LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 \1 
 
 y'',
 
 "^■v 
 
 v^ 
 
 Z-Jj^cL 
 
 //^/""i^*'<^- 
 
 ^ i^s--]
 
 DRAMATIC CRITICISM
 
 DRAMATIC 
 CRITICISM 
 
 THREE LECTURES DELIVERED 
 
 AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION 
 
 FEBRUARY 1903 
 
 -4 
 
 / 
 
 BY 
 
 A^ B. WALKLEY 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 
 
 1903
 
 -n 

 
 CONTENTS 
 PART I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 7 
 
 PART 11 
 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 47 
 
 PART III 
 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 87
 
 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR
 
 DHAMATIC CRITICISM 
 
 It is not to be gainsaid that the word 
 " criticism " has gradually acquired a certain 
 connotation of contempt. Indeed, one is 
 sometimes tempted to wish that " criti- 
 cism" and " critic " could be expunged from 
 the dictionary, so lamentably misused as 
 they are. Every one who expresses opinions, 
 however imbecile, in print calls himself a 
 ** critic." The greater the ignoramus, the 
 gi-eater the likelihood of his posing as a 
 " critic." The title has become as vulgar as 
 " Professor," which Matthew Arnold mod- 
 estly declined to share with Professor 
 Pepper. But vulgarity, as we know, is 
 sometimes a very different thing from 
 popularity. It is significant that the voca- 
 bulary of daily life has never adopted the 
 word " critic " as a term of endearment.
 
 10 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 From the people whom the critic criticises 
 it would be unreasonable to expect sym- 
 pathy. When the rowdy baronet in Mr. 
 Pinero's play felt particularly lively he 
 always broke a valuable piece of porcelain, 
 and it is an infallible sign of exuberant 
 health in a popular actor when he says 
 something sarcastic about the dramatic 
 critics. There is a story in Bret Harte — or 
 in Mark Twain — of a youthful convalescent 
 in San Francisco about whom anxious in- 
 quirers were reassured by the information 
 that " he was quite peart-like, heavin rocks 
 at the Chinamen." What the Chinamen 
 were to this interesting invalid, the dramatic 
 critics are to the popular actor — hastes 
 humani generis — the mark for rocks, or 
 any more handy missile. The dramatic 
 critics fellow-playgoers regard him as a 
 wet blanket, a spoil-sport. They " know 
 what they like," as the phrase goes, and 
 therefore they look askance at the man one 
 of whose functions it is to persuade them 
 that they do not know what they ought to 
 like. This attitude has been illustrated in 
 a question seriously debated by a club of
 
 THE CRITIC CONTEMNED 11 
 
 playgoers — "Are Dramatic Critics of any 
 use ? " But critics have been most sorely 
 stricken in the house of their friends, that 
 is to say, by authors and other critics. 
 You have Dryden in the dedication of his 
 " Examen Poeticum " declaring that " the 
 corruption of a poet is the generation of a 
 critic " — though here the whirligig of time 
 has brought in his revenges, for Dryden 
 himself is less rarely read to-day for his 
 criticism than for his poetry. You have 
 another critic, Addison, filling a whole 
 Spectator paper with sarcasms against the 
 dramatic critics. You have a third critic. 
 Dr. Johnson, devoting two papers in 
 the Idler to the satirical picture of the 
 dramatic critic Dick Minim, and remarking 
 that " Criticism is a study by which we 
 grow important and formidable at a very 
 small expense." The favourite, the classi- 
 cal, theory, however, of literary persons 
 is that the critic is an author manque. 
 Coleridge said reviewers were " Usually 
 people who would have been poets, his- 
 torians, biographers, if they could ; they 
 have tried their talents at one or the other
 
 12 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 and have failed ; tlierefore they turn critics." 
 Shelley said : " As a bankrupt thief turns 
 thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful 
 author turns critic." Landor, in an Ima- 
 ginary Conversation, made Porson tell 
 Southey: "Those who have failed as 
 writers turn reviewers." Balzac greatly 
 vexed Saint-Beuve by saying of an unsuc- 
 cessful sculptor that "il passa critique 
 comme tous les impuissants qui mentent a 
 leurs debuts." In the same strain you have 
 Lord Beaconsfield's epigram in " Lothair," 
 " Who are the critics ? Those who have 
 failed in literature and art." 
 
 Well, all this is very depressing, and, to 
 recover a little tone, the critic naturally 
 adopts the attitude of Shylock in the speech 
 wherein he demonstrated to the Christians 
 that he was a man and a brother. What 
 people forget is that in this matter of criti- 
 cism we are all tarred with the same brush. 
 Just as one solid body cannot collide with 
 another without the manifestation of a form 
 of energy which we call heat, so one mind 
 cannot impinge upon another without the 
 manifestation of that form of energy which
 
 WHERE IS THE CRITIC? 13 
 
 we call criticism. Criticism is the means 
 whereby art becomes conscious of its exist- 
 ence. Survey the playhouse and take a 
 rapid poll of the audience. The million- 
 aire in the stage box is politely stifling a 
 yawn behind his kid-glove ; Miss in the 
 stalls is whispering to her Mamma that 
 Sir Toby Belch seems very tipsy, and that 
 anyhow it isn't half so funny as Charleys 
 Aunt. The pit are shuffling their feet, 
 and the gallery-boy is shouting " boo ! " 
 They are all " undulant and diverse," as 
 Montaigne would say, and yet the whole 
 audience have one thing in common ; they 
 are all dramatic critics — of the species 
 known as " impressionist." As M. Jour- 
 dain spoke prose, so they are all producing 
 criticism, without knowing it. 
 
 Still there is, of course, criticism and 
 criticism, a right criticism and a wrong ; 
 criticism according to knowledge and good 
 taste and criticism according to neither ; 
 the criticism of the habiles and the criti- 
 cism of the simples^ to use La Bruyere's 
 classification. It must be our task to re- 
 duce, if we can, this chaos of opinion to
 
 14 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 something like order, and to put our finger 
 on the best opinion, the opinion of what 
 we may call the ideal spectator. It is to 
 this ideal spectator that the drama, as an 
 art — we are not concerned here with the 
 drama as merchandise, for that, no doubt, 
 often finds itself addressed to a very dif- 
 ferent destination — it is to this ideal spec- 
 tator that the drama as an art is addressed. 
 Aristotle, the earliest and still the greatest 
 of dramatic critics, made a great point of 
 this ideal spectator. You will remember 
 that it was Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, the 
 auctioneer in " Middlemarch," who con- 
 jectured that " the old masters were prob- 
 ably so called because they knew a thing 
 or two more than the young 'uns." This 
 remark is certainly true about Aristotle, 
 the oldest master, il maesti^o di color che 
 saniio, the master of those M'^ho know. 
 " As in ethics," says Professor Butcher,^ 
 " Aristotle assumes a man of moral insight 
 (6 (f)povifj,o9) to whose trained judgment 
 the appreciation of ethical questions is 
 
 ^ " Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art/' 2nd ed., 
 p. 209.
 
 AN EXAMPLE FROM HAZLITT 15 
 
 submitted, and who, in the last resort, 
 becomes the ' standard and the law ' of 
 right, so too in fine art a man of sound 
 aesthetic interests (6 '^(^apieLs:) is assumed, who 
 is the standard of taste, and to him the 
 final appeal is made." Now there is no 
 need for playgoers to rise up and " con- 
 spuer" this ideal spectator — 6 x^pcei<i. We 
 need none of us be in any hurry to hate 
 him and abuse him as though he had 
 robbed a church. For the fact is, he does 
 not exist. He is like a point in pure 
 geometry, an abstract conception. We 
 call him the ideal spectator, or reader, or 
 listener, just because he is not real. But 
 he furnishes a convenient standard by which 
 we can classify the tastes of real spectators, 
 or readers, or listeners, and the nearest ap- 
 proximation to him will furnish us with 
 our best opinion. To fix your ideas, to 
 give yourselves an instance of an actual 
 approximation to the character of Aris- 
 totle's %aptei9, I think you cannot choose 
 anything much better than Hazlitt's de- 
 scription of his friend Joseph Fawcett: — 
 " We find people of a decided and origi-
 
 16 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 nal, and others of a more general and 
 versatile, taste. I have sometimes thought 
 that the most acute and original-minded 
 men made bad critics. They see everything 
 too much through a particular medium. 
 What does not fall in with their own bias 
 and mode of composition strikes them as 
 commonplace and factitious. . . . The 
 extreme force of their original impressions 
 compared with the feebleness of those they 
 receive at second-hand from others, over- 
 sets the balance and just proportion of 
 their minds. Men who have fewer native 
 resources, and are obliged to apply oftener 
 to the general stock, acquire by habit a 
 greater aptitude in appreciating what they 
 owe to others. Their taste is not made a 
 sacrifice to their egotism and vanity, and 
 they enrich the soil of their minds with 
 continual accessions of borrowed strength 
 and beauty. I might take this opportunity 
 of observing, that the person of the most 
 refined and least contracted taste I ever 
 knew was the late Joseph Fawcett, the 
 friend of my youth. He was almost the 
 first literary acquaintance I ever made, and
 
 JOSEPH FAWCETT 17 
 
 I think the most candid and unsophisticated. 
 He had a masterly perception of all styles 
 and of every kind and degree of excellence, 
 sublime or beautiful, from Milton's 'Para- 
 dise Lost ' to Shenstone's ' Pastoral Ballad,' 
 from Butler's ' Analogy ' down to ' Hum- 
 phrey Clinker.' If you had a favourite 
 author, he had read him too, and knew all 
 the best morsels, the subtle traits, the capital 
 touches. ' Do you like Sterne ? ' — ' Yes, to 
 be sure,' he would say. ' I should deserve 
 to be hanged if I didn't ! ' His repeating 
 some parts of ' Comus ' with his fine, deep, 
 mellow-toned voice, particularly the lines, 
 'I have heard my mother Circe with the 
 Sirens three,' &c., and the enthusiastic 
 comments he made afterwards, were a feast 
 to the ear and to the soul. He read the 
 poetry of Milton with the same fervour and 
 spirit of devotion that I have since heard 
 others read their own. ' That is the most 
 delicious feeling of all,' I have heard him 
 exclaim, 'to like what is excellent, no 
 matter whose it is.' In this respect he 
 practised what he preached. He was in- 
 capable of harbouring a sinister motive.
 
 18 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 and judged only from what he felt. There 
 was no flaw or mist in the clear mirror of 
 his mind. He was as open to impressions 
 as he was strenuous in maintaining them. 
 He did not care a rush whether a writer 
 was old or new, in prose or in verse — 
 ' What he wanted,' he said, ' was something 
 to make him think.' Most men's minds 
 are to me like musical instruments out of 
 tune. Touch a particular key, and it jars 
 and makes harsh discord with your own. 
 They like ' Gil Bias,' but can see nothing 
 to laugh at in ' Don Quixote ' ; they adore 
 Richardson, but are disgusted with Field- 
 ing. Fawcett had a taste accommodated 
 to all these. He was not exceptions. He 
 gave a cordial welcome to all sorts, pro- 
 vided that they were the best in their kind. 
 He was not fond of counterfeits or dupli- 
 cates. . . . His character was frank and 
 ingenuous in the extreme. ... A heartier 
 friend or honester critic I never coped 
 withal." 
 
 There you have the Aristotelian x«P^'? in 
 the library — the ideal consumer of literary 
 art. He is " not exceptions " but catholic,
 
 MISTAKEN IDEALS 19 
 
 with " a masterly perception of all styles and 
 of every kind and degree of excellence." His 
 mind is " a clear mirror." He is open to im- 
 pressions, and strenuous in maintaining them 
 — a lively receptivity, as we say, and a strong 
 enthusiasm — "wax to receive and marble 
 to retain." And now the question arises, 
 Where precisely is such a one, or the closest 
 approximation to such a one, to be found in 
 the playhouse ? Very diverse answers to 
 this question have been given by more or 
 less interested parties. According to a 
 familiar, though apocryphal story, Moliere 
 sought his ideal consumer of drama in his 
 cook. For him o ^(apiei? resided in the 
 kitchen. A popular American actor- 
 manager, Mr. William Gillette, who as 
 the impersonator of Sherlock Holmes 
 ought to be infallible at detective work, 
 has identified 6 x«jO''f'? with the man in the 
 street. The only critic, he says, whose 
 opinion he respects is the average spectator. 
 For Tolstoy, on the other hand, the ideal 
 consumer of art is the moujik — " a respected, 
 wise, educated country labourer," he says 
 (in his "What is Art?")— "one, for in-
 
 20 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 stance, of those wise and truly religious 
 men whom I know among the peasants." 
 And, again, you have Mr. Augustine 
 Birrell urging the claim of the cultivated 
 amateur : "I have had some experience 
 of authors, and have always found them 
 better pleased with the ' unprofessional ' 
 verdicts of educated men actively engaged 
 in the work of the world than ever they 
 were with the laboured praise of the so- 
 called ' expert.' " There are yet other 
 people who maintain that the ideal con- 
 sumer of any art is the producer of it ; 
 that the proper critic of drama is the 
 dramatist, of acting is the actor. I think 
 these various suggestions pretty well ex- 
 haust our possible range of choice, and it 
 will perhaps clear up our ideas if we 
 examine them in turn. 
 
 First of all, then, there is the average 
 spectator, the man in the pit, representing 
 the typical mind and taste of the crowd. 
 The crowd must always be mentioned first, 
 honoris causa, in any discussion touching 
 the drama, because it is to an assembled 
 crowd that the drama is addressed. That
 
 THE CROWD 21 
 
 is the peculiarity which makes drama what 
 it is and not something else, not a novel or 
 an essay or a meditation or a fragment of 
 history or an exercise in pm'e dialectic. 
 And we must deal respectfully with the 
 playhouse crowd, because it is nothing less 
 than the British nation, or, to speak by 
 the card, that respectable minority of the 
 British nation which goes to the play. A^''e 
 must beware of committing what J. R. 
 Green said was Froude's great fault, that 
 in a history of England he had omitted the 
 English people. 
 
 At the same time, the English crowd is a 
 crowd, and we have to consider for the 
 moment the mind of the crowd in general, 
 of the crowd as a crowd. The great point 
 about the crowd — by which I mean any 
 body of men and women assembled together 
 for a common purpose — is that it has a 
 mind and character of its own which differ 
 from the mind and character of its in- 
 dividual members. Collective psychology, 
 as the phrase goes, has only of late years 
 seriously engaged the attention of scientific 
 inquirers. A little band of Frenchmen,
 
 22 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 headed by Professor Tarde of Paris, have 
 taken up this study, with results which, 
 interesting though they are, it would be 
 here out of place to describe at length. 
 
