London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

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 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 passion. 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 assert 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 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 "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 institution; and Irving was as much talked of, everywhere, as the Prince of Wales, 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 pitite, 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 pitite one went to the play for the fun of the thing; as a stallite he went in quest of "copy." As a pitite one had the pleasure of anticipation. 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, 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 pitite 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 pitite'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 passage 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. The tactical manoeuvres consisted in avoiding the door frame while you clung to your half-crown and leaned heavily against your neighbour who was hurled against your ribs. The strategy was to know which half of the door opened first and directly opposite the hole behind which the ticket seller stood ready for action. If you lowered your arms you were helpless in the crowd. The art was to hold them in front of you, breast high, with your half-crown clenched in your left hand, because that was nearer the box office. If you put your hand in your pocket, you were lost, the crowd would rush you aside. If you muddled for change, they roared at you. Your left hand slapped your half-crown on the ledge, your right snatched the pit-check which slid across to you; you ran past the ticket collector, shoving the check into his hand and, making a sharp turn to the left, dashed along the benches until you came to the middle of the pit, and then went over the tops of bench-backs until you had captured your place in the centre of the front row! You had won the best place in the house! A barrier separated you by half an inch from the last row of the stalls. You were cheek by jowl with the mighty. You saw the celebrities of London arrive, you heard them chat; you saw them make others uncomfortable as they uncomfortably squeezed their way to their seats (for the Lyceum stalls were set closely) and as they entered your neighbour would tell you who they were, or you would tell him.

It was in the pit of London's theatres that I first came to know the London crowd, to understand it, to share its enthusiasms, or the reverse. It was in the Lyceum pit that I came to know how the crowd adored Irving, the place Ellen Terry had in its heart, and the place traditions held in the heart of the pit. Are there such pitites now, I wonder, as there were thirty and forty years ago?

Those first nights with the first favourites dissolved my American notions of the British character. I had heard, with the rest of the outer world, that the British were stolid, phlegmatic, cold, and what not, that they repressed their emotions, that they would not and could not let themselves go. I was to find what everybody finds, sooner or later,—that the individual and the mass differ as chalk from cheese. The pit crowds were not icebergs; they had not the immobility of mountains. They laughed, they wept, they cheered; they unlocked their emotions. They were the most sentimental, the most enthusiastic, the most appreciative crowds I had ever seen. The individual was dissolved in the mass. He became natural man. The crowds always took fire from a spark. They received their favourites as if they were conquering heroes. Irving, their greatest favourite, they received like a reigning monarch. One has to learn this about the British; their hearts are big and near their skins, and that is why, as individuals, they armour them.

If you know how to touch them, they respond with such demonstrations of devotion, of enthusiasm, of loyalty, as no other race ever equals in our time. Their loyalty to Irving they expressed with a zeal that was greater even than their appreciation of his powers, immense as that appreciation was. They loved the man. He embodied for them another lofty mark in the records of English achievement. He was great and would be greater by the integrity, the persistence, the elevation of his purpose. Such qualities win the English, and deep is the loyalty with which England rewards them. That, at all events, was true in the Victorian days.

There was a blessed vision called Ellen Terry, in those far-away Lyceum nights. Her power was charm. And she wielded her power almost to the end of King Henry's reign. In comedy she was alluring, audacious, delightful,—as Portia, for instance; as Beatrice; as any number of arch, graceful, incomparable creatures. In tragedy,—well, we forgave her the tragedies, her Lady Macbeth, for example. As Ophelia there was nothing to forgive; as Juliet—here was the exception to her tragic parts; she was a poet's dream, a fragile, loving, playful thing enmeshed by fate and borne down to death. Ellen Terry was the witching consort of Irving's reign. She won half his battle. "A star danced, and under that" she "was born." When Father Time told her that she could not play Portia and Beatrice and Juliet any more, half the attractiveness of the Lyceum was gone, and Irving had to carry the load alone.

But I have wandered far from the first night of "The Merchant of Venice." It was a great occasion. "Everybody" was there. To my gratified eyes the audience was nearly as interesting as the play and the players. Celebrities were "as plenty as blackberries." Now forty years have gone, and the celebrities have gone with them. And the nonentities, too. Of the two thousand or more persons who saw the performance that night, it may be that not more than fifty survive.

