RICHARD MANSFIELD (1857-1907)

Richard Mansfield was either the greatest actor of the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century, or an angular, mechanical aper. It is difficult to judge from this distance. But he was lionized by two of his contemporaries after his premature demise of cancer in 1907. William Winter left a two volume Life and Art of Richard Mansfield, and Paul Wilstach followed soon thereafter with his own Richard Mansfield, The Man and the Actor. Clearly his career, that first brought Shaw and Ibsen toAmerican audiences, is worth study. But what can we learn?

Son of soprano Erminia Rudersdorff Mansfield and her second husband, the wine merchant Maurice Mansfield, Richard Mansfield was born in Berlin. His grandfather was the violin virtuoso Joseph Rudersdorff. Young Richard inherited some of his mother's family's musical gifts. He had made some small success in London in the German Reed entertainments and as Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S Pinafore. The regional press gushed, "It is impossible to imagine how an actor could do more justice to an author's conception that Mr. Mansfield does to this effort of Mr. Gilbert's prolific brain..."

Emboldened by this and other successes in the hinterlands, Mansfield made his London debut in Offenbach's La Boulangére as a lackey. He was, however, permitted to "enlarge his opportunity to amuse the audience." He took full advantage of this opportunity. His career in light opera and operetta was well underway, when his mother died while on tour in the United States. He himself came to America in 1882, making his debut at the Standard Theatre in another light opera, The Three Black Cloaks. He continued there in a string of light operas until he badgered A. M. Palmer into giving him the opportunity to play the Baron Chevrial in A Parisian Romance. Once cast, Mansfield set to work. Says Paul Wilstach, his enthusiastic biographer,

His prediction was true. Baron Chevrial skyrocketed him to fame. There followed a twenty year career of ambitious projects that veered from popular to unpopular, financially successful to disastrous. Always lavish in concept and executed with great attention to detail, Mansfield's productions and portrayals were truly individual. He was one of the last holdouts against the Theatrical Syndicate. He introduced both Shaw's Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple (left) to American audiences He attempted to present "serious" historical portraits of Napoleon (right) and Nero to critical, but no popular success. His last role was the title character in Ibsen's sprawling Peer Gynt (right).

As the accompanying photographs illustrate, he was meticulous in painting exact exteriors for each of his characters, but he was always striving for what he perceived to be "art," an art based on careful observation of life and truth. As he put it, a real actor must "envelope himself in the robe of the part." He must "pretend to be what he is not; he must be what he pretends to be." He saw this as no facile task:

Noted critic and Yaly professor William Lyon Phelps called Mansfield "one of the greatest of modern actors and certainly the most intellectual." He counted his Richard III as one of the best performances he had seen:

John Ranken Towse, surely one of Mansfield's harshest critics, devoted an entire chapter to his work in his retrospective Sixty Years of the Theater, reproduced here in its entirety. It provides a succinct summary of Mansfield's career. If taken with a grain of salt (Towse never trod the boards after all) it may provide insights into the nature of his real art and impact:

Of a very different type from Henry Irving was Richard Mansfield (below, left in 1884), and yet there were some striking similarities between the two men. Both had strong individualities, burning ambition, intense egotism, and high artistic instinct. In both the creative or interpretative faculty was hampered and limited by the ingrained habits of an inexorable personality. Both believed themselves equal to the loftiest flights of tragic emotion, ignoring the limitations of which, perhaps, they were unconscious, and both underrated the exceptional abilities with which they were endowed. Irving, of course, was the greater actor, the finer character, and the more nimble and apprehensive intellect of the two. In the hard school of experience he acquired a wisdom, an adaptability, and a self-control which Mansfield never learned. To the last the latter was imperious, willful, self-centered, and indocile. He was a terror to his managers.

Concerning the brilliancy of his natural talents there can be no dispute. He inherited a large share of them from his mother, Madame Rudersdorf, one of the greatest dramatic singers of her day, and a most capable and headstrong woman. He was musical, sang beautifully, painted with skill, and was a good linguist. I would not hesitate to accredit him with genius were it not for the indefiniteness of a word so profligately misused. Genius, in the sense of an uncommon development of the mimetic and artistic faculties, he undoubtedly had, but not in any superlative degree. His manner, on the stage and off, was apt to be stiff, precise, and angular, but, nevertheless there was about his presence a certain forcefulness-a suggestion of latent power-that concentrated attention and excited interest. His voice was deep, resonant, and musical-few actors have been gifted with a finer organ-but he never learned to take full advantage of it, adopting a falling inflection ending upon the same note at every period, which soon wearied the ear, and was especially fatal in the delivery of blank verse.

