I used to say
when I spoke of his poems: 'He is like a great actor with a bad
part; yet who would look at Hamlet in the grave scene if Salvini
played the grave-digger?' and I might so have explained much that
he said and did. I meant that he was like a great actor of
passion--character-acting meant nothing to me for many years--and
an actor of passion will display some one quality of soul,
personified again and again, just as a great poetical painter,
Titian, Botticelli, Rossetti may depend for his greatness upon a
type of beauty which presently we call by his name. Irving, the
last of the sort on the English stage, and in modern England and
France it is the rarest sort, never moved me but in the expression
of intellectual pride; and though I saw Salvini but once, I am
convinced that his genius was a kind of animal nobility. Henley,
half inarticulate--'I am very costive,' he would say--beset with
personal quarrels, built up an image of power and magnanimity till
it became, at moments, when seen as it were by lightning, his true
self. Half his opinions were the contrivance of a sub-consciousness
that sought always to bring life to the dramatic crisis, and
expression to that point of artifice where the true self could
find its tongue.
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