I.
“The rivalries between American cities,” said Irving, “seem to take a far more aggressive form than the rivalry between England and America, or even between France and England; I mean in regard to their criticisms of each other, and their hostile chaff or badinage in regard to each other’s peculiarities.”
“Is it not very much the same in England?”
“Perhaps.”
“Sheffield scoffs at Birmingham, Liverpool sneers at Bristol, Manchester is supercilious concerning London,” I said.
“And London mildly patronizes the whole of them. I think you are right; but one does not notice the competition at home so much, perhaps, as in America. Boston and Philadelphia seem to indulge in a good deal of badinage at each other’s expense.”
“And they are both sarcastic about the morality of Chicago.”
“A Boston friend of ours,” said Irving, “was telling me yesterday of a little war of words he had with a Philadelphian. Said Boston to the Quaker, ‘Well, there is one thing in which you have the best of us.’—‘Glad you admit one point in our favor anyhow; what is it?’—‘You are nearer to New York than we are.’ Our Boston friend is fond of New York, takes his holidays there; says he likes it nearly as well as London. A less subtle, but more direct, hit at Philadelphia was that of the Bostonian, who, in reply to the question of a Philadelphian, ‘Why don’t you lay out your streets properly?’ said, ‘If they were as dead as yours we would lay them out.’”
“Looked at from a balloon,” I said, “Philadelphia would have the appearance of a checker-board. Boston, on the other hand, would present many of the irregular features of an English city. Both cities are eminently representative of American characteristics, and both are possibly more English in their habits, manners, and customs, than any other cities of the Union.”
“There is nothing dead about the Philadelphia streets, so far as I have noticed them,” Irving replied. “This morning I walked along Chestnut street, and thought it particularly lively and pleasant. The absence of the elevated railroad struck me as an advantage. I felt that when walking down Broadway, in New York. Then the cars in the street itself did not rush along at the New York pace. These seem to me to be advantages in their way on the side of life in Philadelphia. Perhaps one feels the rest, too, of a calmer city, a quieter atmosphere.”
We are sitting near a front window at the Bellevue, looking out upon Broad street. Presently we are joined by the interviewer, and Irving is not long before he is engaged in a conversation about the actor’s art, and his own methods.
“Every character,” he says, “has its proper place on the stage, and each should be developed to its greatest excellence, without unduly intruding upon another, or impairing the general harmony of the picture. Nothing, perhaps, is more difficult in a play than to determine the exact relation of the real, and what I may call the picturesque. For instance, it is the custom in Alsatia for men to wear their hats in a public room; but in a play located in that country it would not do to have a room scene in which a number of men should sit around on the stage with their hats on. There are reasons why they should not do that. In the first place, their hats would hide their faces from the audience. It is also an incongruity to see men sitting in the presence of an audience with their heads covered. Then, again, the attention of the audience would be distracted from the play by a feeling of curiosity as to the reason why the hats were not removed. These are little things that should be avoided; but in general they are not likely to intrude themselves where proper regard is paid to the general appearance of a scene. The make-up of the stage is exactly like the drawing of a picture, in which lights and colors are studied, with a view to their effect upon the whole. There is another feature. I would not have the costume and general appearance of a company of soldiers returning from a war exactly the same as they appeared when the men were starting for the battle-field. I would have them dishevel their hair and assume a careworn aspect, but yet appear in clean clothes. Everything on the stage should always be clean and pleasant.”
The subject of realism being mentioned, he said his death in “The Bells” had been called very realistic, whereas the entire story was unrealistic, in the strict sense, particularly the trial and death. “Dramatically poetic, if you like,” he said, “but not realistic. There are so-called realisms on the stage that are no doubt offensive,—overstrained illustrations of the pangs of death, physical deformities, and such like. As for the interest of an audience in the person who is acting, the knowledge that what they see is an impersonation has its intellectual attractions for them. For instance, it would not be satisfactory to see an old man of eighty play ‘King Lear’; but it would be highly satisfactory to an audience to know that the character was being portrayed by a man in the vigor of life. As you look upon a picture you do not see something that is real, but something that draws upon the imagination.
“Perhaps there is no character about which such a variety of opinions has been expressed as that of Hamlet, and there is no book that will give any one as much opportunity of understanding it as the ‘Variorum Shakespeare’ of Mr. Horace Howard Furness. He is still a young man,—he is not an old man,—and I trust that he will be able to complete the whole of the work that he has begun, and I hope that some one will follow in his footsteps. It was a labor of love, of most intense love to him, and he has earned the gratitude of all readers of Shakespeare. I hope I shall meet him.”