Show irvcng SHOULD LIE IN ABBEY fk it is to be hoped that success will crown the efforts of his admirers to have the late sir henry irvcng interred in westminster abbey many lie there whose work for art or for humanity was less and less fruitful than his irving was not only a great actor and a dramatic reformer a great scholar and a great critic but he was a man whose genial and kindly personality formed a perpetual background to his intellectual genius irving was one of those men who carry with them an atmosphere mo sphere of well wishing and because ot this he will be remembered with affection as well as with admiration and respect irving stamped his impress upon a dramatic age when by sheer weight of ability he forced himself io the front the drama if not debased was at least a negative factor in human life it amused but it educated neither mind nor morals he might have floated with the stream and his genius as an impersonator would have carried him to a success of a kind but he was not that manner of man he had seen visions and dreamed dreams of what the drama ought to be and so far from allowing himself to be governed by popular taste he resolutely SP to work to create a new demand fair something higher and better and to satisfy that demand he recognized that the drama was one ot the greatest of all potential forces for human good as also for human evil in antiquity it had been one of the means of government an instrument ot virtue and of good citizenship it had fallen from that high estate but it could be replaced and he has replaced it so tat as so great a work could be accomplished by one ufa very full of strenuous manful effort guided always by a high ideal tho secret of irvings success was not entirely his genius as an actor other men have haa genius but sometimes they have succeeded in nothing in his case genius was never allowed to take the place of a conscientious thoroughness a perfection of performance that was never marred by a lack of knowledge or by indifference to a detail he could have allowed the inanities and the in decencies of tha day to strut about his stage and he would have been profitably applauded as uch things are applauded now it would have been easy for him to to this because no study no erudition no scholarship would have been needed but hp chose the better part ho sought out tho highest drama that the human mind ha produced and he pre dented it with such a wealth of schol arsbie with such an intellectual per as to compel admiration to wean bis auditors from baser things and to bet standard that will persist until it is surpassed under irvcng tho drama became one ot the great intellectual borcea of the day and one of the great moral forces by the weight ot his genius he snowed the corid what the drama must ono day universally ver sally become from tho purely dramatic point of view some of irvings contemporaries were perhaps as great aa he was ajl son barret in england booth in amer lea left hardly any point open to criticism in tha exquisite purity ot acang in tb masterly presentation of their parts cut irvcng trl nofi ovar all others and h rii this in spite ot defects ahat in any pother man would be batal tatal ats pronunciation nuncia tion was deplored even by english audiences while in america it was sometimes taken for an exaggerated affectation his mannerisms were often painful to witness walla his appearance although it never fell below distinction was not comparable with tho physical completeness of claier booth or barrett nor was WB voice other than harsh when matched kh the exquisitely modulated tones of his great contemporaries but he had what others did not have he had the power and the determination to intellectually saturate himself with ahe spirit of the age and of the men that ing out of his ideal to recreate as veil as to impersonate irvings death will be peculiarly regretted in america he liked americans and americans always liked him whenever ho crossed the atlantic there was never any doubt about his reception and nowhere in the english speaking world was his genius so generously recognized as here national sentiment runs high in america Amei ica as it ought to do but this has never yet prevented the recognition the enthusiastic recognition that there is no nationality tiona lity to genius and no frontier lines genius belongs to tho whole world it Is eternal because it la divine and here at least there Is no ownership and no personal rights except to take to hearts content in this way has genius always been lecog in america and now that the curtain has fallen and the footlights have gone out it is some satisfaction to remember that the lavish generosity of america did very much to give to the actor aho is dead the leisure and the freedom from the lower forms of care that made his success so great and his influence so good |