 And so I must ask you to be good 
 enough to take it for granted that a crowd 
 forms a new entity, with a mind and 
 character of its own ; that it differs from 
 the individuals composing it just as our 
 bodies are unlike the cells of which they 
 are made up, or just as a chemical com- 
 bination is unlike its separate ingredients. 
 The reason, very roughly stated, is, perhaps, 
 this. The qualities in which the members 
 of a crowd differ from one another dis- 
 appear, are mutually cancelled, while the 
 qualities which they have in common 
 are intensified by contact. The qualities 
 in which men differ are principally, of 
 course, the conscious elements of char- 
 acter, the fruit of education, of varying 
 hereditary conditions, and the intelligence. 
 The qualities, on the other hand, in which 
 they resemble one another are principally 
 the unconscious or subconscious qualities, 
 the primary instincts, feelings, and passions
 
 THE CROWD IN THE THEATRE 23 
 
 of the race. It follows that to bring people 
 together in a crowd is to diminish their 
 intellectual and to increase their emotional 
 energy. And so when Thackeray talked of 
 " that great baby, the public," he was really 
 touching a scientific truth. The crowd has 
 the credulity, the absence of judicial faculty, 
 the uncontrolled violence of feeling of a 
 child. Shakespeare knew this when he 
 drew the crowd in Julius Ccesai^ ; Ibsen 
 also, when he drew the crowd in A?i Enemy 
 of Society ; yes, and in another way, Mr. 
 Gilbert knew it too, when he drew his 
 little crowd of " Twelve good men and 
 true " in Trial by Jury. And this general 
 truth is true in particular of the theatrical 
 crowd. The theatrical crowd is not philo- 
 sophic ; it cannot adopt a detached, im- 
 personal, disinterested view of life ; it 
 must take sides. Hence the stage con- 
 vention of the " sympathetic personage." 
 The theatrical crowd has not the judicial 
 faculty, is not accustomed to sift evi- 
 dence or to estimate probabilities. Hence 
 the convention of " The long arm of 
 coincidence," and another convention — at
 
 24 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 least as old as Sophocles — that any, the 
 wildest improbability, may be taken for the 
 postulate, the starting-point of a play. 
 When (Edipus the King comes on the 
 stage he has been married for twelve years 
 to his own mother, and throughout all that 
 time she has never had a talk with him on 
 the past which gives him any suspicion of 
 who she is or of the fact that he has slain 
 his own father. A crowd as a crowd is 
 virtuous and generous ; for we are all on 
 our best behaviour in public. Hear the 
 gallery at a theatre of melodrama hiss 
 the villain ! Yet it is fairly long odds 
 that some of them have robbed their 
 employers, and that others will go home 
 to beat their wives. And the crowd insists 
 upon a strict separation of virtue and vice. 
 It wants its personages all of a piece. The 
 composite characters, the strange blend of 
 good and evil in all of us, it refuses to 
 recognise. Hence the convention of 
 " hero " and " traitor," of '* immaculate 
 heroine " and " viperine adventuress," of 
 " poetic justice," and of " living happy ever 
 afterwards."
 
 PRIMITIVE MAN AS PLAYGOER 25 
 
 You conclude that by the mere fact of 
 forming part of an organised crowd a man 
 descends several rungs in the ladder of 
 civilisation. Isolated, he may be a harm- 
 less citizen, a placid British vestryman ; 
 in a crowd he becomes a barbarian, a 
 Berserker ; he " throws back " to his early 
 ancestors. Note the effect on the theatre. 
 " It is only the life of violence," says 
 Maeterlinck, "the life of bygone days, 
 that is perceived by nearly all our tragic 
 writers ; and truly one may say that 
 anachronism dominates the stage, and that 
 dramatic art dates back as many years 
 as the art of sculpture. ... To the 
 tragic author it is only the violence of 
 the anecdote that appeals. . . . And he 
 imagines, forsooth, that we shall delight 
 in witnessing the very same acts that 
 brought joy to the hearts of the barbarians, 
 with whom murder, outrage, and treachery 
 were matters of daily occurrence. Where- 
 as, it is far away from bloodshed, battle- 
 cry, and sword-thrust that the lives of 
 most of us flow on, and men's tears are 
 silent to-day, and invisible and almost
 
 26 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 spiritual. . . . Indeed, when I go to a 
 theatre I feel as though I were spending 
 a few hours with my ancestors, who con- 
 ceived life as something that was primitive, 
 arid, and brutal ; but this conception of 
 theirs scarcely even lingers in my memory, 
 and surely it is not one that I can share. 
 I am shown a deceived husband killing 
 his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, a 
 son avenging his father, a father slaughter- 
 ing his children, children putting their 
 father to death, murdered kings, ravished 
 virgins, imprisoned citizens — in a word, all 
 the sublimity of tradition, but, alas, how 
 superficial and material ! Blood, surface- 
 tears, and death ! " 
 
 All this, T think you will admit, takes 
 us very far from o x«)0'^'f- The collective 
 mind, the mind of the crowd, approxi- 
 mates rather to the mind of primitive 
 man. 
 
 Further, it is peculiarly apt to be an 
 inattentive mind. A contributor to one 
 of the monthly reviews' has maintained 
 
 * Mrs. Aria in the Nineteenth Century and After, July 
 1902.
 
 THE CROWD SELF-CONSCIOUS 27 
 
 that "half the people in the theatre do 
 not listen to the play ; they do not go to 
 the theatre for that purpose, and it is 
 almost impossible to persuade them to do 
 so. They go there for some extraneous 
 reason far removed from a desire to follow 
 what is proceeding on the stage, and they 
 give their attention either not at all, or 
 in the most perfunctory fashion." 
 
 Allowing for a slight touch of exaggera- 
 tion in the statement, we ought, from the 
 considerations I have been submitting to 
 you, to succeed in accounting for what 
 remains of truth in it. A crowd, having 
 an individuality of its own, cannot but 
 be interested in that individuality, apart 
 from all reference to the cause which has 
 brought it together. The crowd finds it- 
 self an interesting spectacle. From the 
 moment of its formation it becomes self- 
 conscious, self-assertive. To absorb its 
 attention — that is to say, to inake it for- 
 get its own existence — -is an extremely 
 difficult feat. How many platform orators, 
 how many speakers in the House of Com- 
 mons, how many preachers, how many
 
 28 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 actors, can do this ? So few in any 
 generation that the whole generation 
 knows their names. In his preface to 
 Le Fils Naturel the younger Dumas 
 compared the theatre in this respect with 
 the church. " Like the church," he said, 
 "we dramatists address ourselves to men 
 assembled together, and you cannot gain 
 the ear of the multitude for any length 
 of time or in any efficacious way save in 
 the name of their higher interests." The 
 " inattention," then, of the crowd is proof 
 of the independence and the potency of 
 its existence. It is not really inattentive ; 
 on the contrary its attention is of the 
 keenest, but it is directed to itself. Hence 
 the perpetual difficulty of all arts which, 
 like the art of the theatre, involve the 
 presence of a crowd. The crowd has as- 
 sembled because it is interested in the 
 particular art, but, once assembled, it finds 
 another subject of interest and a danger- 
 ous rival to the artistic subject — namely, 
 itself. 
 
 We might perhaps find an additional 
 reason for the inattention of the theatrical
 
 INFLUENCE OF WOMEN 29 
 
 crowd in the temperament of the typical 
 playgoer. Clearly, your typical playgoer 
 is not a reading man, a cloistered student, 
 a " solitary," as our forefathers used to say. 
 He belongs, ea; hypotJicsi, to the class which 
 is " fond of company " ; he would not, even 
 if he could, imitate Macaulay by reading 
 Plato with his feet on the fender ; he must 
 have bustle, the sense of human kinship 
 brought home to him by sitting elbow to 
 elbow with his neighbour ; he desires to see 
 and be seen. The faculty of intellectual 
 attention is seldom high in such a tempera- 
 ment as this. Moreover, the large majority 
 of a modern theatrical audience consists of 
 women ; and it is accurate, I am afraid, if 
 ungallant, to say that women are the less 
 attentive sex. Schoolmasters who have 
 taken "mixed classes" tell us that it is 
 harder to fix the attention of their girls 
 than of their boys. The proof of this in 
 the theatre is that the parts of the house 
 where the women outnumber the men — 
 the stalls, boxes, and circle — are notoriously 
 less attentive than the pit and gallery, where 
 the men outnumber the women. Nor must
 
 30 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 we forget that ladies in public have some- 
 thing else to do than merely to attend. 
 They are on parade, they constitute a show 
 in themselves — very often a more charming 
 show than anything offered on the other 
 side of the footlights. You must frequently 
 have been seated behind a matinee hat which 
 was better worth looking at than the play 
 of which it allowed an occasional glimpse. 
 The argument, then, comes to this : first, 
 that all crowds, because they are crowds, 
 are inattentive — or, more properly speaking, 
 self-attentive — a fact which constitutes a 
 formidable difficulty for all arts which 
 depend upon the crowd ; secondly, that the 
 theatrical crowd is peculiarly inattentive, 
 because it is drawn from the classes whose 
 power of attention is naturally low. . . . 
 And you perceive that we are getting 
 further and further from 6 xapi€i<i. 
 
 But when you have fixed the attention 
 of the crowd, how does that attention work ? 
 The mental state of the theatrical audience, 
 as Coleridge has pointed out, closely re- 
 sembles that of a man in a dream. In a 
 dream you live an imaginary life as though
 
 THEATRICAL ILLUSION 31 
 
 it were real, and yet all the time you have 
 a sub-consciousness that it is not real, you 
 know vaguely all the time that you are 
 only dreaming. So, says Coleridge, " Stage- 
 presentations are to produce a sort of 
 temporary half-faith, which the spectator 
 encourages in himself and supports by a 
 voluntary contribution on his own part, 
 because he knows that it is at all times in 
 his power to see the thing as it really is. 
 Thus the true stage-illusion as to a forest 
 scene consists — not in the mind's judging it 
 to be a forest, but in its remission of the 
 judgment that it is not a forest." The 
 mental state, in fact, is half-way between 
 two extremes, absolute non-illusion and 
 complete delusion. 
 
 Of the first of these extremes you may 
 take an illustration from Tolstoy's account 
 of a visit to Siegfried. '* When I arrived," 
 he says, " an actor sat on the stage amid 
 decorations intended to represent a cave, 
 and which, as is always the case, produced 
 the less illusion the better they were con- 
 structed. He was dressed in woven tights, 
 with a cloak of skins, wore a wig and an
 
 32 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 artificial beard, and with white, weak, 
 genteel hands (his easy movements, and 
 especially the shape of his stomach and his 
 lack of muscle, revealed the actor) beat an 
 impossible sword with an unnatural hammer 
 in a way in which no one ever uses a 
 hammer ; and at the same time opening his 
 mouth in a strange way, he sang some- 
 thing incomprehensible." There you have 
 absolute non - illusion : an unsympathetic 
 detachment of the spectator's mind. And 
 now, for the other extreme state of mind, 
 consider some passages from Addison's 
 account of Sir Roger de Coverley's be- 
 haviour at a performance of The THsti^est 
 Mother, " Upon the entering of Pyrrhus, 
 the Knight told me," says Addison, " that 
 he did not believe the King of France 
 himself had a better strut. I was indeed 
 very attentive to my old friend's remarks, 
 because I looked upon them as a piece of 
 natural criticism, and was well pleased to 
 hear him at the conclusion of almost every 
 scene telling me that he could not imagine 
 how the play would end. One while he 
 appeared much concerned for Andromache,
 
 SIR ROGER AT THE PLAY 33 
 
 and a little while after as much for Her- 
 mione ; and was extremely puzzled to think 
 what would become of Pyrrhus. . . . 
 
 " When Sir Roger saw Andromache's 
 obstinate refusal to her Lover's impor- 
 tunities, he whisper 'd me in the Ear, that 
 he was sure she would never have him ; 
 to which he added, with a more than 
 ordinary vehemence, ' You can't imagine, 
 Sir, what 'tis to have to do with a Widow.' 
 Upon Pyrrhus his threatening afterwards 
 to leave her, the Knight shook his Head, 
 and muttered to himself, ' Ay, do if you 
 can.' This part dwelt so much upon my 
 friend's imagination, that at the close of 
 the Third Act, as I was thinking of some- 
 thing else, he whispered in my Ear, ' These 
 widows. Sir, are the most perverse Creatures 
 in the World.' . . . Upon Hermione's going 
 of! with a Menace to Pyrrhus, the Audience 
 gave a loud Clap ; to which Sir Roger 
 added, ' On my word, a notable young 
 Baggage ! ' " There you have complete de- 
 lusion : wholly sympathetic absorption of 
 the spectator's mind. 
 
 The mind of the crowd, of the average
 
 34 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 spectator, is, as we have seen, somewhere 
 between these two extremes. Now what 
 is the state of mind of the ideal spectator, 
 of o x^P^^^^ ^ It is a rather compHcated 
 state, a state of double consciousness. 
 There is a French proverb which says 
 that you cannot at once join in a pro- 
 cession and look out of the window. Yet 
 it is a feat of that kind which the ideal 
 theatrical spectator has to accomplish, for 
 remember that he is not only taking in 
 pleasure with a complete self-surrender, he 
 is also commanding himself so as to esti- 
 mate the quality of his pleasure — while it 
 is coming in. He must have a mental 
 detachment as absolute as Tolstoy's at 
 Siegfried — but, unlike Tolstoy's, it must 
 be sympathetic detachment — with a sym- 
 pathy as whole-hearted as Sir Roger's at 
 The lyistrest Mother. This by no means 
 easy mental process requires not only an 
 effort of the will, a special motive, but 
 training and special aptitude. It is out 
 of the question to look for this from the 
 crowd. 
 
 'O yaplei^, then, the ideal spectator at the
 
 THE AMATEUR OF CULTURE 35 
 
 play is not the crowd, is not the average 
 spectator, whether Moliere's cook — even 
 though Mohere's cook was that superior 
 article a French cook — or Tolstoy's Russian 
 peasant, or the man who naively asks if 
 dramatic critics are of any use. 
 
 After the crowd, the average or uncul- 
 tivated amateur, let us turn to Mr. Birrell's 
 candidate for the critical post — the man of 
 affairs or of the world who dabbles in the 
 arts ; in other words, the amateur of culture. 
 Mr. Birrell puts in a very artful plea for 
 this class. He says the authors like them, 
 preferring their "verdicts of approval" to 
 the " laboured praise of the so-called ' ex- 
 pert.' " Here, however, we must be on our 
 guard against the rhetorical device of the 
 professional advocate — the familiar device 
 of comparing one thing at its best with 
 another thing at its worst. The praise of 
 the "expert" is not necessarily "laboured." 
 And you will observe that the authors like 
 the men of the world when they deliver 
 " verdicts of approval." What the authors 
 think of this class when they deliver ver- 
 dicts of disapproval we are not told.
 
