the shriek of the feeble."

But the risks to art are considerable

in such cases. Balzac says that when an artist has the misfortune to be overcharged himself with the very passion he seeks to express, he is thereby disqualified for painting itthe thing itself is there, instead of the image of the thing. Now, "l'art procéde du cerveau et non du cœur." When your subject sways you, you are its slave, not its master. The sovereign is besieged by his people. To feel too keenly at the moment when il s'agit d'exécuter, Balzac calls the insurrection of the senses against the faculty of thought.

Diderot has never lacked disciples in his doctrine that not only in the art of acting, but in all the arts which are called imitative, the possession of real sensibility is a bar to eminence; sensibility being, according to his view, "le caractère de la bonté de l'âme et de la médiocrité du génie." But the doctrine has not made over many converts among the countrymen of Shakspeare and Garrick. Mrs. Browning has given forcible expression to a view more in favour among them:

"The artist's part is both to be and do,
Transfixing with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing
He feels the inmost; never felt the less
Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn
For burning next reflectors of blue steel,
That he should be the colder for his place
'Twixt two incessant fires,-his personal life's,
And that intense refraction which burns back
Perpetually against him from the round.
Of crystal conscience he was born into

If artist-born? O sorrowful great gift
Conferr'd on poets, of a twofold life,

When one life has been found enough for pain!"

Charles Lamb was talking with Mrs. Crawford not long before her death about the quantity of real present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences during acting; and when he ventured to think that, from the deadening effect of repetition, the player must at last come to rely on

the memory of past emotion, rather than express a present one, she indignantly repelled the notion that, with a truly great tragedian, the operation by which such effects were produced upon an audience, could ever degrade itself into what was purely mechanical. Elia admired the delicacy with which, avoiding to instance in her self-experience, this lady mentioned that so long ago as when she used to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porter's Isabella, when that impressive actress bent over in her some heartrending colloquy, the younger performer felt real hot tears come trickling from the eyes of the elder, which, in her own vigorous diction, "perfectly scalded her back." One thinks of that favourite image with more than one Lord Lytton, of the actor of Athens who moved all hearts as he clasped the burial urn, and burst into broken sobs: "How few there," exclaims the author of Zanoni, "knew that it held the ashes of his son!" And the author of Lucile has versified, not diversified, the incident:

"When the Greek actor, acting Electra, wept over

The urn of Orestes, the theatre rose

And wept with him.-What was there in such active woes

To thrill a whole theatre? Ah, 'tis his son

That lies dead in the urn he is weeping upon !

'Tis no fabled Electra that hangs o'er that urn,

'Tis a father that weeps his own child.-Men discern

The man through the mask; the heart moved by the heart
Owns the pathos of life in the pathos of art."

M

CHAPTER XI.

Breaking up and Broken off.

§ I.

LIFE'S LAST WORDS CUT SHORT BY DEATH.

Hamlet, Act v., Sc. 2.

UCH could Hamlet, and much he would have said,

for how much, he felt, wanted explaining,-when the stroke of death was upon him, and strength suddenly failed him, and the needed time.

"Had I but time, (as this fell sergeant, death,

Is strict in his arrest,) O, I could tell you,-
But let it be :-Horatio, I am dead."

Did you ever see any man arrested, but it was before he was aware? asks Dr. South in one of his sermons; adding, as became the preacher and his text, "A man would not willingly have his friend take him in a surprise, much less then his greatest enemy." Hamlet can only trust to Horatio to report him and his cause aright. "Oh, I die, Horatio: The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit. . . . The rest is silence." And so cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet

prince.

As fain would survivor sometimes hear more, as dying man would utter it. Like Cymbeline when urging Iachimo,"Renew thy strength :

I had rather thou should'st live while nature will,
Than die ere I hear more; strive, man, and speak."

Hotspur at the last "could prophesy,

But that the earthy and cold hand of death

Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust,
And food for-,"

the unspoken word is supplied by Prince Henry, " For worms, brave Percy; fare thee well, great heart!" And in the Second Part of the same historical play we have the elder Henry, a dying man, thus forced to own his sheer physical inability to say more: "More would I, but my lungs are wasted so, That strength of speech is utterly denied me." So moribund Mortimer, again, in the First Part of King Henry VI., when urged by Plantagenet to explain his strange sad history: "I will, if that my fading breath permit, And death approach not ere my tale be done." And in the Third Part there occurs this record by Somerset of a brave life's last words cut short by death, or so muffled as to be lost in the utterance:

"Ah, Warwick, Montague hath breathed his last;
And to the latest gasp cried out for Warwick,
And said, Commend me to my valiant brother,—
And more he would have said; and more he spoke
Which sounded like a cannon in a vault,

That might not be distinguish'd.'"

Early in the second book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the good Sir Guyon lights on a sorely wounded lady, to whose recovery he devotes himself like a true knight, all of the olden time; but his endeavours are futile: the fell sergeant Death has his summons to enforce against that fair creature, and is strict in his arrest. At least then would the knight learn from her dying lips the story of her wrongs :

"Thrice he her rear'd, and thrice she sunk againe,

Till he his armes about her sides 'gan fold,
And to her said, 'Yet, if the stony cold

Have not all seized on your frozen hart,

Let one word fall that may your grief unfold,
And tell the secret of your mortall smart.""

Some ten succeeding stanzas are occupied with the dying lady's effort to tell her story to its sad end. But her wouldbe last words are cut short by death:

"Which, when I, wretch '-Not one word more she sayd,

But breaking off the end for want of breath,

And slyding soft, as downe to sleepe her layd,
And ended all her woe in quiet death."

The last scene of the Cupid's Revenge of Beaumont and Fletcher, as sensational a tragedy as John Webster himself could have penned, comprises this fragment, by way of an unfinished terminus ad quem:

66

Leucippus. Last, I beseech you that my mother-in-law
May have a burial according to

Yet had the murdered prince been wistful to express his last wishes in full; and in his anxiety to do so, had charged the bystanders to be still, and to hear him out:

"Let not a man stir, for I am but dead :

I've some few words which I would have you hear,
And am afraid I shall want breath to speak them."

The fear was too well founded, and full utterance was denied him. So with Selim in Congreve's Mourning Bride:

"My tongue falters, and my voice fails-I sink-
Drink not the poison-for Alphonso is-

[Dies.

Sheridan burlesqued this sort of thing, in The Critic, when Whiskerandos falls in fair fight with the Beefeater, and tells

him,

Beefeater.

"Captain, thou hast fenced well!

And Whiskerandos quits this bustling scene
For all eter-

-nity, he would have added, but stern death Cut short his being, and the noun at once!"*

Massinger's Duke of Milan ends with this kind of no end:

"Sforza. Death, I obey thee . . . Good Eugenia,

In death forgive me .. Bury me with Marcelia,

And let our epitaph be

[Dies.

In the previous act, Marcelia herself had similarly apostrophized death: