animal excess, all of those
ordinary attributes which are right in nature, and wrong because
obstructive in the art that is nature's interpretation.

Just as the true landscape is the harmonious blending of selected
natural effects, so the true dramatic embodiment is the crystallization
of selected attributes in any given type of human nature, shown in
selected phases of natural condition. McCullough did not present
Virginius brushing his hair or paying Virginia's school-bills; yet he
suggested him, clearly and beautifully, in the sweet domestic repose
and paternal benignity of his usual life--making thus a background of
loveliness, on which to throw, in lines of living light, the terrible
image of his agonising sacrifice. And when the inevitable moment came
for his dread act of righteous slaughter it was the moral grandeur, the
heart-breaking paternal agony, and the overwhelming pathos of the deed
that his art diffused--not the "gashed stab," the blood, the physical
convulsion, the revolting animal shock. Neither was there druling, or
dirt, or physical immodesty, or any other attribute of that class of the
natural concomitants of insanity, in the subsequent delirium.

A perfect and holy love is, in one aspect of it, a sadder thing to see
than the profoundest grief. Misery, at its worst, is at least final: and
for that there is the relief of death. But love, in its sacred
exaltation,--the love of the parent for the child,--is so fair a mark
for affliction that one can hardly view it without a shudder of
apprehensive dread. That sort of love was personified in McCullough's
embodiment of Virginius, and that same nameless thrill of fear was
imparted by its presence,--even before the tragedian, with an exquisite
intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not
admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and
agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting
than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances of the "natural"
school; and all the time it was maintained at the lofty level of classic
grace. It would be impossible to overstate the excellence of all that
McCullough did and said, in the forum scene--the noble severity of the
poise, the grace of the outlines, the terrible intensity of the mood,
the heartrending play of the emotions, the overwhelming delirium of the
climax. Throughout the subsequent most difficult portraiture of
shattered reason the actor