Signifying nothing.
And so, with the “sound and fury” of this present world still ringing in his ears, he passes out into that “life to come” of which he had never dreamed at all.
HENRY IRVING
The value of personality on the stage has rarely been exhibited with greater force than in the case of Sir Henry Irving. Nature had not specially equipped him for his calling; in several respects, indeed, she had weighted him with disabilities which were destined to prove a serious hindrance in the progress of his career. But she had dowered him, as if by way of compensation, with a force and persistence of character that finally shaped for themselves a mode of expression which satisfied the demands of his ambition. And this sense of resident power was mirrored in the man himself, even in the earlier days when those physical peculiarities, which he never wholly lost, were, for the time, gravely imperilling his success upon the stage.
I met him first at the Old Albion Tavern in Drury Lane—a favourite haunt of actors that has long passed away—and I remember then that the man himself impressed me more deeply than any of the few impersonations in which I had seen him. Already in his face and in his bearing he contrived to convey a curious sense of power and authority that he had not yet found the means to incorporate completely in his work upon the stage. I found myself vaguely wondering why he should have chosen the actor’s calling as a means of impressing himself upon his generation, and yet at the time I felt a full assurance that in that or in some other walk of life he was bound to leave a mark upon his time. Johnson once said of Burke that if a stranger should take shelter beside him from the rain, he would part from him with the feeling that chance had brought him in contact with a remarkable man. Something of that same feeling was left in me as the impression drawn from my first meeting with Irving; and it is perhaps characteristic of that unnameable kind of force his personality suggested, that even at the zenith of his career, when he had won complete authority over a public that at first only reluctantly rallied to his banner, there was still room left for a measure of doubt as to whether his powers might not have found a fuller exercise in a different realm. It is, I think, however, an attribute of all the very highest achievement in any art that its authors, even when their special aptitude for the chosen medium of expression is full and complete, possess, by right of their genius, something more and something different in kind from that particular endowment which the art they have adopted calls into exercise. In Irving’s case, this thought marked itself more deeply, because, as I have already hinted, his command of the special resources of his art was by no means complete, and his whole career may be said to have been a struggle, fiercer and more obstinate than most men have to wage, to secure, through the medium of the theatre, a full recognition of the latent forces he undoubtedly possessed.
He was conscious of that himself, and would often openly avow it; very conscious, I mean, that, in a calling in which there is no escape from the physical presence of the artist, he had much to contend with. It made him quickly appreciative of the kind of perfection achieved by others in whom the motive and the means of expression were more finely attuned; and he never wearied in later days of appraising this quality in the acting of Ellen Terry, whose varied gifts in the moment of perfection were combined in a fashion so easy and so absolute as sometimes almost to rob her of the praise due to conscious art.
Such appreciation would sometimes, though not so often, be extended to the comrades of his own sex; and I recollect, during the time when William Terriss was a member of his company, he would comment, with a sense of half-humorous envy, upon the ease and grace with which the younger actor could at once establish himself in the favour of his audience. But this recognition of the qualities he knew himself not to possess never, I think, for a moment shook his deeper conviction that, when he could subdue to the service of his art the more refractory elements of his own physical personality, he had a message to convey which would carry a deeper and more lasting impression.
And he proved by his career that he had a true title to that conviction. Force was always there, force that showed itself almost to the point of terror in his early impersonation of “The Bells.” But sweetness and grace came not till later, and was only won as the reward of patient and unceasing effort: it was the case of the honeycomb bedded in the carcase of the lion, and it took all a lion’s strength to reveal it to the world. In the man himself, however, as distinguished from his art, it was present from the first; and I recall, in those earlier days of our friendship, that a certain grave courtliness of bearing was among the first things that struck me. A certain sense of loneliness and isolation always belonged to him—the index, as it seemed to me, of a mind that was conscious that in his case the road towards fame must be trodden alone; that such perfection as he could ultimately achieve could borrow little from example, but must be due to his own unaided subjugation of whatever in his individuality impeded his progress.
But this suggestion was never so far obtruded as to burden the freedom of personal intercourse, and my long association with him, in work or at play, is rich in the remembrance of many varied moods of a sweet and affectionate character. In common with all men who remain permanently attractive in companionship, he had a quick and delicate sense of humour, sometimes half-mischievous in its exercise, and touched now and then with a slightly saturnine quality, but always ready at call—even in his most serious moods.
One evening during a brief holiday with him in Paris it was somewhat roughly put to the test. We stood in a group of spectators watching the agile performances of some dancers who were exhibiting the wayward figures of the Can-Can, when one of the more adventurous of the troupe, greatly daring, suddenly lifted her foot and neatly removed the hat that Irving was wearing. The other spectators, some of whom, I think, had recognised the actor, and all of whom, as I had remarked, were attracted by his personality, stood in momentary wonder as to how this audacious act of familiarity might be received, and I thought that I myself detected in Irving’s face a momentary struggle between the dignity that was natural to him and the genial acceptance of the spirit of the place in which we found ourselves. But it was only momentary, and when he acknowledged with hearty laughter the adroitness of the performer, the Parisians around us found themselves free to indulge in the merriment which the look upon his grave, pale face had for the time held in check.