a fierce encounter between the message that was in him to convey and the restricted means that nature had placed at his disposal. His individuality betrayed at the first, and indelibly stamped upon every creation even to the close of his career, formed at first a serious weakness and again, finally, the saving element of strength in the work that he had to offer to the theatre. There will always, I suppose, be a radical divergence of thought as to the proper attributes of an actor. To some minds it seems a self-evident proposition that the highest triumph of histrionic art is that in which the personality of the performer is most effectively concealed. To such critics completeness of disguise is completeness of victory, and in the region of comedy there is perhaps room for the confident assertion of this idea, for it is unquestionable that a full measure of enjoyment is conferred upon his audience by the actor’s successful assumption of alien idiosyncrasies of bearing and manner. In what is technically known in the theatre as character-acting, this is a goal of perfection that is rightly sought for; and although Irving proved himself on occasion a capable actor of character, it seems to me that his efforts in this direction bore with rare exception an impression of exaggeration. And the reason is not far to seek. Conscious of his own peculiarities, so difficult if not impossible to efface, he was disposed to seek for concealment by forcing to the verge of the grotesque the personation of characteristics that were not his own. He was for this reason, to my thinking, never wholly successful as an actor of disguise; but at the opposite pole of histrionic achievement lies, I think, a faculty that is both rarer and greater, the faculty of revelation. Between these two spheres of disguise and revelation lie all the possibilities of the actor’s art. The choice of the one or of the other must be determined by the temperament of the actor, and in an equal measure by the response he receives from the temper of his audience. Speaking only for myself, I may frankly say that the greatest impressions I have received in the theatre have been made upon me by performers who never left me for a moment to imagine they were not themselves; but who, without greatly striving to realise the external attributes of the characters they were presenting, have succeeded in the power of constantly identifying themselves with the culminating passions of life. And of course these greater victories, if they are greater, belong in the nature of things to those actors whose ambition it is to present and interpret the deeper emotions--those emotions, I mean, so deeply seated in humanity that their occasional difference of expression counts as for nothing beside the intensity with which they are felt and experienced by all.