There is a commonplace about the evanescent glory of actors that will
hardly bear close scrutiny. It is said that, as they live more intensely
than other men, enjoying their reward on the spot, so they die more
completely, and leave behind nothing but a name. Even so, are they worse
off than the famous authors whom nobody ever reads? Or than the famous
painters whose works have disappeared? Which is the more live figure
for us to-day, John Kemble, who played in the _Iron Chest_, or William
Godwin, who wrote the original story? Is Zeuxis or Apelles anything more
than a name? It is said that whereas other artists survive in their work,
the actor’s dies with him. But we make of every work of art a palimpsest,
and it is for us what we ourselves have written over its original text—so
that the artist only lives vicariously, through our own life—while the
dead actor’s work stands inviolate, out of our reach, a final thing. Lamb
says of Dodd’s Aguecheek, “a part of his forehead would catch a little
intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder.”
Nothing can alter that forehead now; but if Dodd could have left it
behind him, we should be all agog to revise the verdict. So Mrs. Siddons
was famous for her graceful manner of dismissing the guests at Macbeth’s
banquet. Nothing can impair that grace now; could it have been handed
down, we should be having two opinions about it. Dead actors, then, live
again in the pages that commemorate them, and they live more securely
than the artists whose works survive. They are no longer the sport of
opinion.
But this is only casuistry, the vain effort to seek consolation for
the death of a friend. I am not speaking of a boon companion, but
of something much better, of that ideal, disinterested friend which
every actor is for us on the stage, giving us his mind and heart and
temperament and physical being, immolating his very self for us, and at
the end (I can see Henry Irving the elder standing before the curtain as
he uttered the words) our “obliged, respectful, loving servant.” This is
pure friendship, purer than any private intimacy, with its inevitable
contacts and reserves of different egoisms. Why does my mind go back to
the elder Irving? Because I am thinking of his son Harry, who was so
like him (too like him, it was a perpetual handicap), and never more
like him than in that pride which does not ape humility but feels it—the
pride of the artist in his art and the humility of the devotee in the
temple of art. Indeed, I think Harry Irving had an almost superstitious
reverence for his profession. He had it perhaps not merely because he
was his father’s son, but also because he was his father’s son with
a difference, an academic difference; he was one of a little band of
Oxford men whose adoption of the stage was, in those days, a breach
with orthodox Oxford tradition. All that, I daresay, is altered now.
In an Oxford which has widened Magdalen Bridge and built itself new
Schools anything is possible. But in those days undergraduates were not
habitually qualifying for the stage; indeed, the old “Vic” in term-time
was out of bounds. The old “Vic” had only just disappeared when I went
up to see young Irving as Decius Brutus in _Julius Cæsar_, and H. B. was
still very much an undergraduate. Heavens! the pink and green sweets we
ate at supper not far from Tom Tower after the show—the sweets that only
undergraduates can eat! If I remember the sweets better than the Decius
Brutus, it will be indulgent to infer that Harry Irving’s _début_ was
not of the most remarkable. But his reverence for the histrionic art
was, even then. I teazed him (youthful critics have a crude appetite
for controversy) by starting an assault, entirely theoretical and
Pickwickian, on that reverential attitude; we beat over the ground from
Plato to Bossuet; and I think it took him some time to forgive me.
In his earlier years on the stage he was a little stiff and
formal—characteristics which were not at all to his disadvantage in the
young prig of _The Princess and the Butterfly_ and the solemn young
man-about-town of _Letty_ (though the smart Bond Street suit and patent
leather shoes of the man-about-town were obviously a sore trial to a boy
who, from his earliest years, dressed after his father). I imagine his
Crichton (1902) was his first real success in London, and an admirable
Crichton it was, standing out, as the play demanded, with that vigour
and stamp of personal domination which he had inherited from his father.
His Hamlet, though his most important, was hardly his best part. It was
too cerebral. But is not Hamlet, some one will ask, the very prince
of cerebrals? Yes, but Hamlet has grace as well as thought, sweetness
as well as light. Harry Irving’s Hamlet (of 1905, he softened much in
the later revival) was a little didactic, almost donnish. He hardened
the hardness of Hamlet—particularly his hardness to women, Ophelia and
Gertrude, which we need not be sickly sentimentalists to dislike seeing
emphasized. In a word he was impressive rather than charming—was perhaps
almost harsh after the conspicuously charming Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson.
Nevertheless, if Harry Irving’s Hamlet was second to Forbes-Robertson’s,
it was a very good second.
He had his father’s rather Mephistophelean humour—but I am annoyed to
find myself always harping on his father. It is a tiresome obsession.
None suffered from it more than the son himself, at once hero and martyr
of filial piety. He invited comparison, playing as many as possible of
his father’s old parts, all ragged and threadbare as they had become.
But he lacked the quality which originally saved them, the romantic
flamboyant _baroque_ quality of his father’s genius. Sir Henry impressed
himself upon his time by sheer force of individuality and by what Byron
calls “magnoperation.” He was a great manager as well as a great actor,
doing everything on a gigantic scale and in the grand style. He was a
splendid figure of romance, off as well as on the stage. It was hopeless
to provoke comparison with such a being as this. Though the son showed
the family likeness he was naturally a reasonable man, a scholar, a man
of discursive analytic mind rather than of the instinctive perfervid
histrionic temperament. It was always a pleasure to swop ideas with him,
to talk to him about the principles of his art, the great criminals of
history, or the latest murder trial he had been attending at the Old
Bailey; but I suspect (I never tried) conversation with his father, in
Boswell’s phrase, a “tremendous companion,” must have been a rather
overwhelming experience.... And, after all, the wonderful thing is that
the son stood the comparison so well, that he was not utterly crushed
by it—that the successor of so exorbitant an artist could maintain
any orbit of his own. That is a curious corner of our contemporary
society the corner of the second generation, where the son mentions “my
father” quickly, with a slight drop of the voice, out of a courteous
disinclination to let filial respect become a bore to third parties.
There is an academician of the second generation in Pailleron’s play who
is always alluding to _mon illustre père_, and as the ill-natured say
_joue du cadavre_. In our little English corner there is never any such
lapse from good taste, Harry Irving was greatly loved there; and will be
sadly missed.