vanity--for me. We players are not above that weakness, if it be a
weakness. If ever anything inspires us to do our best it is the presence
in the audience of some fellow-artist who must in the nature of things
know more completely than any one what we intend, what we do, what we
feel. The response from such a member of the audience flies across the
footlights to us like a flame. I felt it once when I played Olivia
before Eleonora Duse. I felt that she felt it once when she played
Marguerite Gauthier for me.
When I read "Hamlet" now, everything that Henry did in it seems to me
more absolutely right, even than I thought at the time. I would give
much to be able to record it all in detail--but it may be my
fault--writing is not the medium in which this can be done. Sometimes I
have thought of giving readings of "Hamlet," for I can remember every
tone of Henry's voice, every emphasis, every shade of meaning that he
saw in the lines and made manifest to the discerning. Yes, I think I
could give some pale idea of what his Hamlet was if I read the play.
"Words! words! words!" What is it to say, for instance, that the
cardinal qualities of his Prince of Denmark were strength, delicacy,
distinction? There was never a touch of commonness. Whatever he did or
said, blood and breeding pervaded him.
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 theater. The last was to all that he imagined
and thought, what charity is said by St. Paul 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 thŽ‰tre_ 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 the
theater, 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 merely a contribution to the
general excited anticipation, the Prince 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 illumination to the "Reciter,"
compiled by Dr. Pinches (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
With which to 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.
"Oh, 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; 'tis 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."
His advice to the players was not advice. He did not speak it as an
actor. Nearly all Hamlets in that scene give away the fact that they are
actors, and not dilettanti of royal blood. Irving defined the way he
would have the players speak as an _order_, an instruction of the merit
of which he was regally sure. There was no patronizing flavor in his
acting here, not a touch of "I'll teach you how to do it." He was
swift--swift and simple--pausing for the right word now and again, as in
the phrase "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature." His slight pause
and eloquent gesture was the all-embracing word "Nature" came in answer
to his call, were exactly repeated unconsciously years later by the
Queen of Roumania (Carmen Sylva). She was telling us the story of a
play that she had written. The words rushed out swiftly, but
occasionally she would wait for the one that expressed her meaning most
comprehensively and exactly, and as she got it, up went her hand in
triumph over her head. "Like yours in 'Hamlet,'" I told Henry at the
time.
I knew this Hamlet both ways--as an actress from the stage, and as an
actress putting away her profession for the time as one of the
audience--and both ways it was superb to me. Tennyson, I know, said it
was not a perfect Hamlet. I wonder, then, where he hoped to find
perfection!
James Spedding, considered a fine critic in his day, said Irving was
"simply hideous ... a monster!" Another of these fine critics declared
that he never could believe in Irving's Hamlet after having seen "_part_
(sic) of his performance as a murderer in a commonplace melodrama."
Would one believe that any one could seriously write so stupidly as that
about the earnest effort of an earnest actor, if it were not quoted by
some of Irving's biographers?
Some criticism, however severe, however misguided, remains within the
bounds of justice, but what is one to think of the _Quarterly_ Reviewer
who declared that "the enormous pains taken with the scenery had ensured
Mr. Irving's success"? The scenery was of the simplest--no money was
spent on it even when the play was revived at the Lyceum after Colonel
Bateman's death. Henry's dress probably cost him about £2!
My Ophelia dress was made of material which could not have cost more
than 2_s._ a yard, and not many yards were wanted, as I was at the time
thin to vanishing point! I have the dress still, and, looking at it the
other day, I wondered what leading lady now would consent to wear it.
At all its best points, Henry's Hamlet was susceptible of absurd
imitation. Think of this well, young actors, who are content to play for
safety, to avoid ridicule at all costs, to be "natural"--oh, word most
vilely abused! What sort of _naturalness_ is this of Hamlet's?
"O, villain, villain, smiling damned villain!"
Henry Irving's imitators could make people burst with laughter when they
took off his delivery of that line. And, indeed, the original, too, was
almost provocative of laughter--rightly so, for such emotional
indignation has its funny as well as its terrible aspect. The mad, and
all are mad who have, as Socrates put it, "a divine release from the
common ways of men," may speak ludicrously, even when they speak the
truth.
All great acting has a certain strain of extravagance which the
imitators catch hold of and give us the eccentric body without the
sublime soul.
