It is, of course, the common habit of the prejudiced critic to overlook, in the estimate of acting as an art, the few admirable exponents of acting and to take into convenient consideration only the enormous majority of incompetents. But to argue that acting is not an art simply because a thousand Edmund Breeses and Miss Adele Bloods give no evidence that it is an art is to argue that sculpture is not an art simply because a thousand fashioners of Kewpies and plaster of Paris busts of Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Harding give no evidence in a like direction. Yet the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent actors as well as bad actors establishes acting as an art no more than the circumstance that there are admittedly excellent cuckoo-whistlers as well as bad cuckoo-whistlers establishes the playing of the cuckoo-whistle as an art. If I seem to reduce the comparison to what appears to be an absurdity, it is because by such absurdities, or elementals, is the status of acting in the field of the arts most sharply to be perceived. For if Bernhardt’s ever-haunting cry of the heart in “Izeyl” is a peg, however slight, upon which may be hung a strand of the theory that maintains acting as an art, so too, by the strict canon of dialectics, is Mr. Ruben Katz’s ever-haunting cry of the cuckoo in the coda of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. If acting is an art, the proofs thus far offered are not only unconvincing but fundamentally, on the score of logic, not a little droll. Let us view a few illustrations. If criticism is an art (thus a familiar contention), why is not acting also an art, since both are concerned with re-creating works of art? But the artist’s work offered up to the critic is a challenge, whereas the dramatist’s work offered up to the actor is a consonance. Criticism is war, whether in behalf of æsthetic friend or against æsthetic foe; acting is agreement, peace. The critic re-creates, in terms of his own personality, the work of another and often emphatically different and antagonistic personality. The actor re-creates, in terms of a dramatist’s concordantly imagined personality, his own personality: the result is less re-creation than non-re-creation. In other words, the less the actor creates or re-creates and the more he remains simply an adaptable tool in the hands of the dramatist, the better actor he is. The actor’s state is thus what may be termed one of active impassivity. Originality and independence, save within the narrowest of limits, are denied him. He is a literal translator of a work of art, not an independently imaginative and speculative interpreter, as the critic is. The dramatist’s work of art does not say to him, as to the critic, “Here I am! What do you, out of all your experience, taste and training, think of me?” It says to him, instead and peremptorily, “Here I am! Think of me exactly as I am, and adapt all of your experience, taste and