For one critic like Mr. J. Ranken Towse who is a Puritan by tradition and training, there are a dozen who are Puritans by proxy. One can no more imagine a dramatic critic on a newspaper owned by Mr. Cyrus H. K. Curtis praising Schnitzler’s “Reigen” or Rip’s and Gignoux’s “Scandale de Deauville” than one can imagine the same critic denouncing “Ben Hur.” What thus holds true in journalistic criticism holds true in precisely the same way in the criticism written by the majority of college professors. I doubt that there is a college professor in America today who, however much he admired a gay, reprobate farce like “Le Rubicon” or “L’Illusioniste,” would dare state his admiration in print. Puritan or no Puritan, it is professionally necessary for him to comport himself as one. His university demands it, silently, sternly, idiotically. He is the helpless victim of its æsthetic Ku Klux. Behind any drama dealing unconventionally with sex, there hovers a spectre that vaguely resembles Professor Scott Nearing. He sees it ... he reflects ... he works up a safe indignation. Dramatic criticism travels, in America, carefully laid tracks. Signal lights, semaphores and one-legged old men with red flags are stationed along the way to protect it at the crossings, to make it safe, and to guard it from danger. It elaborately steams, pulls, puffs, chugs, toots, whistles, grinds and rumbles for three hundred miles--and brings up at something like Hinkletown, Pa. It is eager, but futile. It is honest, but so is Dr. Frank Crane. It is fearless, but so is the actor who plays the hero strapped to the papier-mâché buzz-saw. It is constructive, but so is an embalmer. It is detached, but so is a man in the Fiji Islands. It is sympathetic, but so is a quack prostatitician. VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA VI. DRAMATIC CRITICISM IN AMERICA I Dramatic criticism, at its best, is the adventure of an intelligence among emotions. The chief end of drama is the enkindling of emotions; the chief end of dramatic criticism is to rush into the burning building and rescue the metaphysical weaklings who are wont to be overcome by the first faint whiffs of smoke. Dramatic criticism, in its common run, fails by virtue of its confusion of unschooled emotion with experienced emotion. A dramatic critic who has never been kissed may properly appreciate the readily assimilable glories of “Romeo and Juliet,” but it is doubtful that he will be able properly to appreciate the somewhat more evasive splendours of “Liebelei.” The capability of a judge does not, of course, depend upon his having himself once been in jail, nor does the capability of a critic depend upon his having personally once experienced the emotions of the dramatis personæ, but that critic is nevertheless the most competent whose emotions the dramatis personæ do not so much anticipatorily stir up as recollectively soothe.