There is something about the man which immediately arrests attention; not only his face and his carriage, but his manner and conversation are different from the ordinary. He is the kind of man that any one meeting for the first time would wish to know more about, the kind of man of whom every one would inquire, “Who is he?” if his face were not so well known in the illustrated papers. He could not pass unnoticed anywhere. But after all it is not this personality entirely that has made his fame, for there are people who dislike it as much as others admire it; but as he himself says, any success he has attained is due to the capacity for taking pains.
That Irving’s success has been great no one can deny. His reign at the Lyceum was remarkable in every way. He acted Shakespeare’s plays until he made them the fashion. He employed great artists, musicians, and a host of smaller fry to give him of their best. He produced wondrous stage pictures—he engaged a good company, and one and all must own he was the greatest actor-manager of the last quarter of the last century. Not only England but the world at large owes him a debt of gratitude. With him mere money-making has been a secondary consideration, and this, coupled with his unfailing generosity, has always kept him comparatively a poor man. No one in distress has ever appealed to him in vain. He has not only given money, but time and sympathy, to those less fortunate than himself, and Henry Irving’s list of charitable deeds is endless. But for this he would never have had to leave the Lyceum, a theatre with which his name was associated for so many years.
When Irving opened Drury Lane at Easter, 1903, with _Dante_ he had an ovation such as probably no man has ever received from an audience before. It was a pouring wet night; the rain descended in torrents, but the faithful pittites were there to welcome the popular favourite on his return from America. It so chanced that the audience were entering the Opera House next door at the same moment, and this, combined with the rain, which did not allow people to descend from their carriages before they reached the theatre doors, made the traffic chaotic. I only managed to reach my stall a second before the house was plunged in darkness and the curtain rose.