In the _Yellow Dwarf_ he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of
Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,--full of mockery,
mimicry, lubricity, and spite,--an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of
Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How
those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog!
How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you
shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs
to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled
out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this
mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the
_outre_, an unmistakably tragic element,--an element of depth and
strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became
inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the _cothurnus_ over his clogs.
You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the
mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more
apparent in his subsequent personation of _Medea_, in Robert Brough's
parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of
the abandoned wife of _Jason_, the diabolic loathing in which she holds
_Creuesa_, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children
whom she is afterwards to slay,--all these were portrayed by Robson,
through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with
astonishing force and vigor.
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