VI.
HENRY IRVING AND ELLEN TERRY IN OLIVIA.
It has sometimes been thought that the acting of Henry Irving is seen at its best in those impersonations of his that derive their vitality from the grim, ghastly, and morbid attributes of human nature. That he is a unique actor, and distinctively a great actor, in Hamlet, Mathias, Eugene Aram, Louis XI., Lesurque, and Dubosc, few judges will deny. His performances of those parts have shown him to be a man of weird imagination, and they have shown that his characteristics, mental and spiritual, are sombre. Accordingly, when it was announced that he would play Dr. Primrose—Goldsmith's simple, virtuous, homely, undramatic village-preacher, the Vicar of Wakefield,—a doubt was felt as to his suitability for the part and as to the success of his endeavour. He played Dr. Primrose, and he gained in that character some of the brightest laurels of his professional career. The doubt proved unwarranted. More than one competent observer of that remarkable performance has granted it an equal rank with the best of Henry Irving's achievements; and now, more clearly than before, it is perceived that the current of his inspiration flows as freely from the silver spring of goodness as from the dark and troubled fountain of human misery.
On the first night of Olivia, at the Lyceum Theatre (it was May 27, 1885, when the present writer happened to be in London), Henry Irving's performance of Dr. Primrose was fettered by a curb of constraint. The actor's nerves had been strained to a high pitch of excitement and he was obviously anxious. His spirit, accordingly, was not fully liberated into the character. He advanced with cautious care and he executed each detail of his design with precise accuracy. To various auditors, for that reason, the work seemed a little Methodistical; and drab is a colour at which the voice of the scoffer is apt to scoff. But the impersonation of Dr. Primrose soon became equally a triumph of expression and of ideal; not only flowing out of goodness, but flowing smoothly and producing the effect of nature. It was not absolutely and identically the Vicar that Goldsmith has drawn, for its personality was unmarked by either rusticity or strong humour; but it was a kindred and higher type of the simple truth, the pastoral sweetness, the benignity, and the human tenderness of that delightful original. To invest goodness with charm, to make virtue piquant, and to turn common events of domestic life to exquisite pathos and noble exaltation was the actor's purpose. It was accomplished; and Dr. Primrose, thitherto an idyllic figure, existent only in the chambers of fancy, is henceforth as much a denizen of the stage as Luke Fielding or Jesse Rural; a man not merely to be read of, as one reads of Uncle Toby and Parson Adams, but to be known, remembered, and loved.
Wills's drama of Olivia, based upon an episode in Goldsmith's story, is one of extreme simplicity. It may be described as a series of pictures displaying the consequences of action rather than action itself. It contains an abundance of incident, but the incident is mostly devoid of inherent dramatic force and therefore is such as must derive its chief effect from the manner in which it is treated by the actors who represent the piece. Nevertheless, the piece was found to be, during its first three acts, an expressive, coherent, interesting play. It tells its story clearly and entirely, not by narrative but by the display of characters in their relations to each other. Its language, flavoured here and there with the phraseology of the novel, is consistently appropriate. The fourth and last act is feeble. Nobody can sympathise with "the late remorse of love" in a nature so trivial as that of Thornhill, and the incident of the reconciliation between Olivia and her husband, therefore, goes for nothing. It is the beautiful relation between the father and his daughter that animates the play. It is paternal love that thrills its structure with light, warmth, colour, sincerity, moral force, and human significance. Opinion may differ as to the degree of skill with which Wills selected and employed the materials of Goldsmith's story; but nobody can justly deny that he wrought for the stage a practical dramatic exposition of the beauty and sanctity of the holiest relation that is possible in human life; and to have done that is to have done a noble thing.
