The English Stage Part 7

A love-scene was required in the play, as there were a young man and a girl amongst its characters. Their conversation--apart from certain pretty archaic touches which continue to delight me--is a sort of subtle intellectual game. Each seizes upon some one word in the last phrase of the other, works it up into a new phrase and darts it back. Thus the dialogue is bandied about to and fro, the great thing being to keep it up.

Sometimes, however, it falls to the ground. "I don't know what to say,"

Dorothy's answer to her lover's proposal, seems to suggest that the author himself is in a difficulty. This Dorothy is a thoroughly ingenuous young person, navely outspoken to the point of silliness. She is not sure of being in love, and discusses the subject like a question of conscience with him whose interest in it is most at stake. "These are my feelings,"

she tells him. "Is this love or is it not?" This self-a.n.a.lysing _ingenue_ is the only woman's character in the whole of Gilbert's dramatic work.

Before writing _Engaged_, some such thoughts as these must have pa.s.sed through his mind. "I shall turn out the human soul like a bag and show its lining instead of its cover. It will be very ugly, but all the more amusing. What does a man want when he puts aside all hypocrisy and all regard for social conventions, and gives the rein to his appet.i.tes and instincts?--To eat, to drink, to sleep, to be at his ease; to see all those die off from whom legacies are to be expected; to win, honourably or otherwise, every pretty woman who comes across his path. And what does a woman want?--To s.h.i.+ne in society, to have fine dresses, to be admired, to marry a man who may give her a good position in the world. What is the meeting-point of the feelings of both man and woman?--The greed for money wherewith to buy the rest.

"My _dramatis personae_ shall be neither good nor bad, they shall be navely and absolutely selfish,--their selfishness shown clearly, but in the thousand shades which civilisation has imparted to characters; it shall be expressed not bluntly but in the thousand shades which well-bred people bring into the utterance of fine sentiments and correct commonplaces. They shall lack only the moral sense; of this organ I shall deprive them as neatly and gently as possible. _Fiance_ and _fiancee_, father and daughter, friend and friend, shall become enemies the moment their interests clash; the moment their interests agree they shall clasp hands and kiss again as before. Three couples will perform these evolutions and manoeuvres before the audience, and the young girls will change their lovers as complacently as they would their partners in a quadrille. In a few minutes Cheviot Hill will propose to three different women; within the same s.p.a.ce of time Simperson will throw his daughter at the head of Cheviot Hill, and drive his intending son-in-law to suicide.

Belvonny will expend all his energies in the first half of a scene in denying a certain fact, and during the second half of it will make no less desperate efforts to establish this fact. Thus will the changeableness of men be demonstrated at the same time as their egoism. These puppets are monsters and these monsters puppets: my audience will not need to be told that '_Il faut se hater d'en rire de peur d'etre oblige d'en pleurer_.'"

So cruel a farce had never been seen. The public was accustomed in farces to two or three comic characters, to satire at the expense of two or three ridiculous types. Here was a caricature of all mankind. The spectators laughed, but the jest was too bitter for their palate. It was at once too unreal and too true. Such cynical outspokenness might mark the conversation of the inhabitants of some dreamland. But it was incongruous where people travelled by railway and read the daily paper. Gilbert had but to transfer his puppets to the enchanted region where he located his _Palace of Truth_ for the big children who composed the public to accept them with glee.

The _Palace of Truth_ is a pleasant piece based on the same notions of psychology as _Engaged_, but the satire is less bitter and less obvious.

Here there is no mistake possible. Before seeing the characters as they really are, we have seen them playing every role in the human comedy. In the second act the faithful husband flirts indiscriminately to every side of him; the devoted girl-friend is a machiavelian coquette; the ardent lover, so generous of madrigals and sighs, is a vain and selfish c.o.xcomb; the _ingenue_, chaste and correct almost to the point of coldness, is beyond herself with love; the honey-lipped courtier becomes candid and insolent to all the world; finally, the most amusing metamorphosis of all, the professional boor, who has achieved notoriety by his merciless criticisms, is the only person sincerely content with his life. Alceste has changed skins with Philinthe.

In this world of fantasy, Gilbert was at last thoroughly at home. He experimented without restraint, like those physiologists who practise upon animals, depriving this one of viscera, that one of a cerebral lobe, a third of some nerve essential to motion. His _Creatures of Impulse_ do everything that comes into their heads, obeying every dictate of their instincts. In the case of the inhabitants of the _Palace of Truth_, their language is sincere enough, it is their manner that is hypocritical. The denizens of fairyland in _The Wicked World_ are unacquainted with love; they form a kind of puritanical society up in the clouds. Once they are made to know the sentiment which they have lacked, every evil springs from the Pandora's box. Selene pa.s.ses through every stage of the malady. Joy, ecstasy, absolute security,--the celestial period; then vague disquietude, anxiety, with fierce jealousy on their heels; then anger, quarrels, threats of vengeance, finally, profound humiliation. The mocker had it all his own way, hitting to right and to left. On the one side, at the colourlessness, the shabbiness, the squalid monotony of virtue; on the other, at the enervating and degrading effects of vice.

But Gilbert never soared so high either in his philosophy or in his art as in _Pygmalion and Galatea_. This was one of the great successes of the Haymarket in 1871 and 1872. Galatea was impersonated by Madge Robertson, the young sister of the dramatist, then in the flower of her twenty-second year; and Kendal, whose wife she was soon to be, was Pygmalion. Miss Robertson's grace of person, her pure and n.o.ble diction, were aids to success, though it was not to them that success was due. Even had the piece fallen quite flat, however, I should still give it a place above all the other productions of the author.

I know, of course, what captious critics have had to say on the subject.

Nothing is easier, indeed, than to pull to pieces the figure of Galatea; to show how far it is from plausibility; how inconsistent Gilbert was in his composition of it; to show how, almost in the same breath, she asks the most childish, almost imbecile, questions, and indulges in an a.n.a.lysis of her emotions as subtle as Joubert's or Amiel's; how this absolutely ignorant creature, who asks whether the room in which she comes to life is the world, has yet the faculty of explaining the stages of consciousness through which she has pa.s.sed on her way to full existence; how she can distinguish between an original and a copy, and be jealous at another's having sat as a model for her features, although she does not know the difference between a man and a woman.

Then, again, there is her characterisation of a soldier, when she has the meaning of the word explained to her, as a "hired a.s.sa.s.sin." Her comprehension of these two words "a.s.sa.s.sin" and "hired" presuppose some rudimentary knowledge of the princ.i.p.al social inst.i.tutions which affect the preservation of life, as well as of penalties, and salaries, and of the circulation of money and of the economic laws which it obeys. The soldier, she is told, attacks only the strong. That may be so; still war, she insists, is cruel. As for hunting, it is cowardly. All these reflections and comparisons, all this reasoning in a brain of marble which could not think, which did not exist, a few hours before!

These examples might be multiplied, but to no end. All such criticisms are vain, because they a.s.sume our acceptance of a general thesis more improbable than all the minor ones which it involves. No statue ever did come to life, but if one were to, it would find itself in the position of a newborn child. Before learning to moralise, it would first have to learn how to walk and how to talk; its first movement would be a tumble, its first utterance inarticulate: whoever submits such myths to this kind of critical examination is to be sincerely pitied, for whether he realise it or no he thus deprives himself of whatever of poetry or of suggestiveness, of charm, or of profundity, they may contain.

For Gilbert the fable of Galatea, of the statue come to life, was something more than it had ever been either for artist or man of thought: it offered a form to that dream by which he was haunted, a frame for that favourite picture he had so often sketched out already--the woman whose heart is a _tabula rasa_, whose mind is an instrument that has never been used, but is perfected and ready for use, who for the expression of her unsophisticated feelings has all the resources of intelligence and language at her command. What _we_ learn during the toilsome schooling of twenty or thirty years _she_ apprehends at a glance, and it would seem that she is the better able to judge of life in that she sees it reflected, as it were, in a single picture suddenly unveiled.

Mr. Gilbert's Pygmalion is married to a woman whom he loves, and who sits to him as a model. He is not in love with the statue at the outset. He is jealous, however,--and in this conception the author is more Greek than the Greeks themselves,--of the G.o.ds, in that they alone have the power of giving life. _He_ is capable only of producing this inanimate figure. As for death, any common murderer can achieve that better than he. It is not Venus who gives life to Galatea to satisfy mere l.u.s.t; it is Diana, whose priestess Cynisca he had taken from her, and who avenges herself by this cruel gift, whilst humbling at the same time the pride of the sons of Prometheus. Thus it comes that Pygmalion's feeling upon first noting the aspect of the living statue is not rapture but wonder, a sort of religious awe, the exaltation of a lofty and intellectual paternity. It is the gradual pa.s.sage from this feeling to that of love which const.i.tutes the life and, I may add, the beauty of this scene. You can guess what is the first question of Galatea, "Who am I?"--"A woman." "And you, are you also a woman?"--"No, I am a man." "What, then, is a man?" Upon this the pit would burst out in a roar of laughter which must have hurt the ears of the author. How few of those who laughed were qualified to appreciate Pygmalion's reply--

"A being strongly framed, To wait on woman, and protect her from All ills that strength and courage can avert; To work and toil for her, that she may rest; To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh; To fight and die for her, that she may live!"

Galatea learns the right which another woman possesses to Pygmalion, the thousand shackles by which men are content to limit their slender liberty and to diminish their fugitive enjoyments. The evening comes, and with it sleep. She thinks she is turning again to stone, then she dreams, and then she sees the light once more. But is life the dream or is the dream life?

She asks Myrine, Pygmalion's sister, for an explanation of all these things. Myrine replies--

_Myrine_: "Once every day this death occurs to us, Till thou and I and all who dwell on earth Shall sleep to wake no more!"

_Galatea_: (_Horrified, takes Myrine's hand_) "To wake no more?"

_Pygmalion_: "That time must come, may be, not yet awhile, Still it must come, and we shall all return To the cold earth from which we quarried thee."

_Galatea_: "See how the promises of newborn life Fade from the bright life-picture one by one!

Love for Pygmalion--a blighting sin, _His_ love a shame that he must hide away.

Sleep, stone-like, senseless sleep, our natural state, And life a pa.s.sing vision born thereof, From which we wake to native senselessness!

How the bright promises fade one by one!"

At this point the idea reaches its full expression. The scenes written for old Buckstone, as an Athenian dilettante who judges statues by their weight; his dialogue with Galatea, in which the piece returns to the old groove of fun and folly and sinks almost to the level of burlesque, and finally, the domestic drama in which Pygmalion and Cynisca are concerned, and then the renunciation of self which moves Galatea to become once again the lifeless statue, that she may thus bring back peace and happiness to those upon whom she had entailed trouble and disunion: all this adds but little to the value of the piece, though it cannot be said to spoil it. It remains one of the most delicate, graceful, and ingenious of modern English plays.

Gilbert had felt the need more than once of providing some sort of musical accompaniment for his paradoxical fantasies, for is not music the natural background to the land of dreams? This accompaniment seemed to soften the outlines of his thought and to temper the bitterness of his satire. The writer had experimented first with the music of his own verses, but this was not a success. Why then should he not secure the aid of real music by a musician? He did so in _Trial by Jury_, a very amusing one-act piece, suggested in part by his joyous reminiscences of Liverpool. It was a little piece, but it had a big success. Then came the long series of comic operas which have rendered the Gilbert and Sullivan combination as popular in England as that of Meilhac and Halevy with Offenbach was with us during the last ten years of the Empire. The English owe a debt of grat.i.tude to their compatriots for having dethroned burlesque and operetta, two imports from France which competed with the national manufacture. So far so well, but I doubt whether the native comic opera will survive its originators.

Already they are out of fas.h.i.+on.

For my part, I never yawned so much as I did at _Princess Ida_, unless it was at _Patience_. The first is a parody of the unsuccessful work of Tennyson, which bears the similar t.i.tle _The Princess_, and is a satire upon the higher education of women; the second is a parody of the aesthetic movement. In _Iolanthe_ I saw a Lord Chancellor who has been married to a fairy come at midnight to a spot in Westminster, with his colleagues of the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords, all dressed in their scarlet and ermine, and to sing (and dance) a judicial sentence (expressed in the correct legal phraseology), whilst the s.h.i.+ning face of Big Ben lit up the background and a grenadier on guard paced up and down before Whitehall.

In _The Pirates of Penzance_, and in _Pinafore_, mankind seems to be walking on its head. Everything happens contrariwise. The fun consists in making everyone say and do exactly the opposite of what might be expected from them, considering their character and profession. Here, briefly, is the plot of the _Pirates_. Frederic's nurse was charged by his parents to make him an apprentice to a pilot, but, being deaf, she had misunderstood and had handed him over to a pirate. The young man fulfilled his contract of apprentices.h.i.+p, which provided for a certain number of years. This duty accomplished, it remains for him only to accomplish his duty as a citizen of proceeding to the extermination of his ex-companions. He has set himself ardently to this when the pirate chief points out to him that by the terms of his indenture he is not to be free until his birthday shall have come round a certain specified number of times. Now Frederic was born on the 29th of February in leap year! He has therefore many long years still to serve with the pirates. An outlaw's devotion to strict legality--this may be said to be the idea, which is worked out in the production with a methodical determination to overlook no single aspect of the question, the characters being dealt with like so many briefs. Would you have supposed that there would be material enough in this to furnish forth three hours' entertainment? But the author was justified by the result.

Gilbert never quite succeeded in shaking off the dust of Chancery Lane and Lincoln's Inn. In many respects he may be said to have remained a lawyer all his life: by his professional scepticism, by the variety of his dialectical resources, by his p.r.o.neness to subtle distinctions and interpretations, by his cleverness in setting up appearances against realities, and words against ideas, but above all, by his curious faculty for losing good cases and winning bad ones.

CHAPTER VI

Shakespeare again--From Macready to Irving; Phelps, Fechter, Ryder, Adelaide Neilson--Irving's _Debut_--His Career in the Provinces, and Visit to Paris--The Role of Digby Grant--The Role of Matthias--The Production of _Hamlet_--Successive Triumphs--Irving as Stage Manager--As an Editor of Shakespeare--His Defects as an Actor--Too great for some of his Parts--As a Writer and Lecturer; his Theory of Art--Sir Henry Irving, Head of his Profession.

What became of the "legitimate" drama the while Robertson busied himself with his attempts to bring comedy into the domain of reality, and Gilbert worked away at the exploiting of his fancy? In a preceding chapter I have shown to what a depth of degradation it had fallen towards 1850. The old privileged theatres which had possessed the monopoly of it had abandoned it, and when it became public property the new theatres scorned to take it up. The two little Batemans, aged six and eight, piqued in _Richard III._ the curiosity of an unsophisticated, uneducated public, which was the readier to enjoy these childish exhibitions in that it was itself childish in its literary tastes. These little girls were symbols of a "Shakespeare Made Easy." An actor named Brooke made things still worse; with him it was a case of Shakespeare made ridiculous. He was laughed at up till the day which brought the news of his "Hero"-like end on a s.h.i.+p which was taking him to America, and which was wrecked; the poor tragedian had come upon real tragedy for the first time, in the hour of his death. From 1850 to 1860 the permanent home of Shakespeare was the theatre of Sadler's Wells at Islington. Imagine Corneille exiled to the _Bouffes du Nord_, or, further still, to the _Theatre de Belleville_!

Phelps, whose undertaking it was, was not a great actor, but he was a good actor. He had, besides, the sacred fire, the key to certain roles which up till then had been left to inferior performers, but which suited his personality, as he had the discrimination to perceive. They say his Bottom was a masterpiece of innocuous fatuity and conscientious blundering,--that crazy preoccupation of a workman, one sometimes encounters, with matters beyond the scope of his intelligence. In _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, the fantastic parts were represented behind a curtain of gauze, which threw between the spectator and the scene a faint mist producing the illusion of the vagueness and indistinctness of a dream.[11] Kean and Macready had "popularised" Shakespeare, as had Garrick and Kemble before them, to the best of their ability; they tried to extract from all his plays every bit of the melodrama therein contained. Phelps, as it seems to me, brought out another and n.o.bler distinctive quality--that of _poemes en action_. This does no small credit to the intelligence of a Shakespearian actor.

The Frenchman, Fechter, came next. The same Fechter who, with Madame Roche in _La Dame aux Camelias_, set our mothers weeping, brought back Shakespeare in triumph to the Princess's and to the Lyceum. In _Macbeth_, he was only middling; but while they say his _Oth.e.l.lo_ was the worst imaginable, his _Hamlet_, according to the same critics, could not be surpa.s.sed. He brought to light, indeed, an aspect of this great role which had been ignored. On the evening of his last performance of it, Macready, taking from him Hamlet's velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some emotion, Horatio's words--"Adieu, dear Prince!" and added, "It seems to me that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness, humanity, and poetry in the character." Fechter found out traits which had escaped his predecessors. He imparted grace and elegance to the tranquil and pleasing parts of the action--a refined intellectual elegance proper to a prince who had pa.s.sed through the University of Wittemberg. The advice of Hamlet to the players--the actor's Ten Commandments--he rendered with much art and spirit.

