first time, and Madame Favart, Croisette, Delaunay, and Got. I never
thought Croisette--a superb animal--a "patch" on Sarah, who was at this
time as thin as a harrow. Even then I recognized that Sarah was not a
bit conventional, and would not stay long at the ComŽdie. Yet she did
not put me out of conceit with the old school. I saw "Les PrŽcieuses
Ridicules" finely done, and I said to myself then, as I have often said
since: "Old school--new school? What does it matter which, so long as it
is _good enough_?"
Madame Favart I knew personally, and she gave me many useful hints. One
was never to black my eyes _underneath_ when "making up." She pointed
out that although this was necessary when the stage was lighted entirely
from beneath, it had become ugly and meaningless since the introduction
of top lights.
The friend who took me everywhere in Paris landed me one night in the
dressing-room of a singer. I remember it because I heard her complain to
a man of some injustice. She had not got some engagement that she had
expected.
"It serves you damn right!" he answered. "You can't sing a bit." For the
first time I seemed to realize how brutal it was of a man to speak to a
woman like that, and I _hated_ it.
Long afterwards, in the same city, I saw a man sitting calmly in a
_fiacre_, a man of the "gentlemanly" class, and ordering the _cocher_ to
drive on, although a woman was clinging to the side of the carriage and
refusing to let go. She was a strong, splendid creature of the peasant
type, bareheaded, with a fine open brow, and she was obviously consumed
by resentment of some injustice--mad with it. She was dragged along in
one of the busiest streets in Paris, the little Frenchman sitting there
smiling, easy. How she escaped death I don't know. Then he became
conscious that people were looking, and he stopped the cab and let her
get in. Oh, men!
Paris! Paris! Young as I was, I fell under the spell, of your elegance,
your cleanness, your well-designed streets, your nonchalant gaiety. I
drank coffee at Tortoni's. I visited the studio of Meissonier. I stood
in the crowd that collected round Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair," which was
in the Salon that year. I grew dead sick of the endless galleries of the
Louvre. I went to the Madeleine at Easter time, all purple and white
lilies, and fainted from trying to imagine ecstasy when the Host was
raised.... I never fainted again in my life, except once from _anger_,
when I heard some friends whom I loved slandering another friend whom I
loved more.
Good-bye to Paris and back to London, where I began acting again with
only half my heart. I did very well, they said, as Helen in "The
Hunchback," the first part I played after my return; but I cared nothing
about my success. I was feeling wretchedly ill, and angry too, because
they insisted on putting my married name on the bills.
After playing with Kate at Bristol and at the Adelphi in London, I
accepted an engagement to appear in a new play by Tom Taylor, called
"The Antipodes." It was a bad play, and I had a bad part, but Telbin's
scenery was lovely. Telbin was a poet, and he has handed on much of his
talent to his son, who is alive now, and painted most of our Faust
scenery at the Lyceum--he and dear Mr. Hawes Craven, who so loved his
garden and could paint the flicker of golden sunshine for the stage
better than any one. I have always been friendly with the
scene-painters, perhaps because I have always taken pains about my
dresses, and consulted them beforehand about the color, so that I should
not look wrong in their scenes, nor their scenes wrong with my dresses.
Telbin and Albert Moore together did up the New Queen's Theater, Long
Acre, which was opened in October, 1867, under the ostensible management
of the Alfred Wigans. I say "ostensible," because Mr. Labouchere had
something to do with it, and Miss Henrietta Hodson, whom he afterwards
married, played in the burlesques and farces without which no theater
bill in London at that time was complete. The Wigans offered me an
engagement, and I stayed with them until 1868, when I again left the
stage. During this engagement I acted with Charles Wyndham and Lionel
Brough, and, last but not least, with Henry Irving.
Mrs. Wigan, _nŽe_ Leonora Pincott, did me the honor to think that I was
worth teaching, and took nearly as much pains to improve me as Mrs. Kean
had done at a different stage in my artistic growth. Her own
accomplishments as a comedy actress impressed me more than I can say. I
remember seeing her as Mrs. Candour, and thinking to myself, "This is
absolutely perfect." If I were a teacher I would impress on young
actresses never to move a finger or turn the eye without being quite
certain that the movement or the glance _tells_ something. Mrs. Wigan
made few gestures, but each one quietly, delicately indicated what the
words which followed expressed. And while she was speaking she never
frittered away the effect of that silent eloquence.
