I said:  “But I am innocent.  I lost one leg in the excitement of assuming my professorial chair for the first time, the other I lost when, sunk in thought, I found that important aesthetic law which led to basic changes in our discipline.”

The lady said:  “What is the name of that law?”

I said:  “The law says:  everything depends on the structure of the soul and the mind.  If soul and mind are noble, a body must be considered beautiful, no matter how humped and misshapen it may be.”

The lady ostentatiously lifted her dress and revealed, right up to the top of her thigh, sheathed sumptuously in silk, wonderful legs, that towered, like branches, from her ripe body.

At the same time the lady finally said:  “You may be right, although one might as easily argue the opposite.  In any case, a person with legs is totally different from one without them.”

Then, striding proudly away, she left me sitting there.

Savior of the theater

Theaters should stop competing with the cinema.  By doing so, they are thereby achieving –—­rejoice, friends of the theater – the opposite of what they want:  they are perishing.

The best way for these theaters to maintain themselves is to make concessions to the cinema; they make neither concessions in the selection of plays, nor in scope.  This can be explained.  What movies – giving in to the instincts of the crowd – offer can never be produced in the same dimensions and amount by theater, bound as it is by its limits.  Shaking its head, the public notices the helpless effort.  And runs to the movies.  For what should bind the public most to the theater:  art, is for the most part shamefully neglected.  (As when makers of felt hats had the idea, when straw hats were worn by everyone, to bring to the market felt hats shaped and colored like straw hats.)

Before movies came along, the many second-class theaters were by far a much greater danger to the theater.  Characteristically organizations of this kind are threatened most by movies.  Some will remain for a while, because of the skill of their directors or through other accidents.  Second-class theater undoubtedly will die out in a short time.  The public, which found this sort of thing to their taste, has, in the movies, a much more luxurious substitute:  death and homicide in abundance.  Comedy until you burst.  Juicy melodrama.  And the movie actor with his heavy-handed emphases – for example, in a tragic, many-colored story of adultery (in period costumes) – surpasses the hammy Hamlet in heart-gripping effect.

Theaters that want to survive are compelled to think again about what they are doing.  Directors must cultivate the pure art of theater.  Actors – in contrast to “filmers”, or better still “ciners” or “cinekers” – to maintain their reputations, must abandon all tricks and gimmicks.  The public that goes to the theater in spite of movies is discriminating and can’t be taken in.