 36 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 However, I willingly admit there is some- 
 thing very seductive in the idea of every 
 cultivated gentleman being his own critic — 
 though there is a little treatise called 
 " Every man his own lawyer," which Mr. 
 Birrell, I expect, regards with some 
 suspicion. Criticism from that point of 
 view is very much like the game of golf 
 — which is said to be as good for the duffer 
 as for the expert, and especially good for 
 the middle-aged and even elderly. It is a 
 notion which particularly recommends itself 
 to us English — who are governed by 
 amateurs. That, in fact, is part and parcel 
 of the British Constitution. Small wonder, 
 then, that we should take as quite a natural 
 thing the obiter dicta of the amateur in the 
 comparatively humble region of the arts. 
 But here I think we must distinguish. It 
 would be inaccurate, as well as impertinent, 
 to label the critical writings or discourses of 
 such men as Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Balfour or 
 Lord Rosebery — names which at once occur 
 to everybody's mind in this connection — as 
 amateurish. Whatever else they were or 
 are, these men were or are men of letters,
 
 BIAS OF INDIVIDUAL AND MODE 37 
 
 serious students of their subject. When 
 we refer to the amateur of culture, we are 
 thinking of a class opposed to the literary 
 class, the mundane people, a class which 
 has not the patience or the leisure or the 
 aptitude for serious study of the arts, their 
 history, their laws, their logic, a class to 
 which the arts are a pastime, and nothing 
 but a pastime. Now the criticism of these 
 mundane people is always worth listening 
 to, just as is the criticism of the man in the 
 street. For it is a criticism which is, at 
 any rate, free from the literary bias, from 
 the cant of criticism, from the smell of the 
 lamp. It seldom fails to give us a fresh and 
 suggestive view of the subject. But does it 
 give us the right view ? I am afraid not. 
 For though it is free from the literary, the 
 professional bias, it has a bias of its own — 
 which is either the bias of the individual or 
 the bias of the mode. As for the bias of 
 the individual, you get that in the men of 
 autocratic temper — who take their own 
 subjective opinions for the measure of 
 universal truth. This bias is illustrated 
 by Lord Foppington in The Relapse, who
 
 38 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 preferred the " natural sprouts " of his own 
 brain to the " forced products " of another 
 rnan's. This bias is also illustrated by the 
 opinions of George II. on " bainting and 
 boetry," of George III. on "that sad stuff, 
 Shakespeare," of Frederick the Great on 
 epic poetry, which, he declared, reached its 
 highest pinnacle in Voltaire's " Henriade," 
 and by the opinions of an illustrious suc- 
 cessor of Frederick's on every art under the 
 sun. It is perhaps permissible to suggest 
 that the artistic views of that illustrious 
 monarch, interesting and instructive as they 
 are to the historian and the student of 
 character, are not exactly the opinions of 
 the Aristotelian x«/^'^'?- Then as to the 
 bias of the mode, everybody knows how 
 fashion rules the mundane amateur — 
 fashion, the most changeable, the most 
 relative to time and place, the least reason- 
 able thing in the world. At one time 
 the mundane amateur is all for " Grecian 
 marbles," at another he is all for the 
 paintings of Domenichino or Sir Thomas 
 Lawrence. To be sure fashion sometimes 
 makes a good shot : Garrick became the
 
 THE SERIOUS INTELLECTS 39 
 
 fashion at once. But it is at haphaz- 
 ard. The fashionable people, the mundane 
 amateurs, who made the vogue of Kean, 
 also made the vogue of Master Betty. 
 There are no settled principles of judgment 
 here. 
 
 And there is another subdivision of 
 the cultivated amateur, not the mundane 
 sort, but the intellectual sort — no doubt 
 the sort which Mr. Birrell lias in mind 
 — which is quite as unfitted to run a 
 successful candidate for the post of ideal 
 spectator. " Probably there is nothing," 
 said the late Mr. Grant Allen, "which 
 serious intellects hate so much as an in- 
 tellectual treat ! To be made to sit out a 
 performance at the Francais or the Lyceum 
 would be to a great many of us an unmiti- 
 gated bore. I believe high-class music, 
 high - class plays, high - class novels are 
 produced mainly for people of moderate or 
 medium intelligence ; people whose brains 
 and bodies are systematically underworked. 
 Men who have done a good day's toil with 
 head or hands don't care for Faust: they 
 want a Gaiety burlesque. The silliest
 
 40 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 song, the most rollicking fun, of the Cafe 
 Chantants in the Champs Elysees or of 
 the London Pavilion, is to many intelligent 
 men a far greater relaxation than the best- 
 mounted piece of Shakespeare's or Victor 
 Hugo's. Or rather, the one is a relaxation 
 and the other a nuisance." Well, we can 
 all understand that point of view, and, in 
 certain moods, sympathise with it ; but at 
 the same time we can all see that it is not 
 the point of view of the ideal spectator, of 
 6 ^apieig at the play. 
 
 And now we have done with the amateur, 
 whether of the street or of the salon, whether 
 intellectual or mundane, and must look for 
 our ideal spectator in quite another quarter. 
 It is often said that the ideal consumer of 
 drama, or of any other art, is the producer 
 of it. The proper judges, that is, of pic- 
 tures are painters, of novels are novelists, 
 of plays are playwrights, and of acting are 
 actors. 
 
 " Let such teach others who themselves excel, 
 And censure others who have written well," 
 
 says Pope in his " Essay on Criticism." 
 This is a very plausible contention, which
 
 CRITICISM NOT DIDACTIC 41 
 
 has hoodwinked many worthy people. For 
 here, also, we have a notion which reflects 
 the English spirit : trial by jury, judgment 
 by our peers. And if criticism were a 
 mode of technical instruction, a piece of 
 didactic, the contention would, no doubt, 
 be a perfectly sound one. I will go further 
 and insist that, whenever we say that this 
 or that play is bad, this or that picture 
 ill-painted, this or that symphony poorly 
 orchestrated, we ought always to bear in 
 mind the difficulties of the artist's task and 
 to remember that these things which he 
 has failed to do well we, very likely, can- 
 not do at all. That is a chastening reflec- 
 tion, a salutary moral exercise ; but though 
 it may prompt us to charity, it ought not to 
 aff*ect our ultimate verdict. John Dennis 
 effectively answered Pope that his precept 
 " is denied by matter of fact, and by the 
 experience of above two thousand years." ^ 
 On this point, as on so many others, we 
 get something decisive from the strong 
 common-sense of Samuel Johnson. Boswell 
 
 ^ " Reflections upon a late Rhapsody call'dj An Essay upon 
 Criticism ; by Mr. Dennis."
 
 42 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 had collaborated with two other friends in 
 writing a pamphlet entitled " Critical Stric- 
 tures " against Mallet's tragedy of Elvira ; 
 but one of the friends had misgivings, and 
 said, " We have hardly a right to abuse 
 this tragedy : for bad as it is, how vain 
 should either of us be to write one not 
 near so good." Then Johnson broke in, 
 "Why, no, sir; this is not just reasoning. 
 You may abuse a tragedy, though you can- 
 not write one. You may scold a carpenter 
 who has made you a bad table, though 
 you cannot make a table. It is not your 
 trade to make tables."^ 
 
 So it is not the dramatic critic's trade to 
 make plays, or to teach the way to make 
 plays. It is the function of criticism not to 
 inculcate methods, but to appraise results ; 
 to examine the thing done, not the way to 
 do it. It is, in short, the evaluation of plea- 
 surable impressions ; and to receive these 
 impressions, we must have a perfectly open 
 mind — a clear mirror, as Hazlitt said of 
 Joseph Fawcett. Now your actual, your 
 so-called " creative," artist is too narrow 
 
 ' Dr. Birbeck Hill's edition of Boswell, vol. i. p. 409.
 
 POETS ON A POET 43 
 
 and too intense for that. The very force 
 within him which gives the impulse to 
 creation is fatal to catholicity of taste. His 
 " personal equation," as the astronomers call 
 it, will not permit him to be an accurate 
 observer. Every critical preference he ex- 
 presses is really a veiled justification of 
 himself. As Stendhal said, every eulogy 
 between confrere and confrere is a certi- 
 ficate of resemblance. Of this you will 
 find an amusing instance in Aubrey de 
 Vere's Reminiscences of Tennyson in early 
 days : 
 
 " ' Read the exquisite songs of Burns,' 
 Tennyson exclaimed. ' In shape, each of 
 them has the perfection of the berry, in 
 light the radiance of the dew-drop : you 
 forget for its sake those stupid things, his 
 serious pieces.' The same day," continues 
 Aubrey de Vere, " I met Wordsworth and 
 named Burns to hivi. Wordsworth praised 
 him even more vehemently than Tennyson 
 had done ; but added, ' Of course I refer 
 to his serious efforts; those foolish little 
 amatory songs of his one has to forget.' 
 I told the tale to Henry Taylor the same
 
 44 THE IDEAL SPECTATOR 
 
 evening, and his answer was : ' Burns ' ex- 
 quisite songs and Burns' serious efforts are to 
 me alike tedious and disagreeable reading.' " 
 
 These are authors when they praise, 
 but when they don't ! You know what 
 Corneille thought of Racine ; what Richard- 
 son thought of Fielding and what Fielding 
 of Richardson ; what Borrow and Peacock, 
 two very different authors, agreed in think- 
 ing about a third author, Walter Scott ; 
 what Byron said of Keats ; what Macready 
 thought of Charles Kean and Charles Kean 
 of Macready; what Beaconsfield said of 
 Thackeray, and Charlotte Bronte of Jane 
 Austen. 
 
 And then there is the trite but inevi- 
 table remark, that the nature which invents 
 and combines — the faculty of the so- 
 called " creative " artist — is widely different 
 — though I hope to persuade you later that 
 it is by no means totally different — from the 
 nature which enjoys and analyses — the criti- 
 cal faculty. But there is really no need 
 to argue the point. It was settled, once 
 and for all, by the excellent, the invaluable 
 Aristotle, in Book III. ch. ii. of his " Poli-
 
 ARISTOTLF/S "POLITICS" 45 
 
 tics," where you may read : " Thus it is 
 not the builder alone whose function it is 
 to criticise the merits of a house ; the 
 person who uses it, to wit, the householder, 
 is actually a better judge ; and, similarly, a 
 pilot is a better judge of a helm than a 
 carpenter; or one of the company of a 
 dinner than the cook."
 
 II 
 
 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC
 
 II 
 
 The way ought now to be clear for a con- 
 sideration of the expert playgoer, the so- 
 called dramatic critic. I have pointed out 
 that we are all critics in a sense — criticism 
 being the reaction of mind against mind, 
 the opinion of the consumer about the 
 work of art which the producer offers 
 him — and I have postulated, after Aris- 
 totle, and indeed not only after Aristotle, 
 but in accordance with common-sense and 
 the nature of things, an ideal consumer, 
 the man of the peifect taste and the right 
 opinion, whom Aristotle calls o ;^ap/ei9. We 
 have examined how far and in what way 
 the several classes among consumers of 
 drama diverged from this standard, the 
 ideal consumer. There is the representa- 
 tive of the crowd, with the marked limita- 
 tions imposed by the mental conditions 
 
 peculiar to crowds. There is the cultivated 
 49 j3
 
 50 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 amateur, whether mundane or intellectual, 
 with his limitations, which, for the mun- 
 dane amateur, are the caprice of fashion 
 in artistic taste, and the fact that art is 
 for him only a pastime, just as it is only a 
 pastime, a rest from brain-fag, for a certain 
 sort of intellectual amateur. We have 
 scrutinised the claims of the producer him- 
 self, the playwright or the actor, to be the 
 nearest approximation to the Aristotelian 
 X'^p'^^^'i ill the theatre, and we have rejected 
 the claims of the producer because his own 
 special artistic . individuality is of necessity 
 so strong as to colour his general ideas, 
 and to disqualify him from forming a broad 
 and balanced judgment. Still, these classes 
 are all critics in their way. They are viva 
 voce critics ; and they are irresponsible 
 critics, caring not a rush for antiquity or 
 posterity, or for anything beyond their 
 pleasure of the moment. And remember 
 that this floating mass of irresponsible vhm 
 voce criticism is enormously important to 
 the producers of art ; . for, one way or 
 another, it is the criticism which settles 
 their hash. Authors complain of the se-
 
 AN ARTIST 51 
 
 verity or captiousness, or even malice, of 
 what is written about them by the re- 
 sponsible " official " critics ; but if they 
 only heard what is said about them by 
 the irresponsible viva voce critics ! 
 
 We come now, then, to the class of 
 critics properly so called, who diffisr from 
 all these other classes in that it is their 
 business not only, like the others, to enjoy, 
 but to appraise and to justify their enjoy- 
 ment. And this appraising and justifi- 
 cation have to be made systematic and to 
 be presented in literary form. Hence the 
 critics proper are in the peculiar position 
 of being at once consumers and producers ; 
 they are consumers of one art, the art of 
 drama, and producers of another art, the 
 art of criticism. In other words, the critic 
 has something more to do than to approxi- 
 mate as closely as may be to the ideal 
 spectator — though that to be sure is a 
 very important, perhaps the fundamental, 
 part of his task — he has, over and above 
 that, to be an artist. This claim of criti- 
 cism to be an art is viewed with some 
 jealousy by other artists, who are fond of
 
 52 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 making the distinction that their arts — the 
 poem, the novel, the play — are " creative " 
 arts, whereas criticism is not " creation." 
 This distinction, I cannot but think, 
 is shallow and lamentably unscientific. 
 Science teaches us that there is no such 
 thing as creation ; only change, transmu- 
 tation. But accepting the word " creation," 
 we must apply it to all producers of liter- 
 ary art, whether they be poets or novelists 
 or playwrights or critics. They are all 
 creators, and what they all create is aesthetic 
 feeling. And the raw material out of which 
 they all create this is the same, namely, 
 themselves. Criticism, like any other art 
 — whatever else it may be — is a mode of 
 self-expression. M. Anatole France has 
 given a famous description of criticism as 
 " The adventures of a soul among master- 
 pieces," and he has added : " In order to 
 be frank, the critic ought to say ; Gentle- 
 men, I am about to speak of myself a 
 p?^opos of Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, 
 or Goethe — by no means a bad oppor- 
 tunity." Let us have done, then, with 
 this false old criterion of " creation " as a
 
 DRYDEN'S ESSAY 53 
 
 pretext for giving the name of art to the 
 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe or of 
 Harry Richmond, and withholding it from 
 the Adventures of a Soul among Master- 
 pieces. 
 
 To see what nonsense this criterion really 
 is, you need only take the case of Dry- 
 den. Are we seriously to be told that 
 while Dryden in his Wild Gallant, or in 
 his All for Love, or in his Spanish Friar 
 was doing creative work, he was not, for- 
 sooth, doing creative work in his Essay of 
 Dramatic Poesy ? Why, the very scheme 
 of this beautiful piece, the contrast of a 
 pure classic gem against a rich romantic 
 setting, is, in itself, a creation. " It was 
 that memorable day, in the first summer 
 of the late war, when our navy engaged 
 the Dutch ; a day wherein the two most 
 mighty and best appointed fleets which any 
 age had ever seen, disputed the command 
 of the greater half of the globe, the com- 
 merce of nations, and the riches of the 
 universe. . . . The noise of the cannons 
 from both navies reached our ears about 
 the City, so that all men being alarmed
 
 54 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 with it, and in a dreadful suspense of the 
 event which we knew was then deciding, 
 every one went following the sound as his 
 fancy led him ; ... all seeking the noise in 
 the depths of silence." . . . And so four 
 gentlemen in long perruques, magnificent 
 creatures, took a barge and waited to begin 
 talking until the rush of waters under 
 London Bridge was out of their ears and, 
 getting towards Greenwich, they could 
 order the watermen to let fall their oars 
 more gently. And what could these courtly 
 gentlemen find better to talk about than 
 dramatic criticism ? What the drama is, 
 and was, and may some day be, and what 
 are the Three Unities, and whether rhyme 
 or blank verse is better for tragedy, and 
 whether the Ancients surpass the Moderns 
 and the French the English, and what is 
 to be thought of Terence his plots and of 
 Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher 
 and Ben Jonson. And, then, how artfully 
 the plot of this critical drama is related to 
 the scenic background, so that the very 
 swallows which skim the water ahead of 
 the barge are pressed into service to give
 
 A KINEMATOGRAPH 55 
 
 a simile for the literary points of some 
 poet under discussion ! And by-and-by 
 the watermen are bidden to turn the barge 
 and row softly, that the party may take 
 the cool of the evening in their return ; 
 and the talk flows on, as abundant and 
 as richly laden as the river itself, and the 
 boom of the Dutch guns has now given 
 place to the serene wisdom of Aristotle — 
 the thought of whom among those peri- 
 wigs suggests a Grecian marble over against 
 a Sir Peter Lely. And so rapt were these 
 gentlemen in their discourse that it was 
 not until they had been twice or thrice 
 called to, that they saw the barge had 
 stopped, and they were back at the foot 
 of Somerset stairs. And then there is the 
 choice little final kinematograph : — " The 
 company stood a-while looking back on 
 the water, which the moonbeams played 
 upon, and made it appear like floating 
 quick-silver ; at last they went up through 
 a crowd of French people, who were merrily 
 dancing in the open air, and nothing con- 
 cerned for the noise of guns which had 
 alarmed the town that afternoon."
 
