ear was a remarkable manifestation of
physical resources and of professional skill. The lofty stature, the
ample and resonant voice, the copious animal excitement, the fluent
elocution and the vigorous, picturesque, and often melodramatic
movements, gestures, and poses of Salvini united to animate and
embellish a personality such as would naturally absorb attention and
diffuse excitement. Every artist, however, moves within certain specific
and positive limitations--spiritual, mental, and physical. No actor has
proved equal to every kind of character. Salvini, when he acted Hamlet,
was unspiritual--giving no effect to the haunted tone of that part or to
its weird surroundings; and when he acted Macbeth he was unimaginative,
obscure, common, and therefore inadequate. The only Shakespearean
character that he excelled in is Othello, and even in that his ideal
displayed neither the magnanimity nor the tenderness that are in
Shakespeare's conception. The chief attributes of the Moor that he
interpreted were physical; the loftiest heights that he reached were
terror and distracted grief; but he worked with a pictorial method and a
magnetic vigour that enthralled the feelings even when they did not
command the judgment.

His performance of King Lear gave new evidence of his limitations.
During the first two acts he made the king a merely restless, choleric,
disagreeable old man, deficient in dignity, destitute of grandeur, and
especially destitute of inherent personal fascination--of the
suggestiveness of ever having been a great man. Lear is a ruin--but he
has been a Titan; the delight of all hearts no less than the monarch of
all minds. The actor who does not invest him with that inherent,
overwhelming personal fascination does not attain to his altitude. The
cruel afflictions that occur in the tragedy do not of themselves
signify: the pity is only that they should occur to him. That is the
spring of all the pathos. In Salvini's Lear there were beautiful moments
and magnificent bits of action. "I gave you all" and "I'm cold myself"
were exquisite points. He missed altogether, however, the more subtle
significance of the reminiscent reference to Cordelia--as in "No more of
that, I have noted it well"--and he gave, at the beginning, no
intimation of impending madness. In fact he introduced no element of
lunacy till he reached the lines about "red-hot spits" in Edgar's first
mad scene.

Much of Salvini's mechanism in Lear was