I have referred briefly to the remarkable performance of the Baron Chevrial (right) in A Parisian Romance, in the Union Square Theater, which first brought him prominently into public notice. Hitherto he had been identified chiefly with light dramatic pieces and comic opera-he won praise as Sir Joseph Porter in H. M. S. Pinafore and this realistic exhibition of depravity in dotage, by a young and comparatively unknown actor, was a surprise to the public, the managers, and the critics, and soon became a town topic. It was an extraordinarily clever bit of work, and deserved nearly all the praise that it received. The assumption of senility, aping youth, an ancient satyr with a veneer of superfine polish, of a lust lassata necdum satiata, was almost as fascinating as it was horrible. And the picture of the death stroke, paralyzing an infamous hilarity, was vivid and startling in the extreme. It was a wonderful piece of mimicry, but it was not a great performance, because no great power of emotion or imagination was involved. It could not be compared for a moment with the effect wrought by such actors as Edwin Booth, E. L. Davenport, or Samuel Phelps in the collapse of Sir Giles Overreach. But it saved a poor play from disaster, and made the actor, who had been so prompt in seizing his opportunity, famous.

The part was prominent in his repertory for many years, but in expanding and over-elaborating it he spoiled his own performance. He had, however, established his reputation as an interpreter of eccentric character, and it was for his proficiency in this line that he will be longest remembered. When Steele Mackaye produced his In Spite of All -a variation upon Sardou's , Andrea -Mansfield furnished a most telling sketch of a theatrical manager of German extraction. It was a veritable characterization, in which all the details of speech, appearance, and manner were nicely appropriate, and he maintained the illusion most successfully, until the action of the scene called for a manifestation of emotional pathos, when he broke down, his acting being devoid of all sincerity.

Soon afterward he appeared as the hero of Prince Karl (left), written for him by A. C. Gunter. The piece itself was unmitigated rubbish. It was all about a Prince who, having proposed marriage to one woman, makes love to another, whom he has discovered to be richer, in the guise of his own courier. In it Mr. Mansfield won much popularity. He played the Prince in the light vein of eccentric comedy in which he excelled, and was particularly happy in his broken English, in his snatches of song, and his adoption of a foreign manner. But here again he was least satisfactory in his interpretation of passages of romantic sentiment, demanding some measure of emotional sincerity. Even in these early days it was apparent to experienced observers that the fervor of romantic ardor and the poignancy of true pathos were beyond his means of expression.

Mansfield advanced still further in public favor in a melodramatic version of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (right) of Robert Louis Stevenson . The play reproduced some of the leading incidents of the story and some of the text, but very little of its spirit, significance, and power. As for the performance of Mr. Mansfield of the double personality, that was full of melodramatic effect and theatrical strokes, but showed very little sympathetic imagination. It was in the externals that gratify the crowd, not in the clairvoyance of a perfect intelligence, that it excelled. Jekyll he represented as a young, sallow, melancholy student, with cleanly shaven face, very dark and heavy eyebrows, and long, black hair. Far from being the jovial, debonair man of the world, he was haunted by the terrors of his position, a sort of Hamlet in a frock coat. Hyde he made a nightmare of goblin hideousness, a white, leering vampire, with a ferocious mouth and glazing eyes, deformed, lame, palsied, and infirm. A loathsome object, certainly, and, to a certain extent, like a medieval demon, suggestive of evil, but not half so appalling or infernal as the shriveled Hyde of the original, with his horrible lightness, activity, and energy, impressing the observer with a sense of a deformity which did not actually exist. The subtleties of this creation eluded Mansfield completely. For an imaginative symbolism-in which Irving, who once meditated playing the character, would have reveled-he could only substitute something grossly palpable and material. He utterly failed to denote that one character was supplemental to the other. Essentially the difference between his two men was physical.

The moroseness and gloom of Jekyll had much in common with the sullen ferocity of Hyde. By making Jekyll buoyant and convivial, as he is expressly described in the book, he would have prepared a much finer and more artistic dramatic contrast. That he showed much acting power in illustrating his grotesque idea of Hyde, I fully acknowledge, but it was not of an inspired kind. J. B. Studley, and others of the old Bowery melodramatic days, could have done as much. He was at his best in his scene with Dr. Lanyon, where, after getting the drugs, Hyde taunts him with his incredulity and curiosity At this juncture there was a dash of the demoniacal in his voice and gesture, but the double impersonation, as a whole, evinced no astonishing amount of intuition, or genuine versatility, and was wholly unworthy of the rhapsodical encomiums lavished upon it. Some of the critics seem to have accepted the commonest of theatrical tricks as unprecedented miracles.

