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HENRY IRVING
courage. Nearly all the greatest commen-
tators have agreed that Macbeth, after the
murder of Duncan, grows steadily and
rapidly harder and tougher, always strong
in imaginative vision intellectually, but less
and less capable even of high or unselfish
conceptions, his whole nature sustaining
hideous induration and decadence. But
Mr. Irving in the first two acts so slurred
the better elements in Macbeth's character
that there was no possible interest to be
taken in the struggle between the powers
of good and evil in his soul; and, after
his great crime, he appeared not different
in substance from what he was before, or,
rather, by a strange perversion and inver-
sion of the scheme of the text, he was
shown not as firmer, but softer, of fibre,
more and more hysterical and spasmodic,
more inordinate in grimace and snarl, a
creature not much unlike the Louis XI.
whom Mr, Irving has given us. In short,
the heroic element, the potency of physique
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