 56 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 What an exquisite blend of frank " im- 
 pressionism" and academic theory, of the 
 circumstance of the moment and the eter- 
 nal verities, of Pepysian London and the 
 Athens of the greater Peripatetic ! It is 
 because of the special quality of this blend, 
 its peculiar " thrill" — the Hellenisation, so 
 to speak, of a London day — that I cannot 
 resist the temptation of setting beside this 
 Essay of Dryden's a passage from one of 
 Edward FitzGerald's Letters, where he de- 
 scribes to a friend a jaunt he had in town 
 with James Spedding, the learned editor 
 of Bacon : — 
 
 "The most pleasurable remembrance I 
 had of my stay in town," writes FitzGerald, 
 " was the last day I spent there, having a 
 long ramble in the streets with Spedding, 
 looking at books and pictures ; then a walk 
 with him and Carlyle across the Park to 
 Chelsea, where we dropped that Latter 
 Day Prophet at his house ; then, getting 
 upon a steamer, smoked down to West- 
 minster ; dined at a chop-house by the 
 Bridge, and then went to Astley's ; old 
 Spedding being quite as wise about the
 
 THE CRITIC'S DIFFERENTIA 57 
 
 Horsemanship as about Bacon and Shake- 
 speare. We parted at midnight in Covent- 
 Garden ; and this whole pleasant day has 
 left a taste on my palate like one of 
 Plato's lighter, easier, and more picturesque 
 dialogues." 
 
 It is when we come to recognise that 
 the critic is himself an artist, in his way, 
 that we see the full extent of fatuity 
 in the question, " What is the use of 
 Dramatic Criticism ? " The use of any 
 art is as a channel for the communi- 
 cation of ideas and emotions between 
 man and man. It is a mode by which 
 the producer of the art shares out his 
 moods, his soul -states, his views of life, 
 with the consumer. This is what is 
 meant in popular language by " being 
 interesting." Just as you may have an in- 
 teresting novel or an interesting play, so 
 you may have an " interesting " dramatic 
 criticism. And that is the use of it. 
 
 Well, the peculiar position, the dif- 
 ferentia, of the critic proper results from 
 the fact that he has to be not only 
 consumer but producer, not only observer
 
 58 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 but artist. It is that which chiefly dis- 
 tinguishes him from the other critics 
 whom we have passed in review — from 
 the man in the street, the connoisseur, 
 and the rest of them — in a word, from 
 the pubhc. Not that his attitude, merely 
 as an observer, a consumer, is quite the 
 same as theirs. We have noted the con- 
 tagious influence of the crowd and its 
 results. Now, just as the able theatre- 
 manager is he who allows for that con- 
 tagious influence, is indeed a kind of 
 professional incendiary, always watching 
 when he can set the crowd on fire, so 
 the critic is the one man in the theatre 
 whose business it is to react against the 
 crowd, to " sit tight," as the phrase goes, 
 and to preserve the independence of his 
 personal judgment, the captaincy of his 
 soul. He has to be on his guard, too, 
 against those caprices of literary fashion 
 which sway the mundane amateur, and, 
 on the other hand, against that profes- 
 sional bias which influences the actual 
 producer of drama, be he playwright or 
 player. But, as I say, the main dif-
 
 CRITIC AND PUBLIC 59 
 
 ference between the critic proper and 
 the pubHc at large is the consequence 
 of the pecuhar position of the critic as 
 being himself an artist. 
 
 This disagreement between critics and 
 public is a subject which nobody seems 
 to be in danger of forgetting. When- 
 ever an instance of it occurs the critics' 
 good-natured friends— they have many at 
 such moments — sedulously improve the 
 occasion. " Well, you see you were 
 wrong in ' slating ' So-and-so's piece ; the 
 advertisements already announce its hun- 
 dredth night." Or, "What on earth did 
 you mean by praising that rubbish at the 
 Frivolity? Why, it didn't run a week!" 
 The genial implication in either case is 
 that the critic has been an ass for his 
 pains. But any one who has ever thought 
 the matter over knows that talk of this 
 kind is nothing to the purpose. Take, 
 for an historic instance, the disagree- 
 ment between critics and pubHc in mid- 
 eighteenth century. While English critics 
 of the Chesterfield type were learning to 
 praise French " regularity," a French critic
 
 60 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 like Diderot could wax enthusiastic over 
 the " irregular, rugged, and wild air of 
 the English genius." But there was no 
 mutual concession of this kind on the 
 part of the two publics. Between the 
 critical and the public attitude Mrs. 
 Centlivre (in her preface to Loves Con- 
 trivance) had already made a practical dis- 
 tinction : — 
 
 " The critics cavil most about decorums, 
 and cry up Aristotle's rules, as the most 
 essential part of the play. I own they 
 are in the right of it ; yet I dare venture 
 they'll never persuade the town to be of 
 their opinion." 
 
 The plain truth is that the playgoer 
 who is inerely seeking his pleasure and 
 the playgoer who has to appraise and to 
 justify his pleasure of necessity take some- 
 what different views. For the one there 
 is the sole question, Am I pleased ? For 
 the other there is that question too, 
 but coupled with another question — a 
 question which, by the way, was one of 
 Matthew Arnold's many borrowings from 
 Sainte-Beuve — Am I right to be pleased ?
 
 CRITICAL DIFFICULTIES 61 
 
 Stendhal's precept, " Interroge-toi quand 
 tu ris," is nothing to the pubHc, but it is 
 everything to the critic. Or the pubhc 
 may say, "we were bored," and forget 
 the play as quickly as they can. The 
 critics have to say why they are bored, 
 and that is a bore, so that they are sure 
 to be less charitable to a bad play than 
 the public. The wound is kept open. 
 Then it has to be remembered that good 
 plays, plays which rightly please the public, 
 often make bad " copy " — that is to say, 
 unworkable material — for the critic. A 
 play that presents no variation of type 
 may be interesting enough in itself, but 
 vexes the critic, to whom it offers no 
 "purchase." And, to go a little further 
 into technical particulars, there are certain 
 classes of play — for example, melodramas 
 and farces — which always come out worse 
 on paper than on the boards. The critic 
 is generally tempted to describe melodrama 
 by the ironic method — which is a perfidy 
 — and to narrate the plot of a farce is, at 
 the best, to decant champagne. It is for 
 a kindred reason that the " drama of ideas "
 
 62 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 is apt to be overpraised in print — which 
 is a good medium for ideas. In brief, 
 criticism, being a form of literature, can 
 do justice to the Uterary elements in 
 drama ; but in drama there are many 
 other elements, and criticism is often at 
 fault with these, because of a purely tech- 
 nical difficulty, the difficulty of transposing 
 the effiscts of one art into the effiscts of 
 another. Criticism can give the reader a 
 very fair idea of Hamlet or Paolo and 
 Francesca, of Le Demi- Monde or A JDoU's 
 House, of his or IVie Admii^ablc Crichton. 
 It can give only an inadequate account 
 of the pleasure afforded by A Mid- 
 summer Nighfs Dream or La Locandiera 
 or L' Enfant Pi'odigue. With Box mid 
 Cox or Charleys Aunt it can do nothing. 
 
 And we have seen the reason why. It is 
 because the critic, like the piece of furniture 
 in Goldsmith's poem, has " a double debt to 
 pay " ; because he is at once consumer and 
 producer, at once parasite and independent, 
 substantive artist. In the very act of de- 
 scribing and appraising the methods of 
 another art he has to follow the methods,
 
 CRITICAL DEVICES 63 
 
 the very different methods, of his own. A 
 criticism is a picture with its own laws of 
 perspective and composition and " values," 
 and the play which furnishes the subject for 
 this picture has more often than not to 
 be " humoured " a little, stretched here and 
 squeezed there, in order to fit into the 
 design. The salient points in the pattern 
 of the play may not suit the salient points 
 in the pattern of the criticism — though, no 
 doubt, the good critic is he who most often 
 gets the two sets into perfect coincidence. 
 The critic must have his "general idea," 
 his leading theme, which gives his criticism 
 its unity, something to hold it together. 
 This general idea, however legitimately it 
 may have been derived from the play 
 criticised, will very likely get exaggerated, 
 will assume a much more important part 
 in the criticism than it actually did in the 
 play itself Or the critic may take some 
 significant phrase or catchword of the play 
 as a " refrain " for his article, or he may 
 perform a fantasia on some leading theme 
 of the play (for example, the " nose " theme 
 in Cyrano de Bergei^ac), until he has ex-
 
 64 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 hausted all its possible permutations and 
 combinations. These are devices permis- 
 sible in criticism, because criticism is litera- 
 ture, an art intended to interest, to give 
 pleasui'e, in itself; but their effect is to 
 warp the genuine first-hand impression of 
 the play, to alter its proportions. Thus 
 criticism tends to systematise what may 
 not be systematic, to follow out its own 
 logic and to expand its own formulas, 
 rather than to conform strictly to the out- 
 line and proportions of the thing criticised. 
 That is so, because, in a sense, all art is not 
 only a transformation but a deformation of 
 its subject-matter. It is the old difficulty 
 of the portrait painter. The sitter asks, 
 " Is it like ? " ; the connoisseur, " Is it a good 
 piece of painting?" There are whole ele- 
 ments of a play which are ignored by the 
 critic, for the simple reason that thej" will 
 not work into his scheme. One has even 
 heard of cases where the name of some 
 meritorious actor has been passed over in 
 silence, because mention of it would spoil 
 the hang of the critic's sentence ; but that 
 is immoral.
 
 FIRST NIGHT CRITICISM 65 
 
 One must not be lured into betraying all 
 the secrets of the craft. Enough has been 
 said, perhaps, to show why the critic and 
 the public differ in their opinions of the 
 same thing, and why this difference is 
 widened in the very process by which the 
 critic records his opinions. It is often 
 widened still further by what may seem 
 a purely mechanical accident — the interval 
 of time which elapses between the critic's 
 impression and his record of it. The 
 objection is often raised against " first 
 night " criticism, that it is bound to be 
 hasty, undigested, more or less of an im- 
 provisation. Apart from the fact that 
 newspaper readers, in any case, insist upon 
 having it, I believe that it is on the whole 
 the criticism most advantageous to the 
 play. The critic's sensations are vivid, his 
 mind is full of his subject, he still has the 
 proportions and details of the play in his 
 eye. Writing after an interval, he is apt 
 to remember his general impression of the 
 play rather than the play itself, and his 
 impression has lost in truth by the fading 
 of minor detail, to the consequent exaggera- 
 
 E
 
 66 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 tioii of a few prominent features — a process 
 which may lead the most conscientious 
 critic to unconscious caricature. 
 
 Now I trust I have not been showing you 
 a ghmpse of the critic at work without at 
 the same time suggesting to you his pro- 
 fessional drawbacks, his besetting sins. For 
 one thing, I have said that he has often to 
 give an appearance of system to subject- 
 matter which is not really systematic. And 
 so he is apt to become what Joe Gargery 
 would caU too "architectooralooral.'' Then 
 again, having to deal perpetually in formu- 
 las, he is in danger of becoming their dupe. 
 He is apt to indulge in what another 
 character in Dickens calls " poll-parrot- 
 ting " ; to repeat mechanically cant phrases 
 — "objective" and "subjective," "classic" 
 and "romantic," "organism" and "environ- 
 ment," "development" and "reaction." 
 These are the things which Sir Leslie 
 Stephen, with his wonted manliness and 
 homeliness of sense, brands as "the mere 
 banalities of criticism. I can never hear 
 them," he says, " without a suspicion that 
 a professor of ^Esthetics is trying to hood-
 
 THEORIES "IN THE AIR" 67 
 
 wink me by a bit of technical platitude. 
 The cant phrases which have been used so 
 often by panegyrists, too lazy to define 
 their terms, have become almost as mean- 
 ingless as the complimentary formula? of 
 society." And that is just it ; the man of 
 letters is here showing the same weakness 
 as the man of the world. For there are 
 fashions in the library just as there are 
 fashions in the salon; and the desire for 
 imitation for imitation's sake, is common 
 to all humanity. 
 
 And then the critic is apt to theorise " in 
 the air," because of the constant tendency 
 towards divorce between literature and life. 
 Walter Bagehot makes some characteristic 
 remarks on this point : " The reason why 
 so few good books are written, is that few 
 people that can write know anything. In 
 general an author has always lived in a 
 room, has read books, has cultivated science, 
 is acquainted with the style and sentiments 
 of the best authors, but is out of the way 
 of employing his own ears and eyes. He 
 has nothing to hear and nothing to see. 
 His life is a vacuum. . . . He sits beside a
 
 68 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 library-fire, with nice white paper, a good 
 pen, a capital style, every means of saying 
 everything, and nothing to say. . . . How 
 dull it is to make it your business to write, 
 to stay by yourself in a room to write, 
 and then to have nothing to say." Some- 
 thing like that is very often the fate of 
 the dramatic critic. For there are many 
 plays which are absolutely null and void. 
 The general playgoer settles the matter 
 quite comfortably by falling asleep over 
 them. The critic has to say something, 
 and in reality there is nothing to be said. 
 So much by way of confession of critical 
 sins. There remain two charges constantly 
 brought against critics which may be ad- 
 mitted to the full, but which, instead of 
 being to their discredit, are really the best 
 evidence of their good faith and their good 
 work. These two charges are : first, lack 
 of unanimity — the critics disagree with one 
 another — and, second, lack of consistency — 
 the critic will often disagree with himself. 
 Critics, it is said, not being unanimous, 
 cannot be representative of public opinion. 
 As though public opinion about a play was
 
 CRITICISM MULTANIMOUS 69 
 
 ever unanimous ! We must not be fooled by 
 a noun of multitude. " Public " is one word ; 
 it does not denote one thing. I know I 
 spoke in my first lecture of the crowd as 
 a whole, and sketched the general aspects 
 of the collective mind. But the public, 
 of course, is extraordinarily disparate in 
 its parts. It comprises the people who 
 applaud a play, the people who hiss it, the 
 people who slumber through it, the people 
 who don't know what to think about it, the 
 people who like it because dear Angelina 
 does, the people who dislike it because they 
 had to forgo their after-dinner coffee in 
 order to see it, and the people who would 
 stay away from it if they were not paid 
 to go. So that when criticism is unanimous, 
 then, and only then, shall we be able to say 
 confidently that it is not representative. 
 But fortunately that time — that monotonous 
 time — will never be. For in that time 
 there will have to be absolute rules for 
 judging works of art, applied by everybody 
 in the same way ; all critics will possess 
 the same principles, taste, temperament, 
 intellectual education, moral standard, and
 
 70 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 experience of life. Meanwhile, " with such 
 a being as man in such a world as the 
 present " — as Bishop Butler used to phrase 
 it — no two critics who are thinking and 
 feeling for themselves can be in complete 
 agreement. We might as well complain 
 that their faces are not alike ! There is, 
 no doubt, often a certain appearance of 
 unanimity among critics who are not 
 thinking for themselves but are trying to 
 think what they suppose they ought to 
 think or what they guess other people to 
 be thinking, so as to shout, on Mr. Pick- 
 wick's principle, with the largest crowd. 
 But these are critics who have mistaken 
 their vocation. So that when Mr. Sydney 
 Grundy asks, " When critics fall out, who 
 shall decide ? *' and when Sir Henry Irving 
 refers to " the rapture of disagreement 
 which is served up by the dramatic critics," 
 they ought in reality to have been gratified 
 by the lack of unanimity which they de- 
 plore. It is evidence that the plays of the 
 one and the acting of the other are stimu- 
 lating enough to force the critics into 
 thinking for themselves.
 
