reading a
London newspaper account of the production of a Shakespearean play, he
remarked that "evidently the accessories swallow up the poetry and the
action": and he proceeded, in a reminiscent and regretful mood, to speak
as follows: "In my endeavour to give to Shakespeare all his attributes,
to enrich his poetry with scenes worthy of its interpretation, to give
to his tragedies their due magnificence and to his comedies their entire
brilliancy, I have set an example which is accompanied with great peril,
for the public is willing to have the magnificence without the tragedy,
and the poet is swallowed up in display." Mr. Irving is the legitimate
successor to Macready and he has encountered that same peril. There are
persons--many of them--who think that it is a sign of weakness to praise
cordially and to utter admiration with a free heart. They are mistaken,
but no doubt they are sincere. Shakespeare, the wisest of monitors, is
never so eloquent and splendid as when he makes one of his people
express praise of another. Look at those speeches in _Coriolanus_. Such
niggardly persons, in their detraction of Henry Irving, are prompt to
declare that he is a capital stage manager but not a great actor. This
has an impartial air and a sapient sound, but it is gross folly and
injustice. Henry Irving is one of the greatest actors that have ever
lived, and he has shown it over and over again. His acting is all the
more effective because associated with unmatched ability to insist and
insure that every play shall be perfectly well set, in every particular,
and that every part in it shall be competently acted. But his genius and
his ability are no more discredited than those of Macready were by his
attention to technical detail and his insistence upon total excellence
of result. It should be observed, however, that he has carried stage
garniture to an extreme limit. His investiture of _Faust_ was so
magnificent that possibly it may have tended in the minds of many
spectators, to obscure and overwhelm the fine intellectual force, the
beautiful delicacy, and the consummate art with which he embodied
Mephistopheles. It ought not to have produced that effect--because, in
fact, the spectacle presented was, actually and truly, that of a
supernatural being, predominant by force of inherent strength and charm
over the broad expanse of the populous and teeming world; but it might
have produced it: and, for the practical good of the art of