ell-ringer
tenny Green
hmenry Irving and the Victorian Theatre ,adeleine Bingham (Allen and Unwin t7.50) !II his arrangements with destiny, Henry :tying was doubly unfortunate. Had he 1 :rrived and departed a few years later than ',:e did, the emergent cinematograph would aye preserved his art for later generations It did for men like Du Maurier and 4 eerbohm Tree. Instead, Irving died in 12°S, leaving about his reputation a shadow a doubt. That was the first of his misl°ttunes, and it was compounded by his ,,Seeond. In the absence of tangible proof, v,I3sterity has no choice but to accept the el„reumstantial evidence, and it so happens 'flat Irving was unlucky enough to invite the Wustath and derision of the one great critic of t'le, age whose verdicts interest posterity ,,tIluay. Rarely can one reviewer have poured ;11 to one man's head so vast a quantity of 11,1IuPeration as Shaw poured on Irving's, in brief period from 1895-8 when the 9:11.urday Review was sending the former to rite about the latter. up If We wish to take Irving's true measure, ,.;se Inight be wise to halve Shaw's contempt, n-t've over the decimal point of his derision Place to the left, and then halve the f:silit. For Shaw had ulterior though pera`ctlY honourable motives in his campaign fgalnst Irving. He wanted to clear the way IcI,Shavian drama and he wanted to recruit crying's mistress, Ellen Terry, in the Shavian sahuse. Even so, there was much truth in Caw's strictures about what went on at the d)'conm, strictures which Miss Bingham se'es less than nothing to refute. This is etIrPrising. After all, the issues are simple b11,13.4h. Irving was a great actor with no 0;4.1tI, who treated Shakespeare much as a tqlld deals with an old newspaper, ripping it )issill'eds for its own convenience. That is the ‘‘;'Lavian charge. Irving was a supreme artist sago.gave the stage social respectability and ha erificed everything, marriage, children, PPiness, to the cause of the Theatre. That 1 be the defence for Irving, and the debate Iween the two sides ought to constit6te the vi9ist entertaining, and at times the most thi'dlY comic scenario. Instead Miss Binha411?, determined to give us a plaster saint, s Ignored all the adverse evidence she 111191 handle, and eliminated every flicker of laughter from a story which was not, after all, entirely lacking in accidental slapstick.
I cannot help wondering if she realises that the result of her attempts at rehabilitation only render Irving less likeable than ever. She gives us an account of Irving's transactions with his first two loves, Nelly and Florence, which makes him sound even more monstrous an egocentric than Shaw suggests. She keeps saying that Irving's determination to give the public what it wanted only shows his inherent greatness. And in an attempt to inflate his cultural significance she sometimes bedecks his brow with the garlands of other men, as for instance when she starts an early chapter with: 'ln 1856 the Crimean War ended, Flaubert published Madame Bovary, and John Brodribb changed his name to Henry Irving.'
The result of all this sinning by omission is a solemn portrait of one of the most fascinating men of his time, whose career marked the end of a whole way of theatrical life, and whose art was the central point of attack by the new age. Miss Bingham never so much as mentions Shaw's observation that 'Irving does not merely cut Shakespeare; he disembowells him'. She skates hurriedly past A Story of Waterloo without reference to the marvellous comic sketch into which Shaw transformed his own review of the play, and which, only a few years ago the late Max Adrian was using nightly as a theatrical set-piece in his An Evening with GBS. And she never refers to the Shavian remark about Irving which gives the clue to the spirit in which the attacks were made: 'My regard for Irving cannot blind me to the fact that it would have been better for us twenty-five years ago to have tied him up in a sack with every existing copy of the works of Shakespeare and dropped him into the crater of the nearest volcano.' That Shaw was appealing to the comic rather than the tragic muse is a truism in which posterity delights, but Miss Bingham finds slapstick an affront to the dignity of her hero. Exactly how dignified was he?
The issue can never now be resolved, although it seems likely that in his great days Irving tended to glorify dramaturgic rubbish. Most of his triumphs were with plays long since forgotten, and Miss Bingham's attempts to convince us of the power of The Bells only convinces us otherwise. And yet there is a sense in which Irving was indeed the greatest actor of the age. He was the first actor to be knighted, an event which did much to raise the professional player from vagabond to pillar of the community. Irving seemed the very personification of rectitude and respectability, proving that it was possible after all for a man to be a gentleman and an actor. And yet, if we consider his antics with Nelly and Florence and his long liaison with Ellen Terry, we are forced to the conclusion that the illusion he created of conventional goodness must have been masterly. It is in this context that Miss Bingham achieves her one good laugh. In describing the moment when Irving first made love to
Ellen, she describes Ellen's distraught reaction to her own performance as Ophelia, and then says that after the show Irving went to Ellen's home to 'reassure' her. An odd use of the word.
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