 OTHER VARIATIONS 71 
 
 We have seen that while criticism as to 
 its substance is opinion, as to its form it is 
 art. No two opinions can be the same, 
 because no man has the same perceptive 
 apparatus — eye, ear, nerves, brain — as 
 another man. Is it not notorious that 
 no two people will agree in describing 
 the simplest fact, the pace of an omnibus, 
 the number of cats in the back garden ? 
 But while criticism is bound to vary, as 
 mere record of fact, its variation is enor- 
 mously increased because it is an art. Did 
 you ever see two identical pictures of the 
 same subject by different hands ? Did you 
 ever hear two pianists play the same sonata 
 in the same way ? Of course not, and yet 
 there are people who seem to expect dif- 
 ferent souls to have the same adventures 
 among the masterpieces. And if they 
 were the same, there would still remain 
 the variations of ability to describe them. 
 The critic's real difficulty is that he never 
 does describe them adequately. To adjust 
 language with exactness to one's thoughts 
 and impressions is an impossible feat ; 
 critics, like other writers, spend their lives
 
 72 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 in practising it, and, like other writers, never 
 bring the feat off. 
 
 As to the critic's want of self-consistency, 
 that is apt in this country to bring him 
 into sad trouble. In 1902 a provincial jury 
 mulcted a newspaper in the sum of £100 
 and costs for a certain theatrical " notice," 
 and two of the jurors wrote to the news- 
 papers to say that the main ground of their 
 verdict was the consideration that the notice 
 was inconsistent with a former notice of 
 the same play in the same quarter. If 
 these gentlemen had been philosophers — 
 instead of jurymen — they would have con- 
 gratulated this inconsistent critic on the 
 plain proof that he was not a mechanical 
 recording instrument — a barometer or a 
 pair of scales — a dead thing, but a human 
 being with the principle of groAvth and 
 life within him. They would have recog- 
 nised, with a pure natural joy, that the soul 
 never has the same adventures twice over. 
 Nothing — to take perhaps a less humble 
 literary example — •'nothing could be more 
 interesting than to note the mental develop- 
 ment of the well-known Danish critic, Dr.
 
 NO FINALITY 73 
 
 George Brandes, in studying the works of 
 Ibsen pmi passu with their production. 
 He says himself, after noting how Ibsen 
 at different stages of his work was not 
 the same Ibsen : " But neither was his 
 critic quite the same. He had in the 
 meantime gone through a great deal, and 
 had consequently acquired a larger outlook 
 upon life, and a more flexible emotional 
 nature. He had dropped all the doctrines 
 that were due to education and tradition. 
 He understood the poet better now." A 
 great historical instance of development in 
 the reverse direction is that of Voltaire in 
 regard to Shakespeare. Voltaire began by 
 blessing Shakespeare (with reservations), 
 and ended by (quite unreservedly) cursing 
 him. That was by no means because he 
 understood the poet better ; but for reasons 
 extraneous to his critical development, 
 reasons connected with his objections to 
 the course which he found the French 
 drama was taking without his leave. And 
 the moral of that little affair is that the 
 critic should remain content to be an artist, 
 and not set up for a literary dictator.
 
 74 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 And note this about the changes in the 
 critic's mental experience ; they only re- 
 produce in the individual what has always 
 been happening in the race ; they are the 
 life-history, in miniature, of the whole body 
 of criticism. For example, it has been a 
 persistent cry of criticism throughout the 
 ages that the present age is witnessing the 
 decline of drama. M. Sarcey ^ gave a long 
 list of theatrical pamphlets bought at a 
 collector's sale, from which I select only a 
 few titles and dates ; — 
 
 1768. Causes de la decadence du theatre. 
 1771. Du theatre et des causes de sa decadence. 
 1807. Les causes de la decadence du theatre. 
 1828. Considerations sur les causes de la decad- 
 ence du theatre, 
 
 1841. Recherches sur les causes de la decadence 
 
 du theatre. 
 
 1842. A quelles causes attribuer la decadence de 
 
 la tragedie en France : 
 1849. De la decadence de Tart dramatique. 
 1860. De la decadence des theatres. 
 1866. Rapport an Senat sur la decadence de Tart 
 
 dramatique. 
 1871. De la decadence des theatres, 
 1876. Cri d'alarme sur la situation de Tart 
 
 dramatique. 
 1880, Du theatre a sauver. 
 
 ^ Quara7ite Ans de Theatre, v. i. p. 185 (Paris, 1902),
 
 NEW CRITICAL DEMANDS 75 
 
 Our English critical wailings, if less 
 numerous, have been not a whit less 
 monotonous. The following specimens are 
 culled, almost at random, from Mr. R. W. 
 Lowe's " Bibliographical Account of English 
 Theatrical Literature " : ^ — 
 
 1819. A Letter on the decay and degradation of 
 English theatrical literature. 
 
 1826. A nostrum for theatrical insipidity. 
 
 1853. A New Drama or we faint ! ! ! Decline of 
 the Drama ! ! ! 
 
 1885. The truth about the stage; "something 
 rotten in the, etc.'" 
 
 Of course the perpetual cry of the drama 
 in decline is but the other side of a per- 
 petual change in the theatrical consumer's 
 taste, and, in fact, new critical demands are 
 among the oldest things in the world. 
 Throughout the ages there is not a drama- 
 tist of them all but has recognised, at the 
 moment of writing, a new critical demand, 
 a demand which was to be humoured, or 
 derided, or temporised with, or even attri- 
 buted to his own prescience and invention, 
 as the case might be. Is there not the 
 leading instance of Shakespeare, speaking 
 
 1 London, 1888.
 
 76 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 through the Chorus in Heni^y V. ? What 
 was his appeal to the audience for the freer 
 exercise of their imagination but a tacit 
 recognition of the new demand expressed 
 by Sidney in his "Apologie for Poetry" — 
 Sidney was one of our earhest dramatic 
 critics — the demand for a closer verisimili- 
 tude of the scene ? And did not John 
 Webster, in his preface to The White Devil, 
 openly deride the new critical demand of 
 his age — that novelty which is a critical 
 demand of every age ? "I have noted," 
 says he, " most of the people that come to 
 the playhouse resemble those ignorant asses 
 who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is 
 not to inquire for good books, but new 
 books." So Corneille, in his preface to Le 
 Cid, temporised with the new critical demand 
 of his time for historical fidelity, by faking 
 up documentary evidence in favour of his 
 story ; while Racine, in his preface to 
 Berenice, defended liis evasion of the new 
 critical demand for an ingeniously invented 
 plot, by citing the simple fables of Greek 
 tragedy. In our later times Victor Hugo 
 discusses the new critical demand of the
 
 ART AND PLEASURE 77 
 
 romantic movement, the demand for the 
 beautiful-ugly and the sublime-grotesque, 
 in his preface to CromtveU ; Dumas fils^ 
 in his preface to Le Fils Natwel, defers to" 
 a new critical demand in vaunting his aim 
 of pressing the drama into the service of 
 great social reforms and the great hopes of 
 humanity ; and to-day there is Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw, who is at once a critic and a producer 
 of drama, professedly writing plays to meet 
 a new critical demand for a drama whose 
 outlook upon life shall be that of a " genu- 
 inely scientific natural history." 
 
 Now what is the explanation of this 
 perpetual variation of the critical demand ? 
 The explanation is to be found in the simple 
 fact that the drama, being an art, shares the 
 primary aim of all art, which is to give 
 pleasure. And this pleasure of art, it must 
 be borne in mind, is in the first instance — 
 whatever higher forms it may take in the 
 long run — a pleasure of the senses. It is 
 not the intellectual pleasure of solving a 
 proposition of Euclid, nor is it the moral 
 pleasure of letting a good deed shine in a 
 naughty world. A picture, whatever else
 
 78 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 it does, must first please the eye ; music, 
 whatever else it does, must first please the 
 ear. And pleasure of the senses — this is 
 the important point — is only to be had at 
 the price of perpetual change ; for it is an 
 elementary physiological law that the mere 
 repetition of the same stimulus will not be 
 followed by the same pleasurable reaction. 
 Contrast art, in this respect, with pure 
 science or With fundamental morals. Pure 
 science does not change, and cannot, so long 
 as man remains as we know him. Have 
 not two and two always made four, two 
 sides of a triangle always been greater than 
 the third, two bodies in space always 
 attracted one another inversely as the 
 square of the distance between them ? 
 And, so long as man remains in society 
 as we know it, the first principles of con- 
 duct cannot change : — Thou shalt not kill, 
 steal, bear false witness against thy neigh- 
 bour. No so with art. Our pleasure-sense 
 becomes sharpened by use, more subtle, 
 more exacting. In order to procure the 
 same thrill we are driven to vary and to 
 intensify the exciting cause ; or, as Mr.
 
 THE LAW OF CHANGE 79 
 
 Arthur Balfour has pithily expressed it in 
 one of those amiable digressions with which 
 he has enlivened his " Foundations of Be- 
 lief" — he is actually speaking of music, but 
 the statement may be generalised — " A 
 steady level of aesthetic sensation can only 
 be maintained by increasing doses of 
 aesthetic stimulant." So true is this of the 
 theatre that, to provide the same sum of 
 pleasure for the spectator, dramatic interest 
 has to go on multiplying its intensity, in 
 the course of time, by something like a 
 geometrical progression. Terence took two 
 plays of Menander to make one of his own, 
 and M. Brunetiere computes that there are 
 two of Terence's in one of Moliere's, while 
 to make a play of Dumas or Augier you 
 have to add one of Moliere's to one of 
 Diderot's or Sedaine's. 
 
 But, it may be objected, if art is always 
 transforming itself in response to this de- 
 mand for a change of pleasure-stimulus, 
 what about those works of art which we 
 call classics ? Are they not stable and 
 permanent ? Indeed, do we not call the 
 very greatest classics immortal ? And the
 
 80 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 reply is, that in the existence of the classics 
 lies the very proof of the point. For the 
 virtue of a classic, the quality which gives 
 it that rank, is the property of self-renewal, 
 the property of responding in different ages 
 to different demands for pleasure. Every 
 generation refashions the classics for itself, 
 extracting an entirely new pleasure out of 
 them, so that — to take only one example — 
 you have Aristophanes praising Homer as a 
 moralist, as a teacher of good life, and the 
 seventeenth century admiring Homer for 
 his " correctness," the " nice conduct of his 
 fable," while the twentieth century enjoys 
 Homer for his primitive simplicity, his 
 fairy tale romance, and his '* barbaric yaup." 
 The history of all criticism then — and of 
 dramatic criticism no less than any other 
 species — is, and must be, a history of 
 variations. But to compile a history is 
 not our present affair. At the head of a 
 long list of projected works — projected but 
 never begun — which Johnson gave to his 
 friend Langton and I^angton presented to 
 Cxcorge III. (who must have been highly 
 edified), stands a " History of Criticism,
 
 ARISTOTLE'S MODERNITY 81 
 
 as it relates to judging of authors, from 
 Aristotle to the present age. An account 
 of the rise and improvements of that art ; of 
 the different opinions of authors, ancient and 
 modern." As Johnson's whole life proved 
 insufficient for that adventure, one may 
 hope to stand excused for not attempting 
 a history of dramatic criticism in a brief 
 course of lectures. Enough if it be found 
 possible within our narrow limits to glance at 
 this Aristotle, with whom Johnson would, 
 as in duty bound, have begun, and to trace 
 the vicissitudes through the ages of one or 
 two of his leading ideas. JVIany of those 
 ideas have kept steadily travelling in the 
 world up to this moment — though I think 
 we shall find that, as Voltaire said of some- 
 thing else, they have become diablement 
 changees en route. For I cannot help sus- 
 pecting a certain spice of exaggeration in 
 much current talk about the "modernity" 
 of Aristotle. You have, for example, Mr. 
 Herbert Paul, an accomplished scholar and 
 a most sagacious critic, roundly declaring 
 that "Aristotle is of all Greeks the most 
 modern," and that his Poetics are " intensely
 
 82 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 modern." But what is meant by saying 
 that an old author is " modern " ? Surely, 
 that the " whirligig of time " has turned 
 full circle, that the author's opportunity has 
 come up again, through some quality of 
 his mind or temper which makes him pecu- 
 liarly at home in our own day. Thus a 
 good deal of Montaigne may justly be called 
 " modern " in this age of introspection and 
 Bashkirtseffism. In the same way some of 
 the little intimate passages in Euripide.s 
 seem strangely " modern " in this age of 
 " naturalistic " literature. But that is not 
 the sense in which you can apply the word 
 " modern " to Aristotle ; I think we shall 
 by-and-by encounter another Greek critic 
 who, in that sense, was very much more 
 " modern." Those things in Aristotle which 
 are valid and fresh to-day are not more valid 
 than they were in the day of Elizabeth, or 
 than they were in the day of Louis XIV. 
 It is, for such things, a case of the eternal 
 verities, not the case of Sir Roger de 
 Coverley's coat, which had been in and 
 out of the fashion a dozen times. Euclid is 
 true to-day, but he is not accurately to
 
 ARISTOTLE'S SEMPITERNITY 83 
 
 be described as " intensely modern." And 
 mention of Euclid recalls the other mistake 
 which has been persistently made in dealing 
 with Aristotle: the reverencing of all his 
 leading ideas as though they were even 
 something more than eternal verities, as 
 though they were holy sacraments. Thus 
 to Lessing he was as true as Euclid. In 
 his " Hamburg Dramaturgy " Lessing said : 
 " I do not hesitate to confess (even if in 
 these enlightened times I am to be laughed 
 out of countenance for it) that I hold the 
 Poetics to be infallible as Euclid's Ele- 
 ments." And not so very long before 
 Lessing's time, Dacier had objected to 
 some one who had ventured to set up the 
 Bible against Aristotle : " As if Divinity 
 and the Holy Scriptures could ever be con- 
 trary to the sentiments of Nature on which 
 Aristotle founds his judgment ! " This was 
 only giving another form to Roger Bacon's 
 observation that "Aristotle hath the same 
 authority in philosophy as the Apostle Paul 
 hath in divinity." So that, after all, it was 
 not so very much of a farcical exaggeration 
 when Racine in Les Plaidenrs made an
 
 84 THE DRAMATIC CRITIC 
 
 advocate attempt to browbeat the bench 
 with the authority of Aristotle in a case of 
 fowl-steahng. Why, in one of the liveHest 
 Hterary controversies of 1902, Mr. Churton 
 CoUins, another scholarly critic, singled out 
 some criterion of Aristotle's, and said we 
 must apply it "to all drama of classical 
 quality." Now this is flying in the face of 
 Aristotle himself. For Aristotle, through- 
 out the Poetics^ was professedly examining 
 a particular species of tragedy at a certain 
 stage of its growth. Mattliew Arnold, in 
 his preface to Merope, brings out this point 
 in his own delightful, easy way. "The 
 laws of Greek tragic art," says Arnold, " are 
 not exclusive ; they are for Greek dramatic 
 art itself, but they do not pronounce 
 other modes of dramatic art unlawful. . . . 
 'Tragedy,' says Aristotle, in a remarkable 
 passage, ' after going through many changes, 
 got the nature which suited it, and then it 
 stopped. Whether or no the kinds of 
 tragedy are yet exhausted,' he presently 
 adds, 'tragedy being considered either in 
 itself, or in respect to the stage, I shall not 
 now inquire.' Travelling in a certain path.
 
