Punch: Punch (76.1879)

10 PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. [January 11, 1879.

''THE PROUD (POLICE-)MAN'S CONTUMELY."

Constable (to Old Wiggins, wlio has come down on apiece of Orange-peel and a Slide). " There now, I 'opes you're satisfied !—Serves

you jolly well right !—If I catches you a slidin' on the pavement again, I 'll run you in—sharp ! "

All this Mr. Irving shows us in his Hamlet, hut—to borrow
HamleVs own words to the Players—a rather cruel but just
Nemesis—in such a fashion, " that you would think some of Nature's
journeymen had made a man, and not made him well—he imitates
humanity so abominably."

It would, in short, be difficult to find a better Hamlet, in con-
ception, or a worse, in execution, so far as that depends — and
how far does it! not depend ? —on elocution or action. Surely
these glaring1 faults of elocution and action cannot .be beyond cure
in a man evidently so earnest and so intelligent as Mr. Irving.
If one thought them so, it would be as cruel as useless to dwell
upon them. But it cannot be necessary that a man should go on
with this heartless vivisection of lines and sentences, cutting off
verbs from their nouns, substantives from their adjectives, an-
tecedents from their relatives, and prepositions from the words
they govern; that he should make God" rhyme to "mad," or
''ghost" to "lost," with a host of other tricks of pronuncia-
tion just as outrageous. If these things can be cured, they ought
not to be endured; and that they can be cured Punch does most
potently believe. It is with tricks of movement as of speech. Are
there not drill-sergeants and dancing-masters for the one, as well as
professors of phonetics for the other ?

There is so much thought and meaning, such sincerity of self-
abandonment to the passions of his parts, and such evidently high
aims in Mr. Irvtng—which are the matter and marrow of the Actor's
business—that it is intolerable to find the words through which this
must be conveyed set to such marred music of utterance and move-
ment—which are but the manner and mask of it, but a manner that
cannot be dispensed with, and a mask that cannot be laid aside.

It is quite excusable in the young enthusiasts who are indebted
to Mr. Irving for a keener and deeper insight into certain great parts,
and a fuller realisation of some great creations than the stage of
their time has afforded them? to overlook, and even to admire and
imitate his tricks and eccentricities, awkwardnesses and mannerisms.
One sees and hears young actors by the dozen doing so.

This is one bad effect of these tricks, besides their greater mischief
of making intellectual stage-work—so rare in England—unpalat-

able, by faults which are capable of correction, if the Actor were
made sensible of them. Actors should be models in these points.

In speaking of the Ophelia of this memorable night, there needs
no such qualification. In Ellen Terry's hands the execution of the
part—but for the fright that on the first night almost strangled her
singing in both mad scenes, and weakened the whole effect of the
second—was as consummate, as its conception was subtle and complete.
It was an ideally beautiful presentment, jarring in no point of look,
movement, or speech with the image called up by Shaespeare's
exquisite creation.

A propos of this very performance, Punch lately read the very sa-
pient criticism, that " Ophelia is a part into which it is impossible to
put much fresh significance." He especially admires this wise saw,
when he thinks of the entirely fresh significance put by Ellen
Terry into the great scene of the Third Act, in which Hamlet does
his best to wrench the love of her out of his heart, and breaks
hers in the effort;—when he retraces the delicate shades by which
this admirable actress distinguished the pangs of despised love
from the worse pangs which follow the discovery that the noble
mind she has so worshipped is overthrown—a misery summed up
in the exquisite closing lines of the scene, which are the epitaph, not
of her lost love, but of Hamlet's shattered reason.

If anything more intellectually conceived or more exquisitely
wrought out has been seen on the English stage in this generation,
it has not been within Punch's memory.

When Miss Terry conquers her fright enough to be mistress of her
voice and herself, her mad scenes will, no doubt, be as pathetically,
if not as passionately, beautiful as her scene of heart-break. And
if, on the first night, her "sweet bells were jangled out of tune,"
they were never harsh, and their muffled music but gave, perhaps,
the more appropriate voice to her piteous sorrow, and more piteous
mirth.

Mr. Irvtng's Hamlet, with its beauties and its blemishes, its

freat merits of conception, and its grievous sins of execution, we
new already. Ellen Terry's Ophelia we did not know. That is
the revelation for which we have to thank the new_ management of
the Lyceum.