There are, obviously, more or less definite standards whereby we may estimate critical writings of such men as these so far as those criticisms deal with what we may roughly describe as the cerebral or semi-cerebral arts, but there are no standards, even remotely determinable or exact, whereby we may appraise such of their criticisms as deal with the directly and wholly emotional art of acting. It is perhaps not too far a cry to assume that had Mr. William Archer’s father been murdered shortly before Mr. Archer witnessed Mr. Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, Mr. Archer would have been moved to believe Mr. Forbes-Robertson on even greater actor-artist than he believed him under the existing circumstances, or that had Mr. Otto Borchsenius, the Danish journalist-critic, regrettably found himself a victim of syphilis when he reviewed August Lindberg’s “Oswald,” he would have looked on the estimable Lindberg as a doubly impressive exponent of histrionism. Nothing is more æsthetically and artistically dubious and insecure than the appraisal of acting; for it is based upon the quicksands of varying human emotionalism, and of aural and visual prejudice. Were I, for example, one hundred times more proficient a critic of drama and life than I am, my criticism of acting would none the less remain often arbitrary and erratic, for I would remain constitutionally anæsthetic to a Juliet, however otherwise talented, who had piano legs, or to a Marc Antony who, for all his histrionic power, presented to the vision a pair of knock-knees. This, I well appreciate, is the kind of critical writing that is promptly set down as flippant, yet it is the truth so far as I am concerned and I daresay that it is, in one direction or another, the truth so far as the majority of critics are concerned.