 THE "POETICS'^ 85 
 
 the spirit of man arrived at Greek tragedy ; 
 travelling in other paths, it may arrive at 
 other kinds of tragedy." 
 
 Well, the spirit of man has, in fact, 
 arrived at other kinds of tragedy, so that 
 we must now resign ourselves to the his- 
 torical view of Aristotle's Poetics. It will 
 be our business, then, to consider some of 
 his leading ideas as relative to the condi- 
 tions of his time, and to trace the ups-and- 
 downs of their course through the shifting 
 conditions of later times. By this means 
 we ought to get at any rate a bird's-eye 
 view of what dramatic criticism has been 
 in the past, and we may thus hope to be in 
 a better position to ask how precisely it 
 stands at the present day.
 
 Ill 
 
 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM
 
 Ill 
 
 First, then, Aristotle's general point of 
 view, the whole mood in which he 
 approached art was, in an important re- 
 spect, quite unlike ours. For Aristotle, 
 mighty intellect though his was, could not 
 let his intellect play in vacuo. He was a 
 man of his time, and his time was not, like 
 ours, a time wherein a clear distinction is 
 seen between nature and art, between the 
 practical and the aesthetic. To-day the 
 aesthetic mood and the practical mood are 
 very different. We have had a Schopen- 
 hauer to tell us that art marks off for us 
 the world as idea from the world as will ; 
 it is life purged of the will -to -live. The 
 aesthetic mood is a disinterested mood, and 
 the feelings excited by a work of art — 
 so far as art is directly concerned — are ends 
 in themselves, enjoyed for their own sake, 
 without the sequel of action, their natural 
 
 89
 
 90 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 sequel in real life. In one of the Goncourt 
 novels — Mcmette Sulomon — there is the in- 
 cident of a model, posing before a room 
 full of art-students for what Trilby called 
 " the altogether," who was suddenly covered 
 with confusion by the sight of a stranger 
 peeping in at the window. The students 
 were nothing to the model, who knew that 
 they were in the aesthetic, the " disinter- 
 ested " mood, just as though they were 
 copying a statue ; the Peeping Tom, how- 
 ever, would be in the very different mood 
 of real life. Even to-day there are people 
 who treat art just as they treat reality, 
 because they are incapable of the aesthetic 
 mood. Thomas Love Peacock in " Crotchet 
 Castle " alludes to what was then the recent 
 case of a cheesemonger who had broken 
 the plaster-cast of a ^^enus over the head of 
 its itinerant vendor. What was more, the 
 Justice of the Peace sided with him. There 
 are some remote circles where novels, all 
 novels, are still accounted wicked because 
 they speak of things untrue, that is, which 
 have not actually happened. Now this, or 
 something like this, was the common atti-
 
 THE "MORALISTIC" GREEK 91 
 
 tude of Greek criticism. To the Greek 
 art really was second nature ; an inferior, 
 because a copied, a second-hand nature. 
 He applied the same moral criteria in- 
 differently to art and real life, the image 
 and the object. Hence Greek criticism, 
 being always coloured by this moralistic 
 tinge, differed strangely from ours. Solon 
 is said to have asked Thespis, that very 
 early actor - manager, how he could tell 
 so many lies before so many people. 
 For Plato stories, in our own sense, 
 were " stories " in what is still at times 
 the nursery sense, that is, fibs. There 
 was the same confusion of thought in 
 Aristotle, so that the modern reader is 
 constantly feeling depayse. Why, he asks 
 himself, must the hero of a tragedy be 
 neither very good nor very bad ? Why 
 must his fate be determined by error and 
 not by wickedness ? Why ought the 
 culminating fatality of a tragedy to be the 
 work of ignorance, and its true nature only 
 to be discovered afterwards ? What are 
 we to make of such a distinction as this 
 between tragedy and comedy — that the
 
 92 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 latter aims at representing worse people, 
 and the former better people, than those 
 of present reality ? It is the moralistic 
 attitude, the absence of the disinterested 
 aesthetic mood, which explains these myste- 
 ries. Aristotle would have ruled out not 
 only lago and Richard III. but Cordelia 
 and Desdemona. 
 
 This was what came of identifying art 
 with practical life. Nowadays we have 
 got so far from this point of view as, in 
 certain moods, to consider practical life as 
 an cesthetic spectacle, as a more intense 
 kind of art than art itself. Thus Burke 
 says a playhouse where the best tragedy 
 was being acted would at once be emptied 
 by the news that a state-execution was 
 about to take place in the adjoining square. 
 And Renan talks of all life as an aesthetic 
 spectacle : " This universe is a spectacle 
 which the Deity offers Himself; let us 
 carry out the intentions of the great 
 Choregus in contributing to make the spec- 
 tacle as brilliant, as varied as possible." 
 
 These ideas of Aristotle, I say, seem to 
 us moderns very strange. And they seemed
 
 A CORNELIAN GLOSS 93 
 
 strange, but not so strange, when tragedy 
 was "hatched again," and "hatched differ- 
 ent," as Mrs. Poyser would put it, in France. 
 They seemed strange to Corneille, who dis- 
 cussed the Poetics with great acumen. At 
 that time — and in that place — it would 
 have been impious to assert flatly that 
 Aristotle was wrong ; all that people could 
 venture to contend was that his meaning- 
 had been wrongly interpreted. Did I not 
 say that every generation re-fashions the 
 classics for itself? And so you have Cor- 
 neille, troubled by the Aristotelian dictuin 
 that the morals of the tragic hero must 
 be good, unable to hide the fact that many 
 of his own tragic heroes and heroines in- 
 fringed this law — you have Corneille giving 
 a new interpretation to the word " good." 
 By " good morals," he says, Aristotle must 
 have meant " the brilliant and lofty char- 
 acter of a virtuous or vicious nature, accord- 
 ing as that nature is proper and suitable 
 to the personage." In other words, " good " 
 meant any appropriate character, so long 
 as it was marked by tragic dignity. You 
 will see that this was to empty Aristotle's
 
 94 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 law of all its moral content. In like manner 
 Corneille sought to turn Aristotle's position 
 that the tragic hero must not be entirely 
 good, that people must not be made to 
 suffer on the stage through no fault of 
 their own. But — here is something to 
 show the persistency of Aristotelian ideas — 
 nearly a century after Corneille you have 
 Lessing protesting against his attempt to 
 warp the meaning of Aristotle, and reassert- 
 ing that the spectacle of an entirely good 
 character brought to woe was what Aris- 
 totle called it — iiiapov, shocking. And if 
 you want a still later instance of this view, 
 you have it in the case of the old Sheriff* 
 of Dumbarton known to Louis Stevenson, 
 who could not bear even to read Othello. 
 " That noble gentleman . . . that noble 
 lady . . . too painful for me ! " 
 
 A more vigorous offshoot from this ethi- 
 cal criticism of the Greeks was the notion 
 that drama ought to aim at directly incul- 
 cating a moral. This notion permeated all 
 eighteenth-century commentary and a good 
 deal of eighteenth-century practice. Thus 
 Johnson praised Timon of Athens because
 
 JOHNSON AND DIDEROT 95 
 
 "the catastrophe affords a very powerful 
 warning against ostentatious Hberahty " ; 
 and he hinted some dispraise of As You Like 
 It because " by hastening to the end of the 
 work, Shakespeare suppressed the dialogue 
 between the usurper and the hermit, and 
 lost an opportunity of exhibiting a moral 
 lesson, in which he might have found matter 
 worthy of his highest powers."' Johnson also 
 preferred Tate's Lear to Shakespeare's — 
 Tate, you may remember, gave Cordelia's 
 story a happy ending — because it showed 
 "the final triumph of persecuted virtue." 
 But the great champion of the didactic, or 
 hortatory, drama was Diderot, who wrote : 
 "It is always virtue and virtuous people 
 that a man ought to have in view when he 
 wi-ites. Oh, what good would men gain 
 if all the arts of imitation possessed one 
 common object, and were one day to unite 
 with the laws in making us love virtue and 
 hate vice ! " And so in his Ph^e de Famille 
 Diderot introduces a father who addresses 
 his daughter thus : " Marriage, my daugh- 
 ter, is a vocation imposed by heaven. . . . 
 If marriage exposes us to cruel pain, it
 
 96 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 is also the source of the sweetest pleasures. 
 . . . O sacred bond, if I think of thee, my 
 whole soul is warmed and elevated." " But 
 these virtuous ejaculations," says Mr. John 
 Morley — from whose volume on Diderot 
 I have borrowed this quotation, and upon 
 whose comment it would be presumptuous 
 in me to attempt any improvement — " these 
 virtuous ejaculations do not warm and 
 elevate us. In such a case words count 
 for nothing. It is actual presentation of 
 beautiful character, and not talk about it, 
 that touches the spectator. It is the asso- 
 ciation of interesting action with character 
 that moves and inspires such better moods 
 as may be within our compass. Diderot, 
 like many other people before and since, 
 sought to make the stage the great moral 
 teacher. That it may become so is possible. 
 It will not be," concludes Mr. Morley, " by 
 imitating the methods of that colossal type 
 of histrionic failure, the church-pulpit ! " 
 Allusion to the church pulpit reminds one 
 that the Rev. Jeremy Collier, in his " Short 
 View of the Immorality and Profaneness of 
 the English Stage," laid it down that " the
 
 JEREMY COLLIER AND OTHERS 97 
 
 business of plays is to recommend virtue 
 and discountenance vice." This moralistic 
 position need not surprise us in a clergy- 
 man. But what is surprising is that a man 
 hke Vanbrugh, in his reply to Collier, 
 should have accepted this position as a 
 matter of course. It never occurred to 
 him to say, with FalstafF, " I deny your 
 major " ; all that he could find to say w^as : 
 "What I have done is in general a dis- 
 couragement to vice and folly ; I am sure 
 that I intended it, and I hope I have per- 
 formed it." So you see that Lamb's defence 
 of the Restoration drama on the ground 
 that it was unreal, a sort of fairy tale, some- 
 thing to which the ethical criteria of actual 
 life were irrelevant, could never have oc- 
 curred to the Restoration dramatists them- 
 selves. With Lamb you have at least 
 reached the very opposite pole to the 
 moralistic criticism of Aristotle. You have 
 reached un-moralistic criticism. 
 
 For a still more striking piece of evidence 
 that modern thought cannot get away from 
 Aristotle — that criticism may be with him 
 or may be against him but cannot ignore 
 
 G
 
 98 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 him — take the Aristotehan dictum about 
 the relative importance of character and 
 plot. There was a great to-do over this in 
 the summer of 1902. The trouble began 
 with a statement of a Quai'terly reviewer 
 about the essential thing in drama. " The 
 essential thing in drama," said he, " is that 
 the drama should be based on character, 
 that the actions should be made by the 
 characters." This remark "drew" several 
 scholastic critics, who sought to floor the 
 reviewer with the Poetics, as Johnson is 
 said to have knocked down Osborne the 
 bookseller with a folio. Here is the 
 Aristotelian text: — 
 
 "Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, 
 but of an action and of life. . . . Dramatic 
 action, therefore, is not with a view to the 
 representation of character ; character comes 
 in as subsidiary to the action. Hence the 
 incidents and the plot are the end of a 
 tragedy ; and the end is the chief thing 
 of all. Again, without action there cannot 
 be a tragedy ; there may be without 
 character. . . . The plot, then, is the 
 first principle, and, as it were, the soul
 
 PLOT AND CHARACTER 99 
 
 of a tragedy ; character holds the second 
 place." 
 
 Now the scholastic critics I have alluded 
 to one and all argued as though this passage 
 meant that character-development was less 
 artistically important, less interesting, than 
 plot-weaving ; and there, I humbly think, 
 they were all wrong. I venture to submit 
 to you a very different interpretation of this 
 passage, a sense in which Aristotle's words 
 are absolutely valid for all drama in all 
 time. It is that Aristotle here was not 
 attempting an artistic appreciation at all, 
 but making a scientific classification. He 
 was marking off the special province of 
 drama in the general region of art. The 
 differentia of drama, what makes it itself 
 and not something else, he shows, is action. 
 If it were not action but character, then the 
 " Caracteres " of La Bruyere would be 
 drama, and the description of the Club in 
 the opening numbers of the Sjpectator would 
 be drama, and Elia's sketch of George Dyer 
 would be drama. But characters are isolated 
 forces, forces in vacuo. To make drama 
 these forces must come into collision ;
 
 100 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 mathematically speaking, drama is a de- 
 partment of kinetics, not of statics. In 
 other words, Aristotle is only anticipating 
 M. Brunetiere's consideration of drama as 
 the struggle of a will against obstacles. 
 And the proof, says Aristotle, is that you 
 cannot have drama without action, though 
 you may without character. Melodrama — 
 that is, mechanical tragedy — presents 
 action without character. And there 
 are not wanting dullards who would 
 contend that the opposite case, charac- 
 ter without action, is illustrated by some 
 plays of Ibsen. These are the people 
 who are for ever talking as though 
 action must be something external and 
 strepitous ; they are not satisfied unless the 
 hero smashes the furniture or the heroine 
 pushes her husband down a well. But 
 these people were answered long ago, once 
 and for all, by Dryden, a very great dramatic 
 critic — in some respects, I almost think, the 
 greatest since Aristotle — and I am not for- 
 getting Lessing, for while Dryden's erudi- 
 tion equalled Lessing's, his criticism is more 
 robust, more mundane, less academic. . . .
 
 INTERNAL ACTION 101 
 
 I wish I could have dwelt upon Dryden, 
 not merely upon that wonderful thing of 
 which I have already spoken, the Essay 
 of Dramatic Poesy, with its exquisite 
 little " impressionist " vignettes, its spirited 
 dialectic, its noble liberality of taste, but 
 also upon those critical defences, dedica- 
 tions, discourses, parallels, accompanying 
 his plays, and now so much more valuable 
 to us than, with scarce an exception, the 
 plays themselves. But I could not, within 
 my prescribed limits ; it came to a choice 
 between Aristotle and Dryden, and about 
 that choice there could be no hesitation. 
 . . . Well, Dryden effectually answered 
 the people who talk as though action must 
 be something external. " Every alteration," 
 says one of the interlocutors in his great 
 Essay — "every alteration or crossing of a 
 design, every new-sprung passion, and turn 
 of it, is a part of the action, and much the 
 noblest, except we conceive nothing to be 
 action till the players come to blows." This 
 spiritual plot, this internal will-conflict, these 
 soul-adventures, were all comprised in the 
 AristoteUan " action."
 
