But that, I hasten to add, is its luck rather than its merit. One must not ride the high ethical horse, and I should be sorry to suggest that good criticism is ever written from a sense of duty, any more than a good play or any other piece of good literature. Good criticism is written just because the critic feels like that—and bad, it may be added, generally because the critic has been trying to write something which he supposes other people will feel like. The good critic writes with his temperament—and here is a reason why, in the long run, plays will interest him more than players. For are we not all agreed about the first principle of criticism? Is it not to put yourself in the place of the artist criticized, to adopt his point of view, to recreate his work within yourself? Well, the critic can put himself in the place of the playwright much more readily than into that of the actor. The playwright and he are working in different ways, with much the same material, ideas, and images, or, if you like, concepts and intuitions mainly expressed in words—which is only a long way of saying that they are both authors. And they have in common the literary temperament. Now the literary temperament and the histrionic are two very different things. The actor, as his very name imports, is an active man, a man of action. At his quietest, he perambulates the stage. But violent physical exercise is a part of his trade. He fights single combats, jumps into open graves, plunges into lakes, is swallowed down in quicksands, sharpens knives on the sole of his boot, deftly catches jewel caskets thrown from upper windows, wrestles with heavy-weight champions, knouts or is knouted, stabs or is stabbed, rolls headlong down staircases, writhes in the agonies of poison, and is (or at any rate in the good old days was) kicked, pinched, and pummelled out of the limelight by the “star.” And all this under the handicap of grease-paint and a wig! It must be very fatiguing. But then he enjoys the physical advantages of an active life. He has Sir Willoughby Patterne’s leg (under trousers that never bag at the knee, and terminating in boots of the shiniest patent leather), and all the rest to match. As becomes a man of action, he is no reader. I have heard the late Mr. Henry Neville declare that an actor should never be allowed to look at a book. This may seem to the rest of us a sad fate for him, but look at his compensations! He spends much, if not most, of his stage-life making love to pretty women, wives, widows, or _ingénues_. Frequently he kisses them, or seems to—for he will tell you, the rogue, that stage-kisses are always delivered in the air. Let us say then that he is often within an inch of kissing a pretty woman—which is already a considerable privilege. When he is not kissing her (or the air, as the case may be), he is sentimentally bidding her to a nunnery go or dying in picturesque agonies at her feet. Anyhow he goes through his work in the