Sir Henry Irving and Miss Ellen Terry in Robespierre, Merchant of Venice, The Bells, Nance Oldfield, The Amber Heart, Waterloo, etc. (1896)

Abstract

The practical cause of Henry Irving’s success has, after his gifts as an actor, been his constant, unwearied and single-minded devotion to his chosen work. When in 1856, then a boy of eighteen, he took the final plunge from clerkship, which he began at thirteen years of age, into art, he had already behind him several years of steady toil rigourously given in the leisure hours of his daily working life. In those days, as now, the working hours of a London clerk were as long as the work was poorly paid, and it needed a very fixed resolution to keep a young man constant to the self-imposed task of studying and exacting an endless art. Early and late he was at work, studying plays and parts, and half starving himself to pay for the few lessons kindly given to him at an hour in the morning so early as to be inconvenient to himself by an old actor who believed in his future and who predicted for him great things. This devotion to his aim, however, bore good fruit; and in the earlier years of his stage work at Sunderland and Edinburgh, when the bill was changed so often that it was necessary for a young actor to learn sometimes three or four new parts in a week, he was always able to keep ahead of his work by means of the reserve of some hundred stock parts in which he was in stage language “letter-perfect.”