He did _not_ wear the
miniature of his father obtrusively round his neck! His attitude was one
which I have seen in a common little illumination to the "Reciter,"
compiled by Dr. Pinches (Henry Irving's old schoolmaster). Yet how right
to have taken it, to have been indifferent to its humble origin! Nothing
could have been better when translated into life by Irving's genius.
The hair looked blue-black, like the plumage of a crow, the eyes
burning--two fires veiled as yet by melancholy. But the appearance of
the man was not single, straight or obvious, as it is when I describe
it--any more than his passions throughout the play were. I only remember
one moment when his intensity concentrated itself in a straightforward,
unmistakable emotion, without side-current or back-water. It was when he
said:
"The play's the thing
With which to catch the conscience of the King."
and, as the curtain came down, was seen to be writing madly on his
tablets against one of the pillars.
"Oh, God, that I were a writer!" I paraphrase Beatrice with all my
heart. Surely a _writer_ could not string words together about Henry
Irving's Hamlet and say _nothing, nothing_.
"We must start this play a living thing," he used to say at rehearsals,
and he worked until the skin grew tight over his face, until he became
livid with fatigue, yet still beautiful, to get the opening lines said
with individuality, suggestiveness, speed, and power.
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