But that sudden ambition, though it was not capable of immediate fulfilment, implied a deeper strain in Tissot’s nature which was destined to find expression at a later day. Shortly afterwards he left England, and it was many years before I saw him again, hard at work in his studio in Paris upon the completion of a series of designs in illustration of the Life of Christ. Those designs exhibited an extraordinary persistence in the interpretation of local truth, for he had made a long sojourn in the Holy Land in order to fit himself for the task, and they showed besides an occasional intensity of feeling that lay dormant and unsuspected in the man as I knew him first. What was the real kernel of such a nature it is hard to say. The man himself, although in those earlier days he displayed little but the evident ambition to make his art remunerative, nevertheless, by occasional glimpses, betrayed the elements of a deeper purpose underlying the life that was preoccupying him at the moment.
A strange figure, a strange individuality, yielding by turns to impulses the lightest and the most devout, but always, however he might be engaged, proving himself the possessor of an extraordinary industry and a remarkable talent!
I have already alluded to the suppers in the Beefsteak Room as among the notable social reunions of the time. But there is one of those Lyceum suppers a little more formal than the rest which I feel disposed to recall, because it gave evidence of quite an unsuspected power on the part of Henry Irving of suddenly replying as a speaker to an unexpected attack.
The occasion was the 100th performance of the Merchant of Venice, in 1879, and I think it was the first time that the stage of a great London theatre had been employed as the arena of a large and splendid entertainment. Since that time we have enjoyed such feasts under the hospitable auspices of Mr. Tree at His Majesty’s—once, as I recall, on the occasion of the 100th night of Julius Cæsar, and again on a corresponding occasion to celebrate the successful run of Ulysses.
On the evening to which I now refer, the task of proposing Irving’s health was entrusted to Lord Houghton, who, it was thought, would hardly choose that particular occasion to exhibit the cynical temper he was known to possess. But Lord Houghton, as I afterwards found reason to know, was not disposed to be governed by conventional restrictions, and he devoted nearly the whole of his speech to a considered depreciation of Irving’s conception of Shylock, enlarging, in terms, that seemed to us who sat there, almost designedly bitter, upon what he considered the undeserved dignity that the actor had granted to the character.
It must have been that Irving was taken by surprise, and although his habit was always to speak from preparation, and often indeed to read what he had prepared, he proved himself, on this occasion, a master of good-humoured impromptu, twitting Lord Houghton, in a spirit of genial banter, with being a slave to the old-fashioned idea that Shylock was a comic villain, and promising on some future occasion to try and more amply satisfy his lordship’s ideal by representing Shylock as a Houndsditch Jew with three hats upon his head and a bag of lemons in his hands. The actor’s success, acknowledged by all who were present, was due, I think, mainly to the fact that, although taken off his guard by this unexpected provocation, there was not a trace of ill-humour in his reply.
There was one other occasion when Irving was the host at a small supper-party given at the Continental Hotel, when he showed an equal power of retaining his self-possession in circumstances the most trying and the most unexpected.
The honoured guest of the evening—entertained upon his return from a foreign campaign—was a brilliant and gifted journalist, now no more, and chief among those whom he had specially desired Irving to invite to meet him was a distinguished statesman still living, though by deliberate choice he no longer takes an active part in public affairs. The guest for whom the entertainment was given arrived late, and when he appeared it was evident to those of us who knew him that he had dined, not wisely, but too well. On a sudden, and in response to the most harmless raillery on the part of the statesman to whom I have referred, he rose and retorted with the most bitter and, if I may say so, the most vulgar abuse; and while we all sat appalled by the outrage he was committing, he turned and appealed to Irving to justify his extraordinary outburst. It was then that Irving’s tact showed itself. Quietly and slowly he replied, “All I have to say, my dear friend, is, that first upon the list of those whom you specially desired I should invite to meet you this evening, stood the name of Lord——.” And then, as though to prove to us that he too could exhibit an equal measure of self-possession, the man so wantonly attacked, without a word of resentment or rebuke, quietly filled his glass and invited us to drink just one toast to say how glad we were to see our old friend returned once more from his travels abroad.
CHAPTER XVIII
SOME FOREIGN ACTORS
As I have said in a previous chapter, H. J. Montague, at the time that I first became a theatre-goer, was the accepted jeune premier of the time. He certainly had no rival among his own countrymen as the exponent of lovers’ parts in modern comedy.