Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder,
Adelaide Neilson--Irving's _Debut_--His Career in the Provinces, and Visit
to Paris--The Role of Digby Grant--The Role of Matthias--The Production of
_Hamlet_--Successive Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--As an Editor of
Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of his Parts--As
a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir Henry Irving, Head of his
Profession.
What became of the "legitimate" drama the while Robertson busied himself
with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert
worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have
shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old
privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned
it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it
up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in _Richard III._
the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the
readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish
in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a "Shakespeare
Made Easy." An actor named Brooke made things still worse; with him it
was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the
day which brought the news of his "Hero"-like end on a ship which was
taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come
upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850
to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler's
Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the _Bouffes du Nord_, or,
further still, to the _Theatre de Belleville_!
Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good
actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain roles which up
till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his
personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom
was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering,--that
crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters
beyond the scope of his intelligence. In _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, the
fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw
between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of
the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.[11] Kean and Macready had
"popularised" Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the
best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit
of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out
another and nobler distinctive quality--that of _poemes en action_. This
does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.
The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche
in _La Dame aux Camelias_, set our mothers weeping, brought back
Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess's and to the Lyceum. In _Macbeth_,
he was only middling; but while they say his _Othello_ was the worst
imaginable, his _Hamlet_, according to the same critics, could not be
surpassed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great role which
had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready,
taking from him Hamlet's velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some
emotion, Horatio's words--"Adieu, dear Prince!" and added, "It seems to me
that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness,
humanity, and poetry in the character." Fechter found out traits which had
escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil
and pleasing parts of the action--a refined intellectual elegance proper
to a prince who had passed through the University of Wittemberg. The
advice of Hamlet to the players--the actor's Ten Commandments--he rendered
with much art and spirit.
After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners
became old stagers and appeared in principal roles. Between 1870 and 1875
I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a
hunting-horn, on several occasions, notably in _Anthony and Cleopatra_,
with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm,
one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too,
the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson,
who shook with passion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet
kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pre-Catelan,--it was a
glass of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say
that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman
enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.
He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most
flourishing and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already
been long upon the stage,--he was already an actor of repute even; but the
Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It
was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.
There was an institution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs
of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Class. A certain Mr.
Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction
associated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had
recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it,
pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in
his pronunciation, accent, or emphasis; the master summed up these
criticisms and pronounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to
time they gave public performances.
It was at one of these that there appeared one evening--in 1853--a
strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of
fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman's. He wore a
jacket of the old-fashioned cut and a great white collar. His long raven
locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.
He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East
India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way
corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house
in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured--the
Bible, _Don Quixote_, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western
expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its
reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in
London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like
very ant-hills of humanity.
Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprenticeship, the
stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry
Irving's vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some
day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his
vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct, absolute, not to be
shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly
ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and
inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute
or ill-directed endeavour.
Young Irving frequented Phelps' theatre, Sadler's Wells; an old actor who
belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to
Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank.
Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed
himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the
provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed
pithily at a later period: "The learning how to do a thing is the doing of
it,"--one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in
England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on
September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play
the role of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton's _Richelieu_. Thence he
proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred
and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his _debut_ in
London at the Princess's, in an adaptation of the _Roman d'un Jeune Homme
Pauvre_. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat
those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to
break off his engagement. But before returning to the provinces he gave
two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the _Daily Telegraph_ and the
_Standard_ the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came
seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and
Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a role in one of
Boucicault's dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last
set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James's, whence he passed
first to the Queen's, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.
More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor
Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting
vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted
over his forehead, and his glass fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps
it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which
visited us, hid Henry Irving.
There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during
which the conquest of one's professional brethren is achieved. Now, one's
professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity,
upon the talents they have discovered, and thus retard that second period
during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length
attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand
in James Albery's _Two Roses_. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman
who accepts alms with an air of conferring favours,--a singular blend of
pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The
opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been
pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so
brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the
scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from
fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing
but a tumult of words, a confusion of _jeux de scenes_, interrupted here
and there by silly _preciosites_ which are intended to serve as aphorisms.
