There have been many laments over the fleeting, evanescent character of an actor’s efforts. If his success be triumphant, it is like a dream for those who have not seen. Description gives but the faintest idea of his gifts. The writer, as it were, continues to write after his death, and is read, as he was in his lifetime. But the player gone, the play is over. The actor, it is true, if he be a personality, has another audience outside his theatre. As I have shown in these pages, he can attract by force of character the interest and sympathies of the general community. Whatever he does, or wherever he appears, eyes are turned to him as they would be to one on a stage. There is a sort of indulgent partiality in the case of Irving. He is a dramatic figure, much as was Charles Dickens. Eyes are idly bent on him that enters next. And this high position is not likely to be disturbed; and though all popularity is precarious enough, he has the art and tact to adapt his position to the shifty, capricious changes of taste, and in the hackneyed phrase is more “up to date” than any person of his time. The fine lines in ‘Troilus and Cressida’—the most magnificent in Shakespeare, as they seem to me—should ring in every actor’s ear, or indeed in that of everyone that enjoys public favour. Alas! it must be his lot to be ever at the oar. There is no relaxing, no repose; no coy retirement, or yielding to importunate rivalry:
“To have done, is to hang quite out of fashion,
Like a rusty mail in monumental mockery....
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep, then, the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons,
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or turn aside from the direct forth-right,
Like to an enter’d tide, they all rush by,
And leave you hindmost;—and there you lie