Just as dramatic criticism, as it is practised in America, is Mason-jar criticism--criticism, that is, obsessed by a fixed determination to put each thing it encounters into an air-tight bottle and to label it--so is this dramatic criticism itself in turn subjected to the bottling and labelling process. A piece of criticism, however penetrating, that is not couched in the language of the commencement address of the president of Millsaps College, and that fails to include a mention of the Elizabethan theatre and a quotation from Victor Hugo’s “Hernani,” is labelled “journalistic.” A criticism that elects to make its points with humour rather than without humour is labelled “flippant.” A criticism that shows a wide knowledge of everything but the subject in hand is labelled “scholarly.” One that, however empty, prefixes every name with a Mr. and somewhere in it discloses the fact that the critic is sixty-five years old is labelled “dignified.” One that is full of hard common sense from beginning to end but is guilty of wit is derogatorily labelled “an imitation of Bernard Shaw.” One that says an utterly worthless play is an utterly worthless play, and then shuts up, is labelled “destructive”; while one that points out that the same play would be a much better play if Hauptmann or De Curel had written it is labelled “constructive and informing.” And so it goes. With the result that dramatic criticism in America is a dead art language. Like Mr. William Jennings Bryan, it has been criticized to death. The American mania for being on the popular side has wrapped its tentacles around the American criticism of the theatre. The American critic, either because his job depends upon it or because he appreciates that _kudos_ in this country, as in no other, is a gift of the mob, sedulously plays safe. A sheep, he seeks the comfortable support of other sheep. It means freedom from alarums, a guaranteed pay envelope at the end of the week, dignity in the eyes of the community, an eventual election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and, when he reaches three score years and ten and his trousers have become thin in the seat, a benefit in the Century Theatre with a bill made up of all the eminent soft-shoe dancers and fat tragediennes upon whom he has lavished praise. This, in America, is the respected critic. If we had among us today a Shaw, or a Walkley, or a Boissard, or a Bahr, or a Julius Bab, he would be regarded as not quite nice. Certainly the Drama League would not invite him to appear before it. Certainly he would never be invited to sit between Prof. Richard Burton and Prof. William Lyon Phelps at the gala banquet to Mr. D. W. Griffith. Certainly, if his writings got into the paid prints at all, there would be a discreet editor’s note at the top to the effect that “the publication of an article does not necessarily imply that it represents the ideas of this publication or of its editors.”