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In "Hamlet" Henry Irving did not go to the audience; he made them come to him. Slowly, but surely, attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim. I have seen many Hamlets, Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Friedrich Haase, Forbes-Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere!
They are so many and so minute that it seems a wonder why they were printed, if M. Fechter is sincere in declaring that he has no desire to force others to follow in his exact footsteps in this part.
This was the play with which the Lyceum reopened in the autumn of 1880. I was on the last of my provincial tours with Charles Kelly at the time, but I must have come up to see the revival, for I remember Henry Irving in it very distinctly. He had not played the dual rôle of Louis and Fabien del Franchi before, and he had to compete with old playgoers' memories of Charles Kean and Fechter.
When Fechter played Edmond Dantes or Claude Melnotte, he put reality into those preposterous inventions, and in Hamlet even his alien accent helped him vitalize the part; it might be held to be nearer the Elizabethan accent than ours; and after all, you said Hamlet was a foreigner, and in your high content with what he gave you did not mind its being in a broken vessel.
No doubt some have grappled with this difficulty very cleverly. Modjeska, for instance, Bandmann, Mlle. Béatrice, Marius, Juliette Nesville and the lady who played here as Madame Simon le Bargy. The memory of few goes back to Fechter, and it would hardly be tactful to refer on this topic to several American players.
A leap, as if released from a spring, and Bobby captured it. A snap of his long muzzle, a jerk of his stoutly set head, and the victim hung limp from his grip. And he followed another deeply seated instinct when he carried the slain to Auld Jock's grave. Trophies of the chase were always to be laid at the feet of the master. "Gude dog! eh, but ye're a bonny wee fechter!"
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