Good as is Mr. Irving's Benedick, those who have seen Charles Kemble as Benedick have seen a yet better Benedick than Mr. Irving. It is, however, almost always by an important personality that great things are effected; and it is assuredly the personality of Mr. Irving and that of Miss Ellen Terry which have the happy effect of bringing the Sultanas and of filling the Lyceum.

Both Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry have a personality which peculiarly fits them for ideal comedy. Miss Terry is sometimes restless and over-excited, but she has a spiritual vivacity which is charming. Mr. Irving has faults which have often been pointed out, but he has, as an actor, a merit which redeems them all, and which is the secret of his success: the merit of delicacy and distinction. In some of his parts he shows himself capable, also, of intense and powerful passion. But twenty other actors are to be found who have a passion as intense and powerful as his, for one other actor who has his merit of delicacy and distinction. Mankind are often unjust to this merit, and most of us much resist having to exhibit it in our own life and soul; but it is singular what a charm it exercises

over us.

Mr. Irving is too intelligent, and has too many of an actor's qualities, to fail entirely in any part which he assumes; still there are some parts for which he appears not well 269

VOL. IV

T

fitted, and others for which he appears fitted perfectly.

His true parts are those which most display his rare gift of delicacy and distinction; and such parts are offered, above all, in ideal comedy. May he long continue to find them there, and to put forth in them charm enough to win the Sultanas to art like Much Ado about Nothing, as a change from art like Fédora and Impulse!

May 30, 1883.

AN OLD PLAYGOER.

HAMLET ONCE MORE

BY AN OLD PLAYGOER

Ar the very moment when Mr. Wilson Barrett is bringing out Hamlet at the Princess's, there comes into my hands Shakspeare and Montaigne, an Endeavour to explain the Tendency of Hamlet' from Allusions in Contemporary Works, by Mr. Jacob Feis, an author not known to me. Mr. Feis seeks to establish that Shakspeare in Hamlet identifies_Montaigne's philosophy with madness, branding it as a pernicious one, as contrary to the intellectual conquests his own English nation has made when breaking with the Romanist dogma. 'Shakspeare,' says Mr. Feis, 'wished to warn his contemporaries that the attempt of reconciling two opposite circles of ideas-namely, on the one hand the doctrine that we are to be guided by the laws of nature, and on the other the yielding ourselves up to superstitious dogmas which declare human nature to be sinful, must inevitably produce deeds of madness.'

Mr. Feis's name has a German look, and the first instinct of the 'genuine British narrowness' will be to say that here is another German critic who has discovered a mare's nest. 'Hamlet dies wounded and poisoned, as if Shakspeare had intended expressing his abhorrence of so vacillating a character, who places the treacherous excesses of passion above the power of that human reason in whose free service alone Greeks and Romans did their most exalted deeds of virtue.'

Shakspeare is the 'the great humanist,' in sympathy with the clear unwarped reason of a living Horace or Horatio,' an Horatio intrepid as the author of 'non vultus instantis tyranni.' This is fantastic. Far from abhorring Hamlet, Shakspeare was probably in considerable sympathy with him: nor is he likely to have thought either that salvation for mankind was to be had from the Odes of Horace.

Never

Mr. Feis is too entire, too absolute. theless his book is of real interest and value. He has proved the preoccupation of Shakspeare's mind when he made Hamlet with Montaigne's Essays. John Sterling had inferred it, but Mr. Feis has established it. He shows how passage after passage in the second quarto of Hamlet, published in 1604, has been altered and expanded in correspondence with things in the first English translation of Montaigne's Essays, Florio's, published in 1603.

The Essays had already passed through many editions in French, and were known to Shakspeare in that language. Their publication in English was an event in the brilliant and intellectual London world, then keenly interested in the playhouses; and Shakspeare, in revising his Hamlet in 1604, gives proof of the actual occupation of his patrons with the Englished? Montaigne, and confirms, too, the fact of his own occupation with the Essays previously.

For me the interest of this discovery does not lie in its showing that Shakspeare thought Montaigne a dangerous author, and meant to give in Hamlet a shocking example of what Montaigne's teaching led to. It lies in its explaining how it comes about that Hamlet, in spite of the prodigious mental and poetic power shown in it, is really so tantalising and ineffective a play. To the common public Hamlet is a famous piece by a famous poet, with crime, a ghost, battle, and carnage; and that is sufficient. To the youthful enthusiast Hamlet is a piece handling the mystery of the universe, and having throughout cadences, phrases, and words full of divinest Shakspearian magic; and that, too, is sufficient. To the pedant, finally, Hamlet is an occasion for airing his psychology; and what does pedant require more? But to the spectator who loves true and powerful drama, and can judge whether he gets it or not, Hamlet is a piece which