There is no one in these days to rouse us as we were roused in the late seventies and to the end of the century. The playgoer of to-day is fed on other stuff, on experiences quite unlike those his predecessors knew. And he is not fed so well. He is growing up, or has grown up, without standards. All's fish that comes to his net. I wonder what he would think of Irving if, by miracle, Irving could return to the Lyceum with undiminished powers, with Ellen Terry as she was in the eighties, and all the galaxy and circumstance that surrounded them? I think the playgoer of the present would scarcely notice Irving's mannerisms of speech, of gesture, of gait, he has seen so many mannerisms almost equally quaint, heard so much speech that is quite as queer. What caused Irving's mannerisms? For the life of me I cannot tell. They were not always with him. They grew upon him with the seasons. I do not think he affected them. He was too honest, too sincere for affectations. Besides, he did not need them to attract attention. And they injured his work. They were not caused by physical defects. They were entirely absent when he was not acting. Then his movements and speech were easy, pleasing. His manner had great dignity. I have said that his mannerisms were not with him in all characters, nor at all times. Intensity might bring them out. Declamation did so almost invariably. But they could not be relied upon either for coming or for going. What caused them? Self-consciousness perhaps, nervousness possibly. But why should he be self-conscious or nervous in his own theatre, where he played every night, and show no trace of either when he spoke at a university, or a dinner, or a public meeting? Why should he walk naturally and with ease in Bond Street, and with constraint, as if he were rheumatic, as Hamlet, at Elsinore, and why should he speak with perturbed vowels when he was in costume, and in easy control of them when in ordinary dress? The questions are easily asked; they have never been answered. If I have dwelt upon his peculiarities, it is partly because no one could ignore them, but mainly because he was so great a man that we can measure his powers by the obstacles against which he contended. His peculiarities of speech and motion may have been the causes which retarded his advancement for so many years. And, by the way, he was born in Somersetshire. Perhaps it was the Somersetshire dialect that cropped out at times in his delivery.

Irving's maltreatment of vowels gave much offence to trained ears. I do not know when I ceased, if ever I did cease, to wince at some of his pronunciations, but with time they ceased to present themselves as crimes for scourging, and came to be regarded as misfortunes, as penalties that must be endured for seeing him and enjoying him. When all is said, this thought remains,—the Lyceum productions were immensely satisfying; the beauty of them, the appeal to the eye, the appropriateness of everything that was painted, or woven, or said, or done; the groupings, the general and particular movement, whether of principals or supernumeraries, the tone of the thing, the atmosphere of it. When was the like known before? When since?

Seeing through the fog of mannerism took me a year. After that, as I have said, I grew gradually to appreciate him, to admire him. When I made his acquaintance, ten years after first seeing his Hamlet, I had long passed from the benches of opposition. But even then the wonder grew. First it had been: how did this man of many mannerisms ever become an actor and one of the most distinguished actors of his time? And then it was: how does he escape from carrying his mannerisms into private life? For he did not carry them there. He was a natural, unaffected gentleman, distinguished in bearing, courteous, fine in dignity, without pose. He walked and talked like a human being accustomed to the best of intellectual society, accustomed, indeed, to the ruling of men. He was then neither tone-bound nor muscle-bound. He moved with a certain ease, spoke with exquisite courtesy and quiet, and did not speak too much. He preferred to listen rather than to talk. He could—and did—make excellent speeches after dinner, or before the curtain. They would always have a touch of humour and a touch of pathos. They would always be in earnest. He never spent himself on trivial things; he never trifled about anything.

He had a certain air of authority; he had, at any rate, earned the right to breathe it. Besides, it protected him from bores. It made him, as a listener, the more gracious by just the suggestion of deference to an opinion, especially when he had invited the opinion. He preferred flattering to being flattered. Perhaps discreet flattery was an instrument that he knew how to employ better than most men. It may have been on that account that when it came his way he did not care for it. In all things he preferred giving to receiving.

Next to his work he enjoyed hospitality, that is, the exercise of hospitality. He did not like going out, and very seldom went out to dinners and receptions, those affairs of which one grows weary in London, because there are so many of them, and the celebrity is so often a sacrifice. He enjoyed being the host. This gave him the right of selection, with the minimum of sacrifice.

And what a host he was! You saw him at his best then, I think, his Majesty in evening dress, presiding at his table, after the play. You had seen him crowned and robed and reigning, heard him cheered by his loyal subjects, the British public, and now you were to sup with him after the play. His guests—they might be two, or six, or a dozen—would be shown to a suite of historic rooms upstairs behind the scenes, the rooms which in the eighteenth century and later had belonged to The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks. Perhaps, that night, the play had finished at eleven. The green curtain seldom fell earlier at the Lyceum. In fifteen or twenty minutes Irving would come in. If Miss Terry were coming, she would be later. An actress is usually longer than an actor about "changing." But whether she came, or not, and she would not always come, the feast would be a memorable one, both as to company and to dishes, to coffee and cigars and wines.

In those days teetotalism did not stalk over the world, and arrogantly claim all the virtues, and cry tyrannically, "You shall not touch wine! There are weak souls who cannot drink without drunkenness. To protect them we shall deprive you!" A lot of kindly feeling has vanished with the rise of Bolshevism, Syndicalism, and Teetotalism. Are we coming to a time when Shaving will be forbidden because razors are dangerous? If there are people who drink to excess, are there none who eat excessively? Are dyspepsia and indigestion to reduce the world to a common level of sallowness and pain, to the pangs and palenesses that prevail in teetotal regions? What has all this to do with Henry Irving? Nothing, of course, seeing that he died in 1905. But were he living and in his prime, I can fancy him saying, as many another man is saying: "No more America for me. They won't let me have a pint of wine with my dinner. I believe in freedom."

