alked most
instructively about the actors of the Kemble period. He declared John
Philip Kemble to have been the greatest of actors, and said that his
best impersonations were Penruddock, Zanga, and Coriolanus. Mrs.
Siddons, he said, was incomparable, and the elder Mathews a great
genius,--the precursor of Dickens. For Edmund Kean he had no enthusiasm.
Kean, he said, was at his best in Sir Edward Mortimer, and after that in
Shylock. Miss O'Neill he remembered as the perfect Juliet: a beautiful,
blue-eyed woman, who could easily weep, and who retained her beauty to
the last, dying at 85, as Lady Wrixon Becher.

[Footnote 1: This paper was written in 1888, and now, in 1892, Mr.
Jefferson, Mr. Stoddart, Mrs. Drew, and Mrs. Gilbert are the only
survivors of that noble group.]

II.

HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN FAUST.

It is not surprising that the votaries of Goethe's colossal poem--a work
which, although somewhat deformed and degraded with the pettiness of
provincialism, is yet a grand and immortal creation of genius--should
find themselves dissatisfied with theatrical expositions of it. Although
dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly
dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being
radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction. More
disastrous still, in the eyes of those votaries, it cannot be and it
never has been converted into a play without a considerable sacrifice of
its contents, its comprehensive scope, its poetry, and its ethical
significance. In the poem it is the Man who predominates; it is not the
Fiend. Mephistopheles, indeed, might, for the purpose of philosophical
apprehension, be viewed as an embodied projection of the mind of Faust;
for the power of the one is dependent absolutely upon the weakness and
surrender of the other. The object of the poem was the portrayal of
universal humanity in a typical form at its highest point of development
and in its representative spiritual experience. Faust, an aged scholar,
the epitome of human faculties and virtues, grand, venerable,
beneficent, blameless, is passing miserably into the evening of life. He
has done no outward and visible wrong, and yet he is wretched. The utter
emptiness of his life--its lack of fulfilment, its lack of
sensation--wearies, annoys, disgusts, and torments him. He is divided
between an apathy, which heavily weighs him down into the dust, and a
passionate,