 102 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 If more light is wanted on this subject, 
 it may again be found in Dryden. In 
 some marginal notes scribbled upon the 
 blank leaves of a copy of Rymer's " Re- 
 marks on the Tragedies of the Last Age " 
 — which came into the possession of Gar- 
 rick, who gave it to Johnson, who in his 
 " Life of Dryden " published the annota- 
 tions — Dryden wrote: — "Aristotle places 
 the fable first ; not quoad dignitatem, sed 
 quoad fundamentum" What is that but 
 a pithy confirmation of the view just ad- 
 vanced that Aristotle, in giving the first 
 place to plot, was not attempting an artistic 
 appreciation but a scientific classification ? 
 
 If Aristotle had been content with his 
 scientific classification all would have been 
 well. Unfortunately he was not content ; 
 he subsequently founded on it a piece, a 
 very queer piece, of technical instruction. 
 Plot, it seemed, had to come first in order 
 of composition. "As for the story," he 
 says, "whether the poet takes it ready 
 made or constructs it for himself, he should 
 first sketch its general outline, and then fill 
 in the episodes and amplify in detail." He
 
 THESIS PLAYS 103 
 
 proceeds to illustrate by the story of the 
 Iphigenia. Now, to-day I think it would 
 be held that the play or the novel — for 
 Aristotle's remarks here cover all fiction — 
 originates and grows up in the author's 
 mind in all sorts of ways. Aristotle's way, 
 far from being the only, is probably the 
 worst, way. Is not inventing a plot and 
 then finding characters to fit it rather like 
 the soldier's recipe for making a cannon 
 — first you make a hole and then you pour 
 gun-metal round it ? Robert Louis Steven- 
 son, however, seems to have admitted the 
 possibility. He once told Mr. Balfour, his 
 biographer, that a novelist might devise a 
 plot and find characters to suit ; or he 
 might reverse the process ; or, finally, he 
 might take a certain atmosphere and get 
 both persons and actions to express it. 
 Yes, the novelist — or dramatist — may select 
 any one of these three courses, but his 
 choice is not, I fancy, a matter of indiffer- 
 ence. What — to take only one instance — 
 what is the secret of the unsatisfactory 
 impression left by so many of our thesis 
 (or so-called problem) plays, if it be not
 
 104 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 the feeling that the playwright has first 
 thought of his thesis, his subject, his action 
 as Aristotle would say, and has then fitted 
 his characters to it ? He has aimed at 
 proving a case by manufacturing the evi- 
 dence, and at the same time has spoiled 
 our illusion by an obviously artificial pat- 
 tern, something too symmetrical for resem- 
 blance to what Mr. Henry James calls 
 "the strange irregular rhythm of life." 
 
 Why Aristotle overstated the case for 
 plot, as compared with character, is a 
 point not, I dare say, beyond conjecture. 
 One may hazard the speculation that, in 
 the actual life of his age, incidents, ad- 
 ventures, all the raw material of plot, fell 
 more frequently within the experience of 
 even the average man than they fall now. 
 The " revolutions " and " discoveries " of 
 Greek tragedy which are now relegated 
 to melodrama — the long-lost heir, the 
 " strawberry-mark," and all the rest of it 
 — were not then by any means improbable. 
 On the other hand, human character can- 
 not then have been the complex thing it 
 has since become. Further, it is quite
 
 A NEGLECTED POINT OF VIEW 105 
 
 possible that Aristotle detected a ten- 
 dency in the tragedy of his day which he 
 held dangerous to its vitality — the ten- 
 dency to the merely statuesque, to sheer 
 immobility. If so, his over-statement of 
 the case for the other side was nothing 
 else than a piece of that practical wisdom 
 which we call opportunism. Even to-day 
 the drama of motionless life has beguiled 
 some men to heresy ; IVI. Maeterlinck made 
 it his ideal in his " Static Theatre " — the 
 very negation of all drama. 
 
 And now let us turn to an Aristotelian 
 point which has quite another kind of in- 
 terest for us — an interest arising not from 
 any queer application of it, but from its 
 curious, its almost total, neglect. Aristotle 
 mentions two ways of judging tragedy — in 
 itself and in relation to the stage {-Trpog 
 ra Gear pa). By ra dear pa he means the 
 
 audience as well as the " boards " — the 
 whole "house," as we should say, before 
 and behind the curtain. Now dramatic 
 criticism in general, and Shakespearian 
 criticism in particular, has been continu- 
 ously vitiated by the neglect to consider
 
 106 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 drama -Trpog ra Oearpa, in relation, that is, 
 to the practical conditions of the stage 
 and the audience. Corneille complained 
 of the misrepresentations of Aristotle by 
 scholars who were ignorant of the play- 
 house ; and this particular ignorance has 
 been equally fatal to an adequate inter- 
 pretation of dramatic history. Only one 
 conspicuous critic in the past has given 
 full recognition to this important side of 
 the question, and that is a man of the 
 Italian Renaissance, Lodovico Castelvetro. 
 Castelvetro's main points^ were that not 
 only the form, but the content of the 
 drama was conditioned by the fact that it 
 is something transacted in a public place 
 before a motley crowd upon a circum- 
 scribed space within a limited time. He 
 drew certain conclusions, with which we 
 need not trouble ourselves because they 
 are now out of date ; his interest for us 
 is that he had the right method ; the root 
 of the matter was in him. On the other 
 hand, to this day you will find critics in- 
 
 ^ See A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 
 by Joel Elias Springarn (New York, 1890), p. 72.
 
 BOOKMEN'S OVERSIGHTS 107 
 
 terpreting Shakespeare's plays, and con- 
 trasting them with modern plays, without 
 any consideration of the stage and the 
 audience which Shakespeare had to write 
 for, or of the difference between the stage 
 and the audience as they were then and 
 as they are now. They take exclusively 
 the bookman's view. 
 
 Thus you will find a University Professor 
 deliberately telling us we must appreciate 
 Shakespeare by the text alone. " We 
 may be sure," he says, "that if we have 
 the wit to see it, we shall find in the text 
 the key to every problem which the story 
 may suggest." Just apply this precious 
 principle to solving the question why so 
 much of the Shakespearian text ignores 
 what we should now call the law of 
 dramatic economy, does not help on the 
 action, but consists of moral reflections, 
 apologues, speeches " improving the occa- 
 sion." Examples of this element of the 
 old drama — which in the Aristotelian 
 analysis is called SidvoioL — are Hamlet's 
 moralising on drunkenness, while he is 
 waiting for the ghost, his lecture on act-
 
 108 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 ing to the players, Polonius' advice to 
 Laertes, and Jacques' Seven Ages speech. 
 Well, I defy our University Professor or 
 any one else adequately to explain why 
 this element in Shakespeare and the other 
 Elizabethans has disappeared in modern 
 drama, or to indicate when it disappeared, 
 without consideration of a certain httle 
 change in the mechanical conditions of 
 the stage — namely, the gradual disappear- 
 ance of the " apron." The " apron " is 
 the technical name for the stage-area in 
 front of the curtain. In the Elizabethan 
 theatre it jutted right out among the 
 public, who surrounded it on three sides. 
 This "apron" slowly shrank — CoUey Gibber 
 writes that it was shortened by 10 feet in 
 his time^ — till at last in our day it has 
 altogether disappeared, and the drama has 
 withdrawn within the frame of the pro- 
 scenium. While the apron existed you had 
 a platform- drama, rhetorical recitation in 
 costume, instead of the actual representa- 
 
 ^ When Rich altered the structure of Drury Lane in order 
 to get more room for his pit. See Life of Thomas Betterton, 
 by R. W. Lowe (London^ 1891), p. 27.
 
 THE "APRON" 109 
 
 tion of our modern picture-drama. The 
 " apron " was like the shagreen skin in 
 Balzac's story ; as it shrank, the life of 
 the old rhetoric-drama drew so much nearer 
 to its end. The disappearance of the 
 "apron" is of course not the only cause 
 of difference between Elizabethan and 
 modern drama ; but a cause it is, and an 
 important one. Our " bookmen " have 
 overlooked it, because they cannot be got 
 to consider the drama, in Aristotle's phrase, 
 Trpog ra Oiarpa, in relation to the actual cir- 
 cumstances of the theatre. 
 
 It would be easy to multiply examples 
 of the " bookman's " besetting sin : his in- 
 corrigible habit of explaining plays by 
 play-books or books about plays without 
 reference to playhouses and playgoers. 
 There is, for instance, that famous appeal 
 to the imagination of the audience in the 
 " Chorus " speeches of Henry V.^ in which 
 the "bookmen" represent Shakespeare as 
 talking at the " classic " critics of that day, 
 the strict Unitarians of Place and Time, 
 whereas we, I think, looking at the actual 
 scenic conditions of the Elizabethan stage.
 
 110 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 with its unchanging background, and at the 
 actual mental condition of the Elizabethan 
 audience, which in mobility, in detach- 
 ment, was very different from ours — look- 
 ing, I say, at these conditions of the 
 time, we should, I think, find that Shake- 
 speare was not wasting his breath by talk- 
 ing at anybody, but was trying to mitigate 
 a very real difficulty, to talk over a very 
 real recalcitrancy in his public. Then, 
 again, there is the question of the fights, 
 and wrestling - matches, and slaughterings 
 in Shakespeare's plays — in all Elizabethan 
 drama— which the " bookmen " put down 
 to some deliberate artistic preference in 
 the playwi'ight ; whereas we, I think, look- 
 ing at the playhouse and its circumstances, 
 shall have to say they were there because 
 the Elizabethan public insisted upon them, 
 and insisted upon them for no aesthetic 
 reason whatever, but just because it was 
 accustomed to them, sometimes on that 
 very spot — on theatrical off-nights — and at 
 other times in the playing-fields just out- 
 side. It would be easy, I repeat, to
 
 LONGINUS 111 
 
 multiply examples of commentary running 
 wild for lack of that controlling principle 
 mentioned by Aristotle, the principle of 
 considering the drama irpog ra Oearpa. But 
 I will not proceed with any such multi- 
 plication ; for it is time to have done with 
 Aristotle and his Poetics. If I have dwelt 
 so long on that masterpiece, it was that I 
 might bring out the element of permanence 
 in the history of criticism, the fact that it 
 has dealt through the ages with the same 
 sort of questions, always having them in 
 its mind — though perpetually changing its 
 mind about them. I must, however, en- 
 treat your indulgence for one more refer- 
 ence to a Greek — a successor of Aristotle — 
 merely a passing reference,* because this 
 later Greek, though he occasionally touched 
 upon dramatic diction, did not deal with 
 drama ; but a reference which is obligatory, 
 because he offers a kind of criticism very 
 different from Aristotle's, and above all 
 things different in that it can with pro- 
 priety be called "modern." I refer to 
 Longinus, whom Dryden calls (in his
 
 112 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 " Apology for Heroic Poetry ") " undoubt- 
 edly, after Aristotle, the greatest critic 
 among the Greeks." Aristotle had been 
 a pioneer, an explorer ; he had mapped 
 out the country. His great business was 
 classification ; he was the first of scientific 
 critics. But Longinus, as I say, was of 
 a different sort. Precisely of what sort 
 Longinus was you may learn from a note 
 in Gibbon's Diary for 3rd October 1762 : 
 " Till now," says Gibbon, " 1 was ac- 
 quainted only with two ways of criticising 
 a beautiful passage, the one to show by 
 an exact anatomy of it the distinct beauties 
 of it, and whence they sprang ; the other, 
 an idle exclamation, or general encomium, 
 which leaves nothing behind it. Longinus 
 has shown me that there is a third. He 
 tells me his own feelings upon reading it ; 
 and he tells them with such energy that 
 he communicates them." Longinus, then, 
 narrated the adventures of his soul among 
 masterpieces, he set down his impres- 
 sions ; he was the first of impressionist 
 critics. That character at once brings him 
 alongside an Anatole France or a Jules
 
 JOHNSON'S CLASSIFICATION 113 
 
 Lemaitre ; it carries us into the thick of 
 " modernity." ^ 
 
 Gibbon, as you have seen, divided critics 
 into three classes, and a great contemporary 
 of Gibbon's also divided them into three. 
 Johnson told Fanny Burney — who records 
 it in her diary — that "There are three 
 distinct kinds of judges upon all new 
 authors or productions ; the first are those 
 who know^ no rules, but pronounce entirely 
 from their natural taste and feelings ; the 
 second are those who know, and judge by 
 rules ; and the third are those who know, 
 but are above the rules. These last," said 
 Johnson, " are those you should wish to 
 satisfy. Next to these rate the natural 
 judges ; but ever despise those opinions 
 that are formed by the rules." Now I shall 
 take leave to reduce these three classes to 
 two ; for the fii'st class, those people who 
 knowing no rules are at the mercy of theii' 
 undisciplined taste, do not concern us here ; 
 
 1 For the " impressionism " of Longiuus see Professor 
 Saintsbury's '' History of Criticism," vol. ii. p. 373 (London, 
 1902). Mr Andrew Lang in his Introduction to Mr. H. L. 
 Havell's transLition of Longinus on the Sublime (Loudon, 
 1899) takes a somewhat different view. 
 
 H
 
 114 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 they are not critics, in our sense of the 
 term, at all. There remain, then, two 
 classes of critics. On the one hand, there 
 are those who judge hy "the rules," by a 
 code of orthodox canons and standards, by 
 some law of taste external to their own, 
 and independent of it. On the other hand, 
 there are those who, while they have in- 
 formed and fortified and purified their 
 taste by the preliminary discipline of study 
 — study of the works satisfying orthodox 
 standards, study of " the rules " — neverthe- 
 less form their opinions upon no external 
 laws of taste, but upon the report brought 
 to them by their own taste, their own 
 sensations and impressions. These are the 
 two chief schools of criticism to-day — the 
 brunt of the battle is between them — the 
 " dogmatic " critics and the " impressionist " 
 critics. In the process of comparing ^ these 
 two schools we may perhaps find that there 
 is not so much difference between them as 
 they themselves suppose. 
 
 1 For some points in the comparison I am indebted to 
 M. Eniile Faguet ; Feuilleton of the Journal des Debuts for 
 20th June 1896.
 
 THE DOGMATIST 115 
 
 The " dogmatic " critic is by temperament 
 an " intellectual." Understanding, not feel- 
 ing, is his point. He does not share his 
 feelings with us, as Gibbon said Longinus 
 did, but his ideas. There is the possibility 
 of ample pleasure for us in that, but it is 
 an intellectual pleasure — the pleasure given 
 by a symmetrical or strictly logical ordering 
 of ideas, by subtle disquisition, by what 
 the mathematicians call a " neat " or an 
 "elegant" demonstration. The pleasure 
 for the critic of this sort is to classify, and 
 to compare. Such-and-such a play belongs 
 to this or that dramatic family, or holds 
 a certain rank in the dramatic hierarchy. 
 Hamlet, being a tragedy, is "nobler," as 
 Aristotle would have said, than Much Ado, 
 a comedy. Or you will be shown the 
 " periodicity " of dramatic motives : how 
 Hamlet is largely a modern Oresteia, how 
 the Adelijhi of Terence reappears as A Pair 
 of Spectacles. Or the play, morally con- 
 sidered, belongs to a wholesome, or a 
 pernicious, or a frivolous class. It is 
 always a classification this critic gives you, 
 a classification to accord with general ideas
 
 116 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 of art, or sociology, or ethics ; every work 
 this critic sees he sees through his general 
 idea. He is judging — First Prize, Class A ; 
 Second Prize, Class B ; Proxime Accessit 
 or " Ploughed " — ^judging, not feeling. 
 
