This method came as a boon to reviewers and critics: they no longer had to pretend to read the books they reviewed. To dramatic critics, especially, the system was invaluable; but they have now carried it further still. The “literary” critic who wrote an account of a play instead of telling you what the play was about and the effect it had on the audience, gave you his “impressions” of the play. But now he just gives you his impressions: not his impressions of the play, but his impressions of anything: the Woman’s Suffrage Movement--the Rocky Mountains. He need scarcely mention the play; but it is generally done. These impressions he will write in the obscure dialect of modern Oxford, which consists of a complicated kind of literary slang. He writes so carefully that it is impossible to know exactly what he means. He will begin by describing a journey he has just made; he will continue to give you his views on Henry James, or the principles of art, then he will suddenly find after two columns of disquisition that he has come to the end of his space, and he will put off dealing with the play to the following week. By that time he will have forgotten what he meant to be going to say, and he will be obliged to write a new disquisition on something else. That is how the “literary critic” deals with the drama to-day. I find no fault with the system. This is how the “literary” critic would deal with “Hamlet” were “Hamlet” a new play:-- _A Non-Conductor_ Last week I had a good deal to say about the possible effect of woman’s suffrage on art, and this led me to disagree, as the French say, on the attitude of Aristophanes towards the woman question. The fault I have to find with Mr. Shakespeare’s play which was produced tentatively at the Repertory Theatre in Wolverhampton last Tuesday, will be plainer when I have first explained the reason why Walt Whitman never wrote a play. Walt Whitman had probably the greatest unexpressed dramatic gift of the century. He was the most potentially dramatic of all the modern poets: although his centrifugality led him out, so to speak, of his perspective, and shifted his dioramic outlook from the psychologic-human to the devisualized-ideal. Yes, Whitman was perhaps the greatest dramatist who never wrote a play: with the possible exception of Browning, who wrote plays which were in reality unbegun novels. Unlike Swinburne, whose system consisted of finishing his play before it began and filling up the space with deciduous phrases. Swinburne and Browning are the two great negative poles of drama: Whitman is the inverted mute magnet, who repelled drama from him instead of attracting it. I will explain, and in order to explain, we must go back to the Indian drama; etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.