Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jean Nathan

Nathan needles a certain breed of cultural pessimist: the self-appointed coroner who declares the theater dead every time ticket sales dip or tastes shift. The line is built like a taunt. "Professional undertakers" turns criticism into a trade, suggesting these doom-mongers aren’t bravely diagnosing decline; they’re invested in it. If the theater lives, their expertise evaporates. By casting them as men with tools in hand, Nathan implies the autopsy is prewritten and the burial is more performance than fact.

Then he drops the "pretty girl" like a match. On one level it’s a cheap, brazen image of theatrical vitality: the stage still has glamour, appetite, a pulse. On another, it’s an intentionally tawdry jab at the high-minded critics who want the theater to be only Serious Art. Nathan, a longtime editor-critic with a taste for skewering genteel moralism, is saying: you can sneer at spectacle, sex appeal, and popular pleasure, but those impulses are part of what keeps the form solvent and alive. The theater’s survival isn’t just an argument in aesthetic theory; it’s a real-world ecosystem of bodies, charisma, and desire.

The context is early-20th-century American cultural hand-wringing: film rising, Broadway commercializing, reformers policing "decency". Nathan’s wit slices through all of it. The theater isn’t dying; it’s being repeatedly pronounced dead by people who confuse their boredom with a funeral.