The Story of My Life by Ellen Terry (page 4)

looking precisely like the Vandyck portraits, but not because he had been busy building up his face with wig-paste and similar atrocities. His make-up in this, as in other parts, was the process of _assisting subtly and surely the expression from within_. It was elastic, and never hampered him. It changed with the expression. As Charles, he was assisted by Nature, who had given him the most beautiful Stuart hands, but his clothes most actors would have consigned to the dust-bin! Before we had done with Charles I.–we played it together for the last time in 1902–these clothes were really threadbare. Yet he looked in them every inch a king.

His care of detail may be judged from the fact that in the last act his wig was not only grayer, but had far less hair in it. I should hardly think it necessary to mention this if I had not noticed how many actors seem to think that age may be procured by the simple expedient of dipping their heads, covered with mats of flourishing hair, into a flour-barrel!

Unlike most stage kings, he never seemed to be _assuming_ dignity. He was very, very simple.

Wills has been much blamed for making Cromwell out to be such a wretch–a mean blackguard, not even a great bad man. But in plays the villain must not compete for sympathy with the hero, or both fall to the ground! I think that Wills showed himself a true poet in his play, and in the last act a great playwright. He gave us both wonderful opportunities, yet very few words were spoken.

Some people thought me best in the camp scene in the third act, where I had even fewer lines to speak. I was proud of it myself when I found that it had inspired Oscar Wilde to write me this lovely sonnet:

In the lone tent, waiting for victory, She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain, Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain; The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky, War’s ruin, and the wreck of chivalry
To her proud soul no common fear can bring; Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord, the King, Her soul aflame with passionate ecstasy. O, hair of gold! O, crimson lips! O, face Made for the luring and the love of man! With thee I do forget the toil and stress, The loveless road that knows no resting place, Time’s straitened pulse, the soul’s dread weariness, My freedom, and my life republican!

That phrase “wan lily” represented perfectly what I had tried to convey, not only in this part but in Ophelia. I hope I thanked Oscar enough at the time. Now he is dead, and I cannot thank him any more…. I had so much _bad_ poetry written to me that these lovely sonnets from a real poet should have given me the greater pleasure. “He often has the poet’s heart, who never felt the poet’s fire.” There is more good _heart_ and kind feeling in most of the verses written to me than real poetry.

“One must discriminate,” even if it sounds unkind. At the time that Whistler was having one of his most undignified “rows” with a sitter over a portrait and wrangling over the price, another artist was painting frescoes in a cathedral for nothing. “It is sad that it should be so,” a friend said to me, “but _one must discriminate_. The man haggling over the sixpence is the great artist!”

How splendid it is that _in time_ this is recognized. The immortal soul of the artist is in his work, the transient and mortal one is in his conduct.

Another sonnet from Oscar Wilde–to Portia this time–is the first document that I find in connection with “The Merchant,” as the play was always called by the theater staff.

“I marvel not Bassanio was so bold
To peril all he had upon the lead, Or that proud Aragon bent low his head, Or that Morocco’s fiery heart grew cold; For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold, Which is more golden than the golden sun, No woman Veronese looked upon
Was half so fair as thou whom I behold. Yet fairer when with wisdom as your shield The sober-suited lawyer’s gown you donned, And would not let the laws of Venice yield Antonio’s heart to that accursed Jew– O, Portia! take my heart; it is thy due: I think I will not quarrel with the Bond.”

Henry Irving’s Shylock dress was designed by Sir John Gilbert. It was never replaced, and only once cleaned by Henry’s dresser and valet, Walter Collinson. Walter, I think, replaced “Doody,” Henry’s first dresser at the Lyceum, during the run of “The Merchant of Venice.” Walter was a wig-maker by trade–assistant to Clarkson the elder. It was Doody who, on being asked his opinion of a production, said that it was fine–“not a _join_[1] to be seen anywhere!” It was Walter who was asked by Henry to say which he thought his master’s best part. Walter could not be “drawn” for a long time. At last he said Macbeth.

[Footnote 1: A “join” in theatrical wig-makers’ parlance is the point where the front-piece of the wig ends and the actor’s forehead begins.]

This pleased Henry immensely, for, as I hope to show later on, he fancied himself in Macbeth more than in any other part.

“It is generally conceded to be Hamlet,” said Henry.

“Oh, no, sir,” said Walter, “_Macbeth._ You sweat twice as much in that.”

In appearance Walter was very like Shakespeare’s bust in Stratford Church. He was a most faithful and devoted servant, and was the only person with Henry Irving when he died. Quiet in his ways, discreet, gentle, and very quick, he was the ideal dresser.

The Lyceum production of “The Merchant of Venice” was not so strictly archaeological as the Bancrofts’ had been, but it was very gravely beautiful and effective. If less attention was paid to details of costumes and scenery, the play itself was arranged and acted very attractively and always went with a swing. To the end of my partnership with Henry Irving it was a safe “draw” both in England and America. By this time I must have played Portia over a thousand times. During the first run of it the severe attack made on my acting of the part in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ is worth alluding to. The suggestion that I showed too much of a “coming-on” disposition in the Casket Scene affected me for years, and made me self-conscious and uncomfortable. At last I lived it down. Any suggestion of _indelicacy_ in my treatment of a part always blighted me. Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, of the immortal “Alice in Wonderland”) once brought a little girl to see me in “Faust.” He wrote and told me that she had said (where Margaret begins to undress): “Where is it going to stop?” and that perhaps in consideration of the fact that it could affect a mere child disagreeably, I ought to alter my business!

I had known dear Mr. Dodgson for years and years. He was as fond of me as he could be of any one over the age of ten, but I was _furious_. “I thought you only knew _nice_ children,” was all the answer that I gave him. “It would have seemed to me awful for a _child_ to see harm where harm is; how much more when she sees it where harm is not.”

But I felt ashamed and shy whenever I played that scene. It was the Casket Scene over again.

The unkind _Blackwood_ article also blamed me for showing too plainly that Portia loves Bassanio before he has actually won her. This seemed to me unjust, if only because Shakespeare makes Portia say _before_ Bassanio chooses the right casket:

“One half of me is yours–the other half yours–_All yours!_”

Surely this suggests that she was not concealing her fondness like a Victorian maiden, and that Bassanio had most surely won her love, though not yet the right to be her husband.

“There is a soul of goodness in things evil,” and the criticism made me alter the setting of the scene, and so contrive it that Portia was behind and out of sight of the men who made hazard for her love.

Dr. Furnivall, a great Shakespearean scholar, was so kind as to write me the following letter about Portia:

“Being founder and director of the New Shakespeare Society, I venture to thank you most heartily for your most charming and admirable impersonation of our poet’s Portia, which I witnessed to-night with a real delight. You have given me a new light on the character, and by your so pretty by-play in the Casket Scene have made bright in my memory for ever the spot which almost all critics have felt dull, and I hope to say this in a new edition of ‘Shakespeare.'”

(He did say it, in “The Leopold” edition.)

“Again those touches of the wife’s love in the advocate when Bassanio says he’d give up his wife for Antonio, and when you kissed your hand to him behind his back in the Ring bit–how pretty and natural they were! Your whole conception and acting of the character are so true to Shakespeare’s lines that one longs he could be here to see you. A lady gracious and graceful, handsome, witty, loving and wise, you are his Portia to the life.”

That’s the best of Shakespeare, _I_ say. His characters can be interpreted in at least eight different ways, and of each way some one will say: “That is Shakespeare!” The German actress plays Portia as a low comedy part. She wears an eighteenth-century law wig, horn spectacles, a cravat (this last anachronism is not confined to Germans), and often a mustache! There is something to be said for it all, though I should not like to play the part that way myself.

Lady Pollock, who first brought me to Henry Irving’s notice as a possible leading lady, thought my Portia better at the Lyceum than it had been at the Prince of Wales’s.

“Thanks, my dear Valentine and enchanting Portia,” she writes to me in response to a photograph that I had sent her, “but the photographers don’t see you as you are, and have not the poetry in them to do you justice…. You were especially admirable in the Casket Scene. You kept your by-play quieter, and it gained in effect from the addition of repose–and I rejoiced that you did not kneel to Bassanio at ‘My Lord, my governor, my King.’ I used to feel that too much like worship from any girl to her affianced, and Portia’s position being one of command, I should doubt the possibility of such an action….”

I think I received more letters about my Portia than about all my other parts put together. Many of them came from university men. One old playgoer wrote to tell me that he liked me better than my former instructress, Mrs. Charles Kean. “She mouthed it as she did most things…. She was not real–a staid, sentimental ‘Anglaise,’ and more than a little stiffly pokerish.”

Henry Irving’s Shylock was generally conceded to be full of talent and reality, but some of his critics could not resist saying that this was _not_ the Jew that Shakespeare drew! Now, who is in a position to say what is the Jew that Shakespeare drew? I think Henry Irving knew as well as most! Nay, I am sure that in his age he was the only person able to decide.

Some said his Shylock was intellectual, and appealed more to the intellect of his audiences than to their emotions. Surely this is talking for the sake of talking. I recall so many things that touched people to the heart! For absolute pathos, achieved by absolute simplicity of means, I never saw anything in the theater to compare with his Shylock’s return home over the bridge to his deserted house after Jessica’s flight.

A younger actor, producing “The Merchant of Venice” in recent years, asked Irving if he might borrow this bit of business. “By all means,” said Henry. “With great pleasure.”

“Then, why didn’t you do it?” inquired my daughter bluntly when the actor was telling us how kind and courteous Henry had been in allowing him to use his stroke of invention.

“What do you mean?” asked the astonished actor.

My daughter told him that Henry had dropped the curtain on a stage full of noise, and light, and revelry. When it went up again the stage was empty, desolate, with no light but a pale moon, and all sounds of life at a great distance–and then over the bridge came the wearied figure of the Jew. This marked the passing of the time between Jessica’s elopement and Shylock’s return home. It created an atmosphere of silence, and the middle of the night.

“_You_ came back without dropping the curtain,” said my daughter, “and so it wasn’t a bit the same.”

“I couldn’t risk dropping the curtain for the business,” answered the actor, “_because it needed applause to take it up again_!”

Henry Irving never grew tired of a part, never ceased to work at it, just as he never gave up the fight against his limitations. His diction, as the years went on, grew far clearer when he was depicting rage and passion. His dragging leg dragged no more. To this heroic perseverance he added an almost childlike eagerness in hearing any suggestion for the improvement of his interpretations which commended itself to his imagination and his judgment. From a blind man came the most illuminating criticism of his Shylock. The sensitive ear of the sightless hearer detected a fault in Henry Irving’s method of delivering the opening line of his part:

“Three thousand ducats–well!”