However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste
of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention
more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first
performance of _The Two Roses_, he recited "The Dream of Eugene Aram," and
his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the
actor's art was immensely widened--what he actually expressed in his
recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole
province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse
beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.
Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they
expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them
subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his
conception in the face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.
At this critical moment of his career a happy chance brought to him the
very piece of all others calculated to bring out his gifts--a piece which
should enable him to depict the wonderful and awful dualism of thought and
language, of a man's outward aspect and his soul within,--this was _The
Bells_, an almost literal translation of Erckmann and Chatrian's _Polish
Jew_. Irving bought the MS. and offered it to his manager, Bateman, who
tried it as a last chance. Irving acted Matthias, and in one evening the
actor of talent became the actor of genius. Clement Scott hurried to his
newspaper, _The Daily Telegraph_, and wrote so enthusiastic an account of
the performance that next morning the editor chaffed him on the subject,
and wanted to know who this Irving might be. In an article in the _Times_,
John Oxenford analysed with much penetration that suggestive power of the
actor, and that striking dualism of which I have spoken. Matthias, for all
that idyllic existence in which everything succeeded with him and smiled
upon him, seemed, said Oxenford, to wear the aspect of one living in a
world of terrors, where all was torture and impending destruction. The
horrors of the second and third acts would not have been intelligible, and
would have missed their effect, if they had not been foreshadowed in the
first by the glances, the tremors, the lapses into silence, the
indescribable atmosphere of fatefulness which seemed, under the bright
morning sunshine, to envelop the murderer as with a shroud. The actor was
to give proof of many other gifts, to traverse triumphantly every province
of his art in the course of his splendid career, but it was by his
psychological suggestiveness, by his engendering of fear, both physical
and mental, that he won his first great theatrical victory.
_The Bells_ was succeeded by _Charles I._, by Wills. From the Alsatian
inn-keeper to Charles Stuart was a big jump. Irving managed it without
apparent effort.
It was as though the portrait by Van Dyck had stepped down from its
frame--this stately figure with its cold and lofty aspect, the look of
sadness in the eyes, the lips smiling bitterly under the thin moustache,
the pale veined forehead that bore the seal of destiny. I seem still to
see him, now playing with his children on the grass slopes of Hampton
Court, now crushing Cromwell with his kingly scorn. That phrase of
his--"Who's this rude gentleman?" still rings in my ears. The picture of
Charles clasping little Henriette and her younger brother in his arms in
the heartbreaking farewell scene at the close is still before my eyes....
Then, in a village graveyard, that more terrible figure takes its place,
the sombre phantom-form of Aram, long and lank, the assassin reasoning
with his remorse.
In these fruitful years one creation followed another in quick succession,
each excellent, all different. Finally, on October 31, 1874, Irving
appeared as Hamlet.
This was his Marengo; up to the third act, the battle seemed lost. His
anguish must have been terrible. The audience was mute, frigid, and their
frigidity seemed to increase. The third act produced a complete change.
From the scene with the players and the description of the imaginary
portraits the evening was a continual triumph. The public had before them
a Hamlet they had never seen or even dreamt of; all the Hamlets that had
ever appeared upon the stage seemed to have been assimilated by an
original and powerful temperament, and blended harmoniously into one. _The
Bells_ had been played a hundred and fifty-one times, _Charles I._ eighty
times. _Hamlet_ filled the Lyceum for two hundred nights without
interruption.
Irving took up _Richelieu_ next, and in it strove victoriously against
memories of Macready. At the close of the performance the house rose at
him--men waved their hats in their enthusiasm in the midst of the wildest
cheering. Such a scene had not been witnessed in an English theatre for
half a century! It proclaimed Irving Kean's successor. As though to
complete the rites of this coronation, the sword which clanked at his side
when he played Richard III. was that which Kean had carried in the same
role, and the ring which shone on his finger was a ring of Garrick's. A
colleague, old Chippendale of the Haymarket, had given him the one; the
other was a present from the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. They formed, as it
were, the insignia of royalty.
