Ethel Alec-Tweedie · George H. Doran Company · 1916
Bram Stoker, that delightful, jovial Irish gentleman, who was for so many years Irving’s right-hand man, wrote to me soon after the great actor’s death:
“Irving had so mastered his individuality – crushed it, if you will – that some of his remorseless self-command was bound to have effect on others who came within the sphere of his work. I remember an incident which much struck me in this connection. We had had several important business dealings with a man of some ability but with a ‘get-rich-quick’ weakness. After a somewhat painful interview between the three of us, the stranger went away. We two being left alone, Irving said to me:
“’ I have made up my mind to tell him what I think of him.’
“Much as I valued and respected Irving’s judgment of character, I thought it wise to say:
“’ May you not be mistaken? As yet we have no proof of any wrongdoing – nothing but a suspicion, however just it may be.’
“’ My dear fellow, this is no mere suspicion with me: I know.’
“’ How on earth can you know?’
“’ Because,’ Irving answered, with one of his illuminating smiles, ’ I have played too many villains not to know the heart of one. It seems to me that I can look through that man as if he were glass. He is a crook.’
“Surely enough, though we never had any proof that might be considered legal, all of us who were aware of his transactions had finally, from many unmistakable indications, to agree with our chief. I give this as an illustration of the way characters act and react on each other. Irving the man was endowed with a trusting simplicity of character almost without flaw; Irving the artist, who had had to study human nature, had learned its sad truths so thoroughly that they had bitten deep into his own being.”
It was rumoured that Irving’s production of Henry VIII. a sumptuous play, cost £16,000 to mount, but none of his great costume plays ever cost more than from £3,000 to £10,000 each. Yet, though artistic effect and magnificent pictures were his unceasing cult, nothing in the way of detail was ever too small for his notice. He was completely wrapped up in his work. On the stage nothing mattered to him but the play.
“I remember,” Bram Stoker once told me, “on the first night of his playing Othello with Edwin Booth, he found his throat parched and his powers of voice and articulation consequently crippled. He was always a bad first nighter, for with the responsibility of the play as well as his own work as an actor, such an occasion was apt to strain even his nerves. In one of the great scenes I heard him tell one of the stage workers to bring him some water – quick. The man set off for the dressing-room, but Irving called him back and told him to get it from one of the fire plugs which were on the stage.
“’ Don’t wait for a glass,’ he said, ’ bring it in anything you can lay your hands on.’
“The man filled a jam-pot which he had found somewhere or other. When Irving had drunk and his voice was restored, the lady playing with him, who was rather a dainty creature, said:
“’ Oh, how can you drink such water and out of such a pot?’
“To which he at once answered:
“’ If it would help the play – and I could get nothing else – I would drink the slops.’
“It was part of his belief – on which all his work was based – that an actor should, whilst on the stage, preserve his self-mastery and suffer whatever danger or pain might be involved. On one occasion when a lime light tank under the stage exploded and actually lifted part of the stage, not for a moment did Irving lose the thread of his speech, nor did his voice falter, nor his face change colour. In New York one evening, when he was playing Hamlet, one of the spirit torches used for the scene got overheated, and the flaming spirit overflowed and set the draperies on fire. In an instant there would have been a panic; the people were rising in their seats in preparation for a stampede; but he never even looked round. He appeared and spoke as though the matter was no concern of his – or of anyone else. The men and women sank back into their seats; danger was averted. The only recognition of the incident was in the heartiness and prolongation of the applause which greeted him when he had to take an extra call before the curtain at the end of the act.”
Of lesser occasions of self-control there were numerous instances, for the working of a great play in a big theatre affords many contretemps. Once in Faust he was carried up almost out of sight by the drop curtain catching his Mephistopheles’ cloak. He calmly waited till the curtain was lowered again from the prompt sufficiently to allow his being seized by the anxiously waiting carpenters and placed in safety on his feet.
Personally, I agree with the American critic who said: “I do not consider Irving a great actor, but he was the greatest dramatic artist I ever saw.”
It is said that Irving found the part of King Lear the most physically trying in his whole repertory. After ten consecutive weeks it completely broke down his strength, and thenceforward he always spoke of it as the one part in Shakespeare which could not be played six times a week with impunity. He recalled a curious experience in connection with the part.