“I hear no sound of the usurer in that,” the blind man said at the end of the performance. “It is said with the reflective air of a man to whom money means very little.”

The justice of the criticism appealed strongly to Henry. He revised his reading not only of the first line, but of many other lines in which he saw now that he had not been enough of the money-lender.

In more recent years he made one change in his dress. He asked my daughter–whose cleverness in such things he fully recognized–to put some stage jewels on to the scarf that he wore round his head when he supped with the Christians.

“I have an idea that, when he went to that supper, he’d like to flaunt his wealth in the Christian dogs’ faces. It will look well, too–‘like the toad, ugly and venomous,’ wearing precious jewels on his head!”

The scarf, witnessing to that untiring love of throwing new light on his impersonations which distinguished Henry to the last, is now in my daughter’s possession. She values no relic of him more unless it be the wreath of oak-leaves that she made him for “Coriolanus.”

We had a beautiful scene for this play–a garden with a dark pine forest in the distance. Henry was _not_ good in it. He had a Romeo part which had not been written by Shakespeare. We played it instead of the last act of “The Merchant of Venice.” I never liked it being left out, but people used to say, like parrots, that “the interest of the play ended with the Trial Scene,” and Henry believed them–for a time. I never did. Shakespeare _never_ gives up in the last act like most dramatists.

Twice in “Iolanthe” I forgot that I was blind! The first time was when I saw old Tom Mead and Henry Irving groping for the amulet, which they had to put on my breast to heal me of my infirmity. It had slipped on to the floor, and both of them were too short-sighted to see it! Here was a predicament! I had to stoop and pick it up for them.

The second time I put out my hand and cried: “Look out for my lilies,” when Henry nearly stepped on the bunch with which a little girl friend of mine supplied me every night I played the part.

Iolanthe was one of Helen Faucit’s great successes. I never saw this distinguished actress when she was in her prime. Her Rosalind, when she came out of her retirement to play a few performances, appeared to me more like a _lecture_ on Rosalind, than like Rosalind herself: a lecture all young actresses would have greatly benefited by hearing, for it was of great beauty. I remember being particularly struck by her treatment of the lines in the scene where Celia conducts the mock marriage between Orlando and Ganymede. Another actress, whom I saw as Rosalind, said the words, “And I do take thee, Orlando, to be my husband,” with a comical grimace to the audience. Helen Faucit flushed up and said the line with deep and true emotion, suggesting that she was, indeed, giving herself to Orlando. There was a world of poetry in the way she drooped over his hand.

Mead distinguished himself in “Iolanthe” by speaking of “that immortal land where God hath His–His–er–room?–no–lodging?–no–where God hath His apartments!”

The word he could not hit was, I think, “dwelling.” He used often to try five or six words before he got the right one _or_ the wrong one–it was generally the wrong one–in full hearing of the audience.

IX

LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS

“THE MERCHANT OF VENICE” TO “ROMEO AND JULIET”

“The Merchant of Venice” was acted two hundred and fifty consecutive nights on the occasion of the first production. On the hundredth night every member of the audience was presented with Henry Irving’s acting edition of the play bound in white velum–a solid and permanent souvenir, paper, print and binding all being of the best. The famous Chiswick Press did all his work of this kind. On the title page was printed:

“I count myself in nothing else so happy As in a soul remembering my good friends.”

At the close of the performance which took place on Saturday, February 14, 1880, Henry entertained a party of 350 to supper on the stage. This was the first of those enormous gatherings which afterwards became an institution at the Lyceum.

It was at this supper that Lord Houghton surprised us all by making a very sarcastic speech about the stage and actors generally. It was no doubt more interesting than the “butter” which is usually applied to the profession at such functions, but every one felt that it was rather rude to abuse long runs when the company were met to celebrate a hundredth performance!

Henry Irving’s answer was delightful. He spoke with good sense, good humour and good breeding, and it was all spontaneous. I wish that a phonograph had been in existence that night, and that a record had been taken of the speech. It would be so good for the people who have asserted that Henry Irving always employed journalists (when he could not get Poets Laureate!) to write his speeches for him! The voice was always the voice of Irving, if the hands were sometimes the hands of the professional writer. When Henry was thrown on his debating resources he really spoke better than when he prepared a speech, and his letters prove, if proof were needed, how finely he could write! Those who represent him as dependent in such matters on the help of literary hacks are just ignorant of the facts.

During the many years that I played Portia I seldom had a Bassanio to my mind. It seems to be a most difficult part, to judge by the colorless and disappointing renderings that are given of it. George Alexander was far the best of my Bassanio bunch! Mr. Barnes, “handsome Jack Barnes,” as we called him, was a good actor, is a good actor still, as every one knows, but his gentility as Bassanio was overwhelming. It was said of him that he thought more of the rounding of his legs than the charms of his affianced wife, and that in the love-scenes he appeared to be taking orders for furniture! This was putting it unkindly, but there was some truth in it.

He was so very dignified! My sister Floss (Floss was the first Lyceum Nerissa) and I once tried to make him laugh by substituting two “almond rings” for the real rings. “Handsome Jack” lost his temper, which made us laugh the more. He was quite right to be angry. Such fooling on the stage is very silly. I think it is one of the evils of long runs! When we had seen “handsome Jack Barnes” imperturbably pompous for two hundred nights in succession, it became too much for us, and the almond rings were the result.

Mr. Tyars was the Prince of Morocco. Actors might come, and actors might go in the Lyceum company, but Tyars went on for ever. He never left Henry Irving’s management, and was with him in that last performance of “Becket” at Bradford on October 13, 1905–the last performance ever given by Henry Irving who died the same night.

Tyars was the most useful actor that we ever had in the company. I should think that the number of parts he has played in the same piece would constitute a theatrical record.

I don’t remember when Tom Mead first played the Duke, but I remember what happened!

“Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too.”

He began the speech in the Trial Scene very slowly.

Between every word Henry was whispering: “Get on–get on!” Old Mead, whose memory was never good, became flustered, and at the end of the line came to a dead stop.

“Get on, get on,” said Henry.

Mead looked round with dignity, opened his mouth and shut it, opened it again, and in his anxiety to oblige Henry, did get on indeed!–to the last line of the long speech.

“We all expect a gentle answer, Jew.”

The first line and the last line were all that we heard of the Duke’s speech that night. It must have been the shortest version of it on record.

This was the play with which the Lyceum reopened in the autumn of 1880. I was on the last of my provincial tours with Charles Kelly at the time, but I must have come up to see the revival, for I remember Henry Irving in it very distinctly. He had not played the dual role of Louis and Fabien del Franchi before, and he had to compete with old playgoers’ memories of Charles Kean and Fechter. Wisely enough he made of it a “period” play, emphasizing its old-fashioned atmosphere. In 1891, when the play was revived, the D’Orsay costumes were noticed and considered piquant and charming. In 1880 I am afraid they were regarded with indifference as merely antiquated.

The grace and elegance of Henry as the civilized brother I shall never forget. There was something in _him_ to which the perfect style of the D’Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted full-breasted coats. Such lines as–

“‘Tis she! Her footstep beats upon my heart!”

were not absurd from his lips.

The sincerity of the period, he felt, lay in its elegance. A rough movement, a too undeliberate speech, and the absurdity of the thing might be given away. It was in fact given away by Terriss at Chateau-Renaud, who was not the smooth, graceful, courteous villain that Alfred Wigan had been and that Henry wanted. He told me that he paid Miss Fowler, an actress who in other respects was not very remarkable, an enormous salary because she could look the high-bred lady of elegant manners.

It was in “The Corsican Brothers” that tableau curtains were first used at the Lyceum. They were made of red plush, which suited the old decoration of the theater. Those who only saw the Lyceum after its renovation in 1881 do not realize perhaps that before that date it was decorated in dull gold and dark crimson, and had funny boxes with high fronts like old-fashioned church pews. One of these boxes was rented annually by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. It was rather like the toy cardboard theater which children used to be able to buy for sixpence. The effect was somber, but I think I liked it better than the cold, light, shallow, bastard Pompeian decoration of later days.

In Hallam Tennyson’s life of his father, I find that I described “The Cup” as a “great little play.” After thirty years (nearly) I stick to that. Its chief fault was that it was not long enough, for it involved a tremendous production, tremendous acting, had all the heroic size of tragedy, and yet was all over so quickly that we could play a long play like “The Corsican Brothers” with it in a single evening.

Tennyson read the play to us at Eaton Place. There were present Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, William Terriss, Mr. Knowles, who had arranged the reading, my daughter Edy, who was then about nine, Hallam Tennyson, _and_ a dog–I think Charlie, for the days of Fussie were not yet.

Tennyson, like most poets, read in a monotone, rumbling on a low note in much the same way that Shelley is said to have screamed in a high one. For the women’s parts he changed his voice suddenly, climbed up into a key which he could not sustain. In spite of this I was beginning to think how impressive it all was, when I looked up and saw Edy, who was sitting on Henry’s knee, looking over his shoulder at young Hallam and laughing, and Henry, instead of reproaching her, on the broad grin. There was much discussion as to what the play should be called, and as to whether the names “Synorix” and “Sinnatus” would be confused.

“I don’t think they will,” I said, for I thought this was a very small matter for the poet to worry about.

“I do!” said Edy in a loud clear voice, “I haven’t known one from the other all the time!”

“Edy, be good!” I whispered.

Henry, mischievous as usual, was delighted at Edy’s independence, but her mother was unutterably ashamed.

“Leave her alone,” said Henry, “she’s all right.”

Tennyson at first wanted to call the play “The Senator’s Wife,” then thought of “Sinnatus and Synorix,” and finally agreed with us that “The Cup” was the best as it was the simplest title.

The production was one of the most beautiful things that Henry Irving ever accomplished. It has been described again and again, but none of the descriptions are very successful. There was a vastness, a spaciousness of proportion about the scene in the Temple of Artemis which I never saw again upon the stage until my own son attempted something like it in the Church Scene that he designed for my production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1903.

A great deal of the effect was due to the lighting. The gigantic figure of the many-breasted Artemis, placed far back in the scene-dock, loomed through a blue mist, while the foreground of the picture was in yellow light. The thrilling effect always to be gained on the stage by the simple expedient of a great number of people doing the same thing in the same way at the same moment, was seen in “The Cup,” when the stage was covered with a crowd of women who raised their arms above their heads with a large, rhythmic, sweeping movement and then bowed to the goddess with the regularity of a regiment saluting.

At rehearsals there was one girl who did this movement with peculiar grace. She wore a black velveteen dress, although it was very hot weather, and I called her “Hamlet.” I used to chaff her about wearing such a grand dress at rehearsals, but she was never to be seen in any other. The girls at the theater told me that she was very poor, and that underneath her black velveteen dress, which she wore summer and winter, she had nothing but a pair of stockings and a chemise. Not long after the first night of “The Cup” she disappeared. I made inquiries about her, and found that she was dying in hospital. I went several times to see her. She looked so beautiful in the little white bed. Her great eyes, black, with weary white lids, used to follow me as I left the hospital ward, and I could not always tear myself away from their dumb beseechingness, but would turn back and sit down again by the bed. Once she asked me if I would leave something belonging to me that she might look at until I came again. I took off the amber and coral beads that I was wearing at the time and gave them to her. Two days later I had a letter from the nurse telling me that poor Hamlet was dead–that just before she died, with closed eyes, and gasping for breath, she sent her love to her “dear Miss Terry,” and wanted me to know that the tall lilies I had brought her on my last visit were to be buried with her, but that she had wiped the coral and amber beads and put them in cotton-wool, to be returned to me when she was dead. Poor “Hamlet”!

Quite as wonderful as the Temple Scene was the setting of the first act, which represented the rocky side of a mountain with a glimpse of a fertile table-land and a pergola with vines growing over it at the top. The acting in this scene all took place on different levels. The hunt swept past on one level; the entrance to the temple was on another. A goatherd played upon a pipe. Scenically speaking, it was not Greece, but Greece in Sicily, Capri, or some such hilly region.

Henry Irving was not able to look like the full-lipped, full-blooded Romans such as we see in long lines in marble at the British Museum, so he conceived his own type of the blend of Roman intellect and sensuality with barbarian cruelty and lust. Tennyson was not pleased with him as Synorix! _How_ he failed to delight in it as a picture I can’t conceive. With a pale, pale face, bright red hair, gold armor and a tiger-skin, a diabolical expression and very thin crimson lips, Henry looked handsome and sickening at the same time. _Lechery_ was written across his forehead.

The first act was well within my means; the second was beyond them, but it was very good for me to try and do it. I had a long apostrophe to the goddess with my back turned to the audience, and I never tackled anything more difficult. My dresses, designed by Mr. Godwin, one of them with the toga made of that wonderful material which Arnott had printed, were simple, fine and free.

I wrote to Tennyson’s son Hallam after the first night that I knew his father would be delighted with Henry’s splendid performance, but was afraid he would be disappointed in me.

“Dear Camma,” he answered, “I have given your messages to my father, but believe me, who am not ‘common report,’ that he will thoroughly appreciate your noble, _most_ beautiful and imaginative rendering of ‘Camma.’ My father and myself hope to see you soon, but not while this detestable cold weather lasts. We trust that you are not now really the worse for that night of nights.

“With all our best wishes,

“Yours ever sincerely,

“HALLAM TENNYSON.”

“I quite agree with you as to H.I.’s Synorix.”

The music of “The Cup” was not up to the level of the rest. Lady Winchilsea’s setting of “Moon on the field and the foam,” written within the compass of eight notes, for my poor singing voice, which will not go up high nor down low, was effective enough, but the music as a whole was too “chatty” for a severe tragedy. One night when I was singing my very best:

“Moon, bring him home, bring him home, Safe from the dark and the cold,”

some one in the audience _sneezed_. Every one burst out laughing, and I had to laugh too. I did not even attempt the next line.

“The Cup” was called a failure, but it ran 125 nights, and every night the house was crowded! On the hundredth night I sent Tennyson the Cup itself. I had it made in silver from Mr. Godwin’s design–a three-handled cup, pipkin-shaped, standing on three legs.

“The Cup” and “The Corsican Brothers” together made the bill too heavy and too long, even at a time when we still “rang up” at 7:30; and in the April following the production of Tennyson’s beautiful tragedy–which I think in sheer poetic intensity surpasses “Becket,” although it is not nearly so good a play–“The Belle’s Stratagem” was substituted for “The Corsican Brothers.” This was the first real rollicking comedy that a Lyceum audience had ever seen, and the way they laughed did my heart good. I had had enough of tragedy and the horrors by this time, and I could have cried with joy at that rare and welcome sight–an audience rocking with laughter. On the first night the play opened propitiously enough with a loud laugh due to the only accident of the kind that ever happened at the Lyceum. The curtain went up before the staff had “cleared,” and Arnott, Jimmy and the rest were seen running for their lives out of the center entrance!

People said that it was so clever of me to play Camma and Letitia Hardy (the comedy part in “The Belle’s Stratagem”) on the same evening. They used to say the same kind thing, “only more so,” when Henry played Jingle and Matthias in “The Bells.” But I never liked doing it. A _tour de force_ is always more interesting to the looker-on than to the person who is taking part in it. One feels no pride in such an achievement, which ought to be possible to any one calling himself an actor. Personally, I never play comedy and tragedy on the same night without a sense that one is spoiling the other. Harmonies are more beautiful than contrasts in acting as in other things–and more difficult, too.

Henry Irving was immensely funny as Doricourt. We had sort of Beatrice and Benedick scenes together, and I began to notice what a lot his _face_ did for him. There have only been two faces on the stage in my time–his and Duse’s.

My face has never been of much use to me, but my _pace_ has filled the deficiency sometimes, in comedy at any rate. In “The Belle’s Stratagem” the public had face and pace together, and they seemed to like it.

There was one scene in which I sang “Where are you going to, my pretty maid?” I used to act it all the way through and give imitations of Doricourt–ending up by chucking him under the chin. The house rose at it!

I was often asked at this time when I went out to a party if I would not sing that dear little song from “The Cup.” When I said I didn’t think it would sound very nice without the harp, as it was only a chant on two or three notes, some one would say:

“Well, then, the song in ‘The Belle’s Stratagem’! _That_ has no accompaniment!”

“No,” I used to answer, “but it isn’t a song. It’s a look here, a gesture there, a laugh anywhere, _and_ Henry Irving’s face everywhere!”

Miss Winifred Emery came to us for “The Belle’s Stratagem” and played the part that I had played years before at the Haymarket. She was bewitching, and in her white wig in the ball-room, beautiful as well. She knew how to bear herself on the stage instinctively, and could dance a minuet to perfection. The daughter of Sam Emery, a great comedian in a day of comedians, and the granddaughter of _the_ Emery, it was not surprising that she should show aptitude for the stage.

Mr. Howe was another new arrival in the Lyceum company. He was at his funniest as Mr. Hardy in “The Belle’s Stratagem.” It was not the first time that he had played my father in a piece (we had acted father and daughter in “The Little Treasure”), and I always called him “Daddy.” The dear old man was much liked by every one. He had a tremendous pair of legs, was bluff and bustling in manner, though courtly too, and cared more about gardening than acting. He had a little farm at Isleworth, and he was one of those actors who do not allow the longest theatrical season to interfere with domesticity and horticulture! Because of his stout gaitered legs and his Isleworth estate, Henry called him “the agricultural actor.” He was a good old port and whisky drinker, but he could carry his liquor like a Regency man.

He was a walking history of the stage. “Yes, my dear,” he used to say to me, “I was in the original cast of the first performance of ‘The Lady of Lyons,’ which Lord Lytton gave Macready as a present, and I was the original Francois when ‘Richelieu’ was produced. Lord Lytton wrote this part for a lady, but at rehearsal it was found that there was a good deal of movement awkward for a lady to do, so I was put into it.”

“What year was it, Daddy?”

“God bless me, I must think…. It must have been about a year after Her Majesty took the throne.”

For forty years and nine months old Mr. Howe had acted at the Haymarket Theater! When he was first there, the theater was lighted with oil lamps, and when a lamp smoked or went out, one of the servants of the theater came on and lighted it up again during the action of the play.

It was the acting of Edmund Kean in “Richard III.” which first filled Daddy Howe with the desire to go on the stage. He saw the great actor again when he was living in retirement at Richmond–in those last sad days when the Baroness Burdett-Coutts (then the rich young heiress, Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts), driving up the hill, saw him sitting huddled up on one of the public seats and asked if she could do anything for him.

“Nothing, I think,” he answered sadly. “Ah yes, there is one thing. You were kind enough the other day to send me some very excellent brandy. _Send me some more._”[1]

[Footnote 1: This was a favorite story of Henry Irving’s, and for that reason alone I think it worth telling, although Sir Squire Bancroft assures me that stubborn dates make it impossible that the tale should be true.]

Of Henry Irving as an actor Mr. Howe once said to me that at first he was prejudiced against him because he was so different from the other great actors that he had known.

“‘This isn’t a bit like Iago,’ I said to myself when I first saw him in ‘Othello.’ That was at the end of the first act. But he had commanded my attention to his innovations. In the second act I found myself deeply interested in watching and studying the development of his conception. In the third act I was fascinated by his originality. By the end of the play I wondered that I could ever have thought that the part ought to be played differently.”

Daddy Howe was the first member of the Lyceum company who got a reception from the audience on his entrance as a public favorite. He remained with us until his death, which took place on our fourth American tour in 1893.

Every one has commended Henry Irving’s kindly courtesy in inviting Edwin Booth to come and play with him at the Lyceum Theater. Booth was having a wretched season at the Princess’s, which was when he went there a theater on the down-grade, and under a thoroughly commercial management. The great American actor, through much domestic trouble and bereavement, had more or less “given up” things. At any rate he had not the spirit which can combat such treatment as he received at the Princess’s, where the pieces in which he appeared were “thrown” on to the stage with every mark of assumption that he was not going to be a success.

Yet, although he accepted with gratitude Henry Irving’s suggestion that he should migrate from the Princess’s to the Lyceum and appear there three times a week as Othello with the Lyceum company and its manager to support him, I cannot be sure that Booth’s pride was not more hurt by this magnificent hospitality than it ever could have been by disaster. It is always more difficult to _receive_ than to _give_.

Few people thought of this, I suppose. I did, because I could imagine Henry Irving in America in the same situation–accepting the hospitality of Booth. Would not he too have been melancholy, quiet, unassertive, _almost_ as uninteresting and uninterested as Booth was?

I saw him first at a benefit performance at Drury Lane. I came to the door of the room where Henry was dressing, and Booth was sitting there with his back to me.

“Here’s Miss Terry,” said Henry as I came round the door. Booth looked up at me swiftly. I have never in any face, in any country, seen such wonderful eyes. There was a mystery about his appearance and his manner–a sort of pride which seemed to say: “Don’t try to know me, for I am not what I have been.” He seemed broken, and devoid of ambition.

At rehearsal he was very gentle and apathetic. Accustomed to playing Othello with stock companies, he had few suggestions to make about the stage-management. The part was to him more or less of a monologue.

