Life & Wisdom Quote by George P. Baker

Baker is making a slyly political argument while pretending to talk about art history. He frames theatrical greatness as the product of three freedoms: what stories can be told, how they can be told, and whether the audience shows up willing to be moved rather than merely entertained. It reads like a neutral checklist, but the subtext is a warning: when any one of those conditions is curtailed, the stage shrinks into propaganda, formula, or safe nostalgia.

The phrase "perfect freedom" does heavy lifting. It is aspirational, even a little polemical, and it quietly positions censorship, commercial gatekeeping, and aesthetic orthodoxy as the enemies of drama. Baker also refuses to let audiences off the hook. Great art, he implies, is not only authored; it is received. "Sympathetic listening" is a demand for a civic virtue: the willingness to inhabit someone else's story long enough to be changed by it. That parenthetical - "even if instruction be involved" - betrays the early-20th-century anxiety that teaching is inherently untheatrical. Baker counters that suspicion by reframing instruction as compatible with pleasure, so long as it comes through lived experience rather than sermon.

Context matters. Writing in an era of expanding mass culture, moral reform campaigns, and increasingly professionalized theater, Baker is staking out a middle path between high-minded uplift and market pandering. He is arguing that the conditions for dramatic peaks are cultural, not merely individual genius: liberty onstage, latitude in craft, and an audience mature enough to listen.