Now, criticism, whether literary or dramatic, is a department of literature, dealing with the permanent, and having little to do with the temporary. It demands qualifications very rarely united--insight, equipment, disinterestedness, and sympathy. So far from being easy, criticism is quite as difficult as creation--more difficult, indeed, if we may judge by its greater rarity. In a superbly creative period there are sometimes three or four distinguished poets, friendly rivals, almost contemporaneous; and even at such a time there is rarely more than one critic worthy to be companioned with them. Æschylus and Sophocles and Euripides followed one after the other; and in time the sole Aristotle came forward as their critic. Corneille and Molière and Racine labored side by side, and only Boileau was competent to interpret and to encourage them. When it attains to the serene plane of Aristotle and Boileau, of Lessing and Sainte-Beuve, criticism is actually creation. "The critical faculty as applied to the masterpieces of literature, and still more the critical faculty as applied to the art of literature itself, is akin to the creative faculty of the artist," so Professor Mackail has told us. "It does not deal with letters as something detached from life, but as the form or substance in which life is intelligibly presented. Its interpretation is also creation." But the criticism of dramatic literature which is also creation, is possible only when the critical faculty is applied to the masterpieces of dramatic literature; and nobody knows better than the play-reviewer that masterpieces of dramatic literature do not present themselves frequently and that they cannot be acclaimed as masterpieces until they have stood the test of time. And this is why a critic-creator would be a little out of place on the staff of a newspaper, daily or weekly, whether he was assigned to deal with the drama or with literature at large. III