“I shall never make you black,” he said one morning. “When I take your hand I shall have a corner of my drapery in my hand. That will protect you.”

I am bound to say that I thought of Mr. Booth’s “protection” with some yearning the next week when I played Desdemona to _Henry’s_ Othello. Before he had done with me I was nearly as black as he.

Booth was a melancholy, dignified Othello, but not great as Salvini was great. Salvini’s Hamlet made me scream with mirth, but his Othello was the grandest, biggest, most glorious thing. We often prate of “reserved force.” Salvini had it, for the simple reason that his was the gigantic force which may be restrained because of its immensity. Men have no need to dam up a little purling brook. If they do it in acting, it is tame, absurd and pretentious. But Salvini held himself in, and still his groan was like a tempest, his passion huge.

The fact is that, apart from Salvini’s personal genius, the foreign temperament is better fitted to deal with Othello than the English. Shakespeare’s French and Italians, Greeks and Latins, medievals and barbarians, fancifuls and reals, all have a dash of Elizabethan English men in them, but not Othello.

Booth’s Othello was very helpful to my Desdemona. It is difficult to preserve the simple, heroic blindness of Desdemona to the fact that her lord mistrusts her, if her lord is raving and stamping under her nose! Booth was gentle in the scenes with Desdemona until _the_ scene where Othello overwhelms her with the foul word and destroys her fool’s paradise. Love _does_ make fools of us all, surely, but I wanted to make Desdemona out the fool who is the victim of love and faith; not the simpleton, whose want of tact in continually pleading Cassio’s cause is sometimes irritating to the audience.

My greatest triumph as Desdemona was not gained with the audience but with Henry Irving! He found my endeavors to accept comfort from Iago so pathetic that they brought the tears to his eyes. It was the oddest sensation when I said “Oh, good Iago, what shall I do to win my lord again?” to look up–my own eyes dry, for Desdemona is past crying then–and see Henry’s eyes at their biggest, luminous, soft and full of tears! He was, in spite of Iago and in spite of his power of identifying himself with the part, very deeply moved by my acting. But he knew how to turn it to his purpose: he obtrusively took the tears with his fingers and blew his nose with much feeling, softly and long (so much expression there is, by the way, in blowing the nose on the stage), so that the audience might think his emotion a fresh stroke of hypocrisy.

Every one liked Henry’s Iago. For the first time in his life he knew what it was to win unanimous praise. Nothing could be better, I think, than Mr. Walkley’s[1] description: “Daringly Italian, a true compatriot of the Borgias, or rather, better than Italians, that devil incarnate, an Englishman Italianate.”

[Footnote 1: Mr. A.B. Walkley, the gifted dramatic critic of _The Times_.]

One adored him, devil though he was. He was so full of charm, so sincerely the “honest” Iago, peculiarly sympathetic with Othello, Desdemona, Roderigo, _all_ of them–except his wife. It was only in the soliloquies and in the scenes with his wife that he revealed his devil’s nature. Could one ever forget those grapes which he plucked in the first act, and slowly ate, spitting out the seeds, as if each one represented a worthy virtue to be put out of his mouth, as God, according to the evangelist, puts out the lukewarm virtues. His Iago and his Romeo in different ways proved his power to portray _Italian_ passions–the passions of lovely, treacherous people, who will either sing you a love sonnet or stab you in the back–you are not sure which!

We played “Othello” for six weeks, three performances a week, to guinea stalls, and could have played it longer. Each week Henry and Booth changed parts. For both of them it was a change _for the worse_.

Booth’s Iago seemed deadly commonplace after Henry’s. He was always the snake in the grass; he showed the villain in all the scenes. He could not resist the temptation of making polished and ornate effects.

Henry Irving’s Othello was condemned almost as universally as his Iago was praised. For once I find myself with the majority. He screamed and ranted and raved–lost his voice, was slow where he should have been swift, incoherent where he should have been strong. I could not bear to see him in the part. It was painful to me. Yet night after night he achieved in the speech to the Senate one of the most superb and beautiful bits of acting of his life. It was _wonderful_. He spoke the speech, beaming on Desdemona all the time. The gallantry of the thing is indescribable.

I think his failure as Othello was one of the unspoken bitternesses of Henry’s life. When I say “failure” I am of course judging him by his own standard, and using the word to describe what he was to himself, not what he was to the public. On the last night, he rolled up the clothes that he had worn as the Moor one by one, carefully laying one garment on top of the other, and then, half-humorously and very deliberately said, “_Never again_!” Then he stretched himself with his arms above his head and gave a great sigh of relief.

Mr. Pinero was excellent as Roderigo in this production. He was always good in the “silly ass” type of part, and no one could say of him that he was playing himself!

Desdemona is not counted a big part by actresses, but I loved playing it. Some nights I played it beautifully. My appearance was right–I was such a poor wraith of a thing. But let there be no mistake–it took strength to act this weakness and passiveness of Desdemona’s. I soon found that, like Cordelia, she has plenty of character.

Reading the play the other day, I studied the opening scene. It is the finest opening to a play I know.

How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, and how little stock he seems to take of _mothers_! Portia and Desdemona, Cordelia, Rosalind and Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine and Hermione, Ophelia, Jessica, Hero, and many more are daughters of _fathers_, but of their mothers we hear nothing. My own daughter called my attention to this fact quite recently, and it is really a singular fact. Of mothers of sons there are plenty of examples: Constance, Volumnia, the Countess Rousillon, Gertrude; but if there are mothers of daughters at all, they are poor examples, like Juliet’s mother and Mrs. Page. I wonder if in all the many hundreds of books written on Shakespeare and his plays this point has been taken up? I once wrote a paper on the “Letters in Shakespeare’s Plays,” and congratulated myself that they had never been made a separate study. The very day after I first read my paper before the British Empire Shakespeare League, a lady wrote to me from Oxford and said I was mistaken in thinking that there was no other contribution to the subject. She enclosed an essay of her own which had either been published or read before some society. Probably some one else has dealt with Shakespeare’s patronage of fathers and neglect of mothers! I often wonder what the mothers of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia were like! I think Lear must have married twice.

This was the first of Henry Irving’s great Shakespearean productions. “Hamlet” and “Othello” had been mounted with care, but, in spite of statements that I have seen to the contrary, they were not true reflections of Irving as a producer. In beauty I do not think that “Romeo and Juliet” surpassed “The Cup,” but it was very sumptuous, impressive and Italian. It was the most _elaborate_ of all the Lyceum productions. In it Henry first displayed his mastery of crowds. The brawling of the rival houses in the streets, the procession of girls to wake Juliet on her wedding morning, the musicians, the magnificent reconciliation of the two houses which closed the play, every one on the stage holding a torch, were all treated with a marvelous sense of pictorial effect.

Henry once said to me: “‘Hamlet’ could be played anywhere on its acting merits. It marches from situation to situation. But ‘Romeo and Juliet’ proceeds from picture to picture. Every line suggests a picture. It is a dramatic poem rather than a drama, and I mean to treat it from that point of view.”

While he was preparing the production he revived “The Two Roses,” a company in which as Digby Grant he had made a great success years before. I rehearsed the part of Lottie two or three times, but Henry released me because I was studying Juliet; and as he said, “You’ve got to do all you know with it.”

Perhaps the sense of this responsibility weighed on me. Perhaps I was neither young enough nor old enough to play Juliet. I read everything that had ever been written about her before I had myself decided what she was. It was a dreadful mistake. That was the first thing wrong with my Juliet–lack of original impulse.

As for the second and the third and the fourth–well, I am not more than common vain, I trust, but I see no occasion to write them _all_ down.

It was perhaps the greatest opportunity that I had yet had at the Lyceum. I studied the part at my cottage at Hampton Court in a bedroom looking out over the park. There was nothing wrong with _that_. By the way, how important it is to be careful about environment and everything else when one is studying. One ought to be in the country, but not all the time…. It is good to go about and see pictures, hear music, and watch everything. One should be very much alone, and should study early and late–all night, if need be, even at the cost of sleep. Everything that one does or thinks or sees will have an effect upon the part, precisely as on an unborn child.

I wish now that instead of reading how this and that actress had played Juliet, and cracking my brain over the different readings of her lines and making myself familiar with the different opinions of philosophers and critics, I had gone to Verona, and just _imagined_. Perhaps the most wonderful description of Juliet, as she should be acted, occurs in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s “Il Fuoco.” In the book an Italian actress tells her friend how she played the part when she was a girl of fourteen in an open-air theater near Verona. Could a girl of fourteen play such a part? Yes, if she were not youthful, only young with the youth of the poet, tragically old as some youth is.

Now I understand Juliet better. Now I know how she should be played. But time is inexorable. At sixty, know what one may, one cannot play Juliet.

I know that Henry Irving’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” has been attributed to my ambition. What nonsense! Henry Irving now had in view the production of all Shakespeare’s actable plays, and naturally “Romeo and Juliet” would come as early as possible in the programme.

The music was composed by Sir Julius Benedict, and was exactly right. There was no _leit-motiv_, no attempt to reflect the passionate emotion of the drama, but a great deal of Southern joy, of flutes and wood and wind. At a rehearsal which had lasted far into the night I asked Sir Julius, who was very old, if he wasn’t sleepy.

“Sleepy! Good heavens, no! I never sleep more than two hours. It’s the end of my life, and I don’t want to waste it in sleep!”

There is generally some “old ‘un” in a company now who complains of insufficient rehearsals, and says, perhaps, “Think of Irving’s rehearsals! They were the real thing.” While we were rehearsing “Romeo and Juliet” I remember that Mrs. Stirling, a charming and ripe old actress whom Henry had engaged to play the nurse, was always groaning out that she had not rehearsed enough.

“Oh, these modern ways!” she used to say. “We never have any rehearsals at all. How am I going to play the Nurse?”

She played it splendidly–indeed, she as the Nurse and old Tom Mead as the Apothecary–the two “old ‘uns” romped away with chief honors, had the play all to nothing.

I had one battle with Mrs. Stirling over “tradition.” It was in the scene beginning–

“The clock struck twelve when I did send the nurse, And yet she is not here….”

Tradition said that Juliet must go on coquetting and clicking over the Nurse to get the news of Romeo out of her. Tradition said that Juliet must give imitations of the Nurse on the line “Where’s your mother?” in order to get that cheap reward, “a safe laugh.” I felt that it was wrong. I felt that Juliet was angry with the Nurse. Each time she delayed in answering I lost my temper, with genuine passion. At “Where’s your mother?” I spoke with indignation, tears and rage. We were a long time coaxing Mrs. Stirling to let the scene be played on these lines, but this was how it _was_ played eventually.

