SIR HENRY IRVING.
If there ever was a case of striking individuality on the stage it is surely to be found in Henry Irving. People often ask if it is a good thing for the exponents of the dramatic profession to possess a strong personality. It is often voiced that it is bad for a part to have the prominent characteristics of the actor noticeable, and yet at the same time there is no doubt about it, it is the men and women of marked character who are successful upon the stage. They may possess great capability for “make-up,” they may entirely alter their appearance, they may throw themselves into the part they are playing; but tricks of manner, intonations of voice, and peculiarities of gesture appear again and again, and very often it is this particular personality that the public likes best.
In olden days it was the fashion—if we may judge from last century books—to speak clearly and to “rant” when excited; in modern days it is the fashion to speak indistinctly, and play with “reserved force.” The drama has its fancies and its fashions like our dresses or our hats.
No man upon the stage has gone through a more severe mill than Sir Henry Irving. Forty-six years ago he was working in the provinces at a trifling salary on which he had to live. Board, lodging, washing, clothes, even some of his stage costumes, had to come out of that guinea a week. The success he has attained has been arrived at—in addition to his genius and ability—by sheer hard work and conscientious attempts to do his best, consequently at the age of sixty-five he was able to fill a vast theatre like Drury Lane when playing in such a trying part as Dante.
The first years of the actor’s life were spent at an office desk. He began to earn his own living as a clerk at thirteen; but during that time he memorised and studied various plays. He learnt fencing, and at the age of nineteen, when he first took to the stage, he was well equipped for his new profession.
For ten years he made little headway, however, and first came into notice as a comedian. In his early days every one thought Irving ought to play “character parts.”
“What that phrase means,” he remarked later, “I never could understand, for I have a prejudice in the belief that every part should be a character. I always wanted to play the higher drama. Even in my boyhood my desire had been in that direction. When at the Vaudeville Theatre, I recited Eugene Aram, simply to get an idea as to whether I could impress an audience with a tragic theme. In my youth I was associated in the public mind with all sorts of bad characters, housebreakers, blacklegs, thieves, and assassins.”
And this was the man who was to popularise Shakespeare on the modern English stage—the man to show the world that Shakespeare spelt Fame and Success.
That acting is a fatiguing art Irving denies. He once played Hamlet over two hundred nights in succession, and yet the Dane takes more out of him than any of his characters. Hamlet is the one he loves best, however, just as Ellen Terry’s favourite part is Portia.
In Percy Fitzgerald’s delightful Life of Henry Irving we find the following interesting and characteristic little story: