when we begin to feel, or to think we feel

"That there hath passed away a glory from the earth."

We get a curious instance of this in one of his sayings, which he notes as a particular impression that his memory has left him of Kean. "Kean," says Lewes, "vigilantly and patiently rehearsed every detail, trying the tones until his ear was satisfied; practising looks and gestures until his artistic sense was satisfied; and having once regulated these he never changed them." But Hazlitt, writing of Kean's Othello, after seeing it again six years after its greatness had first struck him, says, "he played it with variations, and therefore necessarily worse." But indeed one has only to read through Mr. Lewes's observations on Charles Matthews, on Fechter, on Salvini, to detect the difference; to mark where the writer is criticising the living present, and where he is criticising the memory of the past. Another thing, too, we may note; Mr. Lewes seems to have read the character somewhat differently from Hazlitt. In one and the same breath he declares Othello, which he justly names as the most trying of all Shakespeare's parts, to have been Kean's masterpiece, and Kean himself to have been wholly unable to be calmly dignified, to have been nothing if not passionate. May we not rather say Othello can be nothing if not calmly dignified? Passionate, of course, he must be, but it must be with that terrible passion of a calm, majestic soul, "of one not easily moved, but who, being moved, is stirred to the very depths." An Othello who impresses us from the first with a sense of passion, and of passion only, is unable really to stir and terrify when the proper moment for passion comes. A fierce Othello is a monstrosity.

This is the true "noble Moor."

Both Mr. Booth and Mr. Irving fail in this essential quality, though not both in the same degree, nor both Both, inquite from the same causes. deed, show glimpses of it, but neither can keep hold of it. Mr. Booth's voice and presence are against him here; his accent, though certainly much less conspicuous than one might expect, yet ever and again jars painfully on English ears; and though mere smallness of stature signifies littleKean, we know, was a small man, and so is Salvini, whose bearing is yet very stately and imposing-there is some thing in Mr. Booth's presence, with all its grace and agility, that seems to forbid true nobility and majesty of demeanour. Yet, as we have said, he shows glimpses of it sometimes, notably in the speech, "Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them," and again in the passage just quoted, "Hold your hands," &c. in the later scenes he loses sight of it altogether; in these he is tumultuous, fierce, passionate, but never grand, never terrible. Such, indeed, as it seems to us, it is beyond his power to be; he is essentially an actor of When he intellect, not of feeling. strives to express the latter he is compelled to fall back on that emptiest, and alas, commonest resource of the actor's art-on noise. One of the shrewdest and sanest of our mo

But

dern critics of the theatre has recently, in treating of this very performance,

hazarded a doubt whether it is possible for Othello not to rant. "When his moments of frenzy arrive," he says, "when he is required to exclaim, 'Whip me, ye devils!' Roast me in sulphur!' and so on, I think his listeners must prepare to hear from him something very like ranting. Othello is fairly mad at last, should he not rave? I have little doubt that Edmund Kean's Othello raved and ranted very freely indeed." Precisely so; and it is just because Edmund Kean's Othello raved and ranted so freely that he failed to satisfy the acute and clearseeing intelligence of Hazlitt. No doubt, as the writer observes, "the ear of our playgoers is unaccustomed to oratory; and still more certainly Othello is not to be played as a comedy by the late Mr. Robertson is treated upon the stage." Anything which rises above the colloquial drawl of the modern stage is too apt to be called ranting; but between that drawl and real undisguised ranting there are many varieties of speech, and it is one among these varieties that the true Othello should, we think, employ. Sound and fury there must be, but it is when that sound and fury signify nothing that we get ranting. The phrase is regarded as so peculiarly offensive, one of the lowest almost that can be applied to an actor's style, that one is loth to apply it to so intelligent and cultured a performer as Mr. Booth; but certainly in the "torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of his passion," there is but little to recall the noble and loftyminded Moor. One speech in particular is so thoroughly unworthy of his intelligence, that we would especially note it; this is the last speech, that magnificent farewell speech, which surely, in the place and circumstance of its delivery, is one of the most affecting passages in the whole domain of poetry, ancient and modern:

"Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know 't.

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak

Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well; Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say, besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him--thus."

One can imagine Othello standing erect beside the bed with its "tragic loading," giving voice to these beautiful words with the settled calm of a

despair, a hopelessness more terrible, more touching, than all "the sobbing Phrygian strains" in the world, piercing the ears, but leaving the heart cold and unstirred. Yet Mr. Booth, as did Edmund Kean, acts this speech, with violent gestures and disordered voice, as though the frenzy of passion had still hold of his mind. He who can so misconceive this passage can never truly realise Othello.

Mr. Irving gets nearer, we think, to the true man. In the tumult and fury of his passion he gets, indeed, farther away from him, for in such scenes Mr. Irving gets altogether away from humanity. That strange and inexplicable method of speech and action which he has chosen to adopt as proper to the expression of the highest tragedy, in such scenes so overmasters and transforms him, that criticism is completely baffled. It is true that he has of late considerably modified these unfortunate vagaries-in his Iago, indeed, they are for the most part conspicuous only by their absence; but

there of course there is not the same scope for them, for there there is no high passion; still in this Othello they are much less obtrusive than they were in the Othello of his earlier days. But they are still to be seen, and so long

as they are to be seen, so long will Mr. Irving remain unable, in the greatest scenes of tragedy, to satisfy all but those who love these unlovely things for their own sake. An actor must express his author's conception as well as understand it; merely to show that he understands it, without being able to give that understanding its proper form and colour, is but the smallest part of his business. True it is that in our modern theatre this fact is most sadly overlooked. True it is, and in this truth lies the most fatal weakness of our stage, that in these days the actor is paramount, the author nothing, a mere necessary appanage of the theatre, like the carpenter, the scene-shifter, or the call-boy. He is but one of the many satellites of the great Joves of our theatrical galaxy. It is the power of the actor only that we recognise now; it is his intellect, his personality, his style, that we admire-even his peculiarities, so long as they are his own; without any heed of the effect they may have on the creations of the author, without whom these objects of our admiration could not exist. And thus it is we use so complacently that most empty phrase that we have borrowed, together with so many other empty things, from the French theatre, talking rapturously of the brilliant actor who "creates" part, without a thought of the poor author who has spun, as Bacon says, 66 out of his own entrails," the web of this actor's fame. With more justice, really with how much more justice, might we talk of a printer, or a publisher, "creating" a book! To such thoughtless critics, how aptly comes the reproach which the wise Ulysses cast on Achilles and his flatterers.

а

"They tax our policy, and call it cowardice, Count wisdom as no member of the war, Forestall prescience, and esteem no act But that of hand: the still and mental parts

That do contrive how many hands shall strike,

When fitness calls them on, and know by

measure

Of their observant toil the enemies' weight

Why, this hath not a finger's dignity: They call this bed-work, mappery, closet

war:

So that the ram that batters down the wall,

For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,

They place before his hand that made the

engine,

Or those that with the fineness of their souls

By reason guide his execution.” 1

But so long as this is so, so long as plays are made to measure, and the actor is the first figure in our drama, so long will that drama remain the same poor abortive growth it is now; so long shall we have the same thin and slovenly work moving for ever in the same false and narrow lines; so long shall we have such remarks as that which we quoted at the beginning of this paper, "that Shakespeare could not write a tolerable play for a nineteenth-century audience."

Such a sentiment as this it is which has fostered and encouraged Mr. Irving into the extravagances of style which often disfigure even his soundest and most brilliant work. And it is because one gets such work from him that one truly feels the pity of that foolish unthinking admiration which has done 'so much, is every day doing so much, to debase our art, whether in the theatre, the painting-room, or the study. And had Mr. Irving, when first he moved into the higher regions of his own art, been rescued from this baneful and enervating influence into a clearer and keener atmosphere, it is impossible to doubt that one of his energy and intelligence would not have resolved to put away these childish vanities from him-would not have resolved and have succeeded.

Yet despite these grave defects, the gravest an actor can have-for what obstacle can be more serious to an actor than that he has not learned to speak the language in which he acts, has not mastered the medium by which he must stamp upon the world the impress of his art?-in spite of these,

1 Troilus and Cressida, Act i. Sc. 3.

Mr. Irving still, to our mind, more truly understands the noble Moor than does Mr. Booth. One hardly likes to say he more truly realises him, for that is a phrase may hardly be applied to either; but he more truly understands him. He is more dignified, more grand, more noble ; he is a greater personality. It is the method he has adopted to give the impress of this personality which is so retarding. His extreme deliberation of speech, his waywardness of emphasis, his strange pronunciation which no known system of orthography can justify, his ungainly habit of movement: such are the barriers which in his immaturer days he himself placed in his onward path; it is the struggle to emancipate himself from these which so often and so sadly mars his finest work. Yet behind this unlovely veil one gets ever and again a glimpse of the god; the true conception, we think, is there. If he would consent to be naturalnot natural in the sense that some people talk of Robertson's comedies as natural-not commonplace, colloquial, vulgar; but if, by loosing his art from those barbaric fetters in which he once chose to imprison it, he would allow himself the strength and freedom to deal with that conception as, by showing that he understands it he has shown that he should be able to deal with it then, it might be, we should at last get sight of the real Othello, the generous, the high-minded; the man not of physical passion only, but of lofty soul and resolute will; the Moor noble, as well as valiant.

