l, it's so obvious. You've got Terriss in the cast."

"_Terriss!_"

"Yes. I don't doubt Irving's intellectuality, you know. As Romeo he
reminds me of a pig who has been taught to play the fiddle. He does it
cleverly, but he would be better employed in squealing. He cannot shine
in the part like the fiddler. Terriss in this case is the fiddler."

I was furious. "I am sorry you don't realize," I said, "that the worst
thing Henry Irving could do would be better than the best of any one
else."

When dear Terris did play Romeo at the Lyceum two or three years later
to the Juliet of Mary Anderson, he attacked the part with a good deal of
fire. He was young, truly, and stamped his foot a great deal, was
vehement and passionate. But it was so obvious that there was no
intelligence behind his reading. He did not know what the part was
about, and all the finer shades of meaning in it he missed. Yet the
majority, with my political friend, would always prefer a Terriss as
Romeo to a Henry Irving.

I am not going to say that Henry's Romeo was good. What I do say is that
some bits of it were as good as anything he ever did. In the big
emotional scene (in the Friar's cell), he came to grief precisely as he
had done in Othello. He screamed, grew slower and slower, and looked
older and older. When I begin to think it over I see that he often
failed in such scenes through his very genius for impersonation. An
actor of commoner mould takes such scenes rhetorically--recites them,
and gets through them with some success. But the actor who impersonates,
feels, and lives such anguish or passion or tempestuous grief, does for
the moment in imagination nearly die. Imagination impeded Henry Irving
in what are known as "strong" scenes.

He was a perfect Hamlet, a perfect Richard III., a perfect Shylock,
except in the scene with Tubal, where I think his voice failed him. He
was an imperfect Romeo; yet, as I have said, he did things in the part
which were equal to the best of his perfect Hamlet.

His whole attitude before he met Juliet was beautiful. He came on from
the very back of the stage and walked over a little bridge with a book
in his hand, sighing and dying for Rosaline. In Iago he had been
Italian. Then it was the Italy of Venice. As Romeo it was the Italy of
Tuscany. His clothes were as Florentine as his bearing. He ignored the
silly tradition that Romeo must wear a feather in his cap. In the course
of his study of the part he ha