Nevertheless, the _Chronicle_ had had the best of Hazlitt’s stage criticisms, his papers on Kean. Kean’s acting, as I have said, was invaluable to Hazlitt as a stimulus. It stimulated him to a sort of rivalry in Shakespearian interpretation, the actor fairly setting his own conception of the part against the actor’s rendering of it, giving him magnificent praise when the two agreed, and often finding carefully pondered reasons for disagreement. Hazlitt might have said of Kean what Johnson said of Burke: “This fellow calls forth all my powers.” The result is twofold. You get vivid descriptions of Kean’s acting, his voice, his figure, his gestures, his perpetual passionateness, in season and out of season (misrepresenting—_e.g._, Shakespeare’s Richard II., as Hazlitt said, as a character of passion instead of as a character of pathos). And at the same time you get the “psychology” (an inevitable _cliché_, cast since Hazlitt’s day) of the chief Shakespearian tragic characters, carefully “documented” by the text and elaborated and coloured by Hazlitt’s sympathetic vision. You see the same process at work in the criticisms of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons and Macready, but (remember the great Sarah had had her day before Hazlitt began to write) with a milder stimulant there was a milder response. In any case it was a gallery of portraits—a series of full-length figures partly from life and partly from the Shakespearean text. There was little background or atmosphere. That is what makes Hazlitt’s criticism so unlike any modern sort. He wrote in an age of great histrionics, great interpretative art, but no drama, no creative art. His elaborate studies of dead-and-gone players have (except as illustrating Shakespeare) often a merely antiquarian interest. It is a curious detail that Kean’s Richard III. in early performances “stood with his hands stretched out, after his sword was taken from him,” and later “actually fought with his doubled fists like some helpless infant.” So it is a curious detail that Napoleon I. wore a green coat and clasped his hands behind his back. But compare this dwelling on the _minutiæ_ of an actor’s business or, to take a fairer example, compare Hazlitt’s analysis of the character of Iago (as a test of Kean’s presentation)—one of his acutest things—with the range and variety and philosophic depth of a criticism by Jules Lemaître. You are in a different world. Instead of the niggling details of how this man raised his arm at a given moment or delivered a classic speech in a certain way you get a criticism of life, all life, _quicquid agunt homines_. It is interesting, mildly interesting, to know that Kean’s Richard was (for Hazlitt) too grave and his Iago too gay, but after all we cannot be perpetually contemplating these particular personages of Shakespeare. We need fresh ideas, fresh creations, new views of society, anything for a change, so long as it is a thing “to break our minds