1914] on A Criticism on Critics 153 



not wait for Dramaticus to inform them next morning whether thej 

 have or not, while if they have been bored, they do not care whether 

 Dramaticus was amused. For a good 23! ay, after all, from the point 

 of view of the audience, is one which the largest number of Moliere's 

 housemaids like, and in drama above all the arts does the individual 

 rely on his own taste. An author may be boomed by the critics 

 into some sort of esoteric popularity ; and, if they are acute, they 

 will be able to find subtleties and beauties in books and pictures 

 which to the ignorant require to be pointed out, and are enjoyed 

 when seen. For in the matter of reading, it is possible to sit at 

 ease, to look for such beauties, to find them, to enjoy them ; Imt in 

 a play, with the appeal to the eye, the ear and the mind going on 

 simultaneously, and with the inability of the audience to put it "back 

 a scene or two, to go over it again, as we can retrace our passage in 

 a book, they cannot consider what they ought to like, but only what 

 they do like. No dramatist was ever boomed into popularity by 

 the critics, or ever boomed out of it. For all the laws of dramatic 

 art are founded on the taste of the audience : the need of the 

 dramatic unities, for instance, only implies that the average mind 

 requires a certain order and consecution in the events that it watches. 

 Morally, and on principle, the average mind does not care one straw 

 about the question. Meantime, the flood of dramatic criticism that 

 deluges the press after every new play provides excellent practice in 

 rapid writing for the critics, and they have the pleasure of being at 

 all the first nights. 



It has been said— I think most unjustifiably — that critics as a 

 class are unsuccessful and disappointed artists ; but this is not a fair 

 statement, since they have not generally been anything before they 

 became critics, except school-boys. But it often happens that a 

 critic, having perhaps learned something about literature and drama 

 in the course of his judgments upon the works of others, tries his 

 hand at producing himself, and it is then that the disappointment 

 comes. For just as we saw that the practitioners of an art were 

 unfitted by th^ir very practice to be good critics of it, so criticism 

 unfits a man for practising the art which he has spent his time 

 in criticizing. The critic or essayist is apt to be discursive and 

 explanatory if he turns his hand to romance, while in poetry, as in 

 the case of Matthew Arnold, the lyrical mood stiffens into the 

 moralizing or didactic. The critic's business has been to instruct 

 and to interpret, and the habit clogs his pen which should now 

 merely present. His roses are full of censorious thorns, and, when 

 the reader tries to smell them, he merely pricks the end of his nose. 

 Quite as unsuccessfully, though more rarely, does the creative artist 

 try to turn himself into the critic —unsuccessfully because, as we 

 have seen, his work has given him a biased vision, made him squint, 

 if you will : more rarely, because it is undeniably more fun to make 

 a thing, if you can or think you can, than talk about the things 



