Sir Henry Irving’s Position—Miss Geneviève Ward’s Dress—Reformations in Lighting—The most Costly Play ever Produced—Strong Individuality—Character Parts—Irving earned his Living at Thirteen—Actors and Applause—A Pathetic Story—No Shakespeare Traditions—Imitation is not Acting—Irving’s Appearance—His Generosity—The First Night of Dante—First night of Faust—Two Terriss Stories—Sir Charles Wyndham.
HENRY IRVING is a name which ought to be revered for ever in stageland. He has done more for the drama than any other actor in any other country. He has tactfully and gracefully made speeches that have commanded respect. He has ennobled his profession in many ways.
As Sir Squire Bancroft was the pioneer of “small decorations,” so Sir Henry Irving has been the pioneer of “large details.” Artistic effect and magnificent stage pictures have been his cult; but nothing is too insignificant for his notice.
Miss Geneviève Ward told me that in the play of Becket a superb costume was ordered for her. It cost fifty or sixty guineas, but when she tried it on she felt the result was disappointing. A little unhappy about the matter she descended to the stage.
[Pg 223]
“Great Heavens, Miss Ward! what have you got on?” exclaimed the actor manager.
“My new dress, sire, may it please you well,” was the meek reply, accompanied by a mock curtsey.
“You look a cross between a Newhaven fish-wife and a balloon,” he laughed; “that will never do. It is most unbecoming. As we cannot make you thinner to suit the dress, we must try and make the dress thinner to suit you.”
They chaffed and laughed; but finally it was decided alterations would spoil the costume—which in its way was faultless—so without any hesitation Henry Irving relegated it to a “small-part lady,” and ordered a new dress for Miss Ward.
Perhaps the greatest reform this actor ever effected was in the matter of stage lighting. No one previously paid any particular attention to this subject, a red glass or a blue one achieved all that was thought necessary, until he realised the wonderful effects that might be produced by properly thrown lights, and made a study of the subject.
It was Henry Irving who first started the idea of changing the scenes in darkness, a custom now so general, not only in Britain but abroad. He first employed varied coloured lights, and laid stress on illumination generally. It was he who first plunged the auditorium into darkness to heighten the stage effects.
“Stage lighting and grouping,” said Irving on one occasion, “are of more consequence than the scenery.[Pg 224] Without descending to minute realism, the nearer one approaches to the truth the better. The most elaborate scenery I ever had was for Romeo and Juliet, but as I was not the man to play Romeo the scenery could not make it a success. It never does—it only helps the actor. The whole secret of successful stage management is thoroughness and attention to detail.”
To Sir Henry Irving is also due the honour of first employing high-class artists to design dresses, eminent musicians to compose music which he lavishly introduced. It is said that his production of Henry VIII., a sumptuous play, cost ￡16,000 to mount, but all his great costume plays have cost from ￡3,000 to ￡10,000 each.
Sir Henry Irving is famous for his speeches. Few persons know he reads every word of them. Carefully thought out—for he wisely never speaks at random—and type-written, his MS. lies open before him, and being quite accustomed to address an audience, he quietly, calmly, deliberately reads it off with dramatic declamation. His voice has been a subject of comment by many. That characteristic intonation so well known upon the stage is never heard in private life, and even in reading a speech is little noticeable.
Photo by Window & Grove, Baker Street, W.
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, [Pg 225]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[Pg 226] 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:
“Perhaps the most remarkable Christmas dinner at[Pg 227] which I have ever been present, was one at which we dined upon underclothing. Do you remember Joe Robins—a nice, genial fellow who played small parts in the provinces? Ah, no! that was before your time. Joe Robins was once in the gentleman’s furnishing business in London city. I think he had a wholesale trade, and was doing well. However, he belonged to one of the semi-Bohemian clubs; associated a great deal with actors and journalists, and when an amateur performance was organised for some charitable object, he was cast for the clown in a burlesque called Guy Fawkes.
“Perhaps he played the part capitally; perhaps his friends were making game of him when they loaded him with praise; perhaps the papers for which his Bohemian associates wrote went rather too far when they asserted that he was the artistic descendant and successor of Grimaldi. At any rate Joe believed all that was said to and written about him, and when some wit discovered that Grimaldi’s name was also Joe, the fate of Joe Robins was sealed. He determined to go upon the stage professionally and become a great actor. Fortunately Joe was able to dispose of his stock and goodwill for a few hundreds, which he invested, so as to give him an income sufficient to prevent the wolf from getting inside his door, in case he did not eclipse Garrick, Kean, and Kemble. He also packed up for himself a liberal supply of his wares, and started in his profession with enough shirts, collars, handkerchiefs, and underclothing to equip him for several years.
[Pg 228]
“The amateur success of poor Joe was never repeated on the regular stage. He did not make an absolute failure; no manager would trust him with big enough parts for him to fail in; but he drifted down to “general utility,” and then out of London, and when I met him he was engaged in a very small way, on a very small salary, at a Manchester theatre.
“His income eked out his salary; Joe, however, was a generous, great-hearted fellow, who liked everybody, and whom everybody liked, and when he had money, he was always glad to spend it upon a friend or give it away to somebody more needy than himself. So piece by piece, as necessity demanded, his princely supply of haberdashery diminished, and at last only a few shirts and underclothes remained to him.
“Christmas came in very bitter weather. Joe had a part in the Christmas pantomime. He dressed with other poor actors, and he saw how thinly some of them were clad when they stripped before him to put on their stage costumes. For one poor fellow in especial his heart ached. In the depth of a very cold winter he was shivering in a suit of very light summer underclothing, and whenever Joe looked at him, the warm flannel under-garments snugly packed away in an extra trunk weighed heavily on his mind. Joe thought the matter over, and determined to give the actors who dressed with him a Christmas dinner. It was literally a dinner upon underclothing, for most of the shirts and drawers which Joe had cherished[Pg 229] so long went to the pawnbrokers, or the slop-shop to provide the money for the meal. The guests assembled promptly, for nobody else is ever so hungry as a hungry actor. The dinner was to be served at Joe’s lodgings, and before it was placed on the table, Joe beckoned his friend with the gauze underclothing into a bedroom, and pointing to a chair, silently withdrew. On that chair hung a suit of underwear, which had been Joe’s pride. It was of a comfortable scarlet colour; it was thick, warm, and heavy; it fitted the poor actor as if it had been manufactured especially to his measure. He put it on, and as the flaming flannels encased his limbs, he felt his heart glowing within him with gratitude to dear Joe Robins.
“That actor never knew—or, if he knew, could never remember—what he had for dinner on that Christmas afternoon. He revelled in the luxury of warm garments. The roast beef was nothing to him in comparison with the comfort of his under-vest: he appreciated the drawers more than the plum-pudding. Proud, happy, warm, and comfortable, he felt little inclination to eat; but sat quietly, and thanked Providence and Joe Robins with all his heart.
“‘You seem to enter into that poor actor’s feelings very sympathetically.’
“‘I have good reason to do so,’ replied Mr. Irving, with his sunshiny smile, ‘for I was that poor actor!’”
Irving, like most theatrical folk, has a weakness for applause. It is not surprising that hand-clapping[Pg 230] should have an exhilarating effect, or that the volley of air vibrations should set the actor’s blood a-tingling. Applause is the breath in the nostrils of every “mummer.” On one occasion the great Kean finding his audience apathetic, stopped in the middle of his lines and said:
“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,[Pg 231]” 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[Pg 232] his manner and conversation are different from the ordinary. He is............