The justice of this view of the final victory of the actor’s art can only be decided by individual experience and individual impression. Looking back and recalling the performances that have most deeply moved me, I find myself suddenly reverting in recollection to those supreme moments in a great play or in a great impersonation in which the individual is forgotten, and the supreme power of sounding the depths of human feeling is indelibly stamped upon the memory. I saw Desclée, and greatly admired her; and I remember, long afterwards, when I witnessed Sarah Bernhardt’s performance of _Frou-frou_, how much I thought it suffered in comparison with the original in those lighter and earlier scenes of the play in which the qualities of the heroine’s temperament have to be exhibited; and yet, when Madame Bernhardt came to the great scene in the third act, the recollection of Desclée, by a single stroke of genius, was almost effaced, and I can only think of _Frou-frou_ as it is recalled to me by that superb exhibition of passion in her encounter with Louise. It was not Irving’s performance of _The Bells_ or the impression it yielded which satisfied me, even in those days, that he was a great actor. The picture as drawn, both by the author and by the actor, is so narrowly concentrated upon almost a single phase of criminal instinct and abnormal remorse, that it might well have been the outcome of an intelligence intense assuredly and yet confessedly limited in its outlook. It gave no assurance that the actor could touch the finer or deeper notes of feeling, and it was only when he afterwards played _Hamlet_ that he convinced me of the possession of deeper imaginative powers.