your common sense in the study of your own and other people’s emotions.... The public will be your jury. That public often condescends to be trifled with by mere tricksters, but believe me, it is only a condescension, and very contemptuous. In the long run, the public will judge you, and respect you, according to your artistic sincerity. What has here been quoted from the critical writings of the dramatists may seem to some rather elementary; but it is perhaps all the more valuable. As Diderot once said, “a man must have a deep knowledge of any art or science before he is in possession of its elements.” (1920) II UNDRAMATIC CRITICISM II UNDRAMATIC CRITICISM I As criticism has to find its material in the work of the creators it is not surprizing that the masters of the craft have appeared during periods of abundant creation or shortly thereafter. Aristotle was not separated by many years from Sophocles and Euripides. Boileau was the most intimate friend of Molière; and Sainte-Beuve was the contemporary of Hugo and Balzac, altho he did not greatly care for either of them. Coleridge lived in an epoch of ample productivity; and so did Matthew Arnold. Lessing was stimulated by Voltaire and Diderot; and he prepared the way for Goethe and Schiller. And these are only a few of the critics who have held their own by the side of the creators. But when the creative impulse relaxes, when there is no longer a succession of masterpieces demanding appreciation, then is it that the criticasters have their turn, the pigmies who promulgate edicts for those who are still striving to attain the twin summits of Parnassus. It was not in the rich abundance of Athens but in the thin sterility of Alexandria that the laws of poetry were codified with Draconian severity. It was not under Louis XIV but under Napoleon, when French literature was dying of inanition, that Népomucène Lemercier declared the twenty-five rules which the writer of tragedy must obey and the twenty-two to which the writer of comedy must conform.