Though there is a regrettable trace of snobbery in the statement, it yet remains that--with half a dozen or so quickly recognizable exceptions--the practitioners of dramatic criticism in America are in the main a humbly-born, underpaid and dowdy-lived lot. This was as true of them yesterday as it is today. And as Harlem, delicatessen-store dinners, napkin-rings and the Subway are not, perhaps, best conducive to a polished and suavely cosmopolitan outlook on life and romance and enthralling beauty, we have had a dramatic criticism pervaded by a vainglorious homeliness, by a side-street æsthetic, and by not a little of the difficultly suppressed rancour that human nature ever feels in the presence of admired yet unachievable situations. Up to fifteen years ago, drama in America was compelled critically to meet with, and adhere strictly to, the standards of life, culture and romance as they obtained over on Mr. William Winter’s Staten Island. Since Winter’s death, it has been urged critically to abandon the standards of Staten Island and comply instead with the eminently more sophisticated standards derived from a four years’ study of Cicero, Stumpf and the Norwegian system of communal elections at Harvard or Catawba College, combined with a two weeks’ stay in Paris. For twenty years, Ibsen and Pinero suffered the American critical scourge because they had not been born and brought up in a town with a bust of Cotton Mather or William Cullen Bryant in its public square, and did not think quite the same way about things as Horace Greeley. For twenty years more, Porto-Riche and Frenchmen like him will doubtless suffer similarly because, in a given situation, they do not act precisely as Mr. Frank A. Munsey or Dr. Stuart Pratt Sherman would; for twenty years more, Hauptmann and other Germans will doubtless be viewed with a certain measure of condescension because they have not enjoyed the same advantages as Professor Brander Matthews in buying Liberty Bonds, at par.