Sir Henry Irving

HENRY IRVING is the last of his line. It is a long line and great, but it is extinct. Other actors there will be. Some now on the stage maintain the great succession. The race remains. The type disappears. The conditions that created it are gone. No more shall we see the English-speaking actor trained as in the past three centuries. The dire years of obscurity in wandering plays and vagrom companies, despised in the despised purlieus of the city playhouse; the sudden burst on some central audience,— London, for the most part; — the vivid success and such receipts as appall the more frugally sustained and more carefully trained actor of Latin lands, and in the end too often, as for Irving, closing years clouded with the pecuniary anxieties of a career begun without contact with the better cultivation of his day and at the end possessing its best; — these things are no more possible. The great flood of lesser companies give early employment; long runs deprive men of the training that comes from many parts; and when success dawns, men and women stand as part and partners in a great trade whose greater rewards bring a moderate competence in a season.

No one knowing the actors, rising and risen, of the past twenty-five years, will fail to see that Irving, and, with us, men like Booth, Barrett, and Jefferson, gained in catholicity. They won those virtues that go with the experience of Ulysses and all who, like him,—

To these men, as to none to-day, there came the sharp personal struggle which humanizes. Now the organized life, instead, civilizes. So it came about, that when one met the man just gone, leaving sense of loss wherever he was known, one found perpetual reminder of scarred years, and consciousness, as well, of that high temper which stimulates and ennobles all who meet it with high desire to breast life’s fate with more than courage, with emulous emprise.

It was a perpetual marvel that a man whose calling was simulation should be continually sounding in the ears of those who knew him well the call of the greater realities. Even with those most familiar with the stage there is a prepossession, a will to believe that acting is a sublimated trick. Mr. Birrell holds a brief for this view. But here was a man, like all great artists, so much greater than his art — for Art too is but a handmaiden in the House of the Soul — that by sheer weight and force of intellection he made you know and confess that his art was real and dealt in its last resort with the realities of life. Early, he had this grip. An American professor known now in many walks, when he chanced forty-five years ago to meet Henry Irving at a supper in Liverpool with a group of young provincial actors, saw already in him this sharp force. So far as his outer look, accent, manner, and turn of speech were concerned, that night the man was still but as other provincial actors. What these were in place, pay, station, and manner Mr. Pinero has drawn with pitiless fidelity in Trelawney of the Wells.

It was digged out of this pit and this training, so far removed from an academic standard or a cultivated tradition, that, eight years on the stage, at twenty-six, in 1865, he essayed Hamlet, at Manchester. The notices in the provincial press were such as we all give the rising young actor. Praise and appreciation spawn tenfold more critical falsehoods than all else. His conception of the character, its business, the handling of the play scene, were as later. But his personation grew amazingly in power. There are those, and they are many, who deemed Booth’s Winter Garden Hamlet Ids supreme achievement. Irving’s llamlet began lacking weight, and ended by dominating through sheer intellection. This was the note of his interpretation, and the stage and he lost immeasurably when the heavy cost of the modern theatre turned him to plays of spectacle. “Do you remember,” said he, when a friend ventured to object to this side of Faust, “that for a hundred years every London manager has died a bankrupt?” But even in these plays there shone that lambent intellectual quality which lights all that it touches. Better voice, figure, inflection, and all that, there have been; but where the man who left lines, “to his wish or not,” more luminous ?

Sheer mind wins slowly. After more than half a generation, in which Sir Henry had come to stand the dean of his craft and calling, not for his land alone, but for the English-speaking race, it is not easy to recall or realize that his first appearance away from New York, at Philadelphia, on his first tour, in 1884, had its nervous apprehension. He had succeeded in New York, but he had only succeeded. The full harvest came later.¹ Much was done by many friends in Philadelphia toassure him of a public support. From Macready on, not an English actor had succeeded here. In personal conversation, and in some public utterances, Mr. Irving recurred to the Astor Place riots, with anxiety over a welcome which he has done so much to secure to every English actor since, by his immeasurable service to the American stage in educating the American audiences to be satisfied only with the best. Inter alia, he sat, on that visit, now twenty-one years past, at a little supper in the old Journalists’ Club of Philadelphia with a group of newspaper men. It was a bit stiff. In part, I remember, because, while Mr. Irving was equal to the occasion, the waiters were not. “Mr. Irving,” piped a journalist in a pause, “do you not think that actors are superstitious?” “Actors, actors,” was the reply, in some slight heat, “are not this or that; they are simply men, like other men, superstitious as other men are or not. They are not a class by themselves. Take them as they are.”

With no physical advantage, personal charm, or outer aspect which bespoke success, to have at a little past twenty the mental forces which pulled him out of the crowd; to possess from the very dawn of his career an intellectual and imaginative conception of the greatest part on the stage, which only the experience of life could ripen and render visible and of weight; always and everywhere to be insisting that an actor was a man and an artist, to be reckoned with as such, and not put in a class and category apart, alien to the world’s active work and to its higher achievements and recognition,— this, one may fairly say, has been the life of Henry Irving. Along these broad lines his work has steadily run; from the day when, as Franʕois in Richelieu, he stood under the white feather-plume he had bought out of his pittance, and said his first, words before an audience, — “Here’s to our enterprise,” — to the day when, as more than one English paper asserted, he had forced Lord Rosebery to honor the calling of the stage by knighting its most conspicuous member, as for over a century in England knighthood had gone to the representative head of all other callings and professions.

In this long “enterprise,” whose best success in fifty years has been as much the lesson of character achieved as of characters acted, the feathers of Franʕois, the details of a great art, have had from the actor and the manager an unwearied care which has changed the practice of the stage and the standards of the audience. In all art trifles count. In mimetic art they are supreme. The knocks in Macbeth show what a master hand can do with a trifle. The costume on the English provincial stage of forty years ago was provided by the manager. The accessories came from the actors’ purse. A fellow actor has recorded that the young beginner for the trivial part of Franʕois had dressed himself with scrupulous accuracy from an old print of the period. Thirty years later, with all London at his call, he did the same from Van Dyck for his Charles I. I have known a subordinate actor to be kept raising and lowering a curtain for a quarter of an hour, until the quick sweep of the hand, which pictured sudden overpowering attention to what was without, had been caught.

But these details require a perpetual care and the best paid aid. There is a moment in The Bells when Mathias, unconscious of his doom, poking the ruddy glow of his porcelain stove, looks up, sees the similitude of his victim in the door, and drops the poker with a clang that is like the bell of fate. Unless you know the theatre, you cannot know how much it costs to keep that poker always within reach. I mind me of one Philadelphia performance where the poker was missing, and the stove door was kicked shut with a bang that was temper rather than tragedy. Sitice all this costs, and costs much, there is always risk, unless the restraint of the artist be strong, that the golden shower smother Danaë instead of planting the seed of some new life of genius. For all this the largest dramatic receipts in dramatic history have been as freely drawn upon as the pittance earned by the young clerk with theatrical aspirations in 1856. Whole scenes and sets were cancelled after preparation in the Corsican Brothers in 1880. Faust was provided, in the long series of dress rehearsals, over sixty in number, with a mediæval cloak which cost, I believe, some seventy pounds, a pretty trifle for a trifle, a mere detail. The splendid cloak was worn through those tireless dress rehearsals which no other actor or company begins to endure in like number, and whose fruit neither one nor the other is therefore able to equal in complete ensemble and effect. As the picture took its shape and the pageant gained its due proportion, the actor-manager saw that this vivid spot of color unbalanced the broad effect. The gray cloak worn when Shylock comes home to his empty house was substituted. There are few actors, believe me, in whom the love for fine raiment does not come to be a passion. There is something about the dressing-room, that chapel in which so many candles are burned to human vanity masculine more often than feminine, which robs men of the sense of proportion, and a raw newness spoils nine stage pictures out of ten.

If this was avoided by this great artist of the footlights, it is because he was the first to grasp the fact that a stage is a luminous interspace of three dimensions, and not a lighted bas-relief on edge just behind the footlights. Henry Irving had, of course, the prodigious advantage of the volume, the flexibility, and hability of newly discovered lights in gas, calcium, and electricity. It was but a dismal stage in the past, voice and little more, when candles guttered in their tin reflectors, — and how it smelled! Mr. Irving has given the stage not only light in all its tones, but those things as precious, — shadows and darkness.

But the plant, to be effective, must be cultivated with the same artistic penetration, the same capacity of the artist to get hints as to his own medium of expression from all sources and to use them as not abusing.

Abused they are, when mere colored light, stark-naked calcium shadows that could be cut, fill the stage; or that other foible from which even the Lyceum was not exempt, the round radiance which is like the Star’s halo. “ Be patient, my dear boy, said he once to an anxious plea in Louis XI for a share in the radiant privilege, “be patient. You’ll have enough of the light before you are through with the career I see before you.”

