──────────────── CHAPTER III ◆ THEN AND NOW ──────────────── Dramatic criticism, like all of the other arts having to do with our theater, has changed, and like the others the change of the last few years has been for the better. When I first came to New York, William Winter was by far the outstanding critic, and his opinions were eagerly waited for and had great influence. I doubt if any critic of to-day is his equal in some ways, yet the best men of to-day have, I think, a far greater influence upon the actual writing of plays. In William Winter’s time the Shakespearian tradition was strong and the plays of modern writers were of secondary importance. Acting then was more important than play writing, while to-day the dramatist is the important figure in almost every production. I do not in the least mean that acting to-day is any less vital than it used to be, but the standard of acting and of directing is very much higher. Very few first class producers who are fortunate enough to secure a good play are bunglers enough not to take full advantage of it and we have grown to expect adequate performances and take them quite as a matter of course. Even ten years ago there were a number of stars who were sure of some business no matter what play they might appear in, but I think it is a fair statement that to-day no actor alive can do any business at all unless the play is satisfactory. In any case it was the dramatist and not the actor who was responsible for the birth of the new type of drama in America, and when the writer threw into the discard the romantic, the heroic and the sentimental, the actor was forced to change his method. Booth and Jefferson could have played in a modern reticent play, because they were, in their day, outstanding in the quiet and normal method they used, but most of the great actors of our theater would have been lost if they had been deprived of their grand passions and their carefully developed heroics. Of course these men and women played in the accepted tradition of their time, and their talents would have been trained to-day in a different direction. We miss the diction of the good actor of the old school and his beautifully trained voice, and his thorough grasp of all the details of his business, but the characterizations of to-day are far nearer to real life and far less set and conventional than they were under the old system. When I first went into the theater, an actor would be handed a part and told that it was, let us say, “a Sir Francis Levinson.” He would play it that way, and usually play it very well, but frequently in a rather tryingly cut and dried manner.