From the first I saw this extravagance, this bizarrerie in Henry
Irving's acting. I noticed, too, its infinite variety. In "Hamlet,"
during the first scene with Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo, he began by
being very absent and distant. He exchanged greetings sweetly and
gently, but he was the visionary. His feet might be on the ground, but
his head was towards the stars "where the eternal are." Years later he
said to me of another actor in "Hamlet": "_He_ would never have seen the
ghost." Well, there was never any doubt that Henry Irving saw it, and
it was through his acting in the Horatio scene that he made us sure.
As a bad actor befogs Shakespeare's meaning, so a good actor illuminates
it. Bit by bit as Horatio talks, Hamlet comes back into the world. He is
still out of it when he says:
"My father! Methinks I see my father."
But the dreamer becomes attentive, sharp as a needle, with the words:
"For God's love, let me hear."
Irving's face, as he listened to Horatio's tale, blazed with
intelligence. He cross-examined the men with keenness and authority. His
mental deductions as they answered were clearly shown. With "I would I
had been there" the cloud of unseen witnesses with whom he had before
been communing again descended. For a second or two Horatio and the rest
did not exist for him.... So onward to the crowning couplet:
"... foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes."
After having been very quiet and rapid, very discreet, he pronounced
these lines in a loud, clear voice, dragged out every syllable as if
there never could be an end to his horror and his rage.
I had been familiar with the scene from my childhood--I had studied it;
I had heard from my father how Macready acted in it, and now I found
that I had a _fool_ of an idea of it! That's the advantage of study,
good people, who go to see Shakespeare acted. It makes you know
sometimes what is being done, and what you never dreamed would be done
when you read the scene at home.
As one of the audience I was much struck by Irving's treatment of
interjections and exclamations in "Hamlet." He breathed the line: "O,
that this too, too solid flesh would melt," as one long yearning, and,
"O horrible, O horrible! most horrible!" as a groan. When we first went
to America his address at Harvard touched on this very subject, and it
may be interesting to know that what he preached in 1885 he had
practiced as far back as 1874.
"On the question of pronunciation, there is something to be said
which I think in ordinary teaching is not sufficiently considered.
Pronunciation should be simple and unaffected, but not always
fashioned rigidly according to a dictionary standard. No less an
authority than Cicero points out that pronunciation must vary
widely according to the emotions to be expressed; that it may be
broken or cut with a varying or direct sound, and that it serves
for the actor the purpose of color to the painter, from which to
draw variations. Take the simplest illustration. The formal
pronunciation of A-h is 'Ah,' of O-h, 'Oh,' but you cannot
stereotype the expression of emotion like this. These exclamations
are words of one syllable, but the speaker who is sounding the
gamut of human feeling will not be restricted in his pronunciation
by dictionary rule. It is said of Edmund Kean that he never spoke
such ejaculations, but always sighed or groaned them. Fancy an
actor saying:
'My Desdemona! Oh! oh! oh!'
"Words are intended to express feelings and ideas, not to bind them
in rigid fetters; the accents of pleasure are different from the
accents of pain, and if a feeling is more accurately expressed as
in nature by a variation of sound not provided by the laws of
pronunciation, then such imperfect laws must be disregarded and
nature vindicated!"
It was of the address in which these words occur that a Boston hearer
said that it was felt by every one present that "the truth had been
spoken by a man who had learned it through living and not through
theory."
I leave his Hamlet for the present with one further reflection. It was
in _courtesy_ and _humor_ that it differed most widely from other
Hamlets that I have seen and heard of. This Hamlet was never rude to
Polonius. His attitude towards the old Bromide (I thank you, Mr. Gelett
Burgess, for teaching me that word which so lightly and charmingly
describes the child of darkness and of platitude) was that of one who
should say: "You dear, funny old simpleton, whom I have had to bear with
all my life--how terribly in the way you seem now." With what slightly
amused and cynical playfulness this Hamlet said: "I had thought some of
Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well; they imitated
humanity so abominably."
Hamlet was by far his greatest triumph, although he would not admit it
himself--preferring in some moods to declare that his finest work was
done in Macbeth, which was almost universally disliked.
When I went with Coghlan to see Irving's Philip, this "Hamlet"
digression may have suggested that I was not in the least surprised at
what I saw. Being a person little given to dreaming, and always living
wholly in the present, it did not occur to me to wonder if I should ever
act with this marvelous man. He was not at this time lessee of the
Lyceum--Colonel Bateman was still alive--and I looked no further than my
engagement at the Prince of Wales's, although in a few months it was to
come to an end.
Although I was now earning a good salary, I still lived in lodgings at
Camden Town, took an omnibus to and from the theater, and denied myself
all luxuries. I did not take a house until I went to the Court Theater.
