In a broad and comprehensive way his position on the English stage has been defined above. After witnessing his impersonations of Louis XI. and Shylock, some conclusions may be drawn as to his genius and his methods.
There is nothing phenomenal or meteoric about this new actor. Henry Irving is not what Diderot would have us believe a great actor should be, namely, a man without sensibility. Diderot said that sensibility was organic weakness; that it crippled the intelligence, rendering acting alternately warm and cold; and that the great actor should have penetration, without any sensibility whatever. But Talma called sensibility the faculty of exaltation which shakes an actor’s very soul and which enables him to enter into the most tragic situations and the most terrible of passions as if they were his own. In the discussion of these conflicting theories Henry Irving has always taken Talma’s view. He comes nearer realizing Diderot’s ideal of greatness than any other actor of whom we have record.
His imagination is picturesque almost to the verge of sublimity. His fancy is lively and apparently inexhaustible. When he unrolls before us the varied-colored robe of life we look in vain to find one color missing. It is a fancy that is not only vivid, but that is most poetic. How touching is that return of Shylock to his lonely home, walking wearily over the deserted bridge,—the bridge that echoed only a moment before to the shouts and laughter of the merry maskers! The old man walks to the house from which his daughter has fled, knocks twice at the door, and looks up patiently and expectantly towards the casement. Then the curtain falls. The people who do not applaud such a tender touch as this should stop going to the theatre.
In saying that Irving is realistic, that word is not used in its grosser sense. Realism should be the union of the ideal and the true. There may be truth in Zola’s realism, but there is no ideality; for ideality rejects the trivial, the vulgar, the earthly, and grasps the essence. There may be ideality in Mrs. Burnett’s novels, but sentiment is substituted for truth. The realism of Howells, for instance, is a union of the ideal and the true. Irving’s ideals are in harmony with the realistic tendency of literary thought, because they are drawn from humanity, and not from Olympus. His are human, not heroic, ideals. His Louis XI. is as true to nature as any impersonation can be; and yet it is ideal, inasmuch as the essence of the character is incorporated in action, and the baseness, the cruelty, the bigotry, of the king are not repugnant. Here is the union of the ideal and the true. If a man like Zola were playing Louis XI. he would shock and disgust us by a portrayal not essential, but of superficial grossness.