"When the blind went up and down and you smiled," he replied--surely a
naive compliment to my way of "taking a call!" Further pressed, he
volunteered: "When you lay on the bed and died to please the angels."
_Other Plays_
I had exactly ten years more with Henry Irving after "Henry VIII."
During that time we did "King Lear," "Becket," "King Arthur,"
"Cymbeline," "Madame Sans-Gene," "Peter the Great," and "The Medicine
Man," I feel too near to these productions to write about them. But a
time will come. The first night of "Cymbeline" I felt almost dead.
Nothing seemed right. "Everything is so slow, so slow," I wrote in my
diary. "I don't feel a bit inspired, only dull and hide-bound." Yet
Imogen was, I think, the _only_ inspired performance of these later
years. On the first night of "Sans-Gene" I acted _courageously_ and
fairly well. Everyone seemed to be delighted. The old Duke of
Cambridge patted, or rather, _thumped_ me on the shoulder and said
kindly: "Ah, my dear, _you_ can act!" Henry quite effaced me in his
wonderful sketch of Napoleon. "It seems to me some nights," I wrote in
my diary at the time, "as if I were watching Napoleon trying to
imitate H. I., and I find myself immensely interested and amused in
the watching."
"The Medicine Man" was, in my opinion, our only _quite_ unworthy
production and I wrote in my diary: "If 'Manfred' and a few such plays
are to succeed this, I simply must do something else."
But I did not! I stayed on, as everyone knows, when the Lyceum as a
personal enterprise of Henry's was no more, when the farcical Lyceum
Syndicate took over the theatre. I played a wretched part in
"Robespierre," and refused L12,000 to go to America with Henry in
"Dante."
In these days Henry Irving was a changed man. He gave the whole thing
up--as a producer, I mean. As an actor he worked as faithfully as
ever. Henley's stoical lines might have been written of him as he was
in those last days:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbow'd.
Henry Irving did not treat me badly. I did not treat him badly. He
revived "Faust" and produced "Dante." I would have liked to stay with
him to the end of the chapter, but I could not act in either of these
plays. But we never quarrelled. Our long partnership dissolved
naturally. It was all very sad, but it could not be helped.