American dramatic criticism is, and always has been, essentially provincial. It began by mistaking any cheap melodrama like “The Charity Ball” or “The Wife” which was camouflaged with a few pots of palms and half a dozen dress suits for a study of American society. It progressed by appraising as the dean of American dramatists and as the leading American dramatic thinker a playwright who wrote such stuff as “All over this great land thousands of trains run every day, starting and arriving in punctual agreement because this is a woman’s world! The great steamships, dependable almost as the sun--a million factories in civilization--the countless looms and lathes of industry--the legions of labour that weave the riches of the world--all--all move by the mainspring of man’s faith in woman!” It has come to flower today in denouncing what the best European critics have proclaimed to be the finest example of American fantastic comedy on the profound ground that “it is alien to American morality,” and in hailing as one of the most acute studies of a certain typical phase of American life a comedy filched substantially from the French. The plush-covered provincialism of the native dramatic criticism, operating in this wise against conscientious drama and sound appreciation of conscientious drama, constantly betrays itself for all the chintz hocus-pocus with which it seeks drolly to conceal that provincialism. For all its easy incorporation of French phrases laboriously culled from the back of Webster, its casually injected allusions to the Überbrett’l, Stanislav Pshibuishevsky, the excellent _cuissot de Chevreuil sauce poivrade_ to be had in the little restaurant near the comfort station in the Place Pigalle, and the bewitching eyes of the prima ballerina in the 1917 Y. M. C. A. show at Epernay, it lets its mask fall whenever it is confronted in the realistic flesh by one or another of the very things against which it has postured its cosmopolitanism. Thus does the mask fall, and reveal the old pair of suburban eyes, before the “indelicacy” of French dramatic masterpieces, before the “polished wit” of British polished witlessness, before the “stodginess” of the German master depictions of stodgy German peasantry, before the “gloom” of Russian dramatic photography, before the “sordidness” of “Countess Julie” and the “wholesomeness” of “The Old Homestead.” Cosmopolitanism is a heritage, not an acquisition. It may be born to a man in a wooden shack in Hardin County, in Kentucky, or in a little cottage in Hampshire in England, or in a garret of Paris, but, unless it is so born to him, a thousand Cunard liners and Orient Expresses cannot bring it to him. All criticism is geography of the mind and geometry of the heart. American criticism suffers in that what æsthetic wanderlust its mind experiences is confined to excursion trips, and in that what _x_ its heart seeks to discover is an unknown quantity only to emotional sub-freshmen.