III

In the autumn of that year, 1877, Irving again visited Dublin, opening in Hamlet on Monday, November 19. The year’s work had smoothed and rounded his impersonation, and to my mind, improved even upon its excellence. I venture to quote again some sentences from my own criticism upon it as the evidence of an independent and sincere contemporary opinion. In the year that had passed not the public only had learned something—much; he too had learned also, even of his own instinctive ideas—up to then not wholly conscious. We all had learned, acting and reacting on each other. We had followed him. He, in turn, encouraged and aided by the thought as well as the sympathy of others and feeling justified in further advance, had let his own ideas grow, widening to all the points of the intellectual compass and growing higher and deeper than had been possible to his unaided efforts. For original thought must, after all, be in part experimental and tentative. It is in the consensus of many varying ideas, guesses and experiences—reachings out of groping intelligences into the presently dark unknown—that the throbbing heart of true wisdom is to be found. In my criticism I said:

“Mr. Irving has not slackened in his study of Hamlet, and the consequence is an advance. All the little fleeting subtleties of thought and expression which arise from time to time under slightly different circumstances have been fixed and repeated till they have formed an additional net of completeness round the whole character. To the actor, art is as necessary as genius, for it is only when the flashes of genius evoked by occasion have been studied as facts to be repeated, that a worthy reproduction of effect is possible.... Hamlet, as Mr. Irving now acts it, is the wild, fitful, irresolute, mystic, melancholy prince that we know in the play; but given with a sad, picturesque gracefulness which is the actor’s special gift.... In his most passionate moments with Ophelia, even in the violence of his rage, he never loses that sense of distance—of a gulf fixed—of that acknowledgment of the unseen which is his unconscious testimony to her unspotted purity....”

The lesson conveyed to me by his acting of which the above is the expression was put by him into words in his Preface to the edition of Diderot’s Paradox of Acting, translated by Walter Pollock and published in 1883, six years after he had been practising the art by which he taught and illuminated the minds of others.

During this engagement Irving played Richard III., and his wonderful acting satisfied all the hopes aroused by sample given in his Reading at the University. For myself I can say truly that I sat all the evening in a positive quiver of intellectual delight. His conception and impersonation of the part were so “subtle, complete, and masterly”—these were the terms I used in my criticism written that night—that it seemed to me the power of acting could go no further; that it had reached the limit of human power. Most certainly it raised him still higher in public esteem. Its memory being still with me, I could fully appreciate the power and fineness of Tennyson’s criticism which I heard long afterwards. When the poet had seen the piece he said to Irving:

“Where did you get that Plantagenet look?”