Irving's first nights were famous for their supper parties. These were not given in the Beefsteak Rooms but on the stage. The stage would be cleared after the play, and at long tables, at the rear of it, the guests would help themselves, and stroll about, smoking, talking, munching chicken sandwiches and salad, and sipping champagne, claret, or whatever was going. There would be two or three hundred guests, possibly more, men and women titled and untitled, well known in politics, science, letters, art, and social leaders, generals, and admirals, an epitome of that world which is London. It would be one of the most enjoyable receptions of the season. Wearied with conversation and standing about, the guests would begin to disperse about one or half-past one in the morning. By two o'clock, usually, nearly all of them would be gone. Then some one would find a few chairs, and half a dozen of us would sit in a corner talking, and presently Irving would join us, and the talk would gain in weight and point. About three o'clock, I think it was seldom earlier, we would start homeward. Frequently Irving and I would go together. My hansom would drop him at the door of his chambers in Grafton Street, and then I would go on to Chelsea. But whether on first nights, or on other nights, this was our custom for ten years, a custom broken only by my increasing absences from London. I might be in New York or Washington, or Rome, but Irving would know somehow, and we would exchange wires on first nights. On his first night in the World Beyond, I was farther away than usual. I was in Chicago. I wondered, when I heard, next morning, that he had gone, whether he missed the little group that used to foregather with him, and what hansom had conveyed him after his life's drama, and who had accompanied him Home. Always he had seemed to me a lonely man. He was a generous man and a great one. And his fame will last as long as the English stage retains its fame.

CHAPTER XIV

HENRY M. STANLEY

Stanley was the most self-contained man imaginable, when he chose to be. And when he chose to be otherwise, his anger was terrific. He had a hard face and steely-cold grey eyes. Neither eyes nor face revealed what he felt, if he wished to conceal feeling. I have seen him quite unmoved, rock-like, when, after an African expedition, he met devoted friends, or faced a cheering multitude, or drove his way through an angry mob. All was one to him if he had to get anything, or go anywhere, or do anything. None the less he felt, and his feelings were deep, but he held them in the closest grip. But when his temper blazed you wanted to call out the engines. He could not tolerate blunderers and fools; he had no patience with reformers, nor with sentimentalists; and very little with Emin Pasha, whom he came to regard as possessing the "mushy" qualities. Perhaps I should say that he had a great deal of patience with Emin Pasha in view of the fact that Emin, while willing to be found, did not wish to be "rescued", and so Stanley had his aches and pains and hardships for his trouble. It is possible to sympathise with him.

Stanley returned to London in April, 1890, after the Emin Expedition. There were crowds to greet him in the streets, and a big crowd at the railway station. I went, with an old friend of his, to meet him at the train. We had special cards to the platform at which the train would arrive, and were fortunate enough to secure places at the point where Stanley's saloon carriage stopped. There were about five hundred holders of similar cards, I should think, and among them the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who was a very old friend of Stanley. When the train pulled in, the privileged five hundred broke ranks with a rush and a roar and a waving of hats and handkerchiefs. The crowd beyond the platform barriers took up the cheering. As everybody on the platform knew the Baroness by sight, a path to Stanley was promptly cleared for her, and immediately the explorer advanced and shook hands with the kindly old lady. But he did not smile. He was as grim as a statue. He lifted his hat two or three times to the crowd, but he scarcely looked at it. He seemed in no way elated or touched by the popular greeting, but I suppose he was touched.

As soon as he saw the Baroness, he removed his hat, carrying it in his left hand, and stepping forward quickly, held out his right. But he did not speak; nor did she. Her kind old face quivered a little, and there were tears in her eyes. Perhaps if she had spoken, she would have shown too much emotion. Stanley, I thought, realised this, and was silent. But he kept the old lady's hand in his and shook it a little every instant or so, while he looked out over the mass of faces beyond. When he recognised any one standing near him, he nodded, but said never a word; he would look again at the venerable lady, and give her hand another little shake, and then, when all was ready, he gave her his arm and escorted her to her carriage, her husband following. The three entered the carriage, and Stanley stood up, bareheaded, and bowed to the cheering crowd. But never a word spoke he.

Out of the station they drove amid a din of cheering, but still he maintained his silence. One of them told me afterwards that he was silent until they reached their door in Stratton Street, Piccadilly. All the way the crowds cheered. Sometimes, when the roar was unusually loud, he would lift his hat. Then, when the spectators saw that his close-cut hair had turned white, they would double their cheers. I don't know what men think about when they experience such moments. I have asked many who have had them. They seemed to think that they were gratified, or puzzled, or stunned. I can imagine Stanley asking himself: "When can I get out of this?" But his face might have been the face of a graven image,—say a Sphinx from the sands of North Africa.