The drama critic, on the other hand,
has no such advantage. He cannot be selective; he must cover everything that is
offered for public scrutiny in the principal playhouses of the city where he
works. The column space that seemed, yesterday, so pitifully inadequate to
contain his comments on Long Day's Journey Into Night is roughly the same as
that which yawns today for his verdict on the latest scrap of milk-fed Kitsch
that has chanced to find for itself a numbskull hacker with a hundred thousand
dollars to lose. This state of affairs may help to explain why the New York
theater reviewers are so often, and so unjustly, stigmatized as baleful and
destructive fiends. They spend most of their professional lives attempting
to pronounce intelligent judgments on plays that have no aspiration to
intelligence. It is hardly surprising that they lash out occasionally; in fact,
what amazes me about them is that they do not lash out more violently and more
frequently. As Shaw said of his fellow-critics in the nineties, they are "a
culpably indulgent body of men." Imagine the verbal excoriations that would be
inflicted if Lionel Trilling, or someone of comparable eminence, were called on
to review five books a month of which three were novelettes composed of criminal
confessions. The butchers of Broadway would seem lambs by
comparison.
单选题
In writing this passage, the author's chief concern seems to be to ______.