As I watched, at the Lyceum, the sad and eager face of Duse, leaning
forward out of a box, and gazing at the eager and gentle face of Irving,
I could not help contrasting the two kinds of acting summed up in those
two faces. The play was "Olivia," W.G. Wills' poor and stagey version of
"The Vicar of Wakefield," in which, however, not even the lean
intelligence of a modern playwright could quite banish the homely and
gracious and tender charm of Goldsmith. As Dr. Primrose, Irving was
almost at his best; that is to say, not at his greatest, but at his most
equable level of good acting. All his distinction was there, his
nobility, his restraint, his fine convention. For Irving represents the
old school of acting, just as Duse represents the new school. To Duse,
acting is a thing almost wholly apart from action; she thinks on the
stage, scarcely moves there; when she feels emotion, it is her chief
care not to express it with emphasis, but to press it down into her
soul, until only the pained reflection of it glimmers out of her eyes
and trembles in the hollows of her cheeks. To Irving, on the contrary,
acting is all that the word literally means; it is an art of sharp,
detached, yet always delicate movement; he crosses the stage with
intention, as he intentionally adopts a fine, crabbed, personal, highly
conventional elocution of his own; he is an actor, and he acts, keeping
nature, or the too close resemblance of nature, carefully out of his
composition.
With Miss Terry there is permanent charm of a very natural nature, which
has become deliciously sophisticated. She is the eternal girl, and she
can never grow old; one might say, she can never grow up. She learns her
part, taking it quite artificially, as a part to be learnt; and then, at
her frequent moments of forgetfulness, charms us into delight, though
not always into conviction, by a gay abandonment to the self of a
passing moment. Irving's acting is almost a science, and it is a science
founded on tradition. It is in one sense his personality that makes him
what he is, the only actor on the English stage who has a touch of
genius. But he has not gone to himself to invent an art wholly personal,
wholly new; his acting is no interruption of an intense inner life, but
a craftsmanship into which he has put all he has to give. It is an art
wholly of rhetoric, that is to say wholly external; his emotion moves to
slow music, crystallises into an attitude, dies upon a long-drawn-out
word. He appeals to us, to our sense of what is expected, to our
accustomed sense of the logic, not of life, but of life as we have
always seen it on the stage, by his way of taking snuff, of taking out
his pocket-handkerchief, of lifting his hat, of crossing his legs. He
has observed life in order to make his own version of life, using the
stage as his medium, and accepting the traditional aids and limitations
of the stage.
Take him in one of his typical parts, in "Louis XI." His Louis XI. is a
masterpiece of grotesque art. It is a study in senility, and it is the
grotesque art of the thing which saves it from becoming painful. This
shrivelled carcase, from which age, disease, and fear have picked all
the flesh, leaving the bare framework of bone and the drawn and cracked
covering of yellow skin, would be unendurable in its irreverent copy of
age if it were not so obviously a picture, with no more malice than
there is in the delicate lines and fine colours of a picture. The figure
is at once Punch and the oldest of the Chelsea pensioners; it distracts
one between pity, terror, and disgust, but is altogether absorbing; one
watches it as one would watch some feeble ancient piece of mechanism,
still working, which may snap at any moment. In such a personation,
make-up becomes a serious part of art. It is the picture that magnetises
us, and every wrinkle seems to have been studied in movement; the hands
act almost by themselves, as if every finger were a separate actor. The
passion of fear, the instinct of craft, the malady of suspicion, in a
frail old man who has power over every one but himself: that is what Sir
Henry Irving represents, in a performance which is half precise
physiology, half palpable artifice, but altogether a unique thing in
art.
See him in "The Merchant of Venice." His Shylock is noble and sordid,
pathetic and terrifying. It is one of his great parts, made up of pride,
stealth, anger, minute and varied picturesqueness, and a diabolical
subtlety. Whether he paws at his cloak, or clutches upon the handle of
his stick, or splutters hatred, or cringes before his prey, or shakes
with lean and wrinkled laughter, he is always the great part and the
great actor. See him as Mephistopheles in "Faust." The Lyceum
performance was a superb pantomime, with one overpowering figure
drifting through it and in some sort directing it, the red-plumed devil
Mephistopheles, who, in Sir Henry Irving's impersonation of him, becomes
a kind of weary spirit, a melancholy image of unhappy pride, holding
himself up to the laughter of inferior beings, with the old
acknowledgment that "the devil is an ass." A head like the head of
Dante, shown up by coloured lights, and against chromolithographic
backgrounds, while all the diabolic intelligence is set to work on the
cheap triumph of wheedling a widow and screwing Rhenish and Tokay with a
gimlet out of an inn table: it is partly Goethe's fault, and partly the
fault of Wills, and partly the lowering trick of the stage.
Mephistopheles is not really among Irving's great parts, but it is among
his picturesque parts. With his restless strut, a blithe and aged
tripping of the feet to some not quite human measure, he is like some
spectral marionette, playing a game only partly his own. In such a part
no mannerism can seem unnatural, and the image with its solemn mask
lives in a kind of galvanic life of its own, seductively, with some
mocking suggestion of his "cousin the snake." Here and there some of the
old power may be lacking; but whatever was once subtle and insinuating
remains.
Shakespeare at the Lyceum is always a magnificent spectacle, and
"Coriolanus," the last Shakespearean revival there, was a magnificent
spectacle. It is a play made up principally of one character and a
crowd, the crowd being a sort of moving background, treated in
Shakespeare's large and scornful way. A stage crowd at the Lyceum always
gives one a sense of exciting movement, and this Roman rabble did all
that was needed to show off the almost solitary splendour of Coriolanus.
He is the proudest man in Shakespeare, and Sir Henry Irving is at his
best when he embodies pride. His conception of the part was masterly; it
had imagination, nobility, quietude. With opportunity for ranting in
every second speech, he never ranted, but played what might well have
been a roaring part with a kind of gentleness. With every opportunity
for extravagant gesture, he stood, as the play seemed to foam about him,
like a rock against which the foam beats. Made up as a kind of Roman
Moltke, the lean, thoughtful soldier, he spoke throughout with a slow,
contemptuous enunciation, as of one only just not too lofty to sneer.
Restrained in scorn, he kept throughout an attitude of disdainful pride,
the face, the eyes, set, while only his mouth twitched, seeming to chew
his words, with the disgust of one swallowing a painful morsel. Where
other actors would have raved, he spoke with bitter humour, a humour
that seemed to hurt the speaker, the concise, active humour of the
soldier, putting his words rapidly into deeds. And his pride was an
intellectual pride; the weakness of a character, but the angry dignity
of a temperament. I have never seen Irving so restrained, so much an
artist, so faithfully interpretative of a masterpiece. Something of
energy, no doubt, was lacking; but everything was there, except the
emphasis which I most often wish away in acting.