SIR HERBERT TREE’S TRIBUTE
Sir Herbert Tree has written the following tribute to Laurence Irving:
“We actors were proud of Laurence Irving in life and no less proud of him in death. There was always something fateful about his personality, and one feels that his end is in tragic harmony with his being. Irving was an idealist, fearless of standing by his ideals in any company. He was a scholar in knowledge as in expression, and as an actor had already attained to a great height. His work, like the man himself, was always original.”
Technically Irving stood at the very top of his profession. As an actor with power to thrill and hold his public, he had few equals and fewer superiors. Personally, he was a man of rare charm of manner, courteous, dignified, serious in conversation, and imbued with the highest ideals. His devoted wife, whose whole career was wrapped up in her husband’s success, was herself an actress of distinction whose loss is deeply deplored.
They did honor to their profession and added dignity to the stage upon which they had so often appeared together and from which they were destined, in the end, to pass—together, as they would have wished it to be.