It chanced to me once, and only once, in a life of some faring by land and sea, to ride up a Kurdish gorge at early dawn, the sky still starry, as the charcoal-burners had begun their work, and to see over all, as the smoke rose, a gray-blue light as of the depths, some touch of deep-chilled enveloping air on gorge and mountainside, as though a sapphire had aged, and grown gray and wan. Once only I saw this, and never again. When, in Faust, the curtain rose on the Brocken, I saw before me the same miracle of gray-blue. “How did you,” I asked once at supper, “who ride abroad so little and are so rarely on the mountain-side, hit on this, the rarest of lights?” “Once,” and he took up a small plate, “ I saw in a gallery,” and he named it, but I have forgotten, “a landscape bv Dürer the size of this plate, a mountain-side in early morn in this same gray-blue light. It gave me the light I wanted for the Brocken.”

But given fastidious accuracy of detail set in a light that charms, and this is still but framing background and illumination, but soil for that blossom and fruit, dramatic art, which is action,and human action at that. Unless sense of reality be had in that, the rest is waste. This sense and illusion may be secured by a mutual convention between actor and audience. Most acting is on this level. It seeks to express by convention what can only be reproduced by tireless observation and study. The simplest human act is complex. Most actors fail to see this. Their acting is crude in consequence. They do, not what men and women really do, but what it has been agreed shall on the stage be the symbol of what is done. Neither do all bad women smoke cigarettes, nor are all women who smoke cigarettes bad. A shrewd guess can be made as to the kind of woman a man has seen smoking cigarettes, when he maintains as inevitable his evil association of the woman and the cigarette; but on the stage life is made easier, particularly for the actress, if, instead of acting the bad woman, she smokes a cigarette. Labels come cheaper than pictures. More than once, with a graceful acknowledgment of the share our stage has had in his education, Sir Henry Irving has told what touch saved him from mere convention. He was “supporting” Charlotte Cushman. He had to cross with silver the palm of her Meg Merrilies. That magnificent and imperious gypsy witch broke him of the silly stage habit of handing over a purse. She bade him empty its contents in the palm of his hand, finger it, and pick out the coin — which in the case of the prudent and thrifty Charlotte would certainly have been a small one — to give Meg. In all his work there has been this sedulous use of the precise dramatic change needed to woo and win the sibyl of the stage. The sustained interest, and the continuous intense intellectual interest, of his presentations from the rising of the curtain to the going down of the same is precisely due to following and bettering this early hint. The complex of each human act, however simple or trivial, was grasped in all its parts by a keen mental apprehension, and presented, by patient training, in its totality, not as convention, but as human beings really act. Nor has the economy of action been less conspicuous than its employment. As he has broken the stage convention of an uniform glare, so he has broken the convention, as evil, of unremitting speech. He first used silence as the note of an effective stage picture, which tells more than speech, as when Shylock returns to his emptied house.

The opening and the closing of Charles I, which, as first, composed by Wills, had that singular detachment from human interests which marks most of his poetic plays, — perhaps this is why, Mr. Gosse testily suggested, that you could find no literature in Charles I, no, not though you strained it through a sieve, — the scenes of happy family life with which it opens and the parting with which it closes, are both, if the London Spectator is to be trusted, the suggestion of the actor to the playwright. They add human interest to the strained conception of the play as first composed. Fifteen years ago, one returning to the Chestnut Street Opera House some moments after Charles I was over, the audience gone, the lights lowered, and the curtain half hung, as is the theatre habit in an empty house, came upon the great actress who had shaken her house with that parting between Charles and his Queen, walking up and down the darkened stage, still sobbing, quivering with overwrought feeling, lost in the part she had created, still swept by the tides of its emotion, slowly returning to the common dark of night, as a child might come sobbing out of a dream, soothed by a familiar touch and voice.

Apter illustration could not be of Mr. Irving’s well-defended thesis that Diderot’s Paradox of Acting missed the highest flight of the art it sought to compress within the lines of artifice. But such an occurrence is illustration still more apt of the success of the tireless industry of an actor-manager in raising all about him to a common white-heat of emotion. A stage presentation is a blend of the play, the mise-en-scène, the company as a whole, and the actor and actresses, one or both, who lead the performance, as in all great plays a hero and heroine are the protagonists of the action. It is easily possible to detach either or both of these from its context and contexture. Booth, in all his later years, did, so that he walked a puissant figure among characters little less than shades. Men always, and often women, acted worse with him than they did elsewhere. His acting killed theirs. Sir Henry Irving has had the better fortune of treating the play and the company as a whole. Both men and women were better with him than apart. It is the familiar experience of critics, familiar with the rising figures of the stage, to be amazed by the development which took place under his touch. The London Lyceum Company was for twenty years the one school of acting on the English-speaking stage from which men, entering little known, passed to high distinction. William Terris, Alexander and Forbes Robertson, are three such. Mr. Robert Taber furnished an instance as remarkable of sudden sure growth in a career, alas, too early ended and over. Miss Ellen Terry, the only actress on our English-speaking stage whose power, whose temperament, and whose amazing charm equal the eerie glamour of its feminine parts, had been long on the stage before she became the gifted associate of the man with whom her name will always be linked; but her position has all been won since her unrivaled powers came under his extraordinary gift for awakening and evoking the best in all who have come within the circle of his influence. Through all the history of our English stage, these two will together pass in the long flighl of a great art, shadowy but real, — two that ever play together on that stage where a perpetual audience watches the manifold drama of the past.

