But there are artists, and not a few, who are keenly intelligent and who are able to philosophize about their calling; and whenever they are moved to talk about the technic of their several arts we shall do well to listen that we may learn. We can make our profit from what Horace and Wordsworth have to say about poetry and from what Pope and Poe have to say about versification. We can gain enlightenment from the remarks of Reynolds and Fromentin and La Farge on painting and from the remarks of Fielding and Scott, Howells and Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson about fiction. We must, of course, make our allowances in each case for the personal equation and for the predilection the artist-critic is likely to possess for the special school of art to which he himself belongs,—and also for the forgivable intolerance he sometimes reveals toward those who are students in other schools. When the artist who is also a critic addresses the public, he has his eyes directed more often than not particularly to his fellow practitioners. Thus it is that he tends to deal more especially with technic and to talk about the processes of the craft and about the best method of achieving needed effects. Nor is this to be deplored, since we need all the information we can get about technic to enable us to appreciate the artist’s accomplishment,—and who can supply this information so satisfactorily as the artist himself? There may be other points of view than the artist’s, there is that of the public, for one, but the artist’s must ever be the most significant; and what this is we can learn only from him. He at least has practised what he is preaching; and this fact gives a validity to his discourse. Even in this twentieth century there are critics not a few who persist in dealing with the drama as literature only, deliberately ignoring its necessary connection with the theater. This is a wilful error, which vitiates only too many estimates of the masters of tragedy and comedy, Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière. Perhaps the best corrective is a consideration of the utterances of the dramatists who have discussed the principles of playmaking. Here we may find light, even if it is sometimes accompanied by more or less heat.