Joseph Hatton

“ A signal station with green and red lights slips by us. The swinging bell of an approaching train is heard. The conductor stands on the platform and waves his lamp. Our train stops. There looms suddenly out of the darkness behind us a vast globe, white and glowing, like a sun. It comes on, growing larger, and accompanying it is the bang, bang, bang of the engine’s bell, a familiar, but uncanny, sound in America. A number of minor lights dance about on either side of the approaching monster. It does not stop until its great single blazing Cyclopean eye looks straight into our car. ”

“ No man was ever more written of or talked about in America than Henry Irving; probably no man was ever more misrepresented as to his art and his life. A monster, according to his enemies; an angel, if you took the verdict of his friends; he was a mystery to untravelled American journalists, and an enigma to the great play-going public of the American cities. They were told that people either loved or hated him at first sight. American tourists even carried home contradictory reports of him, though the majority were enthusiastic in praise of him as an actor and as a man. ”

“ Nothing in America is so unlike England as the desolate appearance of the meadows in the fall and early winter months. From New York to Boston, a journey of six hours, in the second week of December, not a blade of green grass was to be seen. The train ran through a wilderness of brown, burnt-up meadows. With a tinge of yellow in the color of them, they would have resembled the late corn-stubbles of an English landscape. ”

“ We dash along, over level crossings, past very continental-looking riverside cabarets and rum-shops, under elevated railroads, and up streets that recall Holland, France, Brighton, and Liverpool, until we reach Washington square. The dead leaves of autumn are beginning to hide the fading grass; but the sun is shining gloriously away up in a blue sky. Irving is impressed with the beauty of the city as we enter Fifth avenue, its many spires marking the long line of street as far as the eye can see. The Brevoort House has proved a welcome, if expensive, haven of rest to many a weary traveller. ”

“ These artists were content to stand still while the culture of the century passed by them. At last there emerged out of obscurity, out of the jostling multitude of mediocrity, a man who drank in the spirit of his age,—a man who broke down the rotten barriers of tradition; a man who caught the intensity, the poetry, the artistic realism of his time; a man who inaugurated a new epoch in the art of acting. Final success was achieved only after a long and bitter struggle against conservative prejudices.
This man was Henry Irving. ”

“ They like breadth and color and show; they are accustomed to the marvellous and the gigantic in nature; they expect on the stage some sort of interpretation of these things,—great rivers, lofty mountains, and the startling colors of their fall tints. Your gentle meads of Hampton, the poetic grace of “Charles the First,” the simplicity of your loveliest sets, and the quiet dignity of your Shylock, will, I fear, seem tame to them.”
“Human nature, I fancy,” Irving responded, “is the same all the world over, and I have played to many Americans in this very theatre. ”

“ Irving has done more for dramatic art all round than any actor of our time; and it is open to serious question whether any artist of any time has done as much. Not alone on the stage, but in front of it, at the very entrance of his theatre, the dignified influence of his management is felt. Every department has for its head a man of experience and tact, and every person about the place, from the humblest messenger to the highest officer and actor, seems to carry about with him a certain pride of association with the management. ”

“ Then, convicted and condemned, the murderer dies under the violent shock to his nerves of this retributive force of imagination,—dies while the church-bells are ringing for his daughter’s marriage,—his last agonizing words, “Take the rope from my throat!”
Only a daring artist would undertake such a part; only a great one could succeed in it. Most of the second and last acts is a monologue; and, in a country like America, which is accustomed to rapidity of thought and action, Irving was courageous in risking the result of so serious a strain upon the mind of a highly strung audience. ”

“ I draw a curtain over him, that shuts off his bunk from the room and the general corridor of the car. You hear a good deal of talk in America about “private cars.” Without disparaging the ingenuity and comfort of the private-car system of American railroad travelling let me say, once for all, that the term private applied to it in any sense is a misnomer. There is no privacy about it,—nothing like as much as you may have in an English carriage, to the sole occupancy of which you have bought the right for a railway journey. On an American train there is a conductor to each car. ”

“ We have no tradition in the sense that those who would insist upon our observance of it means; what we have is bad,—Garrick played Othello in a red coat and epaulettes; and if we are to go back to Shakespeare’s days, some of these sticklers for so-called tradition forget that the women were played by boys. Shakespeare did the best he could in his day, and he would do the best he could if he were living now. Tradition! It is enough to make one sick to hear the pretentious nonsense that is talked about the stage in the name of tradition. ”

“ The audience sat spell-bound. Even as Mathias, with the accessories of the mysterious court-scene, Mr. Irving had not held New York play-goers with a firmer grip. They followed the grim story almost in silence. The ancient mariner’s narrative did not more impress the wedding-guest. I have seen all kinds of audiences in both hemispheres, and under all sorts of circumstances, and never saw a theatre full of people more under the control of a story. At the end the applause was loud and continued for some minutes, the reciter having to bow his acknowledgments again and again. ”

“ It is true that in every department of art the power of the imagination has declined with the advance of knowledge. The Greek actors went into convulsions through excess of passion. A Roman actor in the midst of frenzied recitation struck a slave dead. If we have not so much imagination as the ancients (a fact which we need not regret) , we have finer sensibilities, more penetrating insight, and a truer consciousness of life’s mystery and meaning. The art of to-day, if less exuberant than that of yesterday, is more serene, and, above all, its methods are more truthful. ”

“ Irving’s Louis,” said Mr. Dan Frohman, “is a vivid and powerful transcript from history. Once or twice, at the end of an act, he lapsed into his natural voice; but this may be excused from the great draught that such a character must make upon his strength. As a picture of the subtle, crafty, and avaricious old monarch, his representation was absolutely perfect. I think Mr. living’s ‘Louis XI.,’ in a word, is a sort of dramatic liberal education. Every actor can learn something from him. I wish our actors could keep the integrity of their characters as perfectly as Mr. Irving does.” ”