These are, however, all the work of the manager, touched if you please with genius, the genius of conception, execution, and achievement; but still of the manager. Irving restored the play as an organic whole to our stage. He found it the vehicle for elocutionary arias, like the Italian opera. He educated the public to a demand so clear and unmistakable for the presentation of a play as an integral work of art that under his dramatic reign the very argot of managers has come to discriminate between a “performance” and a “production.” The public and actors both once thought of a play as a series of dramatic situations in which some one gifted actor, or at most an actor and an actress joined to him, presented characters, conceived, acted, and admired, apart from their setting. This is gone, never to return. Sir Henry Irving ended the theatrical presentations of the past as completely as Wagner ended the opera of the past. The stage Sir Henry treated as a picture, where others had treated it as a scene. He has given it light and life. He made of it a completed whole, whose organic impression renders bare and skeleton-like the customary stage performance. He vindicated the claim of every character to intelligent treatment and interpretation, and thereby raised, to the dismay of all who meet the prodigious expenses of the modern stage, the salary commanded and the ability needed in lesser characters. Where one well-paid actor and a score of ill-paid subordinates once made up the pay roll, the leaders are better paid than ever before, and the average subordinate salary has risen to a level inconceivable thirty years ago, when Sir Henry’s methods first began to break up the system which had brought the stage to a condition in which actors of eminence and distinction accepted support and scenery which to-day is no longer tolerated by any audience.

These are achievements of the first magnitude; but they stand for nothing in a great art unless to them are added the achievements of the artist. At no point in this singular career has this been universally conceded. He had been thirty years on the stage when Mr. William Winter said of his Hamlet that parts of it were seen at the Star Theatre with “ consternation,” and another New York critic, Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, records that in it his legs passed from “one stained glass attitude to another.” Not a play has been produced in thirty years of his management which has not met the indignant protest of some accepted critic that Sir Henry could do everything on the stage but act. So long as he faced audiences educated in the old conception of an actor as a man of physical presence and comeliness given to the sonorous recitation of effective speeches, his progress was slow. He won the long fight, as all men of genius win, by creating an audience of his own, taught that the highest work of an actor is intellectual interpretation and not elocution and gesture.

The fight has been won against all odds, without and within. Acting is an art in which most men excel, if at all, in their early twenties. Garrick, Kean, Kemble, the Booths, — these all had the world of the stage at their feet at an age when a doctor is seeking his first patient and a lawyer untying his first brief. Sir Henry Irving was forty when his Hamlet was first accepted as a great interpretation of a great part. Tor twelve years he endured an arduous provincial apprenticeship in which he appeared in four hundred and twenty-eight parts, the most utterly insignificant, but all of training value. He had twelve years more of approbation not less trying before London audiences. He won popularity first, having caught, the eye of Dion Boucicault, as the eccentric character comedian who acted “Digby Grant” in the Two Roses. For years, he fought a dubious fight as a tragedian. For a decade it was almost literally true that no one professionally or critically familiar with the stage accepted his success, and that it rested almost wholly on men free from stage preconceptions, who were asking not for conventional grace and modulated speeches, but the thing as it is, — the final core of simulated being, — as the stage and the stage alone lays bare and analyzes life, revealing its final and inmost secret.

There were reasons for this long delay. Of all arts the stage is most rooted in conventions. There is proof in a German diary of the period that the singular halting walk of the stage which has lasted almost to our owm day was a habit of the boards caught from the court of the day, or the reverse, under “ Eliza and our James.” Still more the physical facts were against him as an actor. Youthful beauty was not his. His voice had its manifold limitations. His command of enunciation and pronunciation was not helped by those weary and obscure years in the provinces; for outside of a certain social and educated circle, whose English accent is the best in the tongue, the general speech of England makes but base coin of many a noble word. “I know he is going to do it,” said a life-long friend, yearningly anxious over his success on the eventful evening when he first gave The Bells in New York,"for he is pronouncing God,’God,’and not ' Gawd,’and he never has that word right unless he is up to his best work.”There were doubtless also mannerisms, the spasmodic walk, the frequent gesture, the suppressed interjection. These were once the jest of London. They have been felt by every fresh audience, and laboriously noted by every raw critic. They have been triumphantly overcome by the magic of genius which of imperfection makes the means and mediums of its triumphs.

