After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners became old stagers and appeared in principal rôles. Between 1870 and 1875 I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a hunting-horn, on several occasions, notably in Anthony and Cleopatra, with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm, one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too, the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson, who shook with passion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pré-Catelan,—it was a glass of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.
He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most flourishing and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already been long upon the stage,—he was already an actor of repute even; but the Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.
There was an institution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Class. A certain Mr. Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction associated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it, pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in his pronunciation, accent, or emphasis; the master summed up these criticisms and pronounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to time they gave public performances.
It was at one of these that there appeared one evening—in 1853—a strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman’s. He wore a jacket of the old-fashioned cut and a great white collar. His long raven locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.
He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured—the Bible, Don Quixote, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like very ant-hills of humanity.
Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprenticeship, the stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry Irving’s vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct, absolute, not to be shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute or ill-directed endeavour.
Young Irving frequented Phelps’ theatre, Sadler’s Wells; an old actor who belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank. Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed pithily at a later period: “The learning how to do a thing is the doing of it,”—one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play the rôle of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton’s Richelieu. Thence he proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his début in London at the Princess’s, in an adaptation of the Roman d’un Jeune Homme Pauvre. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to break off his engagement. But before returning to the provinces he gave two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the Daily Telegraph and the Standard the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a rôle in one of Boucicault’s dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James’s, whence he passed first to the Queen’s, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.
More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted over his forehead, and his glass fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which visited us, hid Henry Irving.
There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during which the conquest of one’s professional brethren is achieved. Now, one’s professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity, upon the talents they have discovered, and thus retard that second period during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand in James Albery’s Two Roses. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman who accepts alms with an air of conferring favours,—a singular blend of pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing but a tumult of words, a confusion of jeux de scenes, interrupted here and there by silly preciosités which are intended to serve as aphorisms. However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first performance of The Two Roses, he recited “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” and his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the actor’s art was immensely widened—what he actually expressed in his recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.
Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his conception in the face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.