Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

Nor shall I ever forget the extraordinary impression made upon my own imagination by my first sight of Irving in his performance of The Bells. I have often recalled in recollection the sentence penned by Dutton Cook, who was then the dramatic critic of the Pall Mall Gazette, wherein he said, “Acting at once so intelligent and so intense has not been seen upon the stage for years”; nor do I think any one who witnessed that performance, as it was rendered by Irving in the plenitude of his powers, would be disposed to question the verdict of the critic. To a youth I know it came as an astounding revelation—a revelation charged with such extraordinary concentration of personal feeling that the first vision of it as I recall it now seemed to have almost transgressed the limits of art, so poignant, even to the verge of pain, was the actor’s relentless portraiture of crime and remorse.

It was in Dick Bateman’s company that I first witnessed Irving’s performance of The Bells, and it was through Mr. Bateman’s introduction that I first learned to know the actor himself.

In order to realise the kind and the measure of effect which Irving’s intense individuality exercised over the public of that date, it is necessary to recall, if only for a moment, the condition of the stage at the time. Phelps’s career, in which he had so loyally and so honourably sustained the great tradition he had received from Macready, had practically, for all its influence upon the art, come to an end. He was still to be seen, as I saw him, in occasional engagements at Drury Lane, and later under the management of John Hollingshead at the Gaiety, and it was still possible to appreciate the great and sterling qualities of high training and accomplishment that he brought to the service of the theatre. But the magic which could win the attention of a new generation was no longer there. Its influence, perhaps, had been partly destroyed by the advent of Fechter’s more romantic method, which, even in his rendering of the classic drama, granted to his performance something of the charm and allurement of the conquering hero of a fairy story. And on the other side of the picture there was gradually arising a new school, though it seemed to be at the time exercised in only the tiniest arena, wherein a determined effort was being made to bring life as it was presented on the stage into closer alliance with the accepted realities of contemporary manners.

A revolution in little had been started in the theatre in Tottenham Court Road—a revolution due in the first instance to the talent of Robertson, which was destined to exercise a lasting influence over the theatre in England. Robertson’s new outlook, ably supported as it was by Marie Bancroft and her husband, who found and captured an ally of added strength in the person of John Hare, had the effect, for a while at least, of throwing classical drama into discredit, and it was therefore a matter of supreme difficulty for an actor equipped as Irving was, whose vision struck deeper and whose ambition took a wider range, to find a way to draw back the wandering attention of the public to the more passionate drama which for the time had fallen out of fashion. It was left to him almost unaided to forge a convention of his own, and it is perhaps the highest tribute to his innate gift as an actor that, although endowed by nature with few of the graces an actor might desire to claim, he was enabled from this first adventure in The Bells to win little by little, and with every step in his career fiercely disputed, a commanding position among the professors of his art.

I think at the first nobody was more surprised than Mr. Bateman at the success achieved by Irving’s experiment. In those days the favourite haunt of actors was the old Albion Tavern in Drury Lane. Clubs were comparatively few, and fewer still the actors who belonged to them. The licensing laws imposing the early closure upon the London taverns had not yet been passed, and it was the habit of those who were interested in the theatre to gather in the old-fashioned boxes of the Albion, and to remain in eager discussion over the things of the drama till the small hours of the morning. It was on one evening during the first rendering of The Bells that I found myself seated there in company with a few genial spirits including Henry Montague, Toole, and Tom Thorne, when we noticed that Irving’s manager, Mr. Bateman, had entered and was gazing round the room as though in search of some one he had appointed to meet. It occurred at once to the mischievous spirit of Toole to turn the occasion to account. In a whispered sentence he made the rest of us co-conspirators in the little drama he had suddenly devised, and as Mr. Bateman, still scanning the visitors assembled, advanced from box to box, he and Montague, in tones designedly pitched so that all might hear, began an animated discussion as to Irving’s rightful claims to a larger salary than he was at that time receiving. I believe, in fact, that Irving’s remuneration was something like £15 a week, which represented a substantial advance upon the payment he had received during his engagement for The Two Roses at the Vaudeville Theatre; but Montague and Toole vied with one another like competing bidders at an auction in loud proclaim of his larger worth.

“£15 a week!” said Toole. “Why, he’s worth £20 at any rate!”

“£20!” retorted Montague. “Nonsense! He’s worth £30 if he’s worth a penny!”

And then Thorne, topping Montague, said he would be perfectly willing to give him £40 if he would return to the Vaudeville; and as the voices grew louder in the increasing estimate of Irving’s value, Bateman, attracted by the discussion, drew nearer and nearer to the box in which we sat, until at last, leaning with his elbows upon the mahogany partition, he leant forward with lowering brows no longer able to contain the indignation which these comments had provoked. And then at last Toole, always incorrigible in humorous mischief, topped all previous bidders by the emphatic announcement that Henry Irving was worth £50 a week if he was worth a shilling, to which Bateman, now incensed beyond measure, retorted, “Yes, and you are the scoundrels who would put him up to asking it.”

Another anecdote, at that time related to me by Irving himself, also belongs to those old days of the Albion. Seated one evening at supper after the play he found himself opposite to a little old gentleman, who was unable to conceal his remembered enjoyment of the performance he had just witnessed at the theatre. Irving, encouraged by his manifest geniality, inquired where he had been, to which the stranger replied that he had come from the Vaudeville, where he had seen the most delightful play, The Two Roses, wherein, of course, at the time Irving was acting. Nothing could exceed the old gentleman’s enthusiasm for the performers, as he recalled them one after another. Montague was superb! Thorne was excellent! and so on and so on in a liberal catalogue of the several performers, his appreciation rising with each added name.

Irving, at last a little nettled, as he confessed to me, at the exclusion of all reference to himself, ventured to inquire of his neighbour whether there was not in the play a character called Digby Grant.