He continued to make himself master of all the great Shakespearian roles,
like a conqueror annexing provinces. Of course, he was not equally good in
all, though to all he brought his understanding and his inspiration, and
to all gave the stamp of his individuality. He sighed and sang of love as
Romeo, railed and mocked at it as Benedick; raged with Othello, trembled
with Macbeth; laid bare, as Wolsey, the inner working of the soul of the
statesman-priest; as Lear, went raving over the desolate heath in the
storm and the darkness of the night. Throughout he has had the
co-operation of Miss Ellen Terry, an actress of the finest and most
delicate talent, whose charm has resisted the passing of the years. Around
them there has grown up a generation of younger actors and actresses, who
to-day adorn the stages of other theatres.
Irving is to be looked on not merely as an interpreter of Shakespeare.
Hardly less important has been his work in editing the plays for the
modern theatre, and in staging them worthily: at the Lyceum he has given
them a setting than which the great dramatist, had he lived in our days
(and read Ruskin), could have wished for nothing better. He has told us in
a few lines, which I regard as the expression of his mature judgment, the
result of thirty years of theory and practice, what sort of staging is
required for masterpieces. _The mise en scene_, he tells us, should not
give the spectator any separate impression, it should be in keeping merely
with the impression of the piece. It should envelop the performers in an
atmosphere, provide them with suitable surroundings, afford the special
kind of lighting that is required for the action. Its role is a negative
one. It should introduce no incongruity, no discordant note; that is all
that is required. To attempt more is a mistake, and is apt to do injury to
the general effect. Whenever I have been to the Lyceum I have found this
programme strictly adhered to.
The restoration of Shakespeare's text, however, was a still more important
achievement. Everyone congratulated him on his good sense in freeing us
from Colley Cibber's version of _Richard III._ He continued the good work
with all the other dramas he took up; and we have to thank him to-day for
an "acting edition" of the Shakespearian masterpieces,--an actable
Shakespeare that is yet a real Shakespeare. The principle which he has
followed in this task may be summarised, I think, as follows:--Omissions,
often; transpositions, sometimes; interpolations, never.
I am far from pretending that Irving as an actor is without fault, that he
is not liable to go wrong like everyone else, that the richness of his
artistic nature attains to universality. There can be no doubt that he is
better as Richard III. than as Macbeth, as Benedick than as Romeo. The
first time you see him, his play of feature seems exaggerated, his motions
jerky and irregular. A critic has compared his gait in _Hamlet_ to that
of a man hurrying over a ploughed field; another critic has found in that
curious gesture, which periodically throws up his shoulders and draws his
head down into his collar-bone, a resemblance to the motion of a savage
making ready to spring upon his foe. His elocution is far from being
perfect,--a fact he has recognised himself, for he has worked hard to
correct the defects of delivery which have been charged against him. But
these are slight shortcomings of which a year of technical study at the
outset of his career would have freed him completely.
A more serious drawback, to my mind, is that he is too great for many of
his roles, that he is out at elbow in them, so to speak. He himself has
told us that the first duty of an actor is to fit his part, to _be_ the
character, to personate; and, it must be admitted, that in following this
principle he has given proof of a versatility unsurpassed by Garrick
himself: yet it would seem that the greater he has grown by study and
thought, (with the growth of his years and of his fame,) it has become
more and more difficult for him to squeeze himself into the smaller
personalities he has had to represent upon the stage, to sink in them that
magnetic individuality of his own which constitutes his power, and to
which he owes his success. Just as that young actor called out "Burbadge"
instead of "Richard," we also, in Irving's case, forget the role, and see
only the actor; and the play assumes for us the character of an admirable
lesson in the art of recitation.
Although he reverences the great actors who have preceded him, Irving
takes but little note of tradition. His method is essentially individual
to himself, and he does not hesitate to recommend this method to all
members of his profession, even beginners.
It may be said to have three phases, involving three successive processes.
First, a patient and conscientious study of the text: it is essential to
understand the author's meaning. When this has been mastered, you may
trust to your instinct, to inspiration. Then, amongst the ideas thus
discovered, you make your selection, of the good ones by a species of
mental process which will enable you to reproduce them artificially at
will.