Many persons appear to think that criticism falls short of its duty unless it wounds and hurts. Goldsmith himself observed that fact. It was in the story of The Vicar of Wakefield that he made his playful suggestion that a critic should always take care to say that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains. Wills probably heard more than enough for his spiritual welfare about the faults of his piece; yet there is really nothing weak in the play except the conclusion. It is not easy to suggest, however, in what way the fourth act could be strengthened, unless it were by a recasting and renovation of the character of Squire Thornhill. But the victory was gained, in spite of a feeble climax. Many persons also appear to think that it is a sort of sacrilege to lay hands upon the sacred ark of a classic creation. Dion Boucicault, perceiving this when he made a play about Clarissa Harlowe, felt moved to deprecate anticipated public resentment of the liberties that he had taken with Richardson's novel. Yet it is difficult to see why the abundant details of that excellent though protracted narrative should not be curtailed, in order to circumscribe its substance within the limits of a practical drama. Jefferson was blamed for condensing and slightly changing the comedy of The Rivals. Yet the author, who probably knew something about his work, deemed it a wretchedly defective piece, and expressed the liveliest regret for having written it. Wills did not reproduce Goldsmith's Vicar upon the stage: in some particulars he widely diverged from it—and his work, accordingly, may be censured. Yet The Vicar of Wakefield is far from being a faultless production, such as a divinity should be supposed to hedge. Critical students are aware of this. It is not worth while to traverse the old ground. The reader who will take the trouble—and pleasure—to refer to that excellent chapter on Goldsmith in Dr. Craik's History of English Literature will find the structural defects of the novel specifically enumerated. If the dramatist has ignored many details he has at least extracted from the narrative the salient points of a consistent, harmonious story. The spectator can enjoy the play, whether he has read the original or not. At the end of its first act he knows the Vicar and his family, their home, their way of life, their neighbours, the two suitors for the two girls, the motives of each and every character, and the relations of each to all; and he sees, what is always touching in the spectacle of actual human life, the contrasted states of circumstance and experience surrounding and enmeshing all. After this preparation the story is developed with few and rapid strokes. Two of the pictures were poems. At the end of act first the Vicar, who has been apprised of the loss of his property, imparts this sad news to his family. The time is the gloaming. The chimes are sounding in the church-tower. It is the hour of evening prayer. The gray-haired pastor calls his loved ones around him, in his garden, and simply and reverently tells them of their misfortune, which is to be accepted submissively, as Heaven's will. The deep religious feeling of that scene, the grouping, the use of sunset lights and shadows, the melody of the chimes, the stricken look in the faces of the women and children, the sweet gravity of the Vicar—instinct with the nobleness of a sorrow not yet become corrosive and lachrymose, as is the tendency of settled grief—and, over all, the sense of blighted happiness and an uncertain future, made up a dramatic as well as a pictorial effect of impressive poetic significance. In act second—which is pictorial almost without intermission—there was a companion picture, when the Vicar reads, at his fireside, a letter announcing the restitution of his estate; while his wife and children and Mr. Burchell are assembled around the spinet singing an old song. The repose with which Henry Irving made that scene tremulous, almost painful, in its suspense, was observed as one of the happiest strokes of his art. The face and demeanour of Dr. Primrose, changing from the composure of resignation to a startled surprise, and then to almost an hysterical gladness, presented a study not less instructive than affecting of the resources of acting. Only two contemporary actors have presented anything kindred with Mr. Irving's acting in that situation and throughout the scene that is sequent on the discovery of Olivia's flight—Jefferson in America and Got in France.
Evil is restless and irresistibly prone to action. Goodness is usually negative and inert. Dr. Primrose is a type of goodness. In order to invest him with piquancy and dramatic vigour Henry Irving gave him passion, and therewithal various attributes of charming eccentricity. The clergyman thus presented is the fruition of a long life of virtue. He has the complete repose of innocence, the sweet candour of absolute purity, the mild demeanour of spontaneous, habitual benevolence, the supreme grace of unconscious simplicity. But he is human and passionate; he shows—in his surroundings, in his quick sympathy with natural beauty, and in his indicated rather than directly stated ideals of conduct—that he has lived an imaginative and not a prosaic life; he is vaguely and pathetically superstitious; and while essentially grand in his religious magnanimity he is both fascinating and morally formidable as a man. Those denotements point at Henry Irving's ideal. For his method it is less easy to find the right description. His mechanical reiteration of the words that are said to him by Sophia, in the moment when the fond father knows that his idolised Olivia has fled with her lover; his collapse, when the harmless pistols are taken from his nerveless hands; his despairing cry, "If she had but died!"; his abortive effort to rebuke his darling child in the hour of her abandonment and misery, and the sudden tempest of passionate affection with which the great tender heart sweeps away that inadequate and paltry though eminently appropriate morality, and takes its idol to itself as only true love can do—those were instances of high dramatic achievement for which epithets are inadequate, but which the memory of the heart will always treasure.
It was said by the poet Aaron Hill, in allusion to Barton Booth, that the blind might have seen him in his voice and the deaf might have heard him in his visage. Such a statement made concerning an actor now would be deemed extravagant. But, turning from the Vicar to his cherished daughter, that felicitous image comes naturally into the mind. To think of Ellen Terry as Olivia will always be to recall one especial and remarkable moment of beauty and tenderness. It is not her distribution of the farewell gifts, on the eve of Olivia's flight—full although that was of the emotion of a good heart torn and tortured by the conflict between love and duty—and it is not the desperate resentment with which Olivia beats back her treacherous betrayer, when, at the climax of his baseness, he adds insult to heartless perfidy. Those, indeed, were made great situations by the profound sincerity and the rich, woman-like passion of the actress. But there was one instant, in the second act of the play, when the woman's heart has at length yielded to her lover's will, and he himself, momentarily dismayed by his own conquest, strives to turn back, that Ellen Terry made pathetic beyond description. The words she spoke are simply these, "But I said I would come!" What language could do justice to the voice, to the manner, to the sweet, confiding, absolute abandonment of the whole nature to the human love by which it had been conquered? The whole of that performance was astonishing, was thrilling, with knowledge of the passion of love. That especial moment was the supreme beauty of it. At such times human nature is irradiated with a divine fire, and art fulfils its purpose.