Pieces of Hate

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40. Professor George Pierce Baker



A great many persons speak and write about Professor George Pierce Baker, of Harvard, as if he were a sort of agitator who made a practice of luring young men away from productive labor to write bad plays. There is no denying the fact that a certain number of dramatists have come out of Harvard's English 47, but the course also has a splendid record of cures. Few things in the world are so easy as to decide to write a play. It carries a sense of satisfaction entirely disproportionate to the amount of effort entailed. Even the failure to put a single line on paper brings no remorse, for it is easy to convince yourself that the thing would have had no chance in the commercial theater.

All this would be well enough except that the author of a phantom play is apt to remain a martyr throughout his life. He makes a very bad husband and father and a worse bridge partner. Freudians know the complaint as the Euripidean complex. The sufferer is ailing because his play lies suppressed in his subconscious mind.

Professor Baker digs these plays out. People who come to English 47 may talk about their plays as much as they choose, but they must write them, too. Often a cure follows within forty-eight hours after the completion of a play. Sometimes it is enough for the author to read the thing through for himself, but if that does not avail there is an excellent chance for him after his play has been read aloud by Professor Baker and criticized by the class. If a pupil still wishes to write plays after this there is no question that he belongs in the business. He may, of course, never earn a penny at it but, starve or flourish, he is a playwright.

Professor Baker deserves the thanks of the community, then, not only for Edward Sheldon, and Cleves Kincaid, and Miss Lincoln and Eugene O'Neill and some of the other playwrights who came from English 47, but also for the number of excellent young men who have gone straight from his classroom to Wall Street, and the ministry, and automobile accessories with all the nascent enthusiasm of men just liberated from a great delusion.

In another respect Professor Baker has often been subjected to much undeserved criticism. Somebody has figured out that there are 2.983 more rapes in the average English 47 play than in the usual non-collegiate specimen of commercial drama. We feel comparatively certain that there is nothing in the personality of Professor Baker to account for this or in the traditions of Harvard, either. We must admit that nowhere in the world is a woman quite so unsafe as in an English 47 play, but the faculty gives no official encouragement to this undergraduate enthusiasm for sex problems. One must look beyond the Dean and the faculty for an explanation. It has something to do with Spring, and the birds, and the saplings and "What Every Young Man Ought to Know" and all that sort of thing.

When I was in English 47 I remember that all our plays dealt with Life. At that none of us regarded it very highly. Few respected it and certainly no one was in favor of it. The course was limited to juniors, seniors and graduate students and we were all a little jaded. There were times, naturally, when we regretted our lost illusions and longed to be freshmen again and to believe everything the Sunday newspapers said about Lillian Russell. But usually there was no time for regrets; we were too busy telling Life what we thought about it. Here there was a divergence of opinion. Some of the playwrights in English 47 said that Life was a terrific tragedy. In their plays the hero shot himself, or the heroine, or both, as the circumstances might warrant, in the last act. The opposing school held that Life was a joke, a grim jest to be sure, cosmic rather than comic, but still mirthful. The plays by these authors ended with somebody ordering "Another small bottle of Pommery" and laughing mockingly, like a world-wise cynic.

Bolshevism had not been invented at that time, but Capital was severely handled just the same. All our villains were recruited from the upper classes. Yet capitalism had an easy time of it compared with marriage. I do not remember that a single play which I heard all year in 47, whether from Harvard or Radcliffe, had a single word of toleration, let alone praise, for marriage. And yet it was dramatically essential, for without marriage none of us would have been able to hammer out our dramatic tunes upon the triangle. Most of the epigrams also were about marriage. "Virtue is a polite word for fear," that is the sort of thing we were writing when we were not empowering some character to say, "Honesty is a bedtime fairy story invented for the proletariat," or "The prodigal gets drunk; the Puritan gets religion."

But up to date Professor Baker has stood up splendidly under this yearly barrage of epigrams. With his pupils toppling institutions all around him he has held his ground firmly and insisted on the enduring quality of the fundamental technic of the drama. When a pupil brings in a play in favor of polygamy, Baker declines to argue but talks instead about peripety. In other words, Professor Baker is wise enough to realize that it is impossible that he should furnish, or even attempt to mold in any way, the philosophy which his students bring into English 47 each year. If it is often a crude philosophy that is no fault of his. He can't attempt to tell the fledgling playwrights what things to say and, of course, he doesn't. English 47 is designed almost entirely to give a certain conception of dramatic form. Professor Baker "tries in the light of historical practice to distinguish the permanent from the impermanent in technic." He endeavors, "by showing the inexperienced dramatist how experienced dramatists have solved problems similar to his own, to shorten a little the time of apprenticeship."

When a man has done with Baker he has begun to grasp some of the things he must not do in writing a play. With that much ground cleared all that he has to do is to acquire a knowledge of life, devise a plot and find a manager.