“As I stood in the wings on the first night before Lear makes his entrance,” he related to me, “ I had a sudden idea which revolutionized the impersonation and launched me into an experience unattempted at rehearsals. I at once tried to combine the weakness of senility with the tempest of passion, but soon found as I proceeded that this was an impossible task. One should never alter a scheme of performance at the last moment. Stage art is too serious to take risks.”
Henry Irving once had the unique experience of performing at Archbishop’s House, Westminster. The play was Becket, and an invitation was extended to him by Cardinal Vaughan to give a reading at his official residence. The invitation was accepted, and Sir Henry Irving read – or rather acted – Tennyson’s best play to a select audience of clergy, peers, and representative laymen, presided over by the Cardinal himself.
His love of animals, and also of children, was one of Irving’s pleasantest characteristics.
“Always since I knew him,” Bram Stoker once said to me, “ he had constantly by him a friend in the shape of a dog or a cat. From the time of taking the Lyceum into his own hands he had two dog friends, Trin and Fussy. Trin, a rough terrier, had been given to him by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and the little creature repaid the great manager’s affection with a whole-souled devotion and shared his life day and night, never being absent from him. When Trin died, after some years of companionship, Ellen Terry replaced him with Fussy, a fox terrier. He had been picked out of a litter by Fred Archer, the great jockey, who diagnosed his character thus: ‘He is absolutely faithful and you cannot lose him.’ Some years afterwards this judgment was proved to be sound. In one of his journeys to America, where Irving was going with his company for a tour, by some mischance Fussy got lost at Southampton, and the party had to start without him. All sorts of persons helped to look for the little dog, or for traces of him, in vain. But some three or four days later Fussy was found one morning outside the door of Irving’s rooms in London. He was weak and famished. His nails were worn down, and his paws covered with coagulated blood. He had found his way alone from Southampton to Bond Street.
“Fussy was killed in Manchester years afterwards by falling from the mezzanine floor to the cellar of the Theatre Royal. I believe, myself, he must have committed suicide. He was very old for a dog, he had rheumatism, and for him all pleasures had passed, and all joys save being with the master whom he loved and to whom he was so devoted. Irving was inconsolable, and for a time he chose no other familiar pet. When he got back to London, however, he was himself adopted by a cat. This was also a clever creature who knew how to control its own destiny. It strayed into the theatre one day, and was placed on the staff. That very evening of Irving’s return from his tour, on entering his dressing-room he saw a big grey cat sitting – of all places – on the pincushion on his table. She at once went up to him, purring, and from that time she attached herself to him as her own.”
Sir Henry was cremated by his own special desire. After this had been done it was suddenly decided that he should be buried in Westminster Abbey – an honour which the nation wished to bestow on the greatest theatrical manager and play producer of his day. When the authorities at Westminster Abbey discovered that this comedian – for he was far finer in comedy than in tragedy – had been cremated they were aghast. Somewhere in the archives of the Abbey there is a direction that “the corpse should be decorously borne into the church,” and so on.
There was no corpse. It had been reduced to white ashes and was reposing in a beautiful casket.
What was to be done? All sorts of cogitations took place. There was no precedent to go upon; nobody liked to take the initiative; and for a couple of days it seemed as if Henry Irving could not be buried there after all. Lo, some wiseacre hit upon an excellent device.
“Let us have a small coffin,” he said,” let the ashes be placed inside; let a cloth cover the top, and let the pallbearers hold its ends. That will meet the requirements of the situation.“
Accordingly, Irving’s remains were buried in a miniature coffin in Westminster Abbey. His were the first cremated ashes to repose in that noble pile, and although many people were horrified for the moment, the ultimate result was a complete reversal of the attitude of the Abbey authorities towards cremation. Some seven years later it was decided that no further burial should take place there unless the body had previously been reduced to ashes. For long the only woman in the Council of the Cremation Society of England, I have naturally a strong interest in cremation – inherited, no doubt, for Sir Henry Thompson was an old friend of my father, and when Sir Henry started the Cremation Society in 1874, my father was one of the first people to write and preach its doctrines.
A striking tribute at Irving’s funeral was the wreath sent by Queen Alexandra. The empty catafalque, beside which I was sitting with Sir Francis Burnand under the lantern, was covered with purple cloth, surrounded by tall brass candlesticks with long tapers burning. At the foot rested a large cross of Madonna lilies and libes-of-the-valley, bearing the inscription:
“Sir Henry Irving, with deepest regrets, from the Queen.
‘Into Thy hands, O Lord, Into Thy hands.’”
These were the last words which, as Becket, he ever spoke on the stage.