“ At Sheffield one night, during the grouse season, a man in the gallery threw a brace of birds upon the stage, with a rough note of thanks and compliments; and one of the pit audience sent me round a knife which he had made himself. You see, the people who do these things have nothing to gain; they are under no extraneous influence; they judge for themselves; and they are representative of that great Public Opinion which makes or mars, and which in the end is always right. When they are against you it is hard at the time to be convinced that you are wrong ”

“ It is well for the stage that it possesses such a gift as Ellen Terry. The age is, on the whole, terribly unromantic and commonplace; it deals in realism of a very uncompromising form; it calls a spade a spade, and considers sentiment an unpardonable affectation. But Ellen Terry is the one anachronism that the age forgives; she is the one living instance of an ideal being that the purists pardon. As she stands before these cold critics in her classical robes as Camma; as she drags at their heartstrings as the forlorn and abandoned Olivia; as she trips upon the stage as Beatrice ”

“ Irving has intensified all this by a careful personal attention to every detail belonging to the conduct of his theatre. He has stamped his own individuality upon it. His influence is seen and felt on all hands. He has given the color of his ambition to his officers and servants. His object is to perfect the art of dramatic representation, and elevate the profession to which he belongs. There is no commercial consideration at work when he is mounting a play, though his experience is that neither expense nor pains are lost on the public. ”

“ A round of applause greeted the rise of the curtain upon the first scene of “The Bells.” The audience thus testified their desire to be kindly; but, as the first part of the story was told, there was a certain impatience even in their recognition of the artistic simplicity of the scene. “The Bells” opens more like a novel than a play; and yet the suggestiveness of the narrative at the table, as the topers chat and drink, is singularly dramatic. On this first night the play seemed to drag, and the audience were on the tiptoe of expectation. ”

“ I mean in this way: on a first night, for example, I have sometimes gone round to speak to an actor, and have been met with the remark, ‘How cold the audience is!’ as if excessive quietness was indicative of displeasure, the idea being that when an audience is really pleased, it always stamps its feet and claps its hands. I have seen an artist making his or her greatest success with an audience that manifested its delight by suppressing every attempt at applause. ”

“ The adjoining room continues the collection of the actor’s art treasures,—not the mere connoisseur’s museum of articles of virtu, but things which have a personal value and a special history associated with the art their owner loves.
It is a frank smile that greets us as the actor enters and extends his long, thin hand. I know no one whose hand is so suggestive of nervous energy and artistic capacity as Irving’s. ”

“ The ice in the river broke up before we left,—a wonderful sight it was: a great rising flood, filled with ice and snow,—along the wharves silent ships, and steamers,—surprising to look down upon from the hills. As the city has grown the people have had to build on the heights, and the street-cars are hauled up on elevators—you drive your carriage upon these platforms and are raised to the roads above,—it is something like going up in a balloon. ”

“ IV.
“‘Britannic’ ahead!” shouts a voice from the gangway. We clamber on deck. It is daylight. The air is still keen. The wooded shores of Staten island are brown with the last tints of autumn. Up the wide reaches of the river, an arm of the great sea, come all kinds of craft; some beating along under sail; others, floating palaces, propelled by steam. These latter are ferry-boats and passenger steamers. You have seen them in many a marine picture and panorama of American travel. ”

“ Sufficient for the day is the Lyceum thereof. There is no chance of my ever desiring to change. I am devoted to the Lyceum, and to Mr. Irving. No one admires him more than I do; no one knows better, I think, how much he has done for our art; no one dreams of how much more he will yet do if he is spared. I used to think, when I was with Charles Kean,—I served my apprenticeship, you know, with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean,—that his performances and mounting of plays were perfect in their way. ”

“ Dear Sir,—I have received your letter of the 20th, and it gives me great pleasure to have my name associated with so gratifying an intellectual movement among the colored citizens of New York as the establishment of a Dramatic Club. Art is of no country, and has no nationality. Europe is deeply indebted to the artistic culture of the great colored people of the Eastern World, and there is promise of a future for your race, in the fact that you have ceased to feel the disabilities of color in your association with your white fellow-citizens. ”

“ A man knows best what he can do; and it seems to me just as absurd for one actor to imitate another, to recite this speech, or impersonate that action, as he has seen some other actor recite or impersonate, as it would be for a writer to print a historical incident just as some other had done, or for a modern novelist to write his stories on the lines of Fielding, Richardson, or Thackeray, without giving play to his own talents, or reins to his own imagination and conception of character. ”

“ Interspersed among these things are framed play-bills of a past age and interesting autograph letters. Near the dressing-table is a tall looking-glass, in front of it an easy-chair, over which are lying a collection of new draperies and costumes recently submitted for the actor-manager’s approval. The room is warm with the gas that illuminates it; the atmosphere delightful to the fancy that finds a special fascination behind the foot-lights. ”

“ He manages by some magic to get the full meaning of almost every sentence, and the emphasis always falls upon the right word; withal, he has this great and rare merit, that whatever he says does not sound like a speech committed to memory beforehand. He always seems to be talking, and not declaiming. He made Hamlet more of a convincing reality to us than any actor we can remember. ”

“ The excitement of that cheerful October evening, last year, when Henry Irving made his first appearance in New York, was repeated last night, at the Star Theatre, where “Much Ado About Nothing” was presented, and where Mr. Irving and Miss Terry effected their reëntrance, and were welcomed by a great and brilliant company, with acclamations, with floral tributes, and in a charmingly manifest spirit of the heartiest admiration and good-will. The scene, indeed, was one of unusual brightness, kindliness, and enjoyment, both before the curtain and upon the stage. ”