She was the only Nurse that I have ever seen who did not play the part like a female pantaloon. She did not assume any great decrepitude. In the “Cords” scene, where the Nurse tells Juliet of the death of Paris, she did not play for comedy at all, but was very emotional. Her parrot scream when she found me dead was horribly real and effective.

Years before I had seen Mrs. Stirling act at the Adelphi with Benjamin Webster, and had cried out: “_That’s_ my idea of an actress!” In those days she was playing Olivia (in a version of the “Vicar of Wakefield” by Tom Taylor), Peg Woffington, and other parts of the kind. She swept on to the stage and in that magical way, never, never to be learned, _filled_ it. She had such breadth of style, such a lovely voice, such a beautiful expressive eye! When she played the Nurse at the Lyceum her voice had become a little jangled and harsh, but her eye was still bright and her art had not abated–not one little bit! Nor had her charm. Her smile was the most fascinating, irresistible thing imaginable.

The production was received with abuse by the critics. It was one of our failures, yet it ran a hundred and fifty nights!

Henry Irving’s Romeo had more bricks thrown at it even than my Juliet! I remember that not long after we opened, a well-known politician who had enough wit and knowledge of the theater to have taken a more original view, came up to me and said:

“I say, E.T., why is Irving playing Romeo?”

I looked at his distraught. “You should ask me why I am playing Juliet! Why are we any of us doing what we have to do?”

“Oh, _you’re_ all right. But Irving!”

“I don’t agree with you,” I said. I was growing a little angry by this time. “Besides, who would you have play Romeo?”

“Well, it’s so obvious. You’ve got Terriss in the cast.”

“_Terriss!_”

“Yes. I don’t doubt Irving’s intellectuality, you know. As Romeo he reminds me of a pig who has been taught to play the fiddle. He does it cleverly, but he would be better employed in squealing. He cannot shine in the part like the fiddler. Terriss in this case is the fiddler.”

I was furious. “I am sorry you don’t realize,” I said, “that the worst thing Henry Irving could do would be better than the best of any one else.”

When dear Terris did play Romeo at the Lyceum two or three years later to the Juliet of Mary Anderson, he attacked the part with a good deal of fire. He was young, truly, and stamped his foot a great deal, was vehement and passionate. But it was so obvious that there was no intelligence behind his reading. He did not know what the part was about, and all the finer shades of meaning in it he missed. Yet the majority, with my political friend, would always prefer a Terriss as Romeo to a Henry Irving.

I am not going to say that Henry’s Romeo was good. What I do say is that some bits of it were as good as anything he ever did. In the big emotional scene (in the Friar’s cell), he came to grief precisely as he had done in Othello. He screamed, grew slower and slower, and looked older and older. When I begin to think it over I see that he often failed in such scenes through his very genius for impersonation. An actor of commoner mould takes such scenes rhetorically–recites them, and gets through them with some success. But the actor who impersonates, feels, and lives such anguish or passion or tempestuous grief, does for the moment in imagination nearly die. Imagination impeded Henry Irving in what are known as “strong” scenes.

He was a perfect Hamlet, a perfect Richard III., a perfect Shylock, except in the scene with Tubal, where I think his voice failed him. He was an imperfect Romeo; yet, as I have said, he did things in the part which were equal to the best of his perfect Hamlet.

His whole attitude before he met Juliet was beautiful. He came on from the very back of the stage and walked over a little bridge with a book in his hand, sighing and dying for Rosaline. In Iago he had been Italian. Then it was the Italy of Venice. As Romeo it was the Italy of Tuscany. His clothes were as Florentine as his bearing. He ignored the silly tradition that Romeo must wear a feather in his cap. In the course of his study of the part he had found that the youthful fops and gallants of the period put in their hats anything that they had been given–some souvenir “dallying with the innocence of love.” And he wore in his hat a sprig of crimson oleander.

It is not usual, I think, to make much of the Rosaline episode. Henry Irving chose with great care a tall dark girl to represent Rosaline at the ball. Can I ever forget his face when suddenly in pursuit of _her_ he saw _me_…. Once more I reflect that a _face_ is the chiefest equipment of the actor.

I know they said he looked too old–was too old for Romeo. In some scenes he looked aged as only a very young man can look. He was not boyish; but ought Romeo to be boyish?

I am not supporting the idea of an elderly Romeo. When it came to the scenes where Romeo “poses” and is poetical but insincere, Henry _did_ seem elderly. He couldn’t catch the youthful pose of melancholy with its extravagant expression. It was in the repressed scenes, where the melancholy was sincere, the feeling deeper, and the expression slighter, that he was at his best.

“He may be good, but he isn’t Romeo,” is a favorite type of criticism. But I have seen Duse and Bernhardt in “La Dame aux Camelias,” and cannot say which is Marguerite Gauthier. Each has her own view of the character, and each _is_ it _according to her imagination_.

According to his imagination, Henry Irving was Romeo.

Again in this play he used his favorite “fate” tree. It gloomed over the street along which Romeo went to the ball. It was in the scene with the Apothecary. Henry thought that it symbolized the destiny hanging over the lovers.

It is usual for Romeo to go in to the dead body of Juliet lying in Capulet’s monument through a gate on the _level_, as if the Capulets were buried but a few feet from the road. At rehearsals Henry Irving kept on saying: “I must go _down_ to the vault.” After a great deal of consideration he had an inspiration. He had the exterior of the vault in one scene, the entrance to it down a flight of steps. Then the scene changed to the interior of the vault, and the steps now led from a height above the stage. At the close of the scene, when the Friar and the crowd came rushing down into the tomb, these steps were thronged with people, each one holding a torch, and the effect was magnificent.

At the opening of the Apothecary Scene, when Balthazar comes to tell Romeo of Juliet’s supposed death, Henry was marvelous. His face grew whiter and whiter.

“Then she is well and nothing can be ill; Her body sleeps in Capulet’s monument.”

It was during the silence after those two lines that Henry Irving as Romeo had one of those sublime moments which an actor only achieves once or twice in his life. The only thing that I ever saw to compare with it was Duse’s moment when she took Kellner’s card in “Magda.” There was absolutely no movement, but her face grew white, and the audience knew what was going on in her soul, as she read the name of the man who years before had seduced and deserted her.

As Juliet I did not _look_ right. My little daughter Edy, a born archaeologist, said: “Mother, you oughtn’t to have a fringe.” Yet, strangely enough, Henry himself liked me as Juliet. After the first night, or was it the dress rehearsal–I am not quite clear which–he wrote to me that “beautiful as Portia was, Juliet leaves her far, far behind. Never anybody acted more exquisitely the part of the performance which I saw from the front. ‘Hie to high fortune,’ and ‘Where spirits resort’ were simply incomparable…. Your mother looked very radiant last night. I told her how proud she should be, and she was…. The play will be, I believe, a mighty ‘go,’ for the beauty of it is bewildering. I am sure of this, for it dumbfounded them all last night. Now you–we–must make our task a delightful one by doing everything possible to make our acting easy and comfortable. We are in for a long run.”

To this letter he added a very human postscript: “I have determined not to see a paper for a week–I know they’ll cut me up, and I don’t like it!”

Yes, he _was_ cut up, and he didn’t like it, but a few people knew. One of them was Mr. Frankfort Moore, the novelist, who wrote to me of this “revealing Romeo, full of originality and power.”

“Are you affected by adverse criticism?” I was asked once. I answered then and I answer now, that legitimate adverse criticism has always been of use to me if only because it “gave me to think” furiously. Seldom does the outsider, however talented, as a writer and observer, recognize the actor’s art, and often we are told that we are acting best when we are showing the works most plainly, and denied any special virtue when we are concealing our method. Professional criticism is most helpful, chiefly because it induces one to criticize oneself. “Did I give that impression to anyone? Then there must have been something wrong somewhere.” The “something” is often a perfectly different blemish from that to which the critic drew attention.

Unprofessional criticism is often more helpful still, but alas! one’s friends are to one’s faults more than a little blind, and to one’s virtues very kind! It is through letters from people quite unknown to me that I have sometimes learned valuable lessons. During the run of “Romeo and Juliet” some one wrote and told me that if the dialogue at the ball could be taken in a lighter and _quicker_ way, it would better express the manner of a girl of Juliet’s age. The same unknown critic pointed out that I was too slow and studied in the Balcony Scene. She–I think it was a woman–was perfectly right.

On the hundredth night, although no one liked my Juliet very much, I received many flowers, little tokens, and poems. To one bouquet was pinned a note which ran:

“To JULIET,
As a mark of respect and Esteem
From the Gasmen of the Lyceum Theater.”

That alone would have made my recollections of “Romeo and Juliet” pleasant. But there was more. At the supper on the stage after the hundredth performance, Sarah Bernhardt was present. She said nice things to me, and I was enraptured that my “vraies larmes” should have pleased and astonished her! I noticed that she hardly ever moved, yet all the time she gave the impression of swift, butterfly movement. While talking to Henry she took some red stuff out of her bag and rubbed it on her lips! This frank “making-up” in public was a far more astonishing thing in the ‘eighties than it would be now. But I liked Miss Sarah for it, as I liked her for everything.

How wonderful she looked in those days! She was as transparent as an azalea, only more so; like a cloud, only not so thick. Smoke from a burning paper describes her more nearly! She was hollow-eyed, thin, almost consumptive-looking. Her body was not the prison of her soul, but its shadow.

On the stage she has always seemed to me more a symbol, an ideal, an epitome than a _woman_. It is this quality which makes her so easy in such lofty parts as Phedre. She is always a miracle. Let her play “L’Aiglon,” and while matter-of-fact members of the audience are wondering if she looks _really_ like the unfortunate King of Rome, and deciding against her and in favor of Maude Adams who did look the boy to perfection, more imaginative watchers see in Sarah’s performance a truth far bigger than a mere physical resemblance. Rostand says in the foreword to his play, that in it he does not espouse this cause or that, but only tells the story of “one poor little boy.” In another of his plays, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” there is one poor little tune played on a pipe of which the hero says:

“Ecoutez, Gascons, c’est toute la Gascogne.”

Though I am not French, and know next to nothing of the language, I thought when I saw Sarah’s “L’Aiglon,” that of that one poor little boy too might be said:

“Ecoutez, Francais, c’est toute la France!”

It is this extraordinary decorative and symbolic quality of Sarah’s which makes her transcend all personal and individual feeling on the stage. No one plays a love scene better, but it is a _picture_ of love that she gives, a strange orchidaceous picture rather than a suggestion of the ordinary human passion as felt by ordinary human people. She is exotic–well, what else should she be? One does not, at any rate one should not, quarrel with an exquisite tropical flower and call it unnatural because it is not a buttercup or a cowslip.

