instance, when Duse played "La Dame aux Camélias," and gave a
performance that one could not say was _inferior_ to Bernhardt's,
although it was so utterly _different_. No people in their right senses
could have accepted my "Frou-Frou" instead of Sarah's. What I lacked
technically in it was _pace_.

Of course, it is partly the language. English cannot be phrased as
rapidly as French. But I have heard foreign actors, playing in the
English tongue, show us this rapidity, this warmth, this fury--call it
what you will--and have just wondered why we are, most of us, so
deficient in it.

Fechter had it, so had Edwin Forrest. When strongly moved, their
passions and their fervor made them swift. The more Henry Irving felt,
the more deliberate he became. I said to him once: "You seem to be
hampered in the vehemence of passion." "I _am_," he answered. This is
what crippled his Othello, and made his scene with Tubal in "The
Merchant of Venice" the least successful _to him_. What it was to the
audience is another matter. But he had to take refuge in speechless rage
when he would have liked to pour out his words like a torrent.

In the company which Charles Kelly and I took round the provinces in
1880 were Henry Kemble and Charles Brookfield. Young Brookfield was just
beginning life as an actor, and he was so brilliantly funny off the
stage that he was always a little disappointing _on_ it. My old
manageress, Mrs. Wigan, first brought him to my notice, writing in a
charming little note that she knew him "to have a power of _personation_
very rare in an unpracticed actor," and that if we could give him varied
practice, she would feel it a courtesy to her.