We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
CRIME REPENTANT 149
performance of Wills' Olivia. They had done so at the Court and they did so again at the Lyceum when Irving was ill. But the play staged at its best was of less account than when it was used, against its nature, to serve the purposes of genius. Dr. Primrose as Irving played him could not, on Bernard Shaw's evidence, be reconciled to the story. Yet to prove this point the critic used such words as beautiful, dignified, perfect. It was a performance undertaken in defiance of his destiny. " Baa — baaa — baaa " Irving bleated softly at rehearsal (on Gordon Craig's testimony) in self-criticism of his way of over-painting a sanctity he could not believe in. Compare this with its opposite. " A more horribly evil-looking beast of prey than his Macaire never crossed the stage ", said Shaw, which disproves the statement, so often made, that he was biased against the Lyceum.
That Irving could create a character unlike any so far known to the footlights was demonstrated by Digby Grant, monument of classconscious vanity in James Albery 's Two Roses — which enabled him to reverse his usual mood by depicting an old scoundrel without any conscience or sense of guilt whatever. But Irving preferred old parts to new. The Devil, his dearest project, had been played by all manner of actors in all manner of plays — several, including Frederic Lemaitre, Charles Kean, Wallack and Phelps, in versions of Faust. There was a challenge to the shade of Macready in Byron's Werner ; * another to Ben Webster in Watts Phillips' French Revolutionary melodrama, The Dead Heart ; another to Fechter, who had appeared at the Lyceum in 1865 in a dramatization of " The Bride of Lammermoor " (Palgrave Simpson's The Master Of Ravenswood) when Irving put on yet another version, H. C. Merivale's Ravenswood.
At the zenith of his life his thoughts were valedictory. No mere
accident made him choose characters renowned for the ending of their
greatness. Cardinal Wolsey in the spring of 1892 was followed by
Lear in the autumn, and in the spring of 1893 by Tennyson's Becket
with his cry of
Back, I say ! Go on with the office. Shall not Heaven be served Though earth's last earthquake clash'd the minster-bells, And the great deeps were broken up again, And hiss'd against the sun ?
Throughout 1893 and 1894 he was playing Becket, with some other parts, in many cities of America and Britain. For some years past his thoughts had turned to the greatest sunset of all, the fading splendours of a vanished chivalry. The " Idylls of the King " could not be set
1 With an interpolated scene showing the murder to keep the audience from wondering who did it.