we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that
butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A
horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is
it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he
displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast
knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part,--not an
atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it.
Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent
and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius,
the man of vast capacity,--the profound, the witty, accomplished
Richard?

The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of
meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions,
that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters,--Macbeth,
Richard, even Iago,--we think not so much of the crimes which they
commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual
activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell
is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck
and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody who
thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case
to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the
higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon! Do we
think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and the rack
which he deserves? That is all which we really think about him.
Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakespeare so little do the
actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner
mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is
exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when
we see these things represented, the acts which they do are
comparatively everything, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime
emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and horror
which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with which he
entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to
murder Duncan,--when we no longer read it in a book, when we have
given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses
over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes
actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and
impressive, as I have witnes