I have spoken of the face as the chief equipment of the actor. Sarah Bernhardt contradicts this at once. Her face does little for her. Her walk is not much. Nothing about her is more remarkable than the way she gets about the stage without one ever seeing her move. By what magic does she triumph without two of the richest possessions that an actress can have? Eleonora Duse has them. Her walk is the walk of the peasant, fine and free. She has the superb carriage of the head which goes with that fearless movement from the hips–and her face! There is nothing like it, nothing! But it is as the real woman, a particular woman, that Duse triumphs most. Her Cleopatra was insignificant compared with Sarah’s–she is not so pictorial.

How futile it is to make comparisons! Better far to thank heaven for both these women.

EXTRACT FROM MY DIARY

_Saturday, June 11, 1892._–“To see ‘Miss Sarah’ as ‘Cleopatre’ (Sardou superb!). She was inspired! The essence of Shakespeare’s ‘Cleopatra.’ I went round and implored her to do Juliet. She said she was too old. She can _never_ be old. ‘Age cannot wither her.’

_June 18._–“Again to see Sarah–this time ‘La Dame aux Camelias.’ Fine, marvelous. Her writing the letter, and the last act the best.

_July 11._–“_Telegraph_ says ‘Frou-frou’ was ‘never at any time a character in which she (Sarah) excelled.’ Dear me! When I saw it I thought it wonderful. It made me ashamed of ever having played it.”

Sarah Bernhardt has shown herself the equal of any man as a manager. Her productions are always beautiful; she chooses her company with discretion, and sees to every detail of the stage-management. In this respect she differs from all other foreign artists that I have seen. I have always regretted that Duse should play as a rule with such a mediocre company and should be apparently so indifferent to her surroundings. In “Adrienne Lecouvreur” it struck me that the careless stage-management utterly ruined the play, and I could not bear to see Duse as Adrienne beautifully dressed while the Princess and the other Court ladies wore cheap red velveteen and white satin and brought the pictorial level of the performance down to that of a “fit-up” or booth.

Who could mention “Miss Sarah” (my own particular name for her) as being present at a supper-party without saying something about her by the way! Still, I have been a long time by the way. Now for Romeo and Juliet!

At that 100th-night celebration I saw Mrs. Langtry in evening dress for the first time, and for the first time realized how beautiful she was. Her neck and shoulders kept me so busy looking that I could neither talk nor listen.

“Miss Sarah” and I have always been able to understand one another, although I hardly know a word of French and her English is scanty. She too, liked my Juliet–she and Henry Irving! Well, that was charming, although I could not like it myself, except for my “Cords” scene, of which I shall always be proud.

My dresser, Sarah Holland, came to me, I think, during “Romeo and Juliet.” I never had any other dresser at the Lyceum except Sally’s sister Lizzie, who dressed me during the first few years. Sally stuck to me loyally until the Lyceum days ended. Then she perceived “a divided duty.” On one side was “the Guv’nor” with “the Guv’nor’s” valet Walter, to whom she was devoted; on the other was a precarious in and out job with me, for after the Lyceum I never knew what I was going to do next. She chose to go with Henry, and it was she and Walter who dressed him for the last time when he lay dead in the hotel bedroom at Bradford.

Sally Holland’s two little daughters “walked on” in “Romeo and Juliet.” Henry always took an interest in the children in the theater, and was very kind to them. One night as we came down the stairs from our dressing-rooms to go home–the theater was quiet and deserted–we found a small child sitting forlornly and patiently on the lowest step.

“Well, my dear, what are you doing here?” said Henry.

“Waiting for mother, sir.”

“Are you acting in the theater?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what part do you take?”

“Please, sir, first I’m a water-carrier, then I’m a little page, and then I’m a virgin.”

Henry and I sat down on the stairs and laughed until we cried! Little Flo Holland was one of the troop of “virgins” who came to wake Juliet on her bridal morn. As time went on she was promoted to more important parts, but she never made us laugh so much again.

Her mother was a “character,” a dear character. She had an extraordinarily open mind, and was ready to grasp each new play as it came along as a separate and entirely different field of operations! She was also extremely methodical, and only got flurried once in a blue moon. When we went to America and made the acquaintance of that dreadful thing, a “one-night stand,” she was as precise and particular about having everything nice and in order for me as if we were going to stay in the town a month. Down went my neat square of white drugget; all the lights in my dressing-room were arranged as I wished. Everything was unpacked and ironed. One day when I came into some American theater to dress I found Sally nearly in tears.

“What’s the matter with you, Sally?” I asked.

“I ‘aven’t ‘ad a morsel to heat all day, dear, and I can’t ‘eat my iron.”

“Eat your iron, Sally! What _do_ you mean?”

“‘Ow am I to iron all this, dear?” wailed Sally, picking up my Nance Oldfield apron and a few other trifles. “It won’t get ‘ot.”

Until then I really thought that Sally was being sardonic about an iron as a substitute for victuals!

When she first began to dress me, I was very thin, so thin that it was really a grief to me. Sally would comfort me in my thin days by the terse compliment:

“Beautiful and fat to-night, dear.”

As the years went on and I grew fat, she made a change in the compliment:

“Beautiful and thin to-night, dear.”

Mr. Fernandez played Friar Laurence in “Romeo and Juliet.” He was a very nervous actor, and it used to paralyze him with fright when I knelt down in the friar’s cell with my back to the audience and put safety pins in the drapery I wore over my head to keep it in position while I said the lines,

“Are you at leisure, holy father, now Or shall I come to you at evening mass?”

Not long after the production of “Romeo and Juliet” I saw the performance of a Greek play–the “Electra,” I think–by some Oxford students. A young woman veiled in black with bowed head was brought in on a chariot. Suddenly she lifted her head and looked round, revealing a face of such pure classic beauty and a glance of such pathos that I called out:

“What a supremely beautiful girl!”

Then I remembered that there were no women in the cast! The face belonged to a young Oxford man, Frank Benson.

We engaged him to play Paris in “Romeo and Juliet,” when George Alexander, the original Paris, left the Lyceum for a time. Already Benson gave promise of turning out quite a different person from the others. He had not nearly so much of the actor’s instinct as Terriss, but one felt that he had far more earnestness. He was easily distinguished as a man with a purpose, one of those workers who “scorn delights and live laborious days.” Those laborious days led him at last to the control of two or three companies, all traveling through Great Britain playing a Shakespearean repertoire. A wonderful organizer, a good actor (oddly enough, the more difficult the part the better he is–I like his _Lear_), and a man who has always been associated with high endeavor, Frank Benson’s name is honored all over England. He was only at the Lyceum for this one production, but he always regarded Henry Irving as the source of the good work that he did afterwards.

“Thank you very much,” he wrote to me after his first night as Paris, “for writing me a word of encouragement…. I was very much ashamed and disgusted with myself all Sunday for my poverty-stricken and thin performance…. I think I was a little better last night. Indeed I was much touched at the kindness and sympathy of all the company and their efforts to make the awkward new boy feel at home…. I feel doubly grateful to you and Mr. Irving for the light you shed from the lamp of art on life now that I begin to understand the labor and weariness the process of trimming the Lamp entails.”

X

LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS (_continued_)

“MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING” TO “FAUST”

Our success with “The Belle’s Stratagem” had pointed to comedy, to Beatrice and Benedick in particular, because in Mrs. Cowley’s old comedy we had had some scenes of the same type. I have already told of my first appearance as Beatrice at Leeds, and said that I never played the part so well again; but the Lyceum production was a great success, and Beatrice a great personal success for me. It is only in high comedy that people seem to know what I am driving at!

The stage-management of the play was very good; the scenery nothing out of the ordinary except for the Church Scene. There was no question that it _was_ a church, hardly a question that old Mead was a Friar. Henry had the art of making ceremonies seem very real.

This was the first time that we engaged a singer from outside. Mr. Jack Robertson came into the cast to sing “Sigh no more, ladies,” and made an enormous success.

Johnston Forbes-Robertson made his first appearance at the Lyceum as Claudio. I had not acted with him since “The Wandering Heir,” and his improvement as an actor in the ten years that had gone by since then was marvelous. I had once said to him that he had far better stick to his painting and become an artist instead of an actor. His Claudio made me “take it back.” It was beautiful. I have seen many young actors play the part since then, but not one of them made it anywhere near as convincing. Forbes-Robertson put a touch of Leontes into it, a part which some years later he was to play magnificently, and through the subtle indication of consuming and insanely suspicious jealousy made Claudio’s offensive conduct explicable at least. On the occasion of the performance at Drury Lane which the theatrical profession organized in 1906 in honor of my Stage Jubilee, one of the items in the programme was a scene from “Much Ado about Nothing.” I then played Beatrice for the last time and Forbes-Robertson played his old part of Claudio.

During the run Henry commissioned him to paint a picture of the Church Scene, which was hung in the Beefsteak Room. The engravings printed from it were at one time very popular. When Johnston was asked why he had chosen that particular moment in the Church Scene, he answered modestly that it was the only moment when he could put himself as Claudio at the “side”! Some of the other portraits in the picture are Henry Irving, Terriss, who played Don Pedro; Jessie Millward as Hero, Mr. Glenny as Don John, Miss Amy Coleridge, Miss Harwood, Mr. Mead, and his daughter “Charley” Mead, a pretty little thing who was one of the pages.

The Lyceum company was not a permanent one. People used to come, learn something, go away, and come back at a larger salary! Miss Emery left for a time, and then returned to play Hero and other parts. I liked her Hero better than Miss Millward’s. Miss Millward had a sure touch; strength, vitality, interest; but somehow she was commonplace in the part.

Henry used to spend hours and hours teaching people. I used to think impatiently: “Acting can’t be taught.” Gradually I learned to modify this conviction and to recognize that there are two classes of actors:

1. Those who can only do what they are taught.

2. Those who cannot be taught, but can be helped by suggestion to work out things for themselves.

Henry said to me once: “What makes a popular actor? Physique! What makes a great actor? Imagination and sensibility.” I tried to believe it. Then I thought to myself: “Henry himself is not quite what is understood by ‘an actor of physique,’ and certainly he is popular. And that he is a great actor I know. He certainly has both imagination and ‘sense and sensibility.'” After the lapse of years I begin to wonder if Henry was ever really _popular_. It was natural to most people to dislike his acting–they found it queer, as some find the painting of Whistler–but he forced them, almost against their will and nature, out of dislike into admiration. They had to come up to him, for never would he go down to them. This is not popularity.