Throughout his career Mansfield suffered greatly at the hands of his devoted worshipers. He was bepraised with an ecstatical oratory that would have been fulsome if Garrick, Salvini, or Booth had been the subject of it. As a natural consequence he was subjected to unnecessary and cruel comparisons, and often measured by standards wholly disproportionate to his inches. For him, as for Charles Kean, the only true form of criticism was adulation, and this betrayed him into some lamentable mistakes. His Richard III, first produced in London and Boston, was hailed as one of the most splendid achievements of modern managerial art and a presentation instinct with the Shakcspearean spirit. It is only fair to say at once that the scenic production was a very fine one-not better than many of Irving's, not so good as some-but wholly admirable in its excellent painting, its rich and accurate dressing, its well-drilled supernumeraries and its solid architecture.

As for the Shakespearean spirit, it was virtually the old Cibberian compound. It began with the murder of Henry VI, and omitted the whole Clarence episode and the scenes in which Queen Elizabeth, Queen Margaret, and Rivers are concerned. It omitted the first, third, and fourth scenes of the second act and a great part of the fourth act. The later acts were cut with equal freedom, scenes were transposed, and the spurious text was employed much as usual. There was nothing very heinous in all this, nothing for which there was not abundant precedent, but the misrepresentations extensively circulated in relation to it were unnecessary, dishonest, and absurdly foolish. Poor Mansfield was not responsible, of course, for much of the blatant nonsense published about him by his press agents and correspondents of the penny-a-liner breed. He may have winced a little if he ever read the assertion that his Richard was the best since the days of Edmund Kean-and that with Edwin Booth still in the field.

Actually his Richard was a forcible-feeble affair, a cheap, conventional portrait set in a magnificent frame; He may justly be held responsible for his contemptuous disregard of his own prompt book. In a preface to this he declared that inasmuch as Shakespeare had libeled Richard unscrupulously and exaggerated his deformity as he had his crimes, he had determined , to treat that deformity lightly. Nevertheless, he wore a hump like a camel, and tottered and limped in a manner totally inconsistent with the strength and agility of which the usurper is known to have been possessed. With similar irrelevance, after describing Gloster's face as "mournful almost to pathos," he presented him as a hangdog looking, beetle-browed fellow, whose face suggested nothing but a dull malignity. Of the devilish alertness, keen intelligence, courtly habit, native authority, all vital elements of the character, he intimated nothing. His hypocrisy was not so much a veil for his thoughts as a medium for their revelation. Preeminently, the dominant feature of his performance was a labored theatricalism, unenlightened by divination. His entrance into King Henry's chamber in the tower, his studied pause upon the threshold, his warming of his hands at the fire, the careful arrangement of his pose against the wall at the head of the King's bed, his deliberate drawing of his sword, and the testing of the tip exhibited a calculated mechanism in which there was no quiver of life or emotion. He passed his sword through the body of his victim with the nonchalance of a poulterer skewering a fowl, and wiped his sword upon the curtain with the same passionless indifference. His intent, doubtless, was to signify remorseless resolution and unshakable nerve, but he failed utterly to suggest the energy of the direful will below the icy surface. It was clever pantomime, but purely melodramatic, not tragic. All was mere action without informing soul.

A similar straining after theatrical effect was noticeable when he spoke his opening soliloquy in the second act squatting like a toad upon a stone by the wayside. The attitude was inappropriate and undignified, and the delivery without significance or variety. In the wooing of the Lady Anne he was more satisfactory, audacity and cynicism being deftly blended with an air of affected sincerity. But the soliloquy, "Was ever woman," etc., was a direct harangue to the audience, shouted out in varying degrees of loudness, without light or shade, a wretchedly bald and unimaginative recitation, without a trace of the triumphant mockery and satanic exultation with which Edwin Booth used to fill it.