Much else too there is in this presentation one would gladly linger over; the Desdemona, the Cassio, the Roderigo, the Brabantio. But time and space are inexorable now as in the days of the elder Scriblerus. Othello, too, and Iago must still be first and paramount; well played or ill, they must, amid all the other characters, 66 stand up and take the morning." Yet the others, how they all contribute, each according to its own degree, to this supreme and glorious whole

And here it may be noted with what strange blindness we have all agreed to expunge Bianca from our stage. The mistake of an Emilia, "declined into the vale of years," who has left behind her the fatal gift of beauty, has been already touched upon; yet surely this oversight is graver still. It is through Cassio's mistress that the last proof is supplied; by her comes the voice denouncing doom to the gentle Desdemona. Read the first scene of the fourth act through; take away the scene between Iago and Cassio, which Othello sees but hears not:

"As he shall smile Othello shall go mad, And his unbookish jealousy must construe Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures, and light behaviour

Quite in the wrong."

Really if this scene be taken away it seems as though even Othello should stop short of murder. Surely, as the poison now works-he is somewhat too easily moved.

as SO

But of the others. Limited as is Miss Terry's range, wayward and uneven as she herself so often is within that range, yet within it and at her best no living actress of our stage can stand beside her. Of all our actresses, accomplished many of them are, and some at least greater artists than Miss Terry, she alone has that rare and precious gift of charm, that gift to which the dullest of us can never be insensible, which the cleverest can never analyse nor define; like the "grand style" it can be only spiritually discerned. In parts like Desdemona and Ophelia, and, to come lower down in the scale, Olivia, in Mr. Wills's version of the Vicar of Wakefield, we get this inestimable quality in its highest and purest form. earnest tenderness of her appeal to the Duke, that pretty conflict between her "divided duty"; in the playful tenderness of her pleading for Cassio; in the deep yet simple pathos of her appeal to lago, "What shall I do to

In the

win my lord again?" of her answer to his greeting:

"Those that do teach young babes,

Do it with gentle means and easy tasks; He might have chid me so; for, in good faith,

I am a child to chiding :'

we get what none other of her contemporaries can give; much they can give which she can not; but this is hers alone, this seeming simple tenderness and grace, these "tears in the voice," as the French say-in a word, this charm, for there is indeed no other word that can so fitly denote this rare and delicate quality. It has been objected to her that in the scene with Iago she is something too familiar, forgets too far the distinction between the captain's wife and the poor ancient. But surely this is not so. She has been in a manner entrusted to Iago's keeping from the first; his wife is her companion and confidant; she has the utmost faith in his honesty and kindliness; surely it is not unnatural that in the sudden shock and pressure of this stunning blow she should turn for comfort and protection to the stoutest shelter near her.

For Cassio there is Mr. Terriss, a very promising young actor, of pleasing

presence and appearance, and who does not seem inclined, as some young actors are apt to seem, to rely solely on these aids to distinction. His Cassio is a very spirited and agreeable performance, soldierly and yet wellbred, as of one equally at home in camp and court. Alone, of all the Cassios our later stage has seen, he remains a gentleman in his cups; such an one as, one can truly see, would never hold with Iago that the offence of a bodily wound is greater than the offence of a lost reputation. The solemn, yet never tedious, gravity of Mr. Meade's Brabantio, his stately anger, and no less stately tenderness; the clear and polished elocution of Mr. Beaumont as the Duke; the foolishness of Mr. Pinero's Roderigo, never degenerating into buffooneryhe is quite as earnest in his way as Iago himself—all these are well worthy of note; all tending, each in its own degree, to give that proper finish and proportion to the whole which is so greatly to be desired in all such work; and which is, perhaps, a more distinctive and a more valuable feature of this presentation than even the individual merits of Mr. Irving and Mr. Booth, or the happy meeting of two such distinguished actors on one stage.