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BENJAMIN De CASSERES Ijjtes truth more than George Jean Nathan is America’s foremost dramatic ntic. De Casseres, author of "Forty I m mortals,” Spinoza,” etc., is one of the outstanding literary tnal\<!s <n this country. Both are Jems. Both love truth "-lire than success. Sow read the result of “If hen a Cntu Meets a Critic,” and you will understand Sr, nan and l)e Casseres better than ever before.— I nf Fmro*. T <) write the history of America or its po litical and dramatic history from 1910 to somewhere still in the future and leave out the name of Nathan would be comparable to (ioethe having written Faust without Mephis- topheles. I once wrote a little fable. A poet of great originality was walking over a very narrow bridge. When he got near the center he saw two burly ‘hugs approaching him from the other end. The thu;:> commanded the poet to lie down so that thn could walk over him. The poet refusing to do am such unaesthetic thing, the thugs, whose bap tismal names were Circulation and Advertising, tossed the poet in the raging current and strode on. Now, in about 1910 or so, Nathan and Mencken started over this very bridge, and, like the Poet, vere commanded by the thugs, Circulation and Ad vertising, to lie down and be walked over. For • eplv. Nathan and Mencken ripped a ton of iron '»ut of the bridge railings, stoved in the occiputs md cerebrums of the two thugs and passed on, Mencken’s spiked knuckles gleaming in the wester ing sun and Nathan’s glittering intellectual mon- "de singing its blithe and iridescent song to the s’av swish of his malacca cane. And. so far as Nathan is concerned at least, kirv ation and Advertising were never seen again PV(, n unto this day. 1 do not believe that any man’s opinion on any- - in is worth my own opinion about that thing. Wl you will confess on self-examination that that |s precisely your own high opinion about your own u*i. nent. Now, that is the crime George Jean \ aT >n, in the field of dramatic criticism, has com- :nir ‘ i and which has made him a most greatly “hi ed personality in the eyes of the brainy and *' le irst venomously hated man by the low-brows, that his judgments are always right, sound, unprejudiced. He would be the first to ad- md he has many times admitted it, that he more given to occasional fallibility than ever rcy Hammond or an Alexander Woollcott i admit in his most apocalyptically self-cleans- noments. has made me tear my hair and swear many at the contemptuous way in which he has "ed plays that I have liked. But his sin- (even when he has posed as being “insin- —Pdgar Saltus once said to me “1 hope you 1 lot going to be one of those always sincere r s!”), his great, vast background of play- 'e, his two-fisted, fearless he-man style and :> ility to analyze by a spontaneous spurt of e taste, second to none in the world of dra- - criticism—these qualities have won out over 'an mit \va> a I ing tin dis: cer cer cul his TI The Gorgeous Destroyer A Critic Looks at George Jean Nathan By Benjamin De Casseres our differences in judgment. And I take great joy in confessing that, although a dramatic critic my self, 1 have been compelled to reverse myself on my judgments of some plays after reading his close- woven analyses of the plays in question. The essence of Nathan’s greatness as critic, as it is the essence of all first-class critics in any field of thought, is his born gift of dissociating his emotions from his intellectual judgments. Criti cism is thought, and thought is war, a war often against the critic’sown sentimental and emo tional predilections. I may be amused or 1 may sob at a situa tion in a play or a book, but my brain may say, "It’s a bad play,” or “It’s a bad book." The ability to pierce hokum no matter how much it has amused and fascin ated for an hour or two, is the greatest function of the critic. And no one has this gift in a higher degree than Nathan. In his reviews there is not the slightest trace of that arch enemy of intelligence—senti ment. He knows a playplumbcr from a born dramatist. He knows precisely just how’ orig inal and just how plagiaristic a playwright is, having in his head, at his instant command seemingly, the plots and patterns of all plays in all languages from Aeschulus to Anne Nich ols. He knows "where you get it from,” and what you are try ing to “put over.’’ This is also why is feared and hated by the scene-shifters and dialogue- plumbers who call themselves “dramatists.” They know’ there will be a Sherlock Holmes on an aisle seat on the first night. And many have suicidal—if not homicidal—thought when they see Nathan go out w’ith his hat and coat after the first act. Nathan is a gorgeous de stroyer, w’hich should be the primal function of critical thought. I hold that about eighty per cent of all “drama" is bunk and there is no sport like riddling bunk. Why put anything in its place? An open field is superior to a block of rotten rooker ies. Nathan is ruthless, for which I also admire him greatly. When you go to w’ar it is generally believed you go to kill. His ridicule is not as over whelming as Mencken’s, nor is his invective as withering. But it is often subtler. Mencken is an avalanche. Nathan destroys and crumbles from within. He takes the drama, his mistress, more seriously than Mencken takes books and life. In fact, Nathan is the only New York dramatic critic that I know of who takes the drama seriously, as a profound art-form, with the possible exception of Dana Skinner, of the Commonweal, w’ith whom I seldom agree, but for w’hom I have great respect. But they do not know Na than at all who assert that he is only a destroyer. He is a man of great intellectual enthu siasm. Cerebral enthusiasm is the emotion and the sentiment of the artist-critic. Nathan "raved” over the Gest-Rein hardt production of The Mir acle. He has labored in season and out to proclaim the genius of Gordon Craig to the world. He fairly wept streams of men tal tears over the failure of the public to support Rostand’s The Last Night. Of Don Juan and Fugenc O’Neill’s The Foun tain. It was he w’ho persuaded John I). Williams to produce O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon. He printed O’Neill from the first and he fought for him, but will have none of his Lazarus Laughed because it deals w’ith a religious theme, which is an in comprehensible and absurd prej udice to me in view of his writ ten words on The Miracle. He was the first man, I believe, to print Dunsany in America, in that unique The Smart Set, the best magazine America has ever had. He threw’ his hat up over The Captive, aligning Bourdet’s name with Shakespeare. 1 re mark these few instances to show’ that Nathan, like all great critics, is not devoid of enthusi asm and that he can praise as loudly as he can smash. He is a born aesthete. Only* the rare, the beautiful, the dis tinctive have any attraction for him either on the stage or in life. He has "aristocrat” scrawled all over him, in his manner, looks, walk, voice, whereas his partner in critical crime, Mencken, is thoroughly demo cratic. The paradox of Nathan lies in the fact that while he is an aristocrat to the manner born, his style is democratic, loud, slugging. The law* of compensation probably. (Please turn to page 18) GEORGE JEAN NATHAN Occasionally fallible. SOUTHERN ISRAELITE * [9]