ospects as a
Shakespearian actor. You can play hop-scotch on one foot, but you
cannot cut with one blade of a pair of scissors, and you cannot play
Shakespeare by being simply picturesque. Above all, before all, for
this purpose you must have the art of utterance; you must be able to
give value to the divine Shakespearian line--to make it charm our ears
as it charms our mind. It is of course by his picturesqueness that Mr.
Irving has made his place; by small ingenuities of "business" and
subtleties of action; by doing as a painter does who "goes in" for
color when he cannot depend upon his drawing. Mr. Irving's color is
sometimes pretty enough; his ingenuities and subtleties are often
felicitous; but his picturesqueness, on the whole, strikes me as dry
and awkward, and, at the best, where certain essentials are so
strikingly absent, these secondary devices lose much of their power.

Mr. Fechter in Hamlet was preponderantly a "picturesque" actor; but he
had a certain sacred spark, a heat, a lightness and suppleness, which
Mr. Irving lacks; and though, with his incurable foreign accent, he
could hardly be said to _declaim_ Shakespeare in any worthy sense, yet
on the whole he spoke his part with much more of the positively
agreeable than can possibly belong to the utterance of Mr. Irving. His
speech, with all its fantastic Gallicisms of sound, was less foreign
and more comprehensible than that strange tissue of arbitrary
pronunciations which floats in the thankless medium of Mr. Irving's
harsh, monotonous voice. Richard III. is of all Shakespeare's parts the
one that can perhaps best dispense with declamation, and in which the
clever inventions of manner and movement in which Mr. Irving is
proficient will carry the actor furthest. Accordingly, I doubt not, Mr.
Irving is seen to peculiar advantage in this play; it is certainly a
much better fit for him than Macbeth. He has had the good taste to
discard the vulgar adaptation of Cibber, by which the stage has so long
been haunted, and which, I believe, is played in America to the
complete exclusion of the original drama. I believe that some of the
tenderest Shakespearians refuse to admit the authenticity of "Richard
III."; they declare that the play has, with all its energy, a sort of
intellectual grossness, of which the author of "Hamlet" and "Othello"
was incapable. This same intellectual grossness is certainly very
striking; the scene of Richard's wooing of Lady Ann is a c