_Brain_ allied with the instinct of the actor tells, but stupidity allied with the instinct of the actor tells more than brain alone. I have sometimes seen a clever man who was not a born actor play a small part with his brains, and have felt that the cleverness was telling more with the actors on the stage than with the audience.

Terriss, like Mrs. Pritchard, if we are to believe what Dr. Johnson said of her, often did not know what on earth he was talking about! One morning we went over and over one scene in “Much Ado”–at least a dozen times I should think–and each time when Terriss came to the speech beginning:

“What needs the bridge much broader than the flood,”

he managed to give a different emphasis. First it would be:

“What! _Needs_ the bridge much broader than the flood!” Then:

“What needs the bridge _much_ broader than the flood.”

After he had been floundering about for some time, Henry said:

“Terriss, what’s the meaning of that?”

“Oh, get along, Guv’nor, _you_ know!”

Henry laughed. He never could be angry with Terriss, not even when he came to rehearsal full of absurd excuses. One day, however, he was so late that it was past a joke, and Henry spoke to him sharply.

“I think you’ll be sorry you’ve spoken to me like this, Guv’nor,” said Terriss, casting down his eyes.

“Now no hanky-panky tricks, Terriss.”

“Tricks, Guv’nor! I think you’ll regret having said that when you hear that my poor mother passed away early this morning.”

And Terriss wept.

Henry promptly gave him the day off. A few weeks later, when Terriss and I were looking through the curtain at the audience just before the play began, he said to me gaily:

“See that dear old woman sitting in the fourth row of stalls–that’s my dear old mother.”

The wretch had quite forgotten that he had killed her!

He was the only person who ever ventured to “cheek” Henry, yet he never gave offense, not even when he wrote a letter of this kind:

“My dear Guv.,–

“I hope you are enjoying yourself, and in the best of health. I very much want to play ‘Othello’ with you next year (don’t laugh). Shall I study it up, and will you do it with me on tour if possible? Say _yes_, and lighten the drooping heart of yours sincerely,

“WILL TERRISS.”

I have never seen any one at all like Terriss, and my father said the same. The only actor of my father’s day, he used to tell me, who had a touch of the same insouciance and lawlessness was Leigh Murray, a famous _jeune premier_.

One night he came into the theater soaked from head to foot.

“Is it raining, Terriss?” said some one who noticed that he was wet.

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Terriss carelessly.

Later it came out that he had jumped off a penny steamboat into the Thames and saved a little girl’s life. It was pretty brave, I think.

Mr. Pinero, who was no longer a member of the Lyceum company when “Much Ado” was produced, wrote to Henry after the first night that it was “as perfect a representation of a Shakespearean play as I conceive to be possible. I think,” he added, “that the work at your theater does so much to create new playgoers–which is what we want, far more I fancy than we want new theaters and perhaps new plays.”

A playgoer whose knowledge of the English stage extended over a period of fifty-five years, wrote another nice letter about “Much Ado” which was passed on to me because it had some ridiculously nice things about me in it.

SAVILE CLUB,
_January 13, 1883._

“My dear Henry,–

“I were an imbecile ingrate if I did not hasten to give you my warmest thanks for the splendid entertainment of last night. Such a performance is not a grand entertainment merely, or a glorious pastime, although it was all that. It was, too, an artistic display of the highest character, elevating in the vast audience their art instinct–as well as purifying any developed art in the possession of individuals.

“I saw the Kean revivals of 1855-57, and I suppose ‘The Winter’s Tale’ was the best of the lot. But it did not approach last night….

“I was impressed more strongly than ever with the fact that the plays of Shakespeare were meant to be _acted_. The man who thinks that he can know Shakespeare by reading him is a shallow ass. The best critic and scholar would have been carried out of himself last night into the poet’s heart, his mind-spirit…. The Terry was glorious…. The scenes in which she appeared–and she was in eight out of the sixteen–reminded me of nothing but the blessed sun that not only beautifies but creates. But she never acts so well as when I am there to see! That is a real lover’s sentiment, and all lovers are vain men.

“Terriss has ‘come on’ wonderfully, and his Don Pedro is princely and manful.

“I have thus set down, my dear Irving, one or two things merely to show that my gratitude to you is not that of a blind gratified idiot, but of one whose intimate personal knowledge of the English stage entitles him to say what he owes to you.”

“I am

“Affectionately yours,

“A.J. DUFFIELD.”

In 1891, when we revived “Much Ado,” Henry’s Benedick was far more brilliant than it was at first. In my diary, January 5, 1891, I wrote:

“Revival of ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’ Went most brilliantly. Henry has vastly improved upon his _old_ rendering of Benedick. Acts larger now–not so ‘finicking.’ His model (of manner) is the Duke of Sutherland. VERY good. I did some parts better, I think–made Beatrice a nobler woman. Yet I failed to please myself in the Cathedral Scene.”

_Two days later._–“Played the Church Scene all right at last. More of a _blaze_. The little scene in the garden, too, I did better (in the last act). Beatrice has _confessed_ her love, and is now _softer_. Her voice should be beautiful now, breaking out into playful defiance now and again, as of old. The last scene, too, I made much more merry, happy, _soft_.”

_January 8._–“I must make Beatrice more _flashing_ at first, and _softer_ afterwards. This will be an improvement upon my old reading of the part. She must be always _merry_ and by turns scornful, tormenting, vexed, self-communing, absent, melting, teasing, brilliant, indignant, _sad-merry_, thoughtful, withering, gentle, humorous, and gay, Gay, _Gay_! Protecting (to Hero), motherly, very intellectual–a gallant creature and complete in mind and feature.”

After a run of two hundred and fifty nights, “Much Ado,” although it was still drawing fine houses, was withdrawn as we were going to America in the autumn (of 1883) and Henry wanted to rehearse the plays that we were to do in the States by reviving them in London at the close of the summer season. It was during these revivals that I played Janette in “The Lyons Mail”–not a big part, and not well suited to me, but I played it well enough to support my theory that whatever I have _not_ been, I _have_ been a useful actress.

I always associate “The Lyons Mail” with old Mead, whose performance of the father, Jerome Lesurques, was one of the most impressive things that this fine actor ever did with us. (Before Henry was ever heard of, Mead had played Hamlet at Drury Lane!) Indeed when he “broke up,” Henry put aside “The Lyons Mail” for many years because he dreaded playing Lesurques’ scene with his father without Mead.

In the days just before the break-up, which came about because Mead was old, and–I hope there is no harm in saying of him what can be said of many men who have done finely in the world–too fond of “the wine when it is red,” Henry use to suffer great anxiety in the scene, because he never knew what Mead was going to do or say next. When Jerome Lesurques is forced to suspect his son of crime, he has a line:

“Am I mad, or dreaming? Would I were.”

Mead one night gave a less poetic reading:

“Am I mad or _drunk_? Would I were!”

It will be remembered by those who saw the play that Lesurques, an innocent man, will not commit the Roman suicide of honor at his father’s bidding, and refuses to take up his pistol from the table. “What! you refuse to die by your own hands, do you?” says the elder Lesurques. “Then die like a dog by mine!” (producing a pistol from his pocket).

One night, after having delivered the line with his usual force and impressiveness, Mead, after prolonged fumbling in his coat-tail pockets, added another:

“D—, b—-! God bless my soul! Where’s the pistol? I haven’t got the pistol!”

The last scene in the eventful history of “Meadisms” in “‘The Lyons Mail” was when Mead came on to the stage in his own top-hat, went over to the sofa, and lay down, apparently for a nap! Not a word could Henry get from him, and Henry had to play the scene by himself. He did it in this way:

“You say, father, that I,” etc. “I answer you that it is false!”

Mead had a remarkable _foot_. Norman Forbes called it an _architectural_ foot. Bunions and gout combined to give it a gargoyled effect! One night, I forget whether it was in this play or another, Henry, pawing the ground with his foot before an “exit”–one of the mannerisms which his imitators delighted to burlesque–came down on poor old Mead’s foot, bunion gargoyles and all! Hardly had Mead stopped cursing under his breath than on came Tyars, and brought down _his_ weight heavily on the same foot. Directly Tyars came off the stage he looked for Mead in the wings and offered an apology.

“I beg your pardon–I’m really awfully sorry, Mead.”

“Sorry! sorry!” the old man snorted. “It’s a d—-d conspiracy!”

It was the dignity and gravity of Mead which made everything he said so funny. I am afraid that those who never knew him will wonder where the joke comes in.

I forget what year he left us for good, but in a letter of Henry’s dated September, 1888, written during a provincial tour of “Faust,” when I was ill and my sister Marion played Margaret instead of me, I find this allusion to him:

“Wenman does the Kitchen Witch now (I altered it this morning) and Mead the old one–the climber. Poor old chap, he’ll not climb much longer!”

This was one of the least successful of Henry’s Shakespearean productions. Terriss looked all wrong as Orsino; many other people were miscast. Henry said to me a few years later when he thought of doing “The Tempest,” “I can’t do it without three great comedians. I ought never to have attempted ‘Twelfth Night’ without them.”

I don’t think that I played Viola nearly as well as my sister Kate. Her “I am the man” was very delicate and charming. I overdid that. My daughter says: “Well, you were far better than any Viola that I have seen since, but you were too simple to make a great hit in it. I think that if you had played Rosalind the public would have thought you too simple in that. Somehow people expect these parts to be acted in a ‘principal boy’ fashion, with sparkle and animation.”

We had the curious experience of being “booed” on the first night. It was not a comedy audience, and I think the rollickings of Toby Belch and his fellows were thought “low.” Then people were put out by Henry’s attempt to reserve the pit. He thought that the public wanted it. When he found that it was against their wishes he immediately gave in. His pride was the service of the public.

His speech after the hostile reception of “Twelfth Night” was the only mistake that I ever knew him make. He was furious, and showed it. Instead of accepting the verdict, he trounced the first-night audience for giving it. He simply could not understand it!

My old friend Rose Leclercq, who was in Charles Kean’s company at the Princess’s when I made my first appearance upon the stage, joined the Lyceum company to play Olivia. Strangely enough she had lost the touch for the kind of part. She, who had made one of her early successes as the spirit of Astarte in “Manfred,” was known to a later generation of playgoers as the aristocratic dowager of stately presence and incisive repartee. Her son, Fuller Mellish, was also in the cast as Curio, and when we played “Twelfth Night” in America was promoted to the part of Sebastian, my double. In London my brother Fred played it. Directly he walked on to the stage, looking as like me as possible, yet a _man_ all over, he was a success. I don’t think that I have ever seen anything so unmistakable and instantaneous.

