V

In those last seven years of his life I was not able to see so much of him as I had been in the habit of doing throughout the previous twenty. We had each of us his own work to do, and the only way I could help him was to take on my own shoulders all the work I could. As he did not come to his office in the theatre regularly every day as he was accustomed to do, I used to go to him; to his flat in Stratton Street when in London, to his hotel when we travelled. He did not often have supper in the old way. He still entertained to a reasonable amount, but such entertainments were generally in the shape of dinners on Sunday, the only day possible to him. When the play was over at night he would dress slowly, having a chat as he did so; for he loved to talk over his work past, present and future. When travelling he would often be reluctant to take his way to his lonely home—if indeed a hotel can be called a home. When in London he would linger and linger; the loneliness of his home made it in a degree a prison house. But all that while, night by night and year by year, he would stick to his purpose of saving himself for his work—at any cost to himself in the shape of loss of pleasure, of any form of self-abnegation.

Thus it was that through those last seven years I saw less of his private life than I had hitherto done. My work became to save him all I could. Of course each day during working months, each night—except at holiday times—I would see him for hours; and our relations were always the same. But the opportunities were different. Seldom now were there the old long meetings when occasion was full of chances for self-development, for self-illumination; when idea leads on idea till presently the secret chambers of the soul are made manifest. Seldom did one gather the half-formed thoughts and purposes which tell so much of the inner working of the mind. It was, of course, in part that hopes and purposes belonged to an earlier age. There is more life and spring in intentions that have illimitable possibilities than in those that are manifestly bounded, if not cramped, by existing and adverse facts. But the effect was the same. The man, wearied by long toil and more or less deprived by age and health of the spurs of ambition, shrank somewhat into himself.

This book is no mere panegyric; it is not intended to be. For my own part, my love and admiration for Irving were such that nothing I could tell to others—nothing that I can recall to myself—could lessen his worth. I only wish that, so far as I can achieve it, others now and hereafter may see him with my eyes. For well I know that if they do, his memory shall not lack. He was a man with all a man’s weaknesses and mutabilities as well as a man’s strong qualities. Had he not had in his own nature all the qualities of natural man how could he have for close on half a century embodied such forces—general and distinctive—in such a long series of histrionic characters whose fidelity to natural type became famous. I have the feeling strong upon me that the more Irving’s inner life is known, the better he must stand in the minds and hearts of all to whom his name, his work, and his fame are of interest.

The year 1899 was so overwhelmingly busy a one for him that he had little time to think. But the next year, despite the extraordinary success which attended his work, he began to feel the loss of his own personal sway over the destinies of the Lyceum. There was in truth no need for worrying. The work of that year made for the time an extraordinary change in his fortunes. In the short season of fifteen weeks at the Lyceum the gross receipts exceeded twenty-eight thousand pounds. Five weeks’ tour in the Provinces realised over eleven thousand pounds. And the tour in America of twenty-nine weeks reached the amazing total of over half a million dollars. To be exact $537,154.25. The exchange value in which all our American tour calculations were made was $4.84 per £1. So that the receipts become in British money £110,982 4s. 9d.—leaving a net profit of over thirty-two thousand pounds.

But the feeling of disappointment was not to be soothed by material success. Money, except as a means to an end, never appealed to Irving. We knew afterwards that the bitterness that then came upon him, and which lasted in lessening degree for some three years, was due in the main to his surely fading health. To him any form of lingering ill-health was a novelty. All his life up till then he had been amazingly strong. Not till after he was sixty did he know what it was to have toothache in ever so small a degree. I do not think that he ever knew at all what a headache was like. To such a man, and specially to one who has been in the habit of taxing himself to the full of his strength, restriction of effort from any cause brings a sense of inferiority. So far as I can estimate it, for he never hinted at it much less put it in words, Irving’s tinge of bitterness was a sort of protest against Fate. Certainly he never visited it on any of those around him. Indeed, in any other man it would hardly have been noticeable; but Irving’s nature was so sweet, and he was so really thoughtful for his fellow workers of all classes, that anything which clouded it was a concern to all.

As his health grew worse the bitterness began to pass away; and for the last two years of his life his nature, softened however to a new tenderness, went back to its old dignified calm.