Page:The Dial vol. 15 (July 1 - December 16, 1893).djvu/102

90 In short, Dr. Ebers resolved, not without some twinges of his scientific conscience, to compose a novel embodying this troublesome material, and the outcome was "The Egyptian Princess"—a title suggested by Auerbach. His account of the reception by the austere Lepsius of the finished manuscript is amusing:

With the account of his first novel, Dr. Ebers closes the first instalment of his autobi- ography. We shall look for the half-promised supplementary volume with interest.

Whatever the place to which definitive criticism may assign the fame of Mr. Henry Irving as an actor, there is no possibility that his service to the stage, as artist, producer, champion, will be overpraised. He deserves of his professional brethren more than the pretense of gratitude, and the intellectual world is under obligation to him not merely for additions to its refinement but for positive increase of its knowledge. It is not necessary to assume that before Mr. Irving's time there was no actor esteemed and no art of acting appreciable, for in his excellent little volume of Addresses on the Drama—in which jewels of literature sort with gems of reason—our lecturer is at loving pains to tell us what noble figures in his regard are four of the masters of other days, Burbage, Betterton, Garrick, Kean. But Mr. Irving chanced upon, though he partly brought about, an era of dramatic renaissance, to which Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett in our own country, Salvini and Rossi in Italy, Sonnenthal and Barnay in Germany, were equally coincident and contributory. It was the first period in the history of the theatre that found actors ready and capable to assert themselves as peers in the kingdom of Genius, entitled to move by authority and not by sufferance; and they claimed the right to be received as equals and factors, not as proteges and exhibits, of the society that tardily opened to them its doors.

Circumstances have peculiarly favored Mr. Irving, and he has had the shrewdness to derive their full benefit. He came in the deciduous season of the English stage. The great ones were fallen or falling, and there was so little promise in the rising actors that the chief honors were to be worn by him who should most urgently set himself to possess them. Though he has something of the poetic temperament and much of artistic culture, Mr. Irving is firmly practical, methodic, and calculating. Ardent impulses never mislead him; calm, discriminating judgment guides him. As a young man he saw the opportunities opening to someone in the uncertain conditions of the English theatre, and he determined to be that someone. He strove with a strenuousness it is not in the power of fate to resist. He began by educating himself, with an eye to mastery; and, assiduous then, he has been unremitting since. Truly and thoroughly proud of his vocation, nothing would content him but that it should be so much a pride to others as to give its chief representatives absolute equality with the eminent followers of other arts and professions. So it came about that to-day we have, eloquently worded and of manly spirit, preserved in the covers of a book, lectures delivered by an actor as the nobly honored guest of that stern and august mistress of learning, the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh; of that ancient contemner of the mummer vagabond, the University of Oxford; and of Harvard, venerable in age but never intolerant. That Mr. Irving should a little exult in his triumph and in the greater triumph of the stage, was a thing expected and pardonable; but the objection may be urged against him that he has been so candid in the expression of his satisfaction as rather to give the impression of a favor received than of a right secured. However, it must be admitted that for a grievous time in the world's history the actor class was, partly through its own ignoble obsequiousness, but mostly by force of community prejudices and ignorance, made unworthy social esteem; and if the old trend of thought bore off the current of new ideas long after the stage had indicated its right to the regard of the wise and the good, there is abundant reason now for gratulation that a