Acting is perhaps best to be criticized not as art but as colourful and impressive artifice. Miss Margaret Anglin’s Joan of Arc is a more or less admirable example of acting not because it is art but because it is a shrewd, vivid and beguiling synthesis of various intrinsically spurious dodges: black tights to make stout Anglo-Saxon limbs appear Gallicly slender, a telescoping of words containing the sound of _s_ to conceal a personal defect in the structure of the upper lip, a manœuvring of the central action up stage to emphasize, through a familiar trick of the theatre, the sympathetic frailty of the character which the actress herself physically lacks, two intakes of breath before a shout of defiance that the effect of the ring of the directly antecedent shout on the part of one of the inquisitors may be diminished.... An effective acting performance is like a great explosion; and as T N T is made from nitric acid, which is in turn made from such nitrates as potassium nitrate or saltpeter, which are in turn derived from the salts of decomposed guano, so is a great explosion of histrionism similarly made and derived from numerous--and not infrequently ludicrous and even vulgar--basic elements. The ill-balanced species of criticism which appraises an histrionic performance as art on the sole ground of the hypnotic effect it produces, with no inquiry into the means whereby that effect is produced, might analogously, were it to pursue this logic, appraise similarly as art the performance of an adept literal hypnotist. And with logic perhaps much more sound. For if acting as an art is to be appraised in the degree of the effect it imparts to, and induces in, the auditor-spectator, surely--if there is any sense at all in such a method of estimate--may certain other such performances as I have suggested be similarly appraised. Criticism rests upon a foundation of logic; whatever it may deal with--æsthetics, emotions, what not--it cannot remove itself entirely from that foundation. Thus, if Mr. John Barrymore is an artist because, by identifying the heart and mind of his auditor-spectator with some such character as Fedya and by suggesting directly that character’s tragic dégringolade, he can make the auditor-spectator pity and cry, so too an artist--by the rigid canon of æsthetic criticism--was Friedrich Anton Mesmer, who is said to have been able to do the same thing.