We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
38 THE NEW SPIRIT IN THE CINEMA
Man in society, and the human mind (or " soul " as it is sometimes miscalled) as it is revealed by environment, and by reaction to and against human life. I did not do any exploring in an " armchair " but in the open amongst my fellow creatures. I became a social organiser, I organised civic surveys, I formed committees of Labour representatives and learned from them, and so I came to think in terms of human values, and to seek such values in human institutions, and sociological expression in art galleries, museums, and wherever it was likely to be found. I aspired to become the first sociological dramatic critic hoping thereby to give a sociological direction to dramatic criticism generally. I had grown weary of the Theatre as it then was a mixture of money-making and pseudo-scientific expression; on the one hand, unshamedly commercial, on the other, pretending to be uncommercial by thrusting a mess of guesswork social science down the public throat while keeping an eye on the main chance. The Free Theatre movement had pardy caught it which meant that it was being maltreated by about fifty varieties of a vague something called Socialism.
The effect of my first acquaintance with sociology was to set me reapproaching the Theatre from a fresh point of view. One day I spoke to Professor Geddes about contributing a regular article on the drama to the " Sociological Review." He liked the suggestion, and the outcome was that we discussed it with the late William Archer. This dramatic critic had not much sociology in his bones but he was a very great admirer of Professor Geddes (who is not?). He thought my proposal sound and saw no harm in its being tried. Accordingly I prepared some pages of criticism for the next issue of the " Review," but for a reason that I forget this initial interpretation of sociological expression in the Theatre never went in, and as shortly after I had sent it in matters took me out of London, I dropped the experiment so far as the " Sociological Review " was concerned.
The next eighteen or twenty years saw me following the