His denunciation of Hastings was noisy and overwrought, and in the encounter of wits with the little Duke of York he betrayed his discomfiture in starts and scowls which ill became so accomplished a hypocrite, while in the scene with the Lord Mayor, and of the offer of the crown, he indulged in extravagances which won some cheap applause, indeed, but came perilously close to burlesque. It is needless to multiply instances of this kind-they were continuous in the performance. But one device was too illustrative of the spirit of the performance to be disregarded. As Richard assumed his throne a ray of red light was thrown upon his hand. This presently became green, as if to show the King in a new complexion. It was upon such tricks as these that Mr. Mansfield put his main dependence. The impersonation, considered as the work of an ambitious and unqualified novice, was not without its compensating merits, but as a study of Shakespearean character it was hopelessly commonplace. In later years it improved somewhat, but not much. It never rose above the level of the second rate.

From Shakespeare Mr. Mansfield plunged boldly downward to Simms and Pettit. Words would be wasted even in the briefest description of such miserable trash as Master and Man. In it he depicted a villainous hunchback, whose accumulated crimes against innocent virtue finally prompted his neighbors to bake him in the furnace of a foundry. This bit of the grotesque he enacted with vividness and enthusiasm, employing some of the most lurid effects of his Hyde and Richard and adding others. In the furnace scene his portrayal of abject, shrieking, convulsive terror , was exceedingly well done, with an amazing display of physical vigor. But, of course, such a part did not require any uncommon ability.

He next appeared in a character which afforded him a much better opportunity for artistic work, Beau Brummell, which proved one of his most popular impersonations. The play was the invention of the ingenious and prolific Clyde Fitch and was a poor affair. Anxious to fit Mr. Mansfield with a neat dramatic suit, he endowed the Beau with generosity, deep emotions, heroic capacity for self-sacrifice, and other virtues completely foreign to his nature, thus making the shallow, foppish, selfish side of him wholly incomprehensible. Brummell really was a worthless creature, a sort of confidence man of a refined type, with a superficial gloss of elegant manner the polish, as it were, upon the brass which was his principal constituent. In this piece he is an altruist who sacrifices love and fortune for the sake of a favorite nephew and retires to dignified exile, solitude, and starvation. This version, however, provides for the one original, imaginative, and effective scene in the play, in which the starving exquisite, dreaming of his former state, dines luxuriously off phantom dishes, while entertaining old companions conjured up by his delirium. In this closing episode, well suited to his ironic humor and mimetic skill, Mansfield played with admirable delicacy, humor, and feeling, but he was not so entirely successful as might have been expected in the more characteristic Brummellian scene of the opening act. The invincible stiffness and angularity of his manner, to which I have alluded previously, militated against his perfect assumption of the graceful, if formal, elegance which distinguished the fop of the period, when people stood in the streets to see the "First Gentleman in Europe" take off his hat. Spontaneity and suppleness of action he never could acquire. The graces of gesture and diction, although his voice was singularly powerful and melodious, always eluded him. But the air of indolent indifferenee, impcrturbable composure, languid boredom, and quiet insolence he caught without difficulty, and his execution was admirable in its deliberation, smoothness, and finish.

The impudent speeches so often quoted as witty (every available anecdote historical or apocryphal, is embalmed in the play) he spoke very neatly. It was a clever performance, with a great deal more of Mr. Mansfield in it than of Beau Brummell, and this fact, probably, contributed not a little to its prolonged popularity.

It is scarcely worth while to dwell upon his appearance in "Don Juan," an amateurish piece, crude in matter and form, which he wrote for himself. It probably represented his own estimate of his dramatic aptitudes and was a curious instance of self-deception. In the earlier acts, mainly farcical, the Don was exhibited in a variety of his youthful escapades. The last act, melodramatic, showed him in prison, wounded and dying, but still invincible. The first scenes needed lightness, fervor, gayety, and grace, in all of which he was deficient, while the last acts were of a quality which the best of acting could not have redeemed. Nor was he much more fortunate when he undertook to embody the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale in a not very brilliant adaptation which Joseph Hatton had made out of The Scarlet Letter. His impersonation was devoid of almost every attribute ascribed to the original by his creator.

