II

The first season made great interest for the public. It was all fairly new to me, for except when I had been present at the first night of Wills’s Medea played by Mrs. Crowe (Miss Kate Bateman) in July 1872 and had seen Irving in The Lyons Mail in 1877 and had been at the performance and rehearsal of Vanderdecken in 1878, I had not been into the theatre till I came officially. As yet I knew nothing at all of the audiences, from the management point of view. I soon found an element which had only anything like a parallel in the enthusiasm of the University in Dublin. Here was an audience that believed in the actor whom they had come to see; who took his success as much to heart as though it had been their own; whose cheers and applause—whose very presence—was a stimulant and a help to artistic effort.

This was the audience that he had won—had made; and I myself, as a neophite, was in full sympathy with them. With such an audience an artist can go far; and in such circumstances there seems nothing that is not possible on the hither side of life and health. The physicists tell us that it is a law of nature that there must be two forces to make impact; that the anvil has to do its work as well as the hammer. And it is a distinguishing difference between scientific and other laws that the former has no exceptions. So it is in the world of the theatre. Without an audience in sympathy no actor can do his best. Nay more, he should have the assurance of approval, or else sustained effort at high pitch becomes impossible. Some people often think, and sometimes say, that an actor’s love of applause is due to a craving vanity. This may be in part true, and may even be wholly true in many cases; but those who know the stage and its needs and difficulties, its helps and thwarting checks, learn to dread a too prolonged stillness. The want of echoing sympathy embarrasses the player. For my own part, having learned to understand their motives, to sympathise with their aims, and to recognise their difficulties, I can understand the basic wisdom of George Frederick Cook when on the Liverpool stage he stopped in the middle of a tragic part and coming down to the footlights said to the audience:

“Ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t applaud I can’t act!”

It was from Irving I heard the story; and he certainly understood and felt with that actor of the old days. If the members of any audience understood how much better value they would get for their money—to put the matter on its lowest basis—when they show appreciation of the actor’s efforts, they would certainly now and again signify the fullest recognition of his endeavour.

This “Lyceum audience,” whose qualities endeared them to me from that first night, December 30, 1878, became for twenty-four years of my own experience a quantity to be counted on. Nay more, for when the Lyceum came as a theatre to an end, the audience followed Irving to Drury Lane. They or their successors in title were present on that last night of his season, June 10, 1905, that memorable night when he said farewell, not knowing that it would be the last time, except one benefit performance, he should ever appear in London as a player.