m comprises upward of ninety lines--and that is a severe
and perilous strain upon an actor's power of holding the public
interest. The beauties of the play, however, are many and strong. Its
crowning excellence is that it gives dramatic permanence to a strangely
interesting character.

The knowledge of human nature that Henry Irving revealed in this part
and the manner in which he revealed it were nothing less than wonderful.
The moment he walked upon the scene you saw the blighted figure of a man
who has endured, and is enduring, spiritual torment. The whole
personality was suffused with a mournful strangeness. The man was
isolated and alone. It was a purely ideal view of the character that
the actor denoted; for he made Eugene Aram a noble, tender, gentle
person, whom ungovernable passion, under circumstances of overwhelming
provocation, had once impelled to an act of half-justifiable homicide,
and who had for years been slowly dying with remorse. He touched no
chord of terror, but only the chord of pity. Like his portrayal of
Mathias, the picture showed the reactionary effect of hidden sin in the
human soul; but the personality of the sufferer was entirely different.
Each of those men has had experience of crime and of resultant misery,
but no two embodiments could possibly be more dissimilar, alike in
spiritual quality and in circumstances. Mathias is dominated by paternal
love and characterised by a half-defiant, ever-vigilant, and often
self-approbative pride of intellect, in being able to guard and keep a
terrible and dangerous secret. Eugene Aram is dominated by a saint-like
tenderness toward a sweet woman who loves him, and characterised by a
profound, fitful melancholy, now humble and submissive, now actively
apprehensive and almost frenzied. Only once does he stand at bay and
front his destiny with a defiance of desperate will; and even then it is
for the woman's sake rather than for his own. Henry Irving's acting
made clear and beautiful that condition of temperament. A noble and
affectionate nature, shipwrecked, going to pieces, doomed, but making
one last tremendous though futile effort to avert the final and
inevitable ruin--this ideal was made actual in his performance. The
intellectual or spiritual value of such a presentment must depend upon
the auditor's capacity to absorb from a tragedy its lessons of insight
into the relations of the human soul to the moral government of the
world. Many spectators w