All criticism is more or less a statement in terms of the present of what one has viewed of the past through a delicate, modern reducing-glass. Intelligence is made up, in large part, of dead emotions; ignorance, of emotions that have lived on, deaf and dumb and crippled, but ever smiling. The general admission that a dramatic critic must be experienced in drama, literature, acting and theories of production but not necessarily in emotions is somewhat difficult of digestion. Such a critic may conceivably comprehend much of Sheridan, Molière, Bernhardt and Yevreynoff, but a hundred searching and admirable things like the beginning of “Anatol,” the middle of “Lonely Lives” and the end of “The Case of Rebellious Susan” must inevitably be without his ken, and baffle his efforts at sound penetration. I do not here posture myself as one magnificently privy to all the mysteries, but rather as one who, failing perhaps to be on very intimate terms with them, detects and laments the deficiencies that confound him. Experience, goeth the saw, is a wise master. But it is, for the critic, an even wiser slave. A critic on the Marseilles _Petits Pois_ may critically admire “La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan,” but it takes an Anatole France critically to understand it. The superficial quality of American emotions, sociological and æsthetic, enjoyed by the great majority of American critics, operates extensively against profundity in American criticism--in that of literature and music no less than that of drama. American emotions, speaking in the mass, where they are not the fixed and obvious emotions ingenerate in most countries--such as love of home, family and country, and so on--are one-syllable emotions, primary-colour emotions. The polysyllabic and pastel emotions are looked on as dubious, even degenerate. No man, for example, who, though absolutely faithful to his wife, confessed openly that he had winked an eye at a ballet girl could conceivably be elected to membership in the Union League Club. The man who, after a cocktail, indiscreetly gave away the news that he had felt a tear of joy in his eye when he heard the minuet of Mozart’s G minor symphony or a tear of sadness when he looked upon Corot’s “La Solitude,” would be promptly set down by the other members of the golf club as a dipsomaniac who was doubtless taking narcotics on the side. If a member of the Y. M. C. A. were to glance out of the window and suddenly ejaculate, “My, what a beautiful girl!” the superintendent would immediately grab him by the seat of the pantaloons and throw him down the back stairs. And if a member of the American Legion were to sniffle so much as once when the orchestra in the Luna Park dance hall played “Wiener Blut,” a spy would seize him by the ear and hurry him before the heads of the organization as a suspicious fellow, in all probability of German blood.