After Fechter there came a new, but only a partial eclipse. Beginners became old stagers and appeared in princ.i.p.al roles. Between 1870 and 1875 I saw Ryder, whose voice varied in tone from that of an organ to that of a hunting-horn, on several occasions, notably in _Anthony and Cleopatra_, with Miss Wallis, who had not the beauty, and could not suggest the charm, one ascribes to a woman for whom an empire were well lost. I recall, too, the countenance, with its delicately tragic aspect, of Adelaide Neilson, who shook with pa.s.sion from top to toe, and shrieked and writhed, and yet kept her good looks. She met with a sudden death at Pre-Catelan,--it was a gla.s.s of milk that killed her within two hours; and in London they say that the proprietor of the hotel in which she was stopping was inhuman enough to threaten to thrust her out in her agony upon the streets.

He who was to bring back Shakespeare, and to make of him the most flouris.h.i.+ng and most warmly applauded of dramatic writers, had already been long upon the stage,--he was already an actor of repute even; but the Shakespearian revival to which I allude dates from October 31, 1874. It was then that Henry Irving played Hamlet for the first time at the Lyceum.

There was an inst.i.tution in the City, at one time frequented by amateurs of the drama, which was known as the City Elocution Cla.s.s. A certain Mr.

Henry Thomas conducted it according to the principle of mutual instruction a.s.sociated with the name of Pestalozzi. As soon as each student had recited his piece, his colleagues had their say upon his delivery of it, pointing out any faults they discovered in his manner of giving it out, in his p.r.o.nunciation, accent, or emphasis; the master summed up these criticisms and p.r.o.nounced his own judgment upon the subject. From time to time they gave public performances.

It was at one of these that there appeared one evening--in 1853--a strange-looking and attractive youth. His eyes, intelligent and full of fire, lit up a face whose features were delicate as a woman's. He wore a jacket of the old-fas.h.i.+oned cut and a great white collar. His long raven locks covered his neck and reached even to his shoulders.

He was then fourteen years old, and was employed in the office of an East India merchant. His early childhood had been spent in an out-of-the-way corner of Somerset, amongst sailors and miners. The library of the house in which he lived consisted of only three books, which he devoured--the Bible, _Don Quixote_, and a collection of old ballads. From these Western expanses, where the imaginative soul of the Celt has left something of its reveries, he had been transported when eleven to a mean little house in London, in one of those central districts which swarm and overflow like very ant-hills of humanity.

Two years of school-life ensued; then his commercial apprentices.h.i.+p, the stereotyped office-life. How was it that under these conditions Henry Irving's vocation for the theatre came out? He will tell us the story some day, perhaps, and tell it admirably. This, at least, is known, that his vocation, once it had declared itself, was distinct, absolute, not to be shaken. We have before us one of those rare careers which are so perfectly ordered towards the accomplishment of some end by a resolute and inflexible will, that there is to be found in them no single wasted minute or ill-directed endeavour.

Young Irving frequented Phelps' theatre, Sadler's Wells; an old actor who belonged to it, David Hoskyns, gave him lessons, and on going off to Australia left him a letter of recommendation with the address blank.

Phelps would have given him an engagement, but the young aspirant deemed himself too unworthy, and was anxious to commence his novitiate in the provinces. Doubtless he had an inkling already of the truth he expressed pithily at a later period: "The learning how to do a thing is the doing of it,"--one of the most thoroughly English aphorisms ever given out in England. Thus it was that the bills of the Lyceum at Manchester, on September 26, 1856, contained the name of Henry Irving, who was to play the role of the Duke of Orleans in Lord Lytton's _Richelieu_. Thence he proceeded to Edinburgh, and in the next three years he played a hundred and twenty-eight parts. On September 24, 1859, he made his _debut_ in London at the Princess's, in an adaptation of the _Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_. His part was limited to six lines. What was he to do? Repeat those lines evening after evening till he got addled? He preferred to break off his engagement. But before returning to the provinces he gave two lectures at Crosby Hall, which drew from the _Daily Telegraph_ and the _Standard_ the prediction that he would have a fine career. Then came seven years of study and of growing success in Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool theatres. And then, the creation of a role in one of Boucicault's dramas having brought him into greater prominence, he at last set his foot firmly on the stage of the St. James's, whence he pa.s.sed first to the Queen's, later to the Vaudeville, and finally to the Lyceum.

More than one Parisian must remember the posters with which the actor Sothern covered all our walls during the Exhibition of 1867, that haunting vision of Lord Dundreary with his long frock-coat, his hat slightly tilted over his forehead, and his gla.s.s fixed in his eye. In the second, perhaps it would be more correct to say the third, rank of this company which visited us, hid Henry Irving.

There are often two distinct phases of success. The first is that during which the conquest of one's professional brethren is achieved. Now, one's professional brethren maintain silence, sometimes with singular unanimity, upon the talents they have discovered, and thus r.e.t.a.r.d that second period during which the greater and ultimate public success is at length attained. Irving was still in the first phase when he played Digby Grand in James Albery's _Two Roses_. Digby Grand is an impecunious gentleman who accepts alms with an air of conferring favours,--a singular blend of pride and baseness, brazen-faced, insolent, a liar and a blackguard. The opening scene of the piece, in which he induces a landlady who has been pressing him for rent to offer him a loan of twenty pounds, is so brilliantly carried through, that it compels one to compare it with the scene of Don Juan and M. Dimanche. But how far is all the rest of it from fulfilling the promise of this beginning! From this out we have nothing but a tumult of words, a confusion of _jeux de scenes_, interrupted here and there by silly _preciosites_ which are intended to serve as aphorisms.

However, the vogue of the piece was inexhaustible, and such was the taste of the public, that two or three other actors attracted their attention more than Irving. On the occasion of the two hundred and ninety-first performance of _The Two Roses_, he recited "The Dream of Eugene Aram," and his delivery of it was a revelation. In it, indeed, the scope of the actor's art was immensely widened--what he actually expressed in his recital was nothing to what he was able to suggest. With the whole province of life for his subject, what was most impressive was the glimpse beyond, into the region of the unseen and the unknown.

Irving was able not only to impart more meaning to his words than they expressed in themselves, but he was addicted even to making them subservient to his own ideas, and of making the public accept his conception in the face of a text which was in flat contradiction with it.

At this critical moment of his career a happy chance brought to him the very piece of all others calculated to bring out his gifts--a piece which should enable him to depict the wonderful and awful dualism of thought and language, of a man's outward aspect and his soul within,--this was _The Bells_, an almost literal translation of Erckmann and Chatrian's _Polish Jew_. Irving bought the MS. and offered it to his manager, Bateman, who tried it as a last chance. Irving acted Matthias, and in one evening the actor of talent became the actor of genius. Clement Scott hurried to his newspaper, _The Daily Telegraph_, and wrote so enthusiastic an account of the performance that next morning the editor chaffed him on the subject, and wanted to know who this Irving might be. In an article in the _Times_, John Oxenford a.n.a.lysed with much penetration that suggestive power of the actor, and that striking dualism of which I have spoken. Matthias, for all that idyllic existence in which everything succeeded with him and smiled upon him, seemed, said Oxenford, to wear the aspect of one living in a world of terrors, where all was torture and impending destruction. The horrors of the second and third acts would not have been intelligible, and would have missed their effect, if they had not been foreshadowed in the first by the glances, the tremors, the lapses into silence, the indescribable atmosphere of fatefulness which seemed, under the bright morning suns.h.i.+ne, to envelop the murderer as with a shroud. The actor was to give proof of many other gifts, to traverse triumphantly every province of his art in the course of his splendid career, but it was by his psychological suggestiveness, by his engendering of fear, both physical and mental, that he won his first great theatrical victory.

_The Bells_ was succeeded by _Charles I._, by Wills. From the Alsatian inn-keeper to Charles Stuart was a big jump. Irving managed it without apparent effort.

It was as though the portrait by Van Dyck had stepped down from its frame--this stately figure with its cold and lofty aspect, the look of sadness in the eyes, the lips smiling bitterly under the thin moustache, the pale veined forehead that bore the seal of destiny. I seem still to see him, now playing with his children on the gra.s.s slopes of Hampton Court, now crus.h.i.+ng Cromwell with his kingly scorn. That phrase of his--"Who's this rude gentleman?" still rings in my ears. The picture of Charles clasping little Henriette and her younger brother in his arms in the heartbreaking farewell scene at the close is still before my eyes....