“Gentlemen, I can’t act if you can’t applaud.”
There is no doubt about it, a sympathetic audience gets far more out of the actor than a half-hearted apathetic one.
“The true value of art,” once said Henry Irving, “as applied to the drama can only be determined by public appreciation. It is in this spirit that I have invariably made it my study to present every piece in such a way that the public can rely on getting as full a return for their outlay as it is possible to give. I have great faith in the justice of public discrimination, just as I regard the pit audience of a London theatre as the most critical part of the house.
“Art must advance with the time, and with the advance of other arts there must necessarily be advance in art as applied to the stage. I believe everything that heightens and assists the imagination in a play is good. One should always give the best one can. I have lived long enough to find how short is life and how long is art,” he once pithily remarked.
“Have you been guided by tradition in mounting Shakespearian plays?”
“There is no tradition, nor is there anything written down as to the proper way of acting Shakespeare,” the great actor replied, and further added: “Imitation is not acting—there is no true acting where individuality does not exist. Actors should act for themselves. I dislike playing a part I have seen acted by any one else, for fear of losing something of my own reading of the character. We all have our own mannerisms; I never yet saw any human being worth considering without them.”
There is no doubt that Irving’s personality is strong and his appearance striking. He is a tall man—for I suppose he is about six feet high—thin and well knit, with curiously dark and penetrating eyes which are kindly, and have a merry twinkle when amused. The eyebrows are shaggy and protruding, and, oddly enough, remained black after his hair turned grey. He almost always wears eyeglasses, which somehow suit him as they rest comfortably on his aquiline nose. His features are clear-cut and clean-shaven, and the heavy jaw and slightly underhanging chin give strength to his face, which is always pale; the lips are thin and strangely pallid in colouring. Irving, though nearing seventy, has a wonderfully erect carriage, his shoulders are well thrust back and his chest forward, and somehow his movements always denote a man of strength and character. The very dark hair gradually turned grey and is now almost white; it was fine hair, and has always been worn long and thrown well back behind the ears.
There is something about the man which immediately arrests attention; not only his face and his carriage, but his manner and conversation are different from the ordinary. He is the kind of man that any one meeting for the first time would wish to know more about, the kind of man of whom every one would inquire, “Who is he?” if his face were not so well known in the illustrated papers. He could not pass unnoticed anywhere. But after all it is not this personality entirely that has made his fame, for there are people who dislike it as much as others admire it; but as he himself says, any success he has attained is due to the capacity for taking pains.
That Irving’s success has been great no one can deny. His reign at the Lyceum was remarkable in every way. He acted Shakespeare’s plays until he made them the fashion. He employed great artists, musicians, and a host of smaller fry to give him of their best. He produced wondrous stage pictures—he engaged a good company, and one and all must own he was the greatest actor-manager of the last quarter of the last century. Not only England but the world at large owes him a debt of gratitude. With him mere money-making has been a secondary consideration, and this, coupled with his unfailing generosity, has always kept him comparatively a poor man. No one in distress has ever appealed to him in vain. He has not only given money, but time and sympathy, to those less fortunate than himself, and Henry Irving’s list of charitable deeds is endless. But for this he would never have had to leave the Lyceum, a theatre with which his name was associated for so many years.