It was then, too, that I had my first cottage--a wee place at Hampton
Court where my children were very happy. They used to give performances
of "As You Like It" for the benefit of the Palace custodians--old
Crimean veterans, most of them--and when the children had grown up these
old men would still ask affectionately after "little Miss Edy" and
"Master Teddy," forgetting the passing of time.
My little daughter was a very severe critic! I think if I had listened
to her, I should have left the stage in despair. She saw me act for the
first time as Mabel Vane, but no compliments were to be extracted from
her.
"You _did_ look long and thin in your gray dress."
"When you fainted I thought you was going to fall into the
orchestra--you was so _long_."
In "New Men and Old Acres" I had to play the piano while I conducted a
conversation consisting on my side chiefly of haughty remarks to the
effect that "blood would tell," to talk naturally and play at the same
time. I "shied" at the lines, became self-conscious, and either sang the
words or altered the rhythm of the tune to suit the pace of the speech.
I grew anxious about it, and was always practicing it at home. After
much hard work Edy used to wither me with:
"_That's_ not right!"
Teddy was of a more flattering disposition, but very obstinate when he
chose. I remember "wrastling" with him for hours over a little Blake
poem which he had learned by heart, to say to his mother:
"When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of the night arise,
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,
Till morning appears in the skies.
No, no, let us play, for yet it is day,
And we cannot go to sleep.
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all covered with sheep...."
All went well until the last line. Then he came to a stop.
_Nothing_ would make him say sheep!
With a face beaming with anxiety to please, looking adorable, he would
offer any word but the right one.
"And the hills are all covered with--"
"With what, Teddy?"
"Master Teddy don't know."
"Something white, Teddy."
"Snow?"
"No, no--does snow rhyme with 'sleep'?"
"Paper?"
"No, no. Now, I am not going to the theater until you say the right
word. What are the hills covered with?"
"People."
"Teddy, you're a very naughty boy."
At this point he was put in the corner. His first suggestion when he
came out was:
"Grass? Trees?"
"Are grass or trees white?" said the despairing mother with her eye on
the clock, which warned her that, after all, she would have to go to the
theater without winning.
Meanwhile, Edy was murmuring: "_Sheep_, Teddy," in a loud aside, but
Teddy would _not_ say it, not even when both he and I burst into tears!
At Hampton Court the two children, dressed in blue and white check
pinafores, their hair closely cropped--the little boy fat and fair (at
this time he bore a remarkable resemblance to Laurence's portrait of the
youthful King of Rome), the little girl thin and dark--ran as wild as
though the desert had been their playground instead of the gardens of
this old palace of kings! They were always ready to show visitors (not
so numerous then as now) the sights; prattled freely to them of "my
mamma," who was acting in London, and showed them the new trees which
they had assisted the gardeners to plant in the wild garden, and
christened after my parts. A silver birch was Iolanthe, a maple Portia,
an oak Mabel Vane. Through their kind offices many a stranger found it
easy to follow the intricacies of the famous Maze. It was a fine life
for them, surely, this unrestricted running to and fro in the gardens,
with the great Palace as a civilizing influence!
It was for their sake that I was most glad of my increasing prosperity
in my profession. My engagement with the Bancrofts was exchanged at the
close of the summer season of 1876 for an even more popular one with Mr.
John Hare at the Court Theater, Sloane Square.
I had learned a great deal at the Prince of Wales's, notably that the
art of playing in modern plays in a tiny theater was quite different
from the art of playing in the classics in a big theater. The methods
for big and little theaters are alike, yet quite unlike. I had learned
breadth in Shakespeare at the Princess's, and had had to employ it again
in romantic plays for Charles Reade. The pit and gallery were the
audience which we had to reach. At the Prince of Wales's I had to adopt
a more delicate, more subtle, more intimate style. But the breadth had
to be there just the same--as seen through the wrong end of the
microscope. In acting one must possess great strength before one can be
delicate in the right way. Too often weakness is mistaken for delicacy.
Mr. Hare was one of the best stage managers that I have met during the
whole of my long experience in the theater. He was snappy in manner,
extremely irritable if anything went wrong, but he knew what he wanted,
and he got it. No one has ever surpassed him in the securing of a
perfect _ensemble_. He was the Meissonier among the theater artists.
Very likely he would have failed if he had been called upon to produce
"King John," but what better witness to his talent than that he knew his
line and stuck to it?
The members of his company were his, body and soul, while they were
rehearsing. He gave them fifteen minutes for lunch, and any actor or
actress who was foolish or unlucky enough to be a minute late, was sorry
afterwards. Mr. Hare was peppery and irascible, and lost his temper
easily.
Personally, I always got on well with my new manager, and I ought to be
grateful to him, if only because he gave me the second great opportunity
of my career--the part of Olivia in Wills's play from "The Vicar of
Wakefield." During this engagement at the Court I married again. I had
met Charles Wardell, whose stage name was Kelly, when he was acting in
"Rachael the Reaper" for Charles Reade. At the Court we played together
in several pieces. He had not been bred an actor, but a soldier. He was
in the 66th Regiment, and had fought in the Crimean War; been wounded,
too--no carpet knight. His father was a clergyman, vicar of Winlaton,
Northumberland--a charming type of the old-fashioned parson, a
friendship with Sir Walter Scott in the background, and many little
possessions of the great Sir Walter's in the foreground to remind one of
what had been.
Charlie Kelly, owing to his lack of training, had to be very carefully
suited with a part before he shone as an actor. But when he was
suited--his line was the bluff, hearty, kindly, soldier-like
Englishman--he was better than many people who had twenty years' start
of him in experience. This is absurdly faint praise. In such parts as
Mr. Brown in "New Men and Old Acres," the farmer father in "Dora,"
Diogenes in "Iris," no one could have bettered him. His most ambitious
attempt was Benedick, which he played with me when I first appeared as
Beatrice at Leeds. It was in many respects a splendid performance, and
perhaps better for the play than the more polished, thoughtful, and
deliberate Benedick of Henry Irving.
Physically a manly, bulldog sort of a man, Charles Kelly possessed as an
actor great tenderness and humor. It was foolish of him to refuse the
part of Burchell in "Olivia," in which he would have made a success
equal to that achieved by Terriss as the Squire. But he was piqued at
not being cast for the Vicar, which he could not have played well, and
stubbornly refused to play Burchell.
Alas! many actors are just as blind to their true interests.
We were married in 1876; and after I left the Court Theater for the
Lyceum, we continued to tour together in the provinces during vacation
time when the Lyceum was closed. These tours were very successful, but I
never worked harder in my life! When we played "Dora" at Liverpool,
Charles Reade, who had adapted the play from Tennyson's poem, wrote:
"Nincompoop!
"What have you to fear from me for such a masterly performance! Be
assured nobody can appreciate your value and Mr. Kelley's as I do.
It is well played all round."
VII
EARLY DAYS AT THE LYCEUM
It is humiliating to me to confess that I have not the faintest
recollection of "Brothers," the play by Coghlan, in which I see by the
evidence of an old play-bill that I made my first appearance under Mr.
Hare's management. I remember another play by Coghlan, in which Henry
Kemble made one of his early appearances in the part of a butler, and
how funny he was, even in those days, in a struggle to get rid of a pet
monkey--a "property" monkey made of brown wool with no "devil" in it,
except that supplied by the comedian's imagination. We trusted to our
acting, not to real monkeys and real dogs to bring us through, and when
the acting was Henry Kemble's, it was good enough to rely upon!
Charles Coghlan seems to have been consistently unlucky. Yet he was a
good actor and a brilliant man. I always enjoyed his companionship;
found him a pleasant, natural fellow, absorbed in his work, and not at
all the "dangerous" man that some people represented him.
Within less than a month from the date of the production of "Brothers,"
"New Men and Old Acres" was put into the Court bill. It was not a new
play, but the public at once began to crowd to see it, and I have heard
that it brought Mr. Hare £30,000. My part, Lilian Vavasour, had been
played in the original production by Mrs. Kendal, but it had been
written for me by Tom Taylor when I was at the Haymarket, and it suited
me very well. The revival was well acted all round. Charles Kelly was
splendid as Mr. Brown, and Mr. Hare played a small part perfectly.
H.B. Conway, a young actor whose good looks were talked of everywhere,
was also in the cast. He was a descendant of Lord Byron's, and had a
look of the _handsomest_ portraits of the poet. With his bright hair
curling tightly all over his well-shaped head, his beautiful figure, and
charming presence, Conway created a sensation in the 'eighties almost
equal to that made by the more famous beauty, Lillie Langtry.
As an actor he belonged to the Terriss type, but he was not nearly as
good as Terriss. Of his extraordinary failure in the Lyceum "Faust" I
shall say something when I come to the Lyceum productions.