A third rubber-stamp: the critic must have sympathy. As properly contend that a surgeon must have sympathy. The word is misused. What the critic must have is not sympathy, which in its common usage bespeaks a measure of sentimental concern, but interest. If a dramatic critic, for example, has sympathy for an actress he can no more criticize her with poise than a surgeon can operate on his own wife. The critic may on occasion have sympathy as the judge in a court of law may on occasion have it, but if he is a fair critic, or a fair judge, he can’t do anything about it, however much he would like to. Between the fair defendant in the lace baby collar and a soft heart, Article X, Section 123, Page 416, absurdly interposes itself. (In example, being a human being with a human being’s weaknesses before a critic, I would often rather praise a lovely one when she is bad than an unlovely one when she is good--and, alas, I fear that I sometimes do--but in the general run I try to remember my business and behave myself. It isn’t always easy. But I do my best, and angels and Lewes could do no more.) The word sympathy is further mishandled, as in the similar case of the word enthusiasm. What a critic should have is not, as is common, sympathy and enthusiasm _before_ the fact, but _after_ it. The critic who enters a theatre bubblingly certain that he is going to have a good time is no critic. The critic is he who leaves a theatre cheerfully certain that he _has_ had a good time. Sympathy and enthusiasm, unless they are _ex post facto_, are precisely like prevenient prejudice and hostility. Sympathy has no more preliminary place in the equipment of a critic than in the equipment of an ambulance driver or a manufacturer of bird cages. It is the caboose of criticism, not the engine.