One of my besetting sins was--nay, still is--the lack of repose. Mrs.
Wigan at once detected the fault, and at rehearsals would work to make
me remedy it. "_Stand still!_" she would shout from the stalls. "Now
you're of value!" "Motionless! Just as you are! _That's_ right."
A few years later she came to see me at the Court Theater, where I was
playing in "The House of Darnley," and afterwards wrote me the following
very kind and encouraging letter:
"_December 7, 1877._
"Dear Miss Terry,--
"You have a very difficult part in 'The House of Darnley.' I know no one
who could play it as well as you did last night--but _you_ could do it
much better. You would vex me much if I thought you had no ambition in
your art. You are the one young actress of my day who can have her
success entirely in her own hands. You have all the gifts for your
noble profession, and, as you know, your own devotion to it will give
you all that can be learned. I'm very glad my stage direction was useful
and pleasant to you, and any benefit you have derived from it is
overpaid by your style of acting. You cannot have a 'groove'; you are
too much of an artist. Go on and prosper, and if at any time you think I
can help you in your art, you may always count on that help from your
most sincere well-wisher
"LEONORA WIGAN."
Another service that Mrs. Wigan did me was to cure me of "fooling" on
the stage. "_Did_ she?" I thought I heard some one interrupt me unkindly
at that point! Well, at any rate, she gave me a good fright one night,
and I never forgot it, though I will not say I never laughed again. I
think it was in "The Double Marriage," the first play put on at the New
Queen's. As Rose de Beaurepaire, I wore a white muslin Directoire dress
and looked absurdly young. There was one "curtain" which used to
convulse Wyndham. He had a line, "Whose child is this?" and there was I,
looking a mere child myself, and with a bad cold in my head too,
answering: "It's _bine_!" The very thought of it used to send us off
into fits of laughter. We hung on to chairs, helpless, limp, and
incapable. Mrs. Wigan said if we did it again, she would go in front and
hiss us, and she carried out her threat. The very next time we laughed,
a loud hiss rose from the stagebox. I was simply paralyzed with terror.
Dear old Mrs. Wigan! The stories that have been told about her would
fill a book! She was exceedingly plain, rather like a toad, yet,
perversely, she was more vain of her looks than of her acting. In the
theater she gave herself great airs and graces, and outside it hobnobbed
with duchesses and princesses.
This fondness for aristocratic society gave additional point to the
story that one day a blear-eyed old cabman in capes and muffler
descended from the box of a disreputable-looking growler, and inquired
at the stage-door for Leonora Pincott.
"Any lady 'ere of that name?"
"No."
"Well, I think she's married, and changed her name, but she's 'ere right
enough. Tell 'er I won't keep 'er a minute. I'm 'er--old father!"
In "Still Waters Run Deep" I was rather good as Mrs. Mildmay, and the
rest of the cast were admirable. Mrs. Wigan was, of course, Mrs.
Sternhold. Wyndham, who was afterwards to be such a splendid Mildmay,
played Hawksley, and Alfred Wigan was Mildmay, as he had been in the
original production. When the play is revived now, much of it seems very
old-fashioned, but the office scene strikes one as freshly and strongly
as when it was first acted. I don't think that any drama which is vital
and _essential_ can ever be old-fashioned.
MY FIRST IMPRESSION OF HENRY IRVING
One very foggy night in December 1867--it was Boxing Day, I think--I
acted for the first time with Henry Irving. This ought to have been a
great event in my life, but at the time it passed me by and left "no
wrack behind." Ever anxious to improve on the truth, which is often
devoid of all sensationalism, people have told a story of Henry Irving
promising that if he ever were in a position to offer me an engagement I
should be his leading lady. But this fairy story has been improved on
since. The newest tale of my first meeting with Henry Irving was told
during my jubilee. Then, to my amazement, I read that on that famous
night when I was playing Puck at the Princess's, and caught my toe in
the trap, "a young man with dark hair and a white face rushed forward
from the crowd and said: 'Never mind, darling. Don't cry! One day you
will be queen of the stage.' It was Henry Irving!"