In America “Twelfth Night” was liked far better than in London, but I never liked it. I thought our production dull, lumpy and heavy. Henry’s Malvolio was fine and dignified, but not good for the play, and I never could help associating my Viola with physical pain. On the first night I had a bad thumb–I thought it was a whitlow–and had to carry my arm in a sling. It grew worse every night, and I felt so sick and faint from pain that I played most of my scenes sitting in a chair. One night Dr. Stoker, Bram Stoker’s brother, came round between the scenes, and, after looking at my thumb, said:

“Oh, that’ll be all right. I’ll cut it for you.”

He lanced it then and there, and I went on with my part for _that_ night. George Stoker, who was just going off to Ireland, could not see the job through, but the next day I was in for the worst illness I ever had in my life. It was blood-poisoning, and the doctors were in doubt for a little as to whether they would not have to amputate my arm. They said that if George Stoker had not lanced the thumb that minute, I _should_ have lost my arm.

A disagreeable incident in connection with my illness was that a member of my profession made it the occasion of an unkind allusion (in a speech at the Social Science Congress) to “actresses who feign illness and have straw laid down before their houses, while behind the drawn blinds they are having riotous supper-parties, dancing the can-can and drinking champagne.” Upon being asked for “name,” the speaker would neither assert nor deny that it was Ellen Terry (whose poor arm at the time was as big as her waist, and _that_ has never been very small!) that she meant.

I think we first heard of the affair on our second voyage to America, during which I was still so ill that they thought I might never see Quebec, and Henry wrote a letter to the press–a “scorcher.” He showed it to me on the boat. When I had read it, I tore it up and threw the bits into the sea.

“It hasn’t injured me in any way,” I said. “Any answer would be undignified.”

Henry did what I wished in the matter, but, unlike me, whose heart I am afraid is of wax–no impression lasts long–he never forgot it, and never forgave. If the speech-maker chanced to come into a room where he was–he walked out. He showed the same spirit in the last days of his life, long after our partnership had come to an end. A literary club, not a hundred yards from Hyde Park Corner, “blackballed”‘ me (although I was qualified for election under the rules) for reasons with which I was never favored. The committee, a few months later, wished Henry Irving to be the guest of honor at one of the club dinners. The honor was declined.

The first night of “Olivia” at the Lyceum was about the only _comfortable_ first night that I have ever had! I was familiar with the part, and two of the cast, Terriss and Norman Forbes, were the same as at the Court, which made me feel all the more at home. Henry left a great deal of the stage-management to us, for he knew that he could not improve on Mr. Hare’s production. Only he insisted on altering the last act, and made a bad matter worse. The division into two scenes wasted time, and nothing was gained by it. _Never_ obstinate, Henry saw his mistake and restored the original end after a time. It was weak and unsatisfactory but not pretentious and bad like the last act he presented at the first performance.

We took the play too slowly at the Lyceum. That was often a fault there. Because Henry was slow, the others took their time from him, and the result was bad.

The lovely scene of the vicarage parlor, in which we used a harpsichord and were accused of pedantry for our pains, did not look so well at the Lyceum as at the Court. The stage was too big for it.

The critics said that I played Olivia better at the Lyceum, but I did not feel this myself.

At first Henry did not rehearse the Vicar at all well. One day when he was stamping his foot very much, as if he was Matthias in “The Bells,” my little Edy, who was a terrible child _and_ a wonderful critic, said:

“Don’t go on like that, Henry. Why don’t you talk as you do to me and Teddy? At home you _are_ the Vicar.”

The child’s frankness did not offend Henry, because it was illuminating. A blind man had changed his Shylock; a little child changed his Vicar. When the first night came he gave a simple, lovable performance. Many people now understood and liked him as they had never done before. One of the things I most admired in it was his sense of the period.

In this, as in other plays, he used to make his entrance in the _skin_ of the part. No need for him to rattle a ladder at the side to get up excitement and illusion as Macready is said to have done. He walked on, and was the simple-minded old clergyman, just as he had walked on a prince in “Hamlet,” a king in “Charles I.,” and a saint in “Becket.”

A very handsome woman, descended from Mrs. Siddons and looking exactly like her, played the gipsy in “Olivia.” The likeness was of no use, because the possessor of it had no talent. What a pity!

“Olivia” has always been a family play. Edy and Ted walked on the stage for the first time in the Court “Olivia.” In later years Ted played Moses and Edy made her first appearance in a speaking part as Polly Flamborough, and has since played both Sophia and the Gipsy. My brother Charlie’s little girl Beatrice made her first appearance as Bill, my sister Floss played Olivia on a provincial tour, and my sister Marion played it at the Lyceum when I was ill.

I saw Floss play it, and took from her a lovely and sincere bit of “business.” In the third act, where the Vicar has found his erring daughter and has come to take her away from the inn, I had always hesitated at my entrance as if I were not quite sure what reception my father would give me after what had happened. Floss in the same situation came running in and went straight to her father, quite sure of his love if not of his forgiveness.

I did _not_ take some business which Marion did on Terriss’s suggestion. Where Thornhill tells Olivia that she is not his wife, I used to thrust him away with both hands as I said–“Devil!”

“It’s very good, Nell, very fine,” said Terriss to me, “but believe me, you miss a great effect there. You play it grandly, of course, but at that moment you miss it. As you say ‘Devil!’ you ought to strike me full in the face.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Terriss,” I said, “she’s not a pugilist.”

Of course I saw, apart from what was dramatically fit, what would happen.

However Marion, very young, very earnest, very dutiful, anxious to please Terriss, listened eagerly to the suggestion during an understudy rehearsal.

“No one could play this part better than your sister Nell,” said Terriss to the attentive Marion, “but as I always tell her, she does miss one great effect. When Olivia says ‘Devil!’ she ought to hit me bang in the face.”

“Thank you for telling me,” said Marion gratefully.

“It will be much more effective,” said Terriss.

It was. When the night came for Marion to play the part, she struck out, and Terriss had to play the rest of the scene with a handkerchief held to his bleeding nose!

I think it was as Olivia that Eleonora Duse first saw me act. She had thought of playing the part herself some time, but she said: “_Never_ now!” No letter about my acting ever gave me the same pleasure as this from her:

“Madame,–Avec Olivia vous m’avez donne bonheur et peine. _Bonheur_ part votre art qui est noble et sincere … _peine_ car je sens la tristesse au coeur quand je vois une belle et genereuse nature de femme, donner son ame a l’art–comme vous le faites–quand c’est la vie meme, _votre_ coeur meme qui parle tendrement, douleureusement, noblement _sous_ votre jeu. Je ne puis me debarrasser d’une certaine tristesse quand je vois des artistes si nobles et hauts tels que vous et Irving…. Si vous etes si forts de soumettre (avec un travail continu) la vie a l’art, il faut done vous admirer comme des forces de la nature meme qui auraient pourtant le droit de vivre pour elles-memes et non pour la foule. Je n’ose pas vous deranger, Madame, et d’ailleurs j’ai tant a faire aussi qu’il m’est impossible de vous dire de vive voix tout le grand plaisir que vous m’avez donne, mais puisque j’ai senti votre coeur, veuillez, chere Madame, croire au mien qui ne demande pas mieux dans cet instant que de vous admirer et de vous le dire tant bien que mal d’une maniere quelconque. Bien a vous.

“E. DUSE.”

When I wrote to Madame Duse the other day to ask her permission to publish this much-prized letter, she answered:

BUENOS AYRES,
_Septembre 11, 1907._

“Chere Ellen Terry,–

“Au milieu du travail en Amerique, je recois votre lettre envoyee a Florence.

“Vous me demandez de publier mon ancienne lettre amicale. Oui, chere Ellen Terry; ce que j’ai donne vous appartient; ce que j’ai dit, je le peux encore, et je vous aime et admire comme toujours….

“J’espere que vous accepterez cette ancienne lettre que j’ai rendue plus claire et un peu mieux ecrite. Vous en serez contente avec moi car, ainsi faisant, j’ai eu le moyen de vous dire que je vous aime et de vous le dire deux fois.

“A vous de coeur,

“E. DUSE.”

Dear, noble Eleanora Duse, great woman, great artist–I can never appreciate you in words, but I store the delight that you have given me by your work, and the personal kindness that you have shown me, in the treasure-house of my heart!

When I celebrated my stage jubilee you traveled all the way from Italy to support me on the stage at Drury Lane. When you stood near me, looking so beautiful with wings in your hair, the wings of glory they seemed to me, I could not thank you, but we kissed each other and you understood!

“Clap-trap” was the verdict passed by many on the Lyceum “Faust,” yet Margaret was the part I liked better than any other–outside Shakespeare. I played it beautifully sometimes. The language was often very commonplace–not nearly as poetic or dramatic as that of “Charles I.”–but the character was all right–simple, touching, sublime.

The Garden Scene I know was unsatisfactory. It was a bad, weak love-scene, but George Alexander as Faust played it admirably. Indeed he always acted like an angel with me; he was so malleable, ready to do anything. He was launched into the part at very short notice, after H.B. Conway’s failure on the first night. Poor Conway! It was Coghlan as Shylock all over again.

Henry called a rehearsal the next day–on Sunday, I think. The company stood about in groups on the stage while Henry walked up and down, speechless, but humming a tune occasionally, always a portentous sign with him. The scene set was the Brocken Scene, and Conway stood at the top of the slope as far away from Henry as he could get! He looked abject. His handsome face was very red, his eyes full of tears. He was terrified at the thought of what was going to happen. The actor was summoned to the office, and presently Loveday came out and said that Mr. George Alexander would play Faust the following night. Alec had been wonderful as Valentine the night before, and as Faust he more than justified Henry’s belief in him. After that he never looked back. He had come to the Lyceum for the first time in 1882, an unknown quantity from a stock company in Glasgow, to play Caleb Decie in “The Two Roses.” He then left us for a time, returned for “Faust,” and remained in the Lyceum company for some years playing all Terriss’s parts.

Alexander had the romantic quality which was lacking in Terriss, but there was a kind of shy modesty about him which handicapped him when he played Squire Thornhill in “Olivia.” “Be more dashing, Alec!” I used to say to him. “Well, I do my best,” he said. “At the hotels I chuck all the barmaids under the chin, and pretend I’m a dog of a fellow for the sake of this part!” Conscientious, dear, delightful Alec! No one ever deserved success more than he did and used it better when it came, as the history of the St. James’s Theater under his management proves. He had the good luck to marry a wife who was clever as well as charming, and could help him.

The original cast of “Faust” was never improved upon. What Martha was ever so good as Mrs. Stirling? The dear old lady’s sight had failed since “Romeo and Juliet,” but she was very clever at concealing it. When she let Mephistopheles in at the door, she used to drop her work on the