bastian Bach. Then the average college critic of the arts, with
his balderdash about inspiration and moral purpose, is greater than
Georg Brandes or Saint-Beuve. Then Eugene Brieux, with his Y. M. C. A.
platitudinizing, is greater than Moliere, with his ethical agnosticism,
his ironical determinism.

This childish respect for moralizing runs through the whole of
contemporary criticism--at least in England and America. Blatchford
differs from the professorial critics only in the detail that he can
actually write. What he says about Shaw has been said, in heavy and
suffocating words, by almost all of them. And yet nothing could be more
untrue. The moralist, at his best, can never be anything save a sort of
journalist. Moral values change too often to have any serious validity
or interest; what is a virtue today is a sin tomorrow. But the man who
creates a thing of beauty creates something that lasts.

XIX

ACTORS

"In France they call an actor a _m'as-tu-vu_, which, anglicised, means a
have-you-seen-me?... The average actor holds the mirror up to nature and
sees in it only the reflection of himself." I take the words from a late
book on the so-called art of the mime by the editor of a magazine
devoted to the stage. The learned author evades plumbing the
psychological springs of this astounding and almost invariable vanity,
this endless bumptiousness of the _cabotin_ in all climes and all ages.
His one attempt is banal: "a foolish public makes much of him." With all
due respect, Nonsense! The larval actor is full of hot and rancid gases
long before a foolish public has had a fair chance to make anything of
him at all, and he continues to emit them long after it has tried him,
condemned him and bidden him be damned. There is, indeed, little choice
in the virulence of their self-respect between a Broadway star who is
slobbered over by press agents and fat women, and the poor ham who plays
thinking parts in a No. 7 road company. The two are alike charged to the
limit; one more ohm, or molecule, and they would burst. Actors begin
where militia colonels, Fifth avenue rectors and Chautauqua orators
leave off. The most modest of them (barring, perhaps, a few unearthly
traitors to the craft) matches the conceit of the solitary pretty girl
on a slow ship. In their lofty eminence of pomposity they are challenged
only by Anglican bishops and grand opera tenors. I have spoken of the
danger they run of bursting. In the case