x. Courts of law are but man-made machinery and
very imperfect, juries are often very stupid, even judges--but perhaps
we ought to pause here. Consequently, if the author has any grounds for
suggesting that you are ill-disposed towards him, and yet you must act
as critic (amateur or professional), be scrupulously relevant and
decidedly colourless. At present the honesty has not been analysed by
the courts; some day the question will be raised whether competence is
not a necessary ingredient. Could a Gautier who hated music _honestly_
criticize a symphony; could a blind man _honestly_ criticize a picture?
These are extreme cases, and a line must be drawn somewhere. Still, some
day the courts may require the defendant to give evidence of his fitness
to act as a critic if his fitness be challenged. To these remarks one
obvious matter should be added. All statements of fact in a criticism
must be accurate. The line between matters of fact and matters of
opinion is sometimes fine, but the law is clear. An allegation of fact
is not comment, and all such allegations, if injurious, must be
justified--that is--proved to be true, if the defence of fair comment is
pleaded.

CHAPTER II

THE DRAMATIC CRITIC

His Duty to be Tolerant

Some remarks which appeared in a popular weekly paper concerning Mrs
Patrick Campbell's _Deirdre_ and _Electra_ deserve a little
consideration. One of the critics attached to the paper spoke of the
affair as being an "indifferent performance of indifferent tragedies,"
and then said it was "a simple affectation to profess to enjoy it," and
that it was not, "as some people seem to think, a mark of culture, but
only of insufficient culture not to acknowledge that one is bored by
this kind of thing."

An affronted critic wrote to the paper, complaining of the charge of
affectation and insufficient culture, and was promptly rebuked as a
"bumptious correspondent," and told that his letter convinced the critic
that he was one of those affected persons whose misdirected zeal the
writer deplored. This attitude is not a novelty. Many of the critics, at
one period, charged the professed admirers of Wagner with being
impostors or imbeciles; later on, anyone who professed to like the
pictures of Whistler or Rossetti or Burne-Jones, or of any of the
Impressionists, was accused of affectation. When Ibsen was introduced to
England the conservative critics raved, and alleged that the Ibsenites
(or "Obsceni