What I attempt here is no facile paradox, but a _reductio ad absurdum_ designed to show up the fallacy of the prevailing method of actor criticism. In criticism of the established arts, there is no such antic deportment. The critic never confuses the stimulations of jazz music with those of sound music, nor the stimulations of open melodrama with those of more profound drama. From each of these he receives stimulations of a kind: some superficial, some deep. But he inquires, in each instance, into the means whereby the various stimulations were vouchsafed to him. While he recognizes the fact that the sudden and unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Secret Service” produces in him a sensation of shock as great as the sudden and unexpected shooting off of a revolver in “Hedda Gabler,” he does not therefore promptly, and with no further reasoning, conclude that the two sensations are of an æsthetic piece. Nor does he assume that, since the nervous effect of the fall to death in “The Green Goddess” and of the fall to death in “The Master Builder” affect him immediately in much the same way, both sensations are accordingly produced by sound artistic means. Nor, yet again, does he confuse the quality--nor the springs of that quality--of the mood of wistful pathos with which “Poor Butterfly” and “Porgi, Amor” inspire him. But this confusion persists as part and parcel of the bulk of the criticism of acting. For one Hazlitt, or Lamb, or Lewes, or Anatole France who retains, or has retained, his clear discernment before the acted drama, there are, and have been, a number tenfold who have confounded the wonders of the phonograph with the wonders of Josef Haydn. V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM V. DRAMATIC CRITICISM I Arthur Bingham Walkley begins one of the best books ever written on the subject thus: “It is not to be gainsaid that the word criticism has gradually acquired a certain connotation of contempt.... Every one who expresses opinions, however imbecile, in print calls himself a ‘critic.’ The greater the ignoramus, the greater the likelihood of his posing as a ‘critic.’” An excellent book, as I have said, with a wealth of sharp talk in it, but Mr. Walkley seems to me to err somewhat in his preliminary assumption. Criticism has acquired a connotation of contempt less because it is practised by a majority of ignoramuses than because it is accepted at full face value by an infinitely greater majority of ignoramuses. It is not the mob that curls a lip--the mob accepts the lesser ignoramus at his own estimate of himself; it is the lonely and negligible minority man who, pausing musefully in the field that is the world, contemplates the jackasses eating the daisies.