ess declare that for myself I have not mastered the
mystery of his success. His defects seem to me in excess of his
qualities and the lessons he has not learned more striking than the
lessons he has learned.

That an actor so handicapped, as they say in London, by nature and
culture should have enjoyed such prosperity, is a striking proof of the
absence of a standard, of the chaotic condition of taste. Mr. Irving's
Macbeth, which I saw more than a year ago and view under the
mitigations of time, was not pronounced one of his great successes; but
it was acted, nevertheless, for many months, and it does not appear to
have injured his reputation. Passing through London, and curious to
make the acquaintance of the great English actor of the day, I went
with alacrity to see it; but my alacrity was more than equalled by the
vivacity of my disappointment. I sat through the performance in a sort
of melancholy amazement. There are barren failures and there are
interesting failures, and this performance seemed to me to deserve the
less complimentary of these classifications. It inspired me, however,
with no ill will toward the artist, for it must be said of Mr. Irving
that his aberrations are not of a vulgar quality, and that one likes
him, somehow, in spite of them. But one's liking takes the form of
making one wish that really he had selected some other profession than
the histrionic. Nature has done very little to make an actor of him.
His face is not dramatic; it is the face of a sedentary man, a
clergyman, a lawyer, an author, an amiable gentleman--of anything other
than a possible Hamlet or Othello. His figure is of the same cast, and
his voice completes the want of illusion. His voice is apparently
wholly unavailable for purposes of declamation. To say that he speaks
badly is to go too far; to my sense he simply does not speak at all--in
any way that, in an actor, can be called speaking. He does not pretend
to declaim or dream of declaiming. Shakespeare's finest lines pass from
his lips without his paying the scantiest tribute to their quality. Of
what the French call _diction_--of the art of delivery--he has
apparently not a suspicion. This forms three-fourths of an actor's
obligations, and in Mr. Irving's acting these three-fourths are simply
cancelled. What is left to him with the remaining fourth is to be
"picturesque"; and this even his partisans admit he has made his
specialty. This concession darkens Mr. Irving's pr