composition.

With Miss Terry there is permanent charm of a very natural nature, which
has become deliciously sophisticated. She is the eternal girl, and she
can never grow old; one might say, she can never grow up. She learns her
part, taking it quite artificially, as a part to be learnt; and then, at
her frequent moments of forgetfulness, charms us into delight, though
not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment to the self of a
passing moment. Irving's acting is almost a science, and it is a science
founded on tradition. It is in one sense his personality that makes him
what he is, the only actor on the English stage who has a touch of
genius. But he has not gone to himself to invent an art wholly personal,
wholly new; his acting is no interruption of an intense inner life, but
a craftsmanship into which he has put all he has to give. It is an art
wholly of rhetoric, that is to say wholly external; his emotion moves to
slow music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn-out
word. He appeals to us, to our sense of what is expected, to our
accustomed sense of the logic, not of life, but of life as we have
always seen it on the stage, by his way of taking snuff, of taking out
his pocket-handkerchief, of lifting his hat, of crossing his legs. He
has observed life in order to make his own version of life, using the
stage as his medium, and accepting the traditional aids and limitations
of the stage.

Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." His Louis XI. is a
masterpiece of grotesque art. It is a study in senility, and it is the
grotesque art of the thing which saves it from becoming painful. This
shrivelled carcase, from which age, disease, and fear have picked all
the flesh, leaving the bare framework of bone and the drawn and cracked
covering of yellow skin, would be unendurable in its irreverent copy of