In view of these legends, I ought to say all the more stoutly that,
until I went to the Lyceum Theater, Henry Irving was nothing to me and I
was nothing to him. I never consciously thought that he would become a
great actor. He had no high opinion of _my_ acting! He has said since
that he thought me at the Queen's Theater charming and individual as a
woman, but as an actress _hoydenish_! I believe that he hardly spared me
even so much definite thought as this. His soul was not more surely in
his body than in the theater, and I, a woman who was at this time caring
more about love and life than the theater, must have been to him more or
less unsympathetic. He thought of nothing else, cared for nothing else;
worked day and night; went without his dinner to buy a book that might
be helpful in studying, or a stage jewel that might be helpful to wear.
I remember his telling me that he once bought a sword with a jeweled
hilt, and hung it at the foot of his bed. All night he kept getting up
and striking matches to see it, shifting its position, rapt in
admiration of it.
He had it all in him when we acted together that foggy night, but he
could express very little. Many of his defects sprang from his
not having been on the stage as a child. He was stiff with
self-consciousness; his eyes were dull and his face heavy. The piece we
played was Garrick's boiled-down version of "The Taming of the Shrew,"
and he, as Petruchio, appreciated the humor and everything else far more
than I did, as Katherine; yet he played badly, nearly as badly as I did;
and how much more to blame I was, for I was at this time much more easy
and skillful from a purely technical point of view.
Was Henry Irving impressive in those days? Yes and no. His fierce and
indomitable will showed itself in his application to his work. Quite
unconsciously I learned from watching him that to do work well, the
artist must spend his life in incessant labor, and deny himself
everything for that purpose. It is a lesson we actors and actresses
cannot learn too early, for the bright and glorious heyday of our
success must always be brief at best.
Henry Irving, when he played Petruchio, had been toiling in the
provinces for eleven solid years, and not until Rawdon Scudamore in
"Hunted Down" had he had any success. Even that was forgotten in his
failure as Petruchio. What a trouncing he received from the critics who
have since heaped praise on many worse men!
I think this was the peculiar quality in his acting afterwards--a kind
of fine temper, like the purest steel, produced by the perpetual fight
against difficulties. Socrates, it is said, had every capacity for evil
in his face, yet he was good as a naturally good man could never be.
Henry Irving at first had everything against him as an actor. He could
not speak, he could not walk, he could not _look_. He wanted to do
things in a part, and he could not do them. His amazing power was
imprisoned, and only after long and weary years did he succeed in
setting it free.
A man with a will like that _must_ be impressive! To quick-seeing eyes
he must, no doubt. But my eyes were not quick, and they were, moreover,
fixed on a world outside the theater. Better than his talent and his
will I remember his courtesy. In those days, instead of having our
salaries brought to our dressing-rooms, we used to wait in a queue on
Treasury Day to receive them. I was always late in coming, and always in
a hurry to get away. Very gravely and quietly Henry Irving used to give
up his place to me.
I played once more at the Queen's after Katherine and Petruchio. It was
in a little piece called "The Household Fairy," and I remember it
chiefly through an accident which befell poor Jack Clayton through me.
The curtain had fallen on "The Household Fairy," and Clayton, who had
acted with me in it, was dancing with me on the stage to the music which
was being played during the wait, instead of changing his dress for the
next piece. This dancing during the entr'acte was very popular among us.
Many a burlesque quadrille I had with Terriss and others in later days.
On this occasion Clayton suddenly found he was late in changing, and,
rushing upstairs to his dressing-room in a hurry, he missed his footing
and fell back on his head. This made me very miserable, as I could not
help feeling that I was responsible. Soon afterwards I left the stage
for six years, without the slightest idea of ever going back. I left it
without regret. And I was very happy, leading a quiet, domestic life in
the heart of the country. When my two children were born, I thought of
the stage less than ever. They absorbed all my time, all my interest,
all my love.
IV
A SIX-YEAR VACATION
1868-1874
My disappearance from the stage must have been a heavy blow to my father
and mother, who had urged me to return in 1866 and were quite certain
that I had a great future. For the first time for years they had no
child in the theater. Marion and Floss, who were afterward to adopt the
stage as a profession, were still at school; Kate had married; and none
of their sons had shown any great aptitude for acting. Fred, who was
afterwards to do so well, was at this time hardly out of petticoats.
