Last evening we found ourselves uncontrollably forced to admiration and enthusiasm. He manages by some magic to get the full meaning of almost every sentence, and the emphasis always falls upon the right word; withal, he has this great and rare merit, that whatever he says does not sound like a speech committed to memory beforehand. He always seems to be talking, and not declaiming. He made Hamlet more of a convincing reality to us than any actor we can remember. The greatness, the intellectual and the ethical force, above all, the charm and lovableness of the man, were shown as we have never seen them before. Miss Terry’s Ophelia is a revelation of poetic beauty. Here one has nothing to criticise, no one trait to praise more than another. Such a wonderful embodiment of the poet’s conception is quickly praised, but never to be forgotten.
IV.
On the first night of the “Merchant of Venice” at Boston, Irving played Shylock, I think, with more than ordinary thoughtfulness in regard to his original treatment of the part. His New York method was, to me, a little more vigorous than his London rendering of the part. Considerations of the emphasis which actors have laid upon certain scenes that are considered as especially favorable to the declamatory methods possibly influenced him. His very marked success in Louis no doubt led some of his admirers in America to expect in his Shylock a very hard, grim, and cruel Jew. Many persons hinted as much to him before they saw his impersonation of this much-discussed character. At Boston I thought he was, if possible, over-conscientious in traversing the lines he laid down for himself when he first decided to produce the “Merchant” at the Lyceum. Singularly sensitive about the feelings of his audiences, and accustomed to judge them as keenly as they judge him, he fancied the Boston audience, which had been very enthusiastic in their applause on the previous nights, were not stirred as they had been by his other work in response to his efforts as Shylock. The play, nevertheless, was received with the utmost cordiality, and the general representation of it was admirable. I found a Londoner in front, who was in raptures with it. “I think the carnival, Belmont, and court scenes,” he said, “were never better done at the Lyceum.”
At the close of the piece, and after a double call for Irving and Miss Terry, I went to his dressing-room.
“Yes,” he said, “the play has gone well, very well, indeed; but the audience were not altogether with me. I always feel, in regard to this play, that they do not quite understand what I am doing. They only responded at all to-night where Shylock’s rage and mortification get the better of his dignity.”
“They are accustomed to have the part of Shylock strongly declaimed; indeed, all the English Shylocks, as well as American representatives of the part, are very demonstrative in it. Phelps was, so was Charles Kean; and I think American audiences look for the declamatory passages in Shylock, to compare your rendering of them with the readings they have previously heard. You omit much of what is considered great business in Shylock, and American audiences are probably a little disappointed that your view of the part forbids anything like what may be called the strident characteristics of most other Shylocks. Charles Kean ranted considerably in Shylock, and Phelps was decidedly noisy,—both fine, no doubt, in their way. Nevertheless they made the Jew a cruel butcher of a Jew. They filled the stage with his sordid greed and malignant desire for vengeance on the Christian, from his first entrance to his final exit.”
“I never saw Kean’s Shylock, nor Phelps’s, nor, indeed, any one’s. But I am sure Shylock was not a low person; a miser and usurer, certainly, but a very injured man,—at least he thought so. I felt that my audience to-night had quite a different opinion, and I once wished the house had been composed entirely of Jews. I would like to play Shylock to a Jewish audience.”
Mr. Warren,[28] the famous Boston comedian, came into the dressing-room while we were talking. He has been a favorite here for thirty-six years.
“Not so long in one place as Mr. Howe,” he says, with a smile, “who tells me he was a member of the Haymarket Company for forty years.”
“You know Mr. Toole well?” said Mr. Irving.