Instead of being fragile, spiritual, intellectual, eloquent, emotional, hectic, and interesting, he was stolid, sneaking, animal, and Dutch. To the eye he was heavy and dyspeptic; to the ear a droning monotone. His delivery was one everlasting preachment. After these experiments, with characteristic audacity, he ventured to challenge comparison with Edwin Booth by appearing as Shylock. The attempt was attended by a considerable measure of success. He mounted the comedy tastefully, and gave it a fairly good cast. In the Jew he found a part which, according to his reading of it, lay largely within his histrionic boundaries. His impersonation was full of crudities, violence, and inconsistencies, but it gave a promise, never fulfilled, of better things thereafter. It made no pretense of racial or personal dignity, but, except in the second act, was conceived along the lines of low cunning and malevolence, to which he gave vital expression. Some of his bursts of passion, although more vociferous than eloquent, were, nevertheless, effective, and much of his byplay was full of meaning. His farewell to Jessica was an excellent piece of acting-well imagined and wrought-but it was out of harmony with much that had gone before and came after. At no point did the performance show more than ordinary intelligence or any sign of inspiration. Some of the laudations lavished upon it have long been a source to me of utter bewilderment.

Mansfield was in his own proper province when, abandoning the poetic drama, he appeared as the hero of Bernard Shaw's sparkling extravaganza , Arms and the Man, Of this he grasped the humor intuitively, acting with a simple sincerity too often missing in his more ambitious work. He succeeded in identifying himself with the mercenary soldier, devoid of enthusiasm, patriotism, heroism, or any other positive quality, except self-interest and an involuntary habitual truthfulness, often as disconcerting to himself as to others. His stolid imperturbability, his deliberate speech, and quizzical manner were capital, and his whole impersonation, in its humor and finish, did more to justify his reputation than anything he had offered to the public for a long time. His Napoleon, in a disconnected episodical panorama put together by Lorimer Stoddard, was a clever bit of mimicry without much dramatic significance of any kind. Admirably made up he impersonated the Emperor in triumph at Tilsit, in dejection after the Russian campaign, at Elba, on the eve of Waterloo, and dying at St. Helena.

The views he gave were wholly conventional, but he suggested, skillfully enough, some of the leading traits of the great Corsican, his swift comprehension, prompt decision, rapidity in action, and superb self-reliance. But no real study of the character was involved in this exhibition. The King of Peru, by Louis Napoleon Parker, which he produced in 1895, deserved a larger amount of public attention than it received. It was a very clever pseudo-historical social satire, with an interesting story and a wholesome moral. The idea of it was borrowed from the Rois en Exil of Daudet. Mansfield had the part of a royal pretender who held his mimic court in a lodging-house in Soho. The adventurers about him induced him to marry a rich heiress, who adored him, with the view of getting her money and nullifying the marriage should the exile ever become King. After the money has been spent the hero realizes the meanness of the plot in which he has been involved, abjures all royal pretensions, and resolves to support his wife by working honestly for a living. The play was a good one from every point of view and the selection of it did credit to Mansfield's discernment and artistic taste. In many ways the leading character was peculiarly well suited to his temperament and capacities, and in the later acts he played it with skill and thorough comprehension. In the scene of his abasement he displayed both passion and pathos, and in his final renunciation he was manly, dignified, and tender: If the rest of his performance had been equally good, he might have achieved a genuine triumph, but in the opening scenes his stilted pomposity fell little short of the ridiculous. Few actors could be more interesting and attractive than he when at his best, still fewer more exasperating when he was at his worst.

Not long afterward he won an artistic, if not popular, success in Rodion the Student, an adaptation by C. H. Meltzer from the Crime and Punishment of Dostoievsky. The opening acts were ordinary melodrama, but the last three, showing the remorse of the murderer, his dread of self-betrayal, the horrible fascination that ever drew him to the place of his crime, and his final collapse, were of far superior quality. It was in these later introspective scenes that Mansfield did his best work. Up to the murder his acting was forced, rigid, and mechanical, but his portrayal of the tortures of a guilty conscience working upon a nervous system, already wrought to the verge of madness, was exceedingly vivid, and in one scene of frenzied delirium, in which he reenacted the murder in dumb show, grappling in imagination with the shade of his victim, he stirred the spectators to a high pitch of enthusiasm. The simulation of extreme terror is not in itself difficult, but at this juncture the acting of Mr. Mansfield evinced imagination as well as executive power. His next essay was in an old-fashioned melodrama called Castle Sombras, which may be left to oblivion. In it he played a gloomy hero, of the Byronic type, with indifferent success. Nor need I linger over The First Violin, a pretty little romantic play in which he was much more happily placed. It was remotely akin, in general character, to "Prince Karl," and the part of the hero lay well within the scope of his varied abilities, and was not in direct conflict with his personal mannerisms. In it he was long and deservedly successful.

