And so it is, precisely, with criticism. For criticism is also “creative.” But it does not create images of people or their lives; it creates thought, ideas, concepts. That is, it builds up something new out of the artist’s intuitions and exhibits the relations between them. Here, in the conceptual world, we are in a different region from the intuitional world of the artist. Those who care to enter it, who feel at home in it, are comparatively few; the absence of personal interest, of “people,” makes it seem cold to the average, gregarious man. “People” are a natural, ideas an acquired, taste. But the one set are just as much a “creation” as the other. And in the one set just as in the other the thing created may not be worth creating. Ideas, expositions, illustrations in criticism have a distressing habit of being as poor and conventional and mechanical as many a novelist’s or playwright’s characters and life histories. There is not a pin to choose between them. For as the one thing that matters in art is the artist behind it, so the critic behind it is the one thing that matters in criticism. These are elementary commonplaces. But they need restating from time to time. For the average man, with all his interest in life fixed on “people,” is always falling into the error that the novelist or playwright makes something, while the critic makes nothing. And your fourteenth-rate author, sharing the temperament of the average man, falls into the same error and seems, indeed, inordinately proud of it. He seems to say: “Why, you, good master critic, couldn’t even begin to do what _I_, the ‘creative’ artist, do”; and he would probably be surprised by the answer that it is the critic’s very critical faculty, his endowment of judgment and taste, which makes the writing of bad plays or novels impossible, because repugnant to him. It is precisely because the critical faculty is so rare a thing that so many bad novels and plays get themselves written. But enough of these sharp distinctions between the “creation” of images and the “creation” of concepts! Is not a union of the two, like the union of butler and lady’s-maid, as described by Mr. Crichton, “the happiest of all combinations”? Who does not feel how immensely the mere story part of “Tom Jones” gains by the critical chapter introductions? And, on the other hand, how the mere critical part of Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” gains by the little touches of story, from the opening moment when “they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently” to the close at Somerset Stairs, where “they went up through a crowd of French people, who were merrily dancing in the open air”? ACTING AND CRITICISM