Life & Wisdom Quote by George P. Baker

Baker’s sentence has the confident sweep of an early-20th-century humanist: drama isn’t a luxury of “civilized” people, it’s a deep behavioral itch that survives every social upgrade. The key move is his framing of theater as instinct before it’s art. By calling imitation “instinctive pleasure,” he shifts drama out of the salon and into the body. We don’t watch because we’ve been taught to appreciate symbolism; we watch because mimicry is how humans learn, flirt, compete, and belong. Drama, in this view, is culture’s polished version of a primal tool.

The phrase “barbarism and civilization” does double duty. On the surface, it’s period-typical anthropology, the old ladder of progress that modern readers will side-eye. Underneath, it’s a strategic leveling device: if the same appetite appears “in all tongues,” then drama becomes one of the few cross-cultural constants sturdy enough to anchor an academic discipline. Baker is not just describing theater; he’s justifying why it deserves study, institutional support, and a genealogy.

Context matters: Baker helped professionalize theater education in the United States, arguing for drama as both literature and lived performance. “Imitative action” subtly pushes back against purely text-based criticism. The essence of drama isn’t the script on the page; it’s bodies doing, copying, enacting. That’s why the claim still lands: it explains drama’s stickiness in an era of screens, memes, and reenactments. We keep remaking each other because that’s how we make sense of being human.