Perhaps it was because I knew they would oppose me that I left the stage
quite quietly and secretly. It seemed to outsiders natural, if
regrettable, that I should follow Kate's example. But I was troubling
myself little about what people were thinking and saying. "They are
saying--what are they saying? Let them be saying!"
Then a dreadful thing happened. A body was found in the river,--the dead
body of a young woman very fair and slight and tall. Every one thought
that it was my body.
I had gone away without a word. No one knew where I was. My own father
identified the corpse, and Floss and Marion, at their boarding-school,
were put into mourning. Then mother went. She kept her head under the
shock of the likeness, and bethought her of "a strawberry mark upon my
left arm." (_Really_ I had one over my left knee.) That settled it, for
there was no such mark to be found upon the poor corpse. It was just at
this moment that the news came to me in my country retreat that I had
been found dead, and I flew up to London to give ocular proof to my poor
distracted parents that I was alive. Mother, who had been the only one
not to identify the drowned girl, confessed to me that she was so like
me that just for a second she, too, was deceived. You see, they knew I
had not been very happy since my return to the stage, and when I went
away without a word, they were terribly anxious, and prepared to believe
the first bad tidings that came to hand. It came in the shape of that
most extraordinary likeness between me and that poor soul who threw
herself into the river.
I was not twenty-one when I left the stage for the second time, and I
haven't made up my mind yet whether it was good or bad for me, as an
actress, to cease from practicing my craft for six years. Talma, the
great French actor, recommends long spells of rest, and says that
"perpetual indulgence in the excitement of impersonation dulls the
sympathy and impairs the imaginative faculty of the comedian." This is
very useful in my defense, yet I could find many examples which prove
the contrary. I could never imagine Henry Irving leaving the stage for
six months, let alone six years, and I don't think it would have been of
the slightest benefit to him. But he had not been on the stage as a
child.
If I was able to rest so long without rusting, it was, I am sure,
because I had been thoroughly trained in the technique of acting long
before I reached my twentieth year--an age at which most students are
just beginning to wrestle with elementary principles.
Of course, I did not argue in this way at the time! As I have said, I
had no intention of ever acting again when I left the Queen's Theater.
If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to
renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of
life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great
work--then I was never an artist. I have been happiest in my work when I
was working for some one else. I admire those impersonal people who care
for nothing outside their own ambition, yet I detest them at the same
time, and I have the simplest faith that absolute devotion to another
human being means the greatest _happiness_. That happiness was now mine.
I led a most unconventional life, and experienced exquisite delight from
the mere fact of being in the country. No one knows what "the country"
means until he or she has lived in it. "Then, if ever, come perfect
days."
What a sensation it was, too, to be untrammeled by time! Actors must
take care of themselves and their voices, husband their strength for the
evening work, and when it is over they are too tired to do anything! For
the first time I was able to put all my energies into living. Charles
Lamb says, I think, that when he left the East India House, he felt
embarrassed by the vast estates of time at his disposal, and wished that
he had a bailiff to manage them for him, but I knew no such
embarrassment.
I began gardening, "the purest of human pleasures"; I learned to cook,
and in time cooked very well, though my first essay in that difficult
art was rewarded with dire and complete failure.
It was a chicken! Now, as all the chickens had names--Sultan, Duke, Lord
Tom Noddy, Lady Teazle, and so forth--and as I was very proud of them as
living birds, it was a great wrench to kill one at all, to start with.
It was the murder of Sultan, not the killing of a chicken. However, at
last it was done, and Sultan deprived of his feathers, floured, and
trussed. I had no idea _how_ this was all done, but I tried to make him
"sit up" nicely like the chickens in the shops.
He came up to the table looking magnificent--almost turkey-like in his
proportions.
"Hasn't this chicken rather an odd smell?" said our visitor.
"How can you!" I answered. "It must be quite fresh--it's Sultan!"
However, when we began to carve, the smell grew more and more potent.
_I had cooked Sultan without taking out his in'ards!_
There was no dinner that day except bread-sauce, beautifully made,
well-cooked vegetables, and pastry like the foam of the sea. I had a
wonderful hand for pastry!
My hour of rising at this pleasant place near Mackery End in
Hertfordshire was six. Then I washed the babies. I had a perfect mania
for _washing_ everything and everybody. We had one little servant, and I
insisted on washing her head. Her mother came up from the village to
protest.
