But there is one thing for which I envy the general playgoer above all. I mean his freedom and pungency of criticism. Anonymity gives him irresponsibility, and, his resentment at being bored not being subject to the cooling process of literary composition, his language is apt to be really terrible. Talk of printed criticism! Actors and authors do talk of it often enough, and on the whole don’t seem to like it; but let them mingle with the general playgoer and keep their ears open! Who was the man in Balzac who said that it was absurd to speak of the danger of certain books when we all had the corrupt book of the world open before us, and beyond that another book a thousand times more dangerous—all that is whispered by one man to another or discussed behind ladies’ fans at balls? So the general playgoer is the great purveyor of secret criticism. Disraeli, or another, said that the secret history of the world, which never got into the history books, was the only true history. Let us hope that secret criticism is not the only true sort, but it is certainly the most live. It is free from the literary bias, the cant of criticism, the smell of the lamp. And it is the most potent of persuasives. Published criticism is powerless against it. The fate of a play is not decided by newspaper criticisms (thank goodness! I should be miserable if it were), but by what the general playgoers say to one another and pass on to their friends. How many plays with “record” runs have been dismissed by the newspapers on the morrow of the first night with faint praise or positive dispraise? The general playgoer has said his say, and what he says “goes.” I know he is giving many worthy people just now much uneasiness. They form little theatrical societies _à côté_ to keep him out. They deplore his taste and organize leagues for his education and improvement. I rather fancy he is like the young lady in the play who “didn’t want to have her mind improved.” But that is another story. What I have been envying him for is not his taste but the heartiness with which he “abounds in his own sense” and his freedom in expressing it. After all, perhaps criticism that is so free and so pervasive and so potent is not exactly to be called “secret.” I seek the _mot juste_. Or I would if that were not a back-number. Has not Mr. Beerbohm finally put it in its place as the Holy Grail of the nineties? FIRST NIGHTS