London Days Part 15

We got to talking about socialism. "Its basis," he said, "is materialism, not man. Herbert Spencer said: 'By no political alchemy can you get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.' And that's a good standard for testing politicians. None better."

Drummond was always looking at the bright side of life, illuminating it with common sense. And he loved a joke as well as anybody. He told with gusto of the fun he had at the Chicago Exhibition when, one evening, a dozen Arabs and Turks strode through the grounds, gazing gravely at the marvels of that western civilisation.

"Marvellous," he repeated. "We shall never see anything like it again.

Nor like those Arabs. If you could have seen them, as they pa.s.sed from light to darkness at an exit gate, while, choking {182} with laughter, they removed the sheets and pillow cases, and silk handkerchiefs, and colored tablecloths which had served them as robes and turbans and sashes, you would have said they were as marvellous as anything in the show. And when they wiped the colour from their faces, you would have recognised several of the most learned professors in America and one Scotsman with a smudge on his cheek." He roared at the recollection.

He was a professor at twenty-five. And his pupils were university graduates studying for the ministry. It was part of their duty to study natural science, to know something about the world they would preach in and the stupidity of trying to dig science out of Scripture.

Well, Drummond was the man for his work. And besides natural science, his work was for philanthropy and a rousing, liberalising evangelicism.

At the end of his week in the cla.s.sroom he would run over to Edinburgh and hold a religious service with a thousand young men attending earnestly.

"How do you get into personal touch with your college students?" I asked him.

"There you touch a tender point," he said. "There is n't enough personal touch in the colleges of Scotland! We put too much faith in lectures. Young men come but rarely into personal touch with their professors. I knew very little of mine. And that's the rule. A man must break through the routine; the professor must, the student must.

Personal touch would open both of them. Take So-and-So at the University. He lectures in the {183} morning to one hundred and fifty or two hundred students. In the afternoon to two hundred more. No personal touch in that; no opportunity for it. Youth can't be taught in droves, or saved in ma.s.ses. And yet, if you go in for individual development, or by small groups, you multiply the work beyond all possibility. Our system is wrong. It neglects character for the sake of compet.i.tion. But what can be done? Effort, individual effort, is the only thing worth a bawbee. All the rest is formulae."

He said that, as far as his own efforts went, he did what he could, in every way that he could. The development of personal responsibility was what he drove at. "That's the aim and end of life. If you don't base education on it, what is the use of education? Come. We are responsible for our physical condition. Let's go for a walk!"

Even in Scotland there are moments without rain. Pallid things that might have been stars peeped through the scudding clouds. We walked on, with good, easy strides, and talked,--talked of patriotism for one thing. "We don't have to teach that in Scotland," he said. "We take it for granted. Every Scot is born with it. And there 's no immigration in Scotland. We 're luckier than you, in America, where you have--what is it? A million a year pouring through the steerages?

I asked about that in my visits, but could n't find that you were teaching patriotism, except by fits and starts, in widely separated places. They were talking of teaching it there in the schools. What a funny idea! School is n't the place to acquire {184} patriotism. Home is! But where you have immigration on a huge scale the conditions differ, I confess."

The talk swung over to Gladstone. Drummond was very friendly with him.

I had said that I thought the G.O.M. a vindictive old gentleman.

Drummond laughed: "Oh, but we worship him. We take him very seriously."

"Yes, and he ill.u.s.trates your favourite theory about taking an interest in things."

"Right! He is interested in things--movements, tendencies of thought, theology, religion, literature. I can't, though, quote him as an authority on science. But his interest, his active interest in things, keeps him fresh and young, and out of grooves. He is interested in things, in ma.s.ses, nations, races, mountain ranges, literature, not art--literature above all, theological literature most of all."

"In Home Rule but not in Home Rulers," I interrupted.

"Does not the greater include the less?"

"Sometimes," said I, "but in politics it does not include even what is set down in black and white. Where would you put Gladstone as compared with your other hero, Moody? Moody, you say, was the biggest human being you ever knew."

"I won't retract that. Gladstone throws a greater spell over his hearers, and, when one meets him, an incomparable fascination. Moody's influence will last the longer, and so will his work."

This was interesting, to say the least of it. Then we turned home.

Four years later, Drummond died. Only forty-five!

