If, then, you dislike the author, dip your pen in honey rather than in vinegar or, wiser still, leave his work alone. You must be more than human not to be biassed and if, to contradict the bias, you praise the book against your judgment, you act wrongly as a critic. What is honesty? There is the crux. Courts of law are but man-made machinery and very imperfect, juries are often very stupid, even judges--but perhaps we ought to pause here. Consequently, if the author has any grounds for suggesting that you are ill-disposed towards him, and yet you must act as critic (amateur or professional), be scrupulously relevant and decidedly colourless. At present the honesty has not been analysed by the courts; some day the question will be raised whether competence is not a necessary ingredient. Could a Gautier who hated music _honestly_ criticize a symphony; could a blind man _honestly_ criticize a picture? These are extreme cases, and a line must be drawn somewhere. Still, some day the courts may require the defendant to give evidence of his fitness to act as a critic if his fitness be challenged. To these remarks one obvious matter should be added. All statements of fact in a criticism must be accurate. The line between matters of fact and matters of opinion is sometimes fine, but the law is clear. An allegation of fact is not comment, and all such allegations, if injurious, must be justified--that is--proved to be true, if the defence of fair comment is pleaded. CHAPTER II THE DRAMATIC CRITIC His Duty to be Tolerant Some remarks which appeared in a popular weekly paper concerning Mrs Patrick Campbell's _Deirdre_ and _Electra_ deserve a little consideration. One of the critics attached to the paper spoke of the affair as being an "indifferent performance of indifferent tragedies," and then said it was "a simple affectation to profess to enjoy it," and that it was not, "as some people seem to think, a mark of culture, but only of insufficient culture not to acknowledge that one is bored by this kind of thing." An affronted critic wrote to the paper, complaining of the charge of affectation and insufficient culture, and was promptly rebuked as a "bumptious correspondent," and told that his letter convinced the critic that he was one of those affected persons whose misdirected zeal the writer deplored. This attitude is not a novelty. Many of the critics, at one period, charged the professed admirers of Wagner with being impostors or imbeciles; later on, anyone who professed to like the pictures of Whistler or Rossetti or Burne-Jones, or of any of the Impressionists, was accused of affectation. When Ibsen was introduced to England the conservative critics raved, and alleged that the Ibsenites (or "Obscenites"--the word was considered very witty) were humbugs; this was one of the least offensive charges. The same kind of thing happened in the case of Maeterlinck. Many other instances might be cited.