society and with the active co-operation of pretty women. And note, for it is an enormous advantage to him, that that work is a fixed, settled thing. His words have been invented for him and written out in advance. He has rehearsed his actions. He knows precisely what he is going to do. Contrast with this alluring picture the temperament and working habits of the critic. He is a man, not of action, but of contemplation. His pursuit is sedentary, and with his life of forced inaction he risks becoming as fat as Mr. Gibbon, without the alleviation of the Gibbonian style. Personal advantages are not aids to composition, and he may be the ugliest man in London, like G. H. Lewes, whose dramatic criticisms, nevertheless, may still be read with pleasure. His fingers are inky. His face is not “made up,” but sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. No pretty women help him to write his criticisms. Indeed, if Helen of Troy herself, or Aphrodite new-risen from the sea came into his study he would cry out with writer’s petulance (a far more prevalent and insidious disease than writer’s cramp), “Oh, do please go away! Can’t you see I’m not yet through my second slip?” (She will return when he is out, and “tidy up” his desk for him—a really fiendish revenge). Books, forbidden to the actor, are the critic’s solace—and also his despair, because they have said all the good things and taken the bread out of his mouth. And, unlike the actor, he is working in the unknown. His head is filled with a chaos of half-formed ideas and the transient embarrassed phantoms of logical developments. Will he ever be able to sort them out and to give them at any rate a specious appearance of continuity? Nay, can he foresee the beginning of his next sentence, or even finish this one? Thus he is perpetually on the rack. “Luke’s iron crown and Damien’s bed of steel” are nothing to it. It is true that his criticism does, mysteriously, get itself completed—mysteriously, because he seems to have been no active agent in it, but a mere looker-on while it somehow wrote itself. Is it surprising that it should generally write itself about the play (which, I daresay, writes itself, too, and with the same tormenting anxiety) rather than about the playing, which proceeds from so different a temperament from the critic’s and operates in conditions so alien from his? But, let me add for the comfort of our veteran, there are critics and critics. If some of us displease him by too often sparing only a few lines for the leading actor or actress, there will always be plenty of others who are more interested in persons than in ideas and images, who care less for transpositions of life than for Sarah’s golden voice and Duse’s limp, and “Quin’s high plume and Oldfield’s petticoat.” These will redress the balance. ACTING AS ART