"Never washed her head in my life. Never washed any of my children's
heads. And just look at their splendid hair!"
After the washing I fed the animals. There were two hundred ducks and
fowls to feed, as well as the children. By the time I had done this, and
cooked the dinner, the morning had flown away. After the midday meal I
sewed. Sometimes I drove out in the pony-cart. And in the evening I
walked across the common to fetch the milk. The babies used to roam
where they liked on this common in charge of a bulldog, while I sat and
read.
I studied cookery-books instead of parts--Mrs. Beeton instead of
Shakespeare!
Of course, I thought my children the most brilliant and beautiful
children in the world, and, indeed, "this side idolatry," they were
exceptional, and they had an exceptional bringing up. They were allowed
no rubbishy picture-books, but from the first Japanese prints and fans
lined their nursery walls, and Walter Crane was their classic. If
injudicious friends gave the wrong sort of present, it was promptly
burned. A mechanical mouse in which Edy, my little daughter, showed keen
interest and delight, was taken away as being "realistic and common."
Only wooden toys were allowed. This severe training proved so effective
that when a doll dressed in a violent pink silk dress was given to Edy,
she said it was "vulgar"!
By that time she had found a tongue, but until she was two years old she
never spoke a word, though she seemed to notice everything with her
grave dark eyes. We were out driving when I heard her voice for the
first time:
"There's some more."
She spoke quite distinctly. It was almost uncanny.
"More what?" I asked in a trembling voice, afraid that having delivered
herself once, she might lapse into dumbness.
"Birds!"
The nursemaid, Essie, described Edy tersely as "a piece," while Teddy,
who was adored by every one because he was fat and fair and
angelic-looking, she called "the feather of England."
"The feather of England" was considered by his sister a great coward.
She used to hit him on the head with a wooden spoon for crying, and
exhort him, when he said, "Master Teddy afraid of the dark," to be a
_woman_!
I feel that if I go maundering on much longer about my children, some
one will exclaim with a witty and delightful author when he saw "Peter
Pan" for the seventh time: "Oh, for an hour of Herod!" When I think of
little Edy bringing me in minute branches of flowers all the morning,
with the reassuring intelligence that "there are lots more," I could
cry. But why should any one be interested in that? Is it interesting to
any one else that when she dug up a turnip in the garden for the first
time, she should have come running in to beg me to come quick: "Miss Edy
found a radish. It's as big as--as big as _God_!"
When I took her to her first theater--it was Sanger's Circus--and the
clown pretended to fall from the tightrope, and the drum went bang! she
said: "Take me away! take me away! you ought never to have brought me
here!" No wonder she was considered a dour child! I immediately and
humbly obeyed.
It was truly the simple life we led in Hertfordshire. From scrubbing
floors and lighting fires, cooking, gardening, and harnessing the pony,
I grew thinner than ever--as thin as a whipping-post, a hurdle, or a
haddock! I went to church in blue-and-white cotton, with my servant in
silk. "I don't half like it," she said. "They'll take you for the cook,
and me for the lady!"
We kept a goat, a dear fellow whom I liked very much until I caught him
one day chasing my daughter. I seized him by his horns to inflict severe
punishment; but then I saw that his eyes were exactly like mine, and it
made me laugh so much that I let him go and never punished him at all.
"Boo" became an institution in these days. She was the wife of a doctor
who kept a private asylum in the neighboring village, and on his death
she tried to look after the lunatics herself. But she wasn't at all
successful! They kept escaping, and people didn't like it. This was my
gain, for "Boo" came to look after me instead, and for the next thirty
years I was her only lunatic, and she my most constant companion and
dear and loyal friend.
We seldom went to London. When we did, Ted nearly had a fit at seeing so
many "we'els go wound." But we went to Normandy, and saw Lisieux,
Mantes, Bayeux. Long afterwards, when I was feeling as hard as sandpaper
on the stage, I had only to recall some of the divine music I had heard
in those great churches abroad to become soft, melted, able to act. I
remember in some cathedral we left little Edy sitting down below while
we climbed up into the clerestory to look at some beautiful piece of
architecture. The choir were practicing, and suddenly there rose a boy's
voice, pure, effortless, and clear.... For years that moment stayed with
me. When we came down to fetch Edy, she said:
"Ssh! ssh! Miss Edy has seen the angels!"