{185}

CHAPTER XIII

SIR HENRY IRVING

Too much is said about the evanescent nature of an actor's fame. Is it so evanescent? Or are we believing, according to habit, merely what we have been told? Burbage's fame has lived as long as Queen Elizabeth's, and that is long enough. Suppose the Great Queen's fame eventually should chance to live longer than that of her subject, what is there evanescent about the latter since it has lived already through the three hundred years which separate us from his death? Betterton's fame may yet outlive that of the sovereigns under whom he flourished,--Charles II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne. What reason have we to suppose that it will not? Betterton's name has been one of the highest, most honoured names in England for two centuries and a half. Garrick's fame has lived as long as Doctor Johnson's, and Garrick had no Boswell. Mrs. Siddons is as well known to-day as, say George III, and more favourably known. Talma's fame has not been eclipsed by Napoleon's. Of Rachel we know as much as of the Empress Josephine. It is easier to tell offhand who was a famous actor one hundred and fifty years ago than {186} to say who was Prime Minister at the same time. Plunket was a greater orator, by all accounts, than Gladstone or Canning, Disraeli or Bright. Tell me--without looking him up in a Book of Reference--who was Plunket? Who were the chancellors of exchequer during Henry Irving's reign? Who were the leaders of the House of Commons? How long must fame last to satisfy all reasonable requirements? The names of how many princes, generals, preachers, statesmen, survive their deaths a hundred years?

An actor's fame, however short it may be, is long enough. How long has the fame of Roscius lasted? An actor has more than fame. He has the public's affection, its money, its applause, its cheers. And he has these nightly, besides the name that lingers after death. How will you prove now that Macready's name is less well known than Macaulay's? Are you safe in a.s.serting that Edmund Kean's name will not add another century to its credit? Or Kemble's name? What reason is there for a.s.suming that Byron's will live longer than that?

Even if the art of acting die, and the acted drama with it, overwhelmed by the cinema, it does not follow that the names and memories of the great players who have already lived will perish the more quickly. We may cherish them with a lively curiosity as the eminent practisers of a lost art, cherish them, in fact, because we are no longer able to replace them. The cinema could never have given us Sir Henry Irving, or the Kendals, the Bancrofts, or John Hare, or Edwin Booth, or Joseph Jefferson, or {187} Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. No, not if it unreeled to a million spectators an hour, and its daily receipts exceeded the transactions at the Bank of England!

It is something to have lived till the second decade of the twentieth century turns the corner, and find that Irving still glows in the memory, Irving and the Lyceum nights. That glow makes the generation which has it richer than the generation which has it not. The Lyceum with Irving was as different from anything now known to London as was all Europe before the war. You cannot make the generation that is pressing on behind understand this. Words cannot do it. Moving pictures cannot do it. Imagine a motion picture of "To be or not to be"!

There was once an art of acting. It is used now chiefly by politicians. But if their parts are more important, their presentation of them is less interesting than that of Irving and Ellen Terry, and the others mentioned here. And it is of no importance at all to art.

The politicians will be remembered only for the troubles they bring to us and to posterity; the actors are still remembered for the enjoyment they brought.

We who saw Irving through his long reign know what the world lost in losing him, for we seek through the world and find nothing to take the place of that sovereign and his achievements, nothing at this day to suggest them even remotely. The lack is a gap in life.

Will the gap ever be filled again? I doubt it. What chance is there of filling it? To begin with, {188} they tell us every day that public taste does not run in that direction. It really does not seem to do so, that is certain. And as the survivors of an older tradition die, their tradition dies with them. Tradition means more to the theatre than it means to other callings. Irving died in 1905. His tradition cannot be revived, that is clear. And it required traditions unbroken for nearly three hundred years to make the conditions for him. Broken now, for the first time in three centuries, who shall replace them?

And how? It may never be done. I do not say that it never will be done, but I do say that all the conditions of modern entertainment are against it. And the generation which furnishes the majority of the playgoers of to-day does not care a b.u.t.ton. It is their affair, after all. And they cannot take from us what we have had.

Irving was a kingly possession. He was as much a national figure as any statesman, or painter, or warrior, or popular personage of his time. He was a great man, and he worked to n.o.ble ends. No one could be in his presence without the consciousness of being in the presence, under the spell, if you like, of a great man. If one appreciates him more since his death, it is because the world is so much the poorer for his absence. We cannot say: "The King is dead; long live the king."

There is no king. There is not even a pretender.

