Word: plumbed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Said one of his fans last week: "Guardini is like a Renaissance humanist-he seems to have the key to everything. If he speaks about atomic science, one feels he knows all there is to know about modern physics. He can plumb the depths of Freud or analyze the mysticism of Paul Klee's paintings; he can throw new light on the obscure poetry of Hölderlin and Rilke, or expound the strengths and weaknesses of Communist dialectic. Guardini seems to control the bridges that lead from art, from literature, from philosophy -to religion...
...with the ability to feel profound and communicable pain. The picturesque discomfiture and knavery that are familiar and amusing in Congreve and Gay are gradually, in Mr. Mayer's scheme, to be exposed as the sort of deep corruption which only the most sombre tragedy will generally attempt to plumb. The diamond-pointed cutting-tools of the Age of Wit are to be used to lay bare the dark reality of metaphysical evil. Think of Congreve trying to be Dostoevsky--better, think of a Broadway playwright of the 1920's, which Mr. Mayer was when he wrote Children of Darkness...
...lacks a certain cleanness of impact, a certain soundness of effect. It pounds too hard at times, and stretches things out too long. And for all its speeches and screams, it does not deeply plumb its moral issue or its chief actors, particularly the key figure of the judge advocate (for which George C. Scott, however brilliant, seems miscast). And by mixing dialectics with histrionics to pose a moral inquiry, The Andersonville Trial disconcertingly forfeits much of the realistic and psychological fascination of a trial. About it all there is too much sense of external pressure, of the author...