ate elements of our nature.
Genius alone can do this.

As an actor, one whose efforts are the result of study, of mental
research, reflection, and combination; as an intellectual
anatomist, whose knowledge must dissect, and then re-form and
reproduce again in beauty and harmony the image he has taken to
pieces; as an artist, who is bound to conceal both the first and
last processes, the dismembering of the parts and the reuniting
them in a whole, and whose business is to make the most deliberate
mental labor and the most studied personal effects appear the
spontaneous result of unpremeditated passion and emotion (feigned
passion and emotion, which are to appear real)--in capacity for all
this Kean may be defective. He may not be an actor, he may not be
an artist, but he _is_ a man of genius, and instinctively with a
word, a look, a gesture, tears away the veil from the heart of our
common humanity, and lays it bare as it beats in every human heart,
and as it throbs in his own. Kean speaks with his whole living
frame to us, and every fiber of ours answers his appeal.

I do not know that I ever saw him in any character which impressed
me as a _whole work of art_; he never seems to me to intend to be
any one of his parts, but I think he intends that all his parts
should be _him_. So it is not Othello who is driven frantic by
doubt and jealousy, nor Shylock who is buying human flesh by its
weight in gold, nor Sir Giles Overreach who is selling his child to
hell for a few years of wealth and power; it is Kean, and in every
one of his characters there is an intense personality of his _own_
that, while one is under its influence, defies all
criticism--moments of such overpowering passion, accents of such
tremendous power, looks and gestures of such thrilling, piercing
meaning, that the excellence of those _parts_ of his performances
more than atones for the want of greater unity in conception and
smoothness in the entire execution of them.

The discussion about Kean led naturally to some talk about his most
famous parts, particularly Shylock. My father's conception of
Shylock seems to me less the right one than Kean's; but then, if my
father took what _I_ think the right view of the part, he would
have to give up acting it. The real Shylock--that i