Irving's declamatory moments were often queer, but his handwriting was always almost the worst in the world. It was almost as bad as Horace Greeley's. I have letters from him which I cannot read to-day. {189} I have forgotten what they were about and appear to have kept no key to their mystery. But I connect with them pleasant recollections, for they never concerned anything that Irving wanted for himself, but always something that he wanted to do for somebody else,--an invitation to the play for some distinguished visitor from my own country, a supper in the Beefsteak Rooms, a Sunday up the river, or something of the kind. If, at the time, the hieroglyphics were indecipherable and could be a.s.sociated with no known subject, I would take the letter to my neighbour, Bram Stoker, Irving's business manager and _Fidus Achates_, and adroitly prevail upon him for a translation. Usually, though, the letter from Irving would be followed, next post, by one from Stoker who would say: "The Chief tells me that you have kindly consented to so-and-so, or will bring So-and-So, or ask This-and-That; do you mind my suggesting Thus-and-So?"

Stoker's handwriting was almost as cryptic as Irving's, but not quite.

It could be read by due perseverance. And, at the worst, one could always know who wrote the first letter because Irving's signature was like a flight of stairs, and Stoker's--well, it was different. Whether Stoker followed up all the letters of his Chief with a translation I cannot say, and now that he has followed his Chief Out Beyond there is no one who can decipher the few remaining letters and so revive in my memory incidents which I am sure were charming and in every way delightful. I must get on without the letters.

I saw the beginning and the end of Irving's {190} management of the Lyceum Theatre, and nearly all the brilliant achievements between the beginning and the end. Management! It was more than a management; it was an august and splendid reign! It lasted more than twenty years; it made victorious expeditions to America; it seemed likely to end only with his life. And it did end only with his life. But the Lyceum, which he had made his home, which indeed he had made the chief temple of the drama in the English-speaking world, pa.s.sed from his control as the nineteenth century died. He made valiant efforts to restore his kingdom, but the Fates prevailed against him. He went to Drury Lane for a while, but it was not _his_ place, not _his_ temple, not the centre to which _he_ had drawn the world. He reigned now, but did not govern. He felt the change. Misfortunes had pressed upon him hotfoot.

The splendour and pomp had vanished; he withdrew from London; he became a king in exile; he died in the provinces. They gave him a stately funeral in Westminster Abbey. If they had supported him as liberally in his final years as they had in his prosperous ones, I would not be inclined to scoff as I do sometimes when the Londoners flatter themselves on their loyalty to old favourites. And Irving would not have died, as I think he died, with a broken heart. But he was valiant and upstanding to the end.

A public loyalty that can last twenty years is indeed marvellous at any time. The marvel is the more interesting in Irving's case. He served his public with all his power. They knew that. They {191} were conscious, I suppose, of Irving's limitations, but I am not sure that he himself was conscious of them. At any rate, his limitations set no bounds to his endeavours. And he achieved everything,--great fame, adulation, financial success; he was more honoured than any other actor of his century; his life was dignified, his death became the man. But what a marvel it was that this man could have become renowned among great actors!

He could not conquer his mannerisms, or he did not. The spectators had to do that, or ignore them. His mannerisms were dropped between the spectator and the performance like a veil. It was a thin veil, but none the less a veil. You saw him through the veil. Suddenly the veil would rise, there would be no mannerism; as suddenly it would fall.

And you heard him through strange obstacles. He could not walk, on the stage, without frequently strutting. Sometimes he did not talk, on the stage, without mouthing, marring the King's English. If he had learned, he had not mastered the elements of his calling. The elements mastered him. He had not the strength for what are called "sustained flights" of pa.s.sion. And yet he would thrill you. There were times when he thrilled you with the suggestion of his meaning, rather than with the expression of it.

It is a commonplace of dramatic criticism to a.s.sert that there is not, and that there cannot be, such a thing as intellectual acting, because acting is concerned wholly with emotions. But Irving proved that what is impossible for the critics was possible {192} for him. There were three aspects of any character he played which never could escape the appreciation of an audience: the inner character, his conception of it--the soul, if you will; the meaning of the man, if you will not--that was the first aspect. The second was the picturesque aspect.

Irving was always picturesque. He understood the appeal to the eye.

Graceful he could not be, but he was always picturesque and always in the picture. The third aspect was the dramatic, the action through his personality. He could and did express every dramatic instant, every meaning, expressed them somehow,--by flashes of the mind, by movement, by simple gesture, by accentuation of line, by lights, by shades. It was acting illuminated by intellect. Whatever he did had behind it a powerful and searching mind, and you came to regard it for its operations. And your admiration of him, if you did admire him, was intellectual rather than emotional. You liked him, or you disliked him. There was no halfway. I am speaking of him now as an actor, not as an actor-manager. When I first saw him, I thought him the worst actor there could be in the world. I was young then, but I had seen much fine acting, great acting. I had grown almost to manhood under the great art of Edwin Booth. Hamlet was the first part I saw Irving play. I suppose that, even then, I knew the lines almost as well as Irving himself. I thought he was speaking Choctaw, or Yorkshirese.

His vowels confounded him. They confused me. The effect was distressing. After Hamlet I had seen him, during '79, in revivals of {193} "Richelieu" (which did not impress me much), "Charles I" (which did impress me), "Eugene Aram", "The Bells", and one or two other parts. It was on November 1, 1879, that he produced "The Merchant of Venice." This was the first of the "great productions" at the Lyceum under his management. His reign actually began then, for then he began fully to exercise his powers. The Tubal scene revealed all Irving's defects; they stood between his Shylock and my eyes and ears; they barked at me, jumped at me like grotesque manikins; I sympathised with the old lady who is reported to have said, after an hour of Irving's Hamlet: "Does that young man come on often? If he does, I'll go home!"

But there were other moments which denied the Tubal scene altogether.

That was forgotten as if it never had been. Shylock grew under your eye, inner man and outer man. The presentation of the entire play felt the magic of the poet-author, the poetic powers of the manager. I began to understand what Irving was--the actor-manager with a poetic spirit.

Possibly the full impact of the shock of his strange personality had worn down its effects by this time. And I had come to know London better. I had had a year of it, and in that time had heard all there was to hear about Irving. His name and his doings were talked of everywhere; the Lyceum, where he had acted several years under Bateman's management, had become a British inst.i.tution; and Irving was as much talked of, everywhere, as the Prince of Wales, {194} Mr.

Gladstone, or the weather. Discussion of his mannerisms was inevitable at any dinner party or afternoon tea. Burlesques of him were frequent, imitations of him were part of the stock-in-trade of weary comedians and gifted amateurs. But, in spite of all the skits and all the laughter, every one respected the man and his work, and knew he was a genius.

When his Shylock came, the awkwardness of the actor was concealed by the costume, or what was not so concealed became apparently characteristic of the Jew. If the Tubal scene showed him almost tone-bound and muscle-bound, the other scenes found him free of many of his afflictions.

Actor-manager with the poetic spirit! Those Lyceum nights were quite Arabian. How fully I realise that as I look back upon them more than forty years after. The pit nights at the play were the best nights I ever knew at the play, wherever the pit, but not, it must be acknowledged, whatever the play. When I ceased to be a pit.i.te, and my connections with the press thrust me a few feet nearer the footlights, half the pleasure of theatre-going vanished, never to return. What had been a joyous zest became plain duty which had to be fulfilled whatever the conditions. As a pit.i.te one went to the play for the fun of the thing; as a stallite he went in quest of "copy." As a pit.i.te one had the pleasure of antic.i.p.ation. Even the fatigue of waiting hours at the doors, and going without dinner, had compensations; one knew that at least he had capacity for endurance. One had, in brief, {195} enthusiasm. One does not have enthusiasm in the stalls, or does not display it. In the pit he lets it loose. There is nothing so contagious as an expressed enthusiasm for a thing, or against it. And the pit.i.te is always conscious of the fact that man is a gregarious animal. The stallite has forgotten this, if ever he knew it. He may not prefer segregation, but he is the victim of it. The usages are stronger than his feelings. The pit.i.te's feelings come first. That is why the pit is important to the London actor, whatever it may be to the box office.

I have mentioned the first night of Irving's "Merchant of Venice."

That was November 1, 1879. I was in the very front of the crowd that waited five hours in the old covered pa.s.sage that led up from the Strand. There were no _queues_ in those days. Only the strong faced that struggle at the doors. You stood hours in the swelter, and then when the bolts were heard thrusting back from their rings, you thrust yourself back against the crowd, which surged and pressed behind you, and was pressed again by the less fortunate beings in the distant rear.