His "make-up" was very pale, and this made his face beautiful when one
was close to him, but at a distance it gave him a haggard look. Some
said he looked twice his age.
He kept three things going at the same time--the antic madness, the
sanity, the sense of the theatre. The last was to all that he
imagined and thought what, in the New Testament, charity is said to be
to all other virtues.
He was never cross or moody--only melancholy. His melancholy was as
simple as it was profound. It was touching, too, rather than defiant.
You never thought that he was wantonly sad and enjoying his own
misery.
He neglected no _coup de theatre_ [theatrical artifice] to assist him,
but who notices the servants when the host is present?
For instance, his first entrance as Hamlet was what we call, in
theatrical parlance, very much "worked up." He was always a
tremendous believer in processions, and rightly. It is through such
means that royalty keeps its hold on the feeling of the public and
makes its mark as a figure and a symbol. Henry Irving understood
this. Therefore, to music so apt that it was not remarkable in
itself, but a contribution to the general excited anticipation, the
court of Denmark came on to the stage. I understood later on, at the
Lyceum, what days of patient work had gone to the making of that
procession.
At its tail, when the excitement was at fever-heat, came the solitary
figure of Hamlet, looking extraordinarily tall and thin, The lights
were turned down--another stage trick--to help the effect that the
figure was spirit rather than man.
He was weary; his cloak trailed on the ground. He did not wear the
miniature of his father obtrusively round his neck! His attitude was
one which I have seen in a common little illustration to the
"Reciter," compiled by Dr. Pinch, Henry Irving's old schoolmaster.
Yet, how right to have taken it, to have been indifferent to its
humble origin! Nothing could have been better when translated into
life by Irving's genius.
The hair looked blue-black, like the plumage of a crow; the eyes
burning--two fires veiled, as yet, by melancholy. But the appearance
of the man was not single, straight, or obvious, as it is when I
describe it, any more than his passions throughout the play were. I
only remember one moment when his intensity concentrated itself in a
straightforward unmistakable emotion, without side-current or back
water. It was when he said:
The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King
and, as the curtain came down, was seen to be writing madly on his
tablets against one of the pillars.
"0 God, that I were a writer!" I paraphrase Beatrice with all my
heart. Surely a writer could not string words together about Henry
Irving's Hamlet and say nothing, nothing.
"We must start this play a living thing," he used to say at
rehearsals, and he worked until the skin grew tight over his face,
until he became livid with fatigue, yet still beautiful, to get the
opening lines said with individuality, suggestiveness, speed, and
power:
_Bernardo_: Who's there?
_Francisco_: Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
_Bernardo_: Long live the king!
_Francisco_: Bernardo?
_Bernardo_: He.
_Francisco_: You come most carefully upon your hour.
_Bernardo_: 'Tis now struck twelve: get thee to bed, Francisco.
_Francisco_: For this relief much thanks: 't is bitter cold.
And all that he tried to make others do with these lines he himself
did with every line of his own part. Every word lived.
Some said: "Oh, Irving only makes 'Hamlet' a love poem!" They said
that, I suppose, because in the nunnery scene with Ophelia he was the
lover above the prince and the poet. With what passionate longing his
hands hovered over Ophelia at her words, "Rich gifts wax poor when
givers prove unkind!"