learnt; and then, at
her frequent moments of forgetfulness, charms us into delight, though
not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment to the self of a
passing moment. Irving's acting is almost a science, and it is a science
founded on tradition. It is in one sense his personality that makes him
what he is, the only actor on the English stage who has a touch of
genius. But he has not gone to himself to invent an art wholly personal,
wholly new; his acting is no interruption of an intense inner life, but
a craftsmanship into which he has put all he has to give. It is an art
wholly of rhetoric, that is to say wholly external; his emotion moves to
slow music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn-out
word. He appeals to us, to our sense of what is expected, to our
accustomed sense of the logic, not of life, but of life as we have
always seen it on the stage, by his way of taking snuff, of taking out
his pocket-handkerchief, of lifting his hat, of crossing his legs. He
has observed life in order to make his own version of life, using the
stage as his medium, and accepting the traditional aids and limitations
of the stage.

Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." His Louis XI. is a
masterpiece of grotesque art. It is a study in senility, and it is the
grotesque art of the thing which saves it from becoming painful. This
shrivelled carcase, from which age, disease, and fear have picked all
the flesh, leaving the bare framework of bone and the drawn and cracked
covering of yellow skin, would be unendurable in its irreverent copy of
age if it were not so obviously a picture, with no more malice than
there is in the delicate lines and fine colours of a picture. The figure
is at once Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners; it distracts
one between pity, terror, and disgust, but is altogether absorbing; one
watches it as one would watch some feeble ancient piece of mechanism,
still working, which may snap at any moment. In such a personation,
make-up becomes a serious part of art. It is the picture that magnetises
us, and every wrinkle seems to have been studied in movement; the hands
act almost by themselves, as if every finger were a separate actor. The
passion of fear, the instinct of craft, the malady of suspicion, in a
frail old man who has power over every one but himself: that is what Sir
Henry Irving represents, in a performance which is half precise
physiology, half palpable arti