Judge — May 22, 1920 — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Drown by Uexwas Parwen High-Browsing in Low Spirits By Perrirox Maxweut of intellectual HE assumption and displa superiority is a sure sign of mental depravity. Like the man whoinsists thathe’s a gentleman your conscious highbrow is a lad of more ego than percipience; the female of the species is mere petticoated impertinence and utterly impossible from any human viewpoi The scholastic highbrow is both a bore and a fraud; his cerebral garret is alive with the rats of useless lore and inutile information. The scientific highbrow is a fellow who can explain to you in eight-syllable words the operation of an electric current, but who has to send for the local electrician when the plug breaks loose from his reading-lamp. The highbrow actor is the most amusing gink of all; he would rather mouth the florid lines of Maeterlinck and gloom along with Yeats than impersonate to the life a red-blooded American man of affairs. And the high- wot! is a type of vain with a brow producing-manager, God business man who camouflages his itch for cc studied indifference to “what the people want” The cardinal crime in his moral calendar is the achievement of a “hit.” Losing money (O. P. ML.) is the chief reason for his existence. There are two or three managers in New York who play up to the highbrow label. ‘Tongue in cheek, they work their press-agents overtime to make the public believe their place in the theatre is the Olympian pinnacle. They are the self-styled conservators of show= manship. Do they frankly in for” melodrama or musical comedy? ‘They do not. They take a ripsnort- ing tragedy place the scen where in the medieval period, costume it gorgeously, hire a well-known star and proceed to thrill the impressionable “ elect.” Shorn of its glitter bombast and exotic “atmosphere” you ve a sord nd revolting play. Garb the characters modern attire and the rant and blood-letting would be merely ridiculous. By the same tok our Dun- sanys and Gorkis, played humanly and not affectedly exploited, not advertized as symbolistic presentations but as plays, would have even less appeal than they joy. Any manager with half of his cerebellum at work can put on an old-time Bowery melodrama, tag it as a “literary play,” costume it gorgeously and set som td it ina period remote from the present and thereby carn a reputation overnight for “artistic perception” and a fine sense of dramaturgic beauty. The so-called highbrow drama, reduced to its ¢ sence, means little more than a dull presentation of the problem “Who stabbed mother?” or “Why is a banshee?” With murder as its motif, a darkened stage, a deal of palaver, irrelevant but sufficiently con- fusing to the auditor to derail his critical facult and draw over these time-worn ingredients a thick pall of printed exploitation and you have one of those “liter- ary plays” bidding for the favor of the cognoscenti who hug themselves in self-congratulation and shout aloud that they are not as other box-office patrons. It is all very amusing, but one wonders how long the dear public will “fall for” the buncombe clutter- ing the present-day stage under the guise of “art” or the “new not In the phrase of Sidney Carton “it is a far, far better thing” to be an honest lowbrow than n attitudinizing “intellectual” or a self-spoofed dweller in a cobweb tower of Bamboozleum. — If the theatre is a world of make-believe the men who run it are no poetic dreamers; they believe only in the fairies who stand ready to back them financially. The show- business exists for one purpose—to make money, and when any one pretends that he is in the business of entertaining the public for any other motive than money profit, you may write him down as a whited sepulcher or a darkened gabemouche. The real high- brow (just to use a distinguishing tag) is the broadly cultured person with a generous lowbrow leven—the red-blooded touch of nature that makes the whole world spin. \s a matter of frigid fact there are neither high- brows nor lowbrows; in the makeup of every highbrow (either of the conscious or the oblivious type) there is ninety per cent. of undiluted bromide; in every low- brow, whether thug, peasant or play-producer there is enough of the milk of human kindness beneath the calloused pachyderm to prove, in an analysis, some spiritual quality not measurable in terms of forehead. If we must speak of high- and lowbrows let us bunch them in a word—browlers. comicbooks.com