It was in 1898 that Mansfield, with characteristic boldness and artistic ambition, effected one of his most notable representations, that of Edmond Rostand's brilliant romantic and literary fantasy, Cyrano de Bergerac, in the English version of Howard Thayer Kingsbury. His individual performance, taking it for all in all, was one of his most memorable achievements. I do not propose to attempt here any synopsis or review of a play that has been so frequently described and discussed, but wish to record my personal conviction that the part of Cyrano as conceived by its creator has never been fully embodied in this country, not even by Coquelin, for whom it was originally designed. It is one of extraordinary difficulty, because of the blend in it of the ideally romantic and the visibly grotesque.

The problem before the actor is to make the facial malformity of the man sufficiently prominent to account for its consequences, and, at the same time, to bring into full relief the precious jewels of character contained in that unpromising casket. I think that Mansfield, out of overconscientiousness, perhaps, made a great mistake and subjected himself to an unnecessary handicap in wearing a snout like that of a tapir, long, flexible, hideous, possibly comic, but inhuman, which dwarfed not only every other feature, but the head and countenance, virtually annihilating all power of facial expression. This was an especially serious deprivation to an actor so weak in oratorical expedient. At first Mansfield trusted too much to his comic vein, his behavior and carriage scarcely justifying the prompt acquiescence of so distinguished an assemblage in the authority of his self-constituted censorship. His faulty elocution prevented him from doing much with the ballade, punctuated by his rapier thrusts.

In the bakery scene with Roxane, when he mistakes the confession of her love for Christian for an avowal to himself, his sudden change from an attitude of ecstatic anticipation to one of bitter but sternly repressed disappointment was admirable acting. In his explosive outbursts of rage at the insults of the incomprehensive Christian, there were flashes of the right fire. He came near to genuine eloquence in the balcony episode, where he pleads the cause of his rival, but his treatment of the following passage, where he delays the amorous Duke in the courtyard, savored of burlesque. In the camp and battle scenes of the fourth act he bore himself with soldierly gallantry, but it was in the final act, where the dying Cyrano, loyally concealing his own hurt, betrays his secret to Roxane by his fervid recitation of the letter which he is supposed never to have seen, that he seemed suddenly to seize the soul of the character, acting with a fervor, simplicity, and unaffected manliness which touched the heart and quickened the pulse. Rarely had he created so fine an effect. His death, too, on his feet, hurling a last defiance against the foes he had always fought, was a worthy realization of the brilliant fancy of the poet. The whole impersonation was one to which a sincere tribute of hearty praise may be gladly given.

Two years later, Mr. Mansfield put Shakespeare's Henry V upon the stage with a scenic completeness and splendor worthy of Irving himself. The throne room at Westminster, with its matchless roof; the quay at Southampton; the intrenchments at Harfleur; the English lines at Agincourt, and the Cathedral at Troyes were pictures that have seldom been surpassed upon the stage. The supporting cast was of level and respectable capacity. All the accessories reflected credit upon his managerial liberality and his artistic taste. But, unfortunately, the driving force needed to give animation and dramatic vitality to all the elaborate preparation was wanting. Henry V is the ultimate development of the graceless, reckless, chivalrous, and fascinating Prince Hal of Henry IV at once sobered and inspired by responsibility. For such a part, which demands a combination of distinct and rare faculties-the lightness and eloquence of high comedy and the virility and fire of heroic romance--Mr. Mansfield was in many ways unequipped. His presentment was gallant and attractive in form, but heavy in manner and uninspired in spirit. It was deficient in grace of movement and gesture, in unconscious dignity, in geniality, in buoyancy, in eloquence, and spontaneous soldierly ardor. From first to last it labored beneath the actor's inveterate egoism and the fatal mannerisms - rigid, spasmodic gesture, stiff, jerky walk, and monotonous utterance-which marred so much of his most ambitious work.

During his mid-career he mastered most of the mechanical difficulties of his art, and greatly developed his powers of voicing the baser forms of passion. Thus in melodrama he was often exceedingly impressive. The loftier heights of tragic emotion he could not scale. That he had imagination was sufficiently proven by the range and variety of the characters he assumed, but he could only vitalize such ideals as could be expressed in the terms of his individual self. He was not really a versatile player except in the realm of eccentric comedy, where the mimetic faculty, which was strong in him, had full scope. Had he worked steadily along this line, he might have created masterpieces which would have won a permanent place in theatrical history. As it is, I can not recall a single character, of any importance, that is now associated with his name. His personality only will endure in the memory of his contemporaries.