ould find it merely morbid and gloomy; others
would find it superlatively illuminative and eloquent. Its artistic
value the actor himself made evident to every comprehension. There is a
moment of the performance when the originally massive and passionate
character of Eugene Aram is suddenly asserted above his meekness,
contrition, and sorrow; when, at the sound of his enemy's voice, he
first becomes petrified with the sense of peril, and then calmly gathers
all his powers to meet and conquer the danger. The splendid
concentration, the perfect poise, the sustained intensity, the copious
and amazing variety and force of emotion, and the positive, unerring,
and brilliant art with which Henry Irving met that emergency and
displayed that frightful and piteous aspect of assailed humanity,
desperate and fighting for life, made up such an image of genius as
seldom is seen and never will be forgotten. Rapid transition has ever
been one of the commonest and most effective expedients used in
histrionic art. This, on the contrary, was an example of sustained,
prolonged, cumulative, artistic expression of the most harrowing and
awful emotions with which the human soul can be convulsed; and it was a
wonder of consummate acting. The same thoroughness of identification and
the same astonishing adequacy of feeling pervaded the scene in the
churchyard. At first, in the dusky starlight, only a shapeless figure,
covered with a black cloak, was seen among the gravestones, crouched
upon a tomb; but the man that rose, as if out of the grave, pallid,
emaciated, ghastly, the spectre of himself, was the authentic image of
majestic despair, not less sublime than pitiable, and fraught with a
power that happiness could never attain. Not in our time upon the stage
has such a lesson been taught, with such overwhelming pathos, of the
utter helplessness of even the strongest human will, when once the soul
has been vitiated by sin and the eternal law of right defied by mortal
passion. In the supplication to his astonished accomplice the actor
seemed like one transfigured, and there the haunted effect was extremely
awful.

XXV.

CHARLES FISHER.

In old times Charles Fisher often figured in the old comedies, and he
was one of the last of the thin and rapidly lessening group of actors
capable of presenting those pieces--wherein, although the substance be
human nature, the manner is that of elaborate and diversified artifice.
When he played Lieu