H. B. IRVING
There is a commonplace about the evanescent glory of actors that will hardly bear close scrutiny. It is said that, as they live more intensely than other men, enjoying their reward on the spot, so they die more completely, and leave behind nothing but a name. Even so, are they worse off than the famous authors whom nobody ever reads? Or than the famous painters whose works have disappeared? Which is the more live figure for us to-day, John Kemble, who played in theIron Chest, or William Godwin, who wrote the original story? Is Zeuxis or Apelles anything more than a name? It is said that whereas other artists survive in their work, the actor’s dies with him. But we make of every work of art a palimpsest, and it is for us what we ourselves have written over its original text—so that the artist only lives vicariously, through our own life—while the dead actor’s work stands inviolate, out of our reach, a final thing. Lamb says of Dodd’s Aguecheek, “a part of his forehead would catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder.” Nothing can alter that forehead now; but if Dodd could have left it behindhim, we should be all agog to revise the verdict. So Mrs. Siddons was famous for her graceful manner of dismissing the guests at Macbeth’s banquet. Nothing can impair that grace now; could it have been handed down, we should be having two opinions about it. Dead actors, then, live again in the pages that commemorate them, and they live more securely than the artists whose works survive. They are no longer the sport of opinion.
But this is only casuistry, the vain effort to seek consolation for the death of a friend. I am not speaking of a boon companion, but of something much better, of that ideal, disinterested friend which every actor is for us on the stage, giving us his mind and heart and temperament and physical being, immolating his very self for us, and at the end (I can see Henry Irving the elder standing before the curtain as he uttered the words) our “obliged, respectful, loving servant.” This is pure friendship, purer than any private intimacy, with its inevitable contacts and reserves of different egoisms. Why does my mind go back to the elder Irving? Because I am thinking of his son Harry, who was so like him (too like him, it was a perpetual handicap), and never more like him than in that pride which does not ape humility but feels it—the pride of the artist in his art and the humility of the devotee in the temple of art. Indeed, I think Harry Irving had an almost superstitious reverence for his profession. He had it perhaps not merely because he was his father’sson, but also because he was his father’s son with a difference, an academic difference; he was one of a little band of Oxford men whose adoption of the stage was, in those days, a breach with orthodox Oxford tradition. All that, I daresay, is altered now. In an Oxford which has widened Magdalen Bridge and built itself new Schools anything is possible. But in those days undergraduates were not habitually qualifying for the stage; indeed, the old “Vic” in term-time was out of bounds. The old “Vic” had only just disappeared when I went up to see young Irving as Decius Brutus inJulius Cæsar, and H. B. was still very much an undergraduate. Heavens! the pink and green sweets we ate at supper not far from Tom Tower after the show—the sweets that only undergraduates can eat! If I remember the sweets better than the Decius Brutus, it will be indulgent to infer that Harry Irving’sdébutwas not of the most remarkable. But his reverence for the histrionic art was, even then. I teazed him (youthful critics have a crude appetite for controversy) by starting an assault, entirely theoretical and Pickwickian, on that reverential attitude; we beat over the ground from Plato to Bossuet; and I think it took him some time to forgive me.
In his earlier years on the stage he was a little stiff and formal—characteristics which were not at all to his disadvantage in the young prig ofThe Princess and the Butterflyand the solemn young man-about-town ofLetty(though the smart Bond Street suitand patent leather shoes of the man-about-town were obviously a sore trial to a boy who, from his earliest years, dressed after his father). I imagine his Crichton (1902) was his first real success in London, and an admirable Crichton it was, standing out, as the play demanded, with that vigour and stamp of personal domination which he had inherited from his father. His Hamlet, though his most important, was hardly his best part. It was too cerebral. But is not Hamlet, some one will ask, the very prince of cerebrals? Yes, but Hamlet has grace as well as thought, sweetness as well as light. Harry Irving’s Hamlet (of 1905, he softened much in the later revival) was a little didactic, almost donnish. He hardened the hardness of Hamlet—particularly his hardness to women, Ophelia and Gertrude, which we need not be sickly sentimentalists to dislike seeing emphasized. In a word he was impressive rather than charming—was perhaps almost harsh after the conspicuously charming Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. Nevertheless, if Harry Irving’s Hamlet was second to Forbes-Robertson’s, it was a very good second.
He had his father’s rather Mephistophelean humour—but I am annoyed to find myself always harping on his father. It is a tiresome obsession. None suffered from it more than the son himself, at once hero and martyr of filial piety. He invited comparison, playing as many as possible of his father’s old parts, all ragged and threadbare as theyhad become. But he lacked the quality which originally saved them, the romantic flamboyantbaroquequality of his father’s genius. Sir Henry impressed himself upon his time by sheer force of individuality and by what Byron calls “magnoperation.” He was a great manager as well as a great actor, doing everything on a gigantic scale and in the grand style. He was a splendid figure of romance, off as well as on the stage. It was hopeless to provoke comparison with such a being as this. Though the son showed the family likeness he was naturally a reasonable man, a scholar, a man of discursive analytic mind rather than of the instinctive perfervid histrionic temperament. It was always a pleasure to swop ideas with him, to talk to him about the principles of his art, the great criminals of history, or the latest murder trial he had been attending at the Old Bailey; but I suspect (I never tried) conversation with his father, in Boswell’s phrase, a “tremendous companion,” must have been a rather overwhelming experience.... And, after all, the wonderful thing is that the son stood the comparison so well, that he was not utterly crushed by it—that the successor of so exorbitant an artist could maintain any orbit of his own. That is a curious corner of our contemporary society the corner of the second generation, where the son mentions “my father” quickly, with a slight drop of the voice, out of a courteous disinclination to let filial respect become a bore to third parties. There is an academician ofthe second generation in Pailleron’s play who is always alluding tomon illustre père, and as the ill-natured sayjoue du cadavre. In our little English corner there is never any such lapse from good taste, Harry Irving was greatly loved there; and will be sadly missed.