It is further maintained that enthusiasm is a supplementary desideratum in a critic, that unless he is possessed of enthusiasm he cannot impart a warm love for fine things to his reader. Surely this, too, is nonsense. Enthusiasm is a virtue not in the critic, but in the critic’s reader. And such desired enthusiasm can be directly generated by enthusiasm no more than a glyceryl nitrate explosion can be generated by sulfuric acid. Enthusiasm may be made so contagious as to elect a man president of the United States or to raise an army large enough to win a world war, but it has never yet been made sufficiently contagious to persuade one American out of a hundred thousand that Michelangelo’s David of the Signoria is a better piece of work than the Barnard statue of Lincoln. Enthusiasm is an attribute of the uncritical, the defectively educated: stump speakers, clergymen, young girls, opera-goers, Socialists, Italians, such like. And not only an attribute, but a weapon. But the cultivated and experienced man has as little use for enthusiasm as for indignation. He appreciates that while it may convert a pack of ignoble doodles, it can’t convert any one worth converting. The latter must be persuaded, not inflamed. He realizes that where a double brass band playing “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” may leave a civilized Englishman cold to the virtues of the United States, proof that the United States has the best bathroom plumbing in the world may warm him up a bit. The sound critic is not a cheer leader, but a referee. Art is hot, criticism cold. Aristotle’s criticism of Euripides is as placid and reserved as Mr. William Archer’s criticism of the latest drama at the St. James’s Theatre; Brunetière is as calm over his likes as Mr. H. T. Parker of the Boston _Transcript_. There is no more enthusiasm in Lessing than there is indignation in Walkley. Hazlitt, at a hundred degrees emotional Fahrenheit, remains critically cool as a cucumber. To find enthusiasm, you will have to read the New York _Times_. Enthusiasm, in short, is the endowment of immaturity. The greater the critic, the greater his disinclination to communicate æsthetic heat. Such communication savours of propaganda and, however worthy that propaganda, he will have naught to do with its trafficking. If the ability to possess and communicate enthusiasm is the mark of the true critic, then the theatrical page of the New York _Journal_ is the greatest critical literature in America.