 But if he does chance to have feelings — 
 and even this temperament can hardly 
 escape them altogether — he regards his 
 feelings with distrust. You seem to over- 
 hear him saying to himself : "I like this 
 play, therefore I am prompted to call it 
 good ; but my general ideas tell me it 
 belongs to a bad class, therefore I must 
 call it bad. Evidently then, despite the 
 evidence of my senses, I can't really like 
 it." And the good man, flushed with the 
 pride of a victory over self, a mortification 
 of the flesh, loudly damns the play to 
 drown the last echoes of his own spon- 
 taneous, human feelings. 
 
 To reinforce his judgments — for judicial 
 decisions must have the sanction of some- 
 thing external to the judge — he calls in 
 tradition, the "rules." This undoubtedly 
 gives him an air of authority. He seems 
 to be broad-based upon the people's will ;
 
 THE IMPRESSIONIST 117 
 
 he comes before us not as himself, but as 
 the representative of a " thumping majority." 
 That is the dogmatic critic. 
 
 The " impressionist " critic has greater 
 interest in his feehngs and less confidence 
 in his general ideas and external authority. 
 His fundamental principle is the fact that 
 we are all, whether we know it or not, shut 
 up within ourselves. It was in answering 
 M. Brunetiere, who has constituted himself 
 the champion — and a very doughty cham- 
 pion — of the dogmatists, that M. Anatole 
 France insisted upon this fundamental 
 principle. " There is no objective criticism 
 any more than there is objective art, and 
 all those who flatter themselves that they 
 put something else than themselves into 
 their work are the dupes of the cheapest 
 illusion. The truth is, we never get out 
 of ourselves. That is one of our greatest 
 miseries. What would we not give for 
 one minute to see heaven and earth with 
 the facetted eye of a fly, or to compre- 
 hend nature with the rude and simple brain 
 of an orang-outang? But that is denied 
 to us. We cannot, like Tiresias, be a
 
 118 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 man and yet remember we have been 
 a woman. We are shut up in our own 
 person as in some perpetual prison-house. 
 The best thing we can do, it occurs to 
 me, is to recognise this frightful limitation 
 with a good grace, and to confess that 
 we are speaking of ourselves — whenever 
 we have not the strength to hold our 
 tongues." Now there is of course some 
 exaggeration here — or rather, some mis- 
 direction. As M. Brunetiere had no diffi- 
 culty in showing, ]M. France has dra^n 
 the red herring of metaphysics across the 
 track. The fact that the external universe 
 is only known through the Ego does not 
 prevent normally constituted men from 
 arriving at a common judgment about in- 
 numerable things in the universe. M. 
 France's argument, in fact, proves too 
 much ; it would invalidate not only ob- 
 jective criticism, but all history, all science. 
 At the same time it proves too little, for 
 it covers only our personal contribution 
 to an act of criticism, it leaves out the 
 contribution of the ages, the " something 
 not ourselves."
 
 VERACITY 119 
 
 Nevertheless, this self - concentration, or 
 introspective habit, of the " impressionist " 
 critic has the supreme merit of genuineness, 
 of veracity. The great drawback of so- 
 called " objective " criticism is its tendency 
 to self-deception, to say nothing of hypocrisy. 
 We take judgments on trust instead of 
 testing them by our actual experience. We 
 cheat ourselves of our pleasures, out of 
 fear of some external prohibition, or else 
 w^e fool ourselves into thinking we like a 
 work, when in reality we do not, just be- 
 cause we suppose that according to " the 
 rules" we ought to like it. To this very 
 common attitude of mind there is a char- 
 acteristic reference by Dickens in one of 
 his letters written to Forster from Venice. 
 Dickens says how necessary it is for a man 
 "to overcome the villainous meanness of 
 professing what other people have professed 
 when he knows (if he has capacity to 
 originate an opinion) that his profession is 
 untrue. The intolerable nonsense against 
 which genteel taste and subserviency are 
 afraid to rise, in connexion with art, is 
 astounding." . . . (You are told) "on pain
 
 120 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 of being broke for want of gentility in 
 appreciation, to go into ecstasies ; . . . you 
 immediately obey, and tell your son to obey. 
 He tells his son, and he tells his, and so 
 the world gets at three-fourths of its frauds 
 and miseries." Well, our safeguard against 
 these frauds and miseries is '* impressionist " 
 criticism. The " impressionist " takes a 
 pure natural joy in his own sensations, 
 because they are his own. He declines to 
 be " connoisseured out of his senses." He 
 asks himself, " Do I really hke this work ? 
 Whether it pleased my great-grandfathers 
 or not — does it please me ? And if it does, 
 then I cannot explain my pleasure to others 
 — in Gibbon's phrase about Longinus, tell 
 my feelings with such energy that I com- 
 municate them — unless I explain myself, my 
 temperament." And so the " impressionist " 
 is committed to an analysis of self, to the 
 psychology of the Ego. He " narrates the 
 adventures of his soul." 
 
 Thereupon there is often a shrill outcry 
 against him. Egoist ! Where is your 
 modesty? Keep yourself to yourself I 
 Thus at a Congress of Journalists in 1902
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 121 
 
 a veteran provincial editor, lecturing the 
 dramatic critics upon their duties — a popu- 
 lar pastime — sternly enjoined absolute 
 silence about the Ego. Well, I cannot 
 but think that those who raise this cry 
 misunderstand the very nature of criticism. 
 I waive the point that the real immodesty 
 lies not with those who pretend to speak 
 only for themselves, but with those who 
 profess to speak in the general name. I 
 waive the point that the reader often objects 
 to " egoism " in the critic merely because it 
 offends his own egoism, because there is a 
 collision of amours prop?^es. I waive the 
 plea for autobiographic criticism which is 
 included in the plea for autobiography at 
 large — that it is, as Sir Leslie Stephen says, 
 the one subject upon which the writer 
 happens to be the highest living authority. 
 But the fact remains that to give an account 
 of your impressions without any account of 
 the temperament which has been impressed, 
 is to withhold from your reader an essential 
 piece of evidence for enabling him to form 
 his own judgment about them. The value 
 of your impressions will depend upon your
 
 122 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 approximation to that ideal consumer of 
 art, described at the outset of this inquiry, 
 o x^jo^'^'f of Aristotle ; it is for you to 
 provide your reader with the necessary 
 materials for making up his mind about 
 you ; you must produce your credentials. 
 
 And your " authority " with the reader ? 
 It will not be found in an external set of 
 laws, traditions, " the rules " ; it will be in 
 the delicacy, the fineness, the distinction, of 
 your impressions. They are for the reader 
 to take or to leave. He may say : "No, I 
 don't feel like that, but comparison of my 
 own feelings with this man's has helped me 
 to realise my own pleasure more clearly " ; 
 or he may say : " Yes, that is what I 
 vaguely feel, the knowledge of this man's 
 feelings has illuminated, expanded, warmed, 
 and invigorated my own." There is the 
 critic's " authority " — the interest, the " use " 
 of criticism. 
 
 And now, after this contrast of the two 
 opposed schools of criticism, it is time to 
 warn you that it has only been made for 
 the sake of clearing up our ideas and must 
 not be taken too seriously. Unmitigated
 
 TEMPERAMENT 123 
 
 dogmatism, absolute impressionism — there 
 are no such things. Your most hardened 
 dogmatist is at times an impressionist — at 
 times when he is driven in upon himself, 
 when his classifications, his references to 
 general principles, break down, and he is 
 left to speak for himself, to say, "1 am so 
 constituted that I cannot help liking this or 
 disliking that"— "I do not like thee, Dr. 
 Fell, But why it is I cannot tell." After 
 all, his general classifications are subjective, 
 for the simple reason that no two critics 
 have ever chosen exactly the same set. 
 And so it is with the most independent 
 impressionist; he cannot — whatever M. 
 France may say — isolate himself from 
 humanity, from the ambient air, from the 
 mass of literary tradition and dogma and 
 the code of artistic right and wrong, better 
 and worse, which is the heritage from our 
 fathers that begat us. In either kind of critic 
 it all comes back in the last resort to a 
 question of temperament ; whether they be 
 impressionists or dogmatists, it is in virtue 
 of their temperament, the true inwardness 
 of them, that they please and persuade us.
 
 124 OLD AND NEW CRITICISM 
 
 It is by their temperament that we shaU 
 rank the men of either kind, or refuse to 
 rank them, among the elect of criticism — 
 "the judices natos" as Dryden calls them 
 (in his Dedication of the iEneid) : " souls of 
 the highest rank and truest understanding. 
 These," says he, " are few in number ; but 
 whoever is so happy as to gain their appro- 
 bation can never lose it, because they never 
 give it blindly. Then they have a certain 
 magnetism in their judgment, which attracts 
 others to their sense. Every day they gain 
 some new proselyte, and in time become the 
 Church." When we clearly perceive that 
 ideal of good criticism, we can all I think 
 assent to what Tennyson said, almost on 
 his deathbed — " Good critics are rarer than 
 good authors." 
 
 But Tennyson said, at an earlier time, 
 something else, something which points to 
 a limitation of even the best criticism and 
 to an excuse for even the worst authors. 
 Some one had quoted to him a prayer of 
 Jowett's, praying that we might see our- 
 selves as others see us. "No," replied 
 Tennyson, " I should not pray for that :
 
 THE INMOST SELF 125 
 
 others cannot see much of one's inner self." 
 Criticism should always allow for that ; it 
 cannot pierce to the author's inmost self. 
 Life is so obscure a thing that there is a 
 sense in which all criticism is futile and 
 impertinent. Who can plumb the ocean of 
 thought and feeling of which any man's 
 written words are but the surface-foam ? 
 The artist abandons himself, in Goethe's 
 phrase, to his dcemon ; what may seem to us 
 failures, incongruities, are but necessary 
 parts of an inward and spiritual harmony 
 of the man, which remains hidden from us. 
 And so, as M. Paul Bourget says in speak- 
 ing of Amiel, " There is in every productive 
 energy something mysterious and sacred, 
 which it behoves us to consider as above 
 discussion and judgment." 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by Ballantynk, Hanson df Co. 
 Edinburgh &^ London
 
 THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON 
 
 A New Text, Collated with the Original MSS. and Revised 
 Proofs, which are still in existence, with many hitherto 
 unpublished additions. This will be the most complete 
 Edition of Lord Byron's Works, as no other Editors have 
 had access to the original MSS. With Portraits and Illus- 
 trations. To be completed in 13 Vols. Crown 8vo, 6s. each. 
 
 POETRY. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 
 
 Vol. I. The Early Poems. 
 
 Vol. II. Childe Harold. 
 
 Vol. III. The Giaour, Bride of Abydos, Corsair, etc. 
 
 Vol. IV. Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, Beppo, Mazeppa, 
 
 Vision of Judgment, Marino Faliero, etc 
 Vol. V. Sardanapalus, etc. 
 Vol. VI. Don Juan. 
 Vol. VII. Epigrams, Bibliography, Index, etc [Shortly. 
 
 %* Owing to the extent of the Notes to Bjn-on's Works, which contain 
 a large amount of new information, it has been found impossible to include 
 the whole in Six Volumes. 
 
 A Seventh Volume, containing occasional pieces, a bibliography, and a 
 very full index of all Byron's Works, is in the press. 
 
 LETTERS. Edited by Rowland E. Prothero, M.V.O. 
 
 Vol. I. 1788 to 1811. 
 Vol. II. 1811 to 1814. 
 Vol. III. 1814 to 1816. 
 
 Vol. IV. 1816 to 1820. 
 Vol. V. 1820 to 1822. 
 Vol. VI. 1 822 to 1824. With Index. 
 
 "The sixth volume of Byron's prose writings concludes one of the most 
 attractive collections of letters and journals in the language, and one of the 
 best edited works our literature possesses." — Dr. R. Garnett in the Bookman. 
 
 IS IT SHAKESPEARE ? The Great Question of 
 
 Elizabethan Literature, answered in the Light of New Revelations 
 and important Contemporary Evidence hitherto unnoticed. By 
 a Cambridge Graduate. With Facsimiles. Demy 8vo, 12s. 
 net. 
 
 NOVA SOLYMA, The Ideal City ; or, Jerusalem 
 
 Regained. An Anonymous Romance written in the Time of 
 Charles I., 1628-1648. Now first drawn from obscurity, and 
 attributed, by internal evidence, to the illustrious John Milton, 
 author of "Paradise Lost." With Introduction, Translation, 
 Literary Essays, and a Bibliography. By the Rev. Walter 
 Begley. 2 Vols. Demy 8vo, 21s. net. 
 
 " One of the most astonishing works that has been produced for years." 
 — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 LONDON : JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 I
 
 OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE. A Transla- 
 
 tion in Prose and Verse from the Old French. Together with 
 AMABEL AND AMORIS (now given for the first time). By 
 Laurence Housman. With Ilhistrations by Paul Woodroffe. 
 Engraved on Wood by Clemence Housman. Crown 8vo, 5s. 
 net. 
 
 THE SAILING OF THE LONG-SHIPS, and 
 
 Other Poems. By Henry Newbolt, Author of "Admirals 
 All," "The Island Race," &c. Small crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 " This volume will be acquired and valued by all who care for vigorous 
 
 and tender verse." — Globe. _ 
 
 " Admirable verses . . . themes of patriotism expressed in lines of true //f* 
 
 poetry." — St. James's Gazette. ^ 
 
 WE ARE SEVEN. Half- Hours on the Stage— Grave 
 and Gay. By Hamilton Aide, Author of "The Snares of the 
 World." Crown 8vo, 4s. net. 
 
 TO ALL LOVERS OF MUSIC 
 MR. MURRAY'S MUSICAL SERIES 
 
 Crown Svo, 5s. net each 
 
 THE ORCHESTRA AND ORCHESTRAL 
 
 MUSIC. With Eight Portraits and other Illustrations. 
 
 WHAT IS GOOD MUSIC .? Suggestions to Persons 
 Desiring to Cultivate a Taste in Musical Art, and HOW^ MUSIC 
 DEVELOPED. By W. J. Henderson. 
 
 MUSIC : How it Came to be What it Is. By Hannah 
 
 Smith. With Illustrations. 
 
 SONGS AND SONG WRITERS. By Henry T. 
 
 FiNCK. With Eight Portraits. 
 
 THE OPERA, PAST AND PRESENT. An His- 
 
 torical Sketch. By William Foster Apthorp. With Portraits. 
 
 CHOIRS AND CHORAL MUSIC. By Arthur 
 
 Mees. With Portraits. 
 
 HOW TO LISTEN TO MUSIC. Hints and 
 
 Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art. By Henry Edward 
 Krehbiel. With Eleven Portraits. 
 
 LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 2
 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 JfN '■ 
 
 
 
 
 JAN [ 
 
 ' 1966 5 
 
 
 
 APR 1 
 
 5 196b 
 
 
 
 lAW 1 ^ 
 
 isBP :3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 GAYLORD 
 
 
 
 PRINTED IN USA. 
 
 ,UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 001 267 539 3