Cymbeline - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

178.
the Christ-figure does not appear, and lachinio has merely
tl
a strange but sad expression of nobility in his face"
(The Theatre. October 1896).
Irving's lachimo was similar, if not to Christ, to the
crudely melodramatic Mathias in The Bells, in which character
Irving displayed "the sorrow which slowly and remorselessly
beat him down" after a crime conceived and committed
in a fateful hour: Shaw's review, on the other hand,
pointed to quite another aspect of lachimo, which he praised
Irving for playing as,
. 1 '
The comedy was noted by the reviewer of The Evening liews,
whose editor awarded it a cross-head of its own:
This is a less refined account of the "perfect temper and
half sympathetic bonhomie" which ¥arwick Bond had noted
later in the play, at II, 4.
Henry James's review, in Harper's Weekly, simply
observed that Irving had done all that could be done with
lachimo, and had made him picturesque. He found none of
the spirituality which impressed The ::venin^ _News as
"devilish" and which "held while it repelled". Nor the
other kind of spirituality underlying the pathos of
Irving's lachimo, which had drawn such strange comparisons
from Scott. But in his review of Irving's next production,