tes"--the word was considered very witty) were humbugs;
this was one of the least offensive charges. The same kind of thing
happened in the case of Maeterlinck. Many other instances might be
cited.

It is a curious form of attack. Why should a critic who alleged that he
had much pleasure and certainly no boredom from Mr Yeats' play and Mrs
Campbell's beautiful acting, be charged with affectation and also with
insufficient culture? Of course, the critics are insufficiently
cultured. There are thousands of plays and books that they ought to have
read, of dramas they ought to have witnessed, of pictures they ought to
have seen, masses of music they ought to have heard--and have not--and,
therefore, they are persons of very insufficient culture. But the writer
in question should offer some evidence of his own sufficiency of culture
before alleging that the critic's opinion concerning the play and the
performance was due to a lack of culture.

After all, one would seem entitled to express an opinion on a question
of art or pleasure without being called a liar by someone who takes a
different view. The matter is one of some importance because the attack
is insidious and dangerous. The deadliest weapon in the hands of the
critic is the allegation of boredom. You can say that a piece is vulgar,
indelicate, inartistic, indecent, full of "chestnuts," old-fashioned,
"melodramatic," ill-constructed or unoriginal, without doing fatal
injury, but if you allege that you and everybody else suffered from
boredom your attack may be fatal. This is the reason why the charge is
so often made by people with strong prejudices.

There is something to be said on both sides. No doubt the lovers of the
severer form of drama, the worshippers of Shaw, the playgoers who
supported the societies of which the Independent Theatre was the first
and regarded the Court Theatre for a while as a kind of Mecca, are not
always judicious when talking about musical comedy and comic opera, and
some of them have been very narrow-minded. They have refused to admit
the merit of any comic operas, except those of Gilbert and Sullivan,
they have lavished indiscriminating abuse upon almost all others, have
looked upon Daly's Theatre and the Gaiety and the Prince of Wales' as so
many Nazareths. This, of course, has caused a great deal of annoyance to
the lovers of musico-dramatic work.

Moreover, some of the austere folk have denounced melodrama and farce,
and the so