capable of exposing himself thus in public. All that the dramatist says is, "My hero would think like this (or I am no artist). His thoughts will eventually become known to the other characters, privately, one by one. To show you these scenes, one by one, would take up too much of your time. So I am trying to bluff you into believing, just while the scene lasts, that he might actually reveal himself to all of them together. And if I can't make you believe it, then I shall try to make the speech so good that you won't stop to ask yourself whether he could or couldn't have spoken it in public; you will let yourself be carried away by it."

It is obvious, of course, that in this matter the author is very much in the hands of his players. I emphasize again that, in detail, no play can be in the least like life; the essentials are true, but the details only masquerade truth. The author puts up a bluff, and the players carry it out. But the author is also very much in the hands of his audience. If they won't be carried away, they won't be carried away. If a scene, written to be judged by their hearts in a moment of emotion, is referred coldly to the judgment of their heads, so much the worse for him. Professor Matthews, on this point, speaks with great understanding of Agamemnon. The beacons announce that Troy is taken; within an hour Agamemnon (absurdly enough) is home again! Modern criticism labours to explain that what Æschylus really meant was this, that, and the other. The simple explanation is that Æschylus knew that his audience, seeing the beacons through the eyes of the watchman, would now want to see Agamemnon, and would want to see him at once. Whether Agamemnon could do a three weeks' journey in an hour had nothing to do with the play, and still less to do with their enjoyment of the play. You may call them unsophisticated, or you may call them uncommonly wise; but, whatever they were, Æschylus knew them and wrote for them. For a more sophisticated (or less wise) public he would have written very different plays. But, since he was an artist, they also would have been the plays of Æschylus.

And now we might ask ourselves (and Professor Matthews): What do we mean by "the plays" of Æschylus, or Shakespeare, or Sheridan? What do we mean by Hamlet? Do we mean Irving's Hamlet, or Tree's, or Forbes-Robertson's? We mean none of these. We mean Shakespeare's Hamlet. And Shakespeare's play of Hamlet can only be found in the printed book. The Professor himself tells us how certain characters in The School for Scandal should be played. How does he know? Because he has read the play. When a critic damns Barker's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (as does Mr. Nathan), he means that, from his reading of the play, he feels certain that Shakespeare meant something different. To the dramatist as artist the printed play is everything; it is his appeal to posterity. To the dramatist as craftsman the acted play is something less than everything; for, until he shares with the Almighty the privilege of creating flesh-and-blood people, it can never be played as he saw it. It is useless to say that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet for Burbage. He may have seen Burbage as he began to write, but after a dozen lines he saw only Hamlet. But if to the dramatist as craftsman the acted play is never all that he meant, the play acted three hundred years later, under a different convention, would be a nightmare. Many critics write of a Shakespearean production as if the ideal Macbeth (or whatever it may be) were waiting round the corner for the ideal producer and the ideal cast. The ideal Macbeth is an impossibility; just as an ideal production of Man and Superman would have been an impossibility in Shakespeare's day. We may read and enjoy Shakespeare's plays, because he was a great artist; but we can never see them performed. He was much too great a craftsman for that.