all revert to our primitive savage state when we become part of a crowd, and that the drama must therefore always appeal to what is primitive and savage in our natures more than any other form of literature. Well, the fact is that all of us are primitive men in spots, and that the theatre may appeal to what is primitive in us if it chooses; but so does fire, so does shipwreck or drowning, whether we choose or not; and for that matter, to get as far from the crowd as possible, so does solitude. If anything is certain in regard to that strange creature man, it is that in solitudes, what we call civilization is most likely to fall from him; and we might with at least equal truth argue that lyric or didactic poetry, intended to be read in the quiet of a man's study, must appeal to the most primitive instincts in him, and that therefore all lyric or didactic poetry must of necessity deal with more primitive and savage themes than any other forms of literature.

Not only is the crowd different from its constituent individualities, and more primitive in instinct than they (I am of course summarizing the virtues of the imaginary crowd created by modern psychologists and dramatic critics), but it is also inattentive, engrossed in itself, difficult to interest, and the first object of the playwright must be to compel its attention. But the fact is that most men and women (whether in a crowd or by themselves) are without the faculty of intellectual concentration. Great art ignores this and other like frailties of men, in the theatre and out of it; while mediocre art focuses its attention on them, in the novel, in song, ballad, lyric, essay, no less than in drama. An Italian critic gave this famous advice to a young poet anxious to know how he could best serve the higher morals in poetry: 'Don't think about morals; that is the best way of serving them in art'. In much the same way, we might say to the playwright: 'Don't think about your audience; that is the best way of serving it in the drama.'

It will be remembered that Pye, in commenting on Aristotle, pointed out that Garrick or Siddons reciting a dramatic poem in a room might affect us with the same pleasure as if they were acting in the theatre. Now, if we do not prefer rather to err with Mr. Walkley than shine with Pye, we may go a step farther, and assume that the audience of Garrick or Siddons in that little room has been reduced to a single spectator. Will there be any diminution in the power of Garrick or Siddons over him because of the absence of a crowd? Or even assuming that Garrick or Siddons might find a stimulus to added passion in the presence of a large audience, or that our single auditor would feel stimulated also by the crowd in the theatre, how can we for a moment believe that the pleasure he receives in the room is different in its nature from the pleasure received from the recitation in the crowded theatre? So that even histrionic art, not to mention dramatic art, speaks with the same voice in solitude as in crowds; and all the more then will the drama itself, 'even apart from representation and actors', as old Aristotle puts it, speak with its highest power to the imagination fitted to understand and receive it.

No, Mr. Walkley and Brunetière and others like them are right when they say that the dramatic critic must 'sit tight' against the prejudices of the crowd, must preserve his own judgement; which is only another way of saying that the critic must be an artist like the dramatist he is criticizing; and this in turn is another way of saying that a play must be judged by its effect on an individual temperament, and not by 'the peculiar psychology of the crowd'. But unfortunately the demoralization which forty years ago Flaubert foresaw in all this arcane théâtral, all this pedantry of 'dramatic technique', of' dramaturgic skill', of scènes à faire, of the conditions of the theatre, the influence of the audience, and the conformation of the stage, this demoralization, I say, has overwhelmed the criticism of the drama.

What the unities, decorum, liaison des scènes, and kindred petty limitations and restrictions were to dramatic theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these things are to criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth. They constitute the new pedantry, against which all aesthetic criticism as well as all creative literature, must wage a battle for life.

Regarding the theatre, therefore, not as a place of amusement (although in that too it has of course its justification as much as golf or cricket), not as a business undertaking (in which case we should have to consider the box-office receipts as the test of a play's excellence), not as an instrument of public morality (since our concern here is not with ethics or political science) but regarding it solely as the home or the cradle of a great art, what do we find its relations to dramatic criticism? Merely this, that for aesthetic criticism the theatre simply does not exist. For criticism, a theatre means only the appearance at any one time or in any one country, as Croce puts it, of a 'series of artistic souls'. All external conditions, as he points out, are only dead material which has no aesthetic significance outside of the poet's soul; and only in the poet's art should we seek to find them.

So after wandering through the centuries we return at last to the collection of theatrical antiquities in the American University. What has aesthetic speculation from Aristotle to Croce to tell us about this so-called 'dramatic museum '? Why, that it contains either too little or too much. Too much, from the standpoint of dramatic criticism, which is concerned with externals, including the theatre, only in so far as they appear in dramatic literature itself. Too little, because from the standpoint of the history of culture, the theatre is only one, and a very insignificant one, of all the influences that have gone to make up dramatic literature.

If we examine the life of any dramatist from Aeschylus to Hauptmann, or any play from Sakuntala to Un Petit Bon Diable,

we shall find a thousand influences affecting in some measure the artist and his work. Hamlet, for instance, is the work of a man whose father (let us say) was a butcher, and whose mother a gentlewoman; obviously, to understand a man of this sort, we should study the effect of his early visits to the butcher's shop on his later work, the influence of gentle birth on character, and the general problem of heredity. Our dramatic museum will be incomplete unless it contain books covering all these topics. The play itself is written in English, and who can tell what influence this fact may have had on the nature of the play? Surely the museum should provide us with text-books on all the other languages of the world in order that we may gauge the peculiar result proceeding from the fact that Hamlet is written in English and not in Greek or Sanskrit; surely it should furnish us with the etymological dictionaries and grammars of our own tongue, in order that we may study the history of each word that Shakespeare used. Hamlet is the son of a king, and we should, of course, understand the ideals of royalty and of government in general in order to appreciate the ideas influencing Shakespeare in writing the play; we need a whole library of political science. Moral ideas are discussed throughout the play; where did they come from? The museum should furnish us with a library on the history of ethics. Hamlet is rather coarse in his language to Ophelia, the result of the influence of woman's position at that time on Shakespeare's mind, needless to say; and we realize that our museum would be incomplete without a whole library on woman, on social usages and customs, on dress, and heaven only knows what else. But why continue? If the museum wishes to furnish us with the external material which influenced dramatic literature, it should furnish us with all the books, all the men, all the things, that have existed side by side with the drama from the beginning of its history and before; for all of these men, or books,

or things may have had a larger and deeper influence than the physical theatre. But if we wish to understand dramatic literature itself, we must seek understanding in the great plays and not in the dead material out of which plays are made.

A collection of theatrical bric-à-brac may interest and enlighten many men-actors, impresarios, stage-managers, playwrights, antiquaries, dilettanti of all sorts, even University teachers of dramatic literature, and who shall say how many others? But the true dramatic critic will transfer his interest from the drama itself to the laws of the theatre' or the conditions of the theatre' only when the lover studies the laws of love' and the 'conditions of love' instead of his lady's beauty and his own soul.

J. E. SPINGARN.