Given the old “reading of lines,” the mellifluous elocution of the part as the test of acting, and they were an insuperable bar to his acceptance as an actor. Overflowing, overwhelming success came in spite of his lack of these, because acting is more than elocution, because it is an art which depends for its success not on cadences, but on the intellectual and emotional mastery of situation and character. “One of my calves,” said Mr. Lawrence Barrett, “is a little smaller than the other. Most legs are that way. I had always padded the worse leg until I was in London, and had a talk with Henry Irving. He pointed out to me that it was better to leave your legs as they were made. They fitted the figure as a whole, and the instant you padded, the general balance of the figure was upset, and you had a sense of unreality.” I quote from memory after years, but with perfect certainty as to broad fact and general expression. How keen, how penetrating, how illuminating was this view, which accepted even physical imperfection as part of the stock in trade with which a sense of reality could be created!

When Mr. Winter saw in Henry Irving twenty years ago no more than “a commanding intellect, and an intense nature concentrated on the sincere and momentous treatment of great themes,” he missed the crowning triumph of the artist as seen by younger men and worse critics less confused by the preconceptions and precon ventions of the stage. The transcendent verbal music of Shakespeare, without equal or example in the whole range of letters until one reads the greatest of the Greeks, has not unnaturally overweighted the attention and devotion to mere verbal cadence in our theatre. Thirty years ago the English-speaking stage had either the tragic or the trivial, either a formal acting which had certain tragic conventions, or the tinkling of Robertson’s tea cups. It was Mr. Irving’s great office, after a training which had been unequaled in the detail of his calling, suddenly to show that it was of more importance to present the thing the words stood for than merely to sing the music of periods. As always comes when in any spoken medium meaning is attained, the words sounded to a new value, and Shakespeare became once more familiar on our stage.

Where plays had dwindled and shrunk to a single part, masque rather than drama, his method, which filled the lines with meaning, the stage with pictures, and thronged the theatre with the ordered whole of characters which made up the tragedy, left the central figure not less, but more. There were characters, like Romeo and Othello, in which physical limitations impeded the path; there were others, like Lear, for which the actor’s temperament was not fitted; but taking the long procession which has crossed the stage through thirty years, it has been true of all his personations that by intellectual weight they vindicated the stage from the frequent charge of mere simulation. By sheer force of acting, not elocution, by character and not by phrases, they have made that, definite and determinate impression which is the high prerogative of genius, creating, as Lessing long since pointed out, a detached existence which lives apart from its creator. Of the greater characters, one may unhesitatingly affirm that there is not one which has not left its clear image as if itself alive; and even of plays of a lower order, like King Arthur or Becket, it is still true that a character barely sketched in the lines has become vital and lived in the pictured world of the stage.

There are lines in Tennyson’s play, in which the great primate dedicates himself to the public service, whose possibilities, Sir Henry has frankly confessed, attracted him to its production and to the character. In a moment of sudden coufidence infinitely precious in memory, he once said, with a light admonitory tap on the shoulder, such as the older gives to the younger man, “They have made me, I hope, a better man.” As he spoke, in his face there dawned that inner light man to man recognizes when one or the other desires to signify and signal some new certainty in this strange night of life in which we all needs must sail by stars “whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.” It was plain, though unsaid, that in the play and the devoted service of the character, he had caught some hint of the great riddle. Its full solution has now come with the last words of the part, “Into thy hands, O God, into thy hands.”

Through half a century he kept to the purpose of his life. For him, as for all men, his life was more than his work. Of all the arts, the stage, with its adulation, applause, and jealousy, its inexorable need for a personal popularity as the one necessary foundation for the very opportunity and occasion of its best work, has been least happy in its heroes. They come and they go, the creatures of a breath, whom voices make and vanishing voices discard. But when the history of the stage of the century just closing comes to be reviewed and recorded, it will be clearer than to-day, and to-day in death it is already clear to most, that in Sir Henry Irving the stage has had one figure which to the genius of the actor and the ability of the manager has added the example of the man who raised an entire calling to a higher level, who gave to an ancient art a new view and aspect, and whose long career has had that intellectual force, personal dignity, high endeavor, and unflinching resolution, which belong to no walk and work alone, but are the common property of the few who, having created great opportunities, use them to great ends.