Thus it is that Irving passes, smiling, by Diderot's paradox about the
actor. Diderot is right, of course, when he says that the actor does not
abandon himself on the stage to the promptings of inspiration; but he is
wrong in concluding that the whole business of acting is mechanical. As
Talma well expressed it in speaking of his own case, the emotions
represented by an actor, and communicated through him to us, are often
worked up from old experiences really met with and stored by study as
material. But shall we exact from him that he should have a real craving
to deceive when he impersonates a hypocrite? or that he should be in love
with the actress who has to enact a love scene with him? or thirst for
blood when he accomplishes a stage murder? These violent and often
contrary emotions--supposing, that is, that any one man should be capable
of them--would paralyse the actor instead of inspiring him. We expect of
him not that he should himself experience personally all these passions,
but that he should understand and be able to portray them. What culture,
though--what a combination of gifts, does this portrayal require and call
into play! An actor may be in turn, painter, sculptor, poet, musician,
psychologist, moralist, historian, and yet be inadequately equipped for
his calling.
Does one go to the theatre to see life depicted upon the stage, or, on the
contrary, to escape from life and forget it? Irving takes up a position
half-way between the realist and that of the ultra-idealist. What one
should see at the theatre is indeed life, but an intenser life, with
emotions that are keener, a pulse that beats more quickly,--a life in
which the potentialities of men and women are at their full, and in which
there is a standard of good and evil to give a moral conclusion, a lesson
in the art of living. "Get the working-man to go to the theatre," he
declares; there is no better way of keeping him out of the public-house.
The theatre should be really a school, should teach the young how to live,
and reconcile the weary and the sad to their existence, by setting before
them the ideal poetic justice which hovers over their heads.
This is the substance of the great actor's teaching, as set forth by him
on many occasions,--I shall not say in defence of his profession: the
theatre, he has declared proudly, no longer needs to be defended--but
rather in glorification of it. Quite recently, in an address to the Royal
Society, in February 1895, he demonstrated that acting was truly one of
the Fine Arts. Taking a definition of Taine's as his starting-point, he
dealt with that great writer's opinions on the same plane of thought, in a
style that was no less brilliant than clear and concise. Irving has too
keen an appreciation of beauty of form not to be conscious of the value
lent to his ideas by his method of expressing them. If he was not a writer
born, he has made himself a writer; his sentences are marked by a purity,
a nobility, a lofty and serene simplicity which communicates to the reader
the same spell his acting has wrought upon the spectator. His first
lectures were full of good things, happy phrases and observations that set
one thinking. In his later ones he has taken up the philosophy of his art,
and has revealed the tireless ambition of an intelligence ever striving
after higher things. To-day it has reached the summit. The royal decree,
therefore, which entitled him "Sir Henry" in May 1895, could not have come
at a more fitting moment. When this favour is bestowed on an official who
has grown old in service, or on a major-general who can no longer mount a
horse, the world takes no notice; this everyday distinction dazzles only
"my lady's" dressmaker and the tradesmen with whom she deals. In Irving's
case, it is an historical occasion, an epoch-making event. He is the first
actor to be invested with the emblem of rank. What is for him a reality is
a possibility for every actor. Thus he has raised them in being raised
above them.
Irving seems to me--may I venture to say it without seeming unappreciative
of the excellent and even great actors of whom our own country can
boast?--to be pre-eminent in his art, the leader of his profession. He
compels this admission by the beauty and unity of his life, by the
splendid strength of his vocation, by the magnificent variety of his
gifts, by his intelligent feeling for all the other arts and for the ideas
which belong to the spirit of his time. And, on the other hand, by the
slow growth, the gradual development of his talent, by his spirit of
independence and initiative, tempered by regard for the past, he is one of
the incarnations of his race, one of those men in whom to-day we may see
most clearly the features of the English character. He has failed in
nothing,--he has not even failed to make a fortune. And in respect to
this, should anyone charge it against him as a fault, he has given his
defence in a saying which I shall quote in conclusion as a finishing touch
to his portrait:--"The drama must succeed as a business, if it is not to
fail as an art." And in truth, does Shakespeare cease to be Shakespeare
because in Irving's hand he is also a mine of gold?