The call was in reference to my engagement as Ophelia. Strangely
characteristic I see it now to have been of Henry that he was content
to take my powers as an actress more or less on trust. A mutual
friend, Lady Pollock, had told him that I was the very person for him;
that "All London" (a vile but convenient phrase) was talking of my
Olivia; that I had acted well in Shakespeare with the Bancrofts; that
I should bring to the Lyceum Theatre what players call "a personal
following." Henry chose his friends as carefully as he chose his
company and his staff. He believed in Lady Pollock implicitly, and he
did not--it is possible that he could not--come and see my Olivia for
himself.
I was living in Longridge Road when Henry Irving came to see me. Not
a word of our conversation about the engagement can I remember. I did
notice, however, the great change that had taken place in the man
since I had last met him in 1867. Then he was really very
ordinary-looking--with a moustache, an unwrinkled face, and a sloping
forehead. The only wonderful thing about him was his melancholy.
When I was playing the piano, once, in the green room at the Queen's
Theatre, he came in and listened. I remember being made aware of his
presence by his sigh--the deepest, profoundest, sincerest sigh I ever
heard from any human being. He asked me if I would not play the piece
again. The incident impressed itself on my mind, inseparably
associated with a picture of him as he looked at thirty--a picture by
no means pleasing. He looked conceited, and almost savagely proud of
the isolation in which he lived. There was a touch of exaggeration in
his appearance, a dash of Werther, with a few flourishes of Jingle!
Nervously sensitive to ridicule, self-conscious, suffering deeply from
his inability to express himself through his art, Henry Irving in 1867
was a very different person from the Henry Irving who called on me at
Longridge Road in 1878. In ten years he had found himself, and so
lost himself--lost, I mean, much of that stiff, ugly
self-consciousness which had encased him as the shell encases the
lobster. His forehead had become more massive, and the very outline
of his features had altered. He was a man of the world, whose
strenuous fighting now was to be done as a general--not, as hitherto,
in the ranks. His manner was very quiet and gentle. "In quietness
and confidence shall be your strength," says the psalmist. That was
always like Henry Irving.
And here, perhaps, is the place to say that I, of all people, can
perhaps appreciate Henry Irving least justly, although I was his
associate on the stage for a quarter of a century, and was on terms of
the closest friendship with him for almost as long a time. He had
precisely the qualities that I never find likable.