opportunity, and the truth of your intention and expression seemed to
bring a note of nature into the horribly sophisticated atmosphere of
that hollow and most claptrappy of all Bulwerian stage offenses. Nothing
could be better than the appeal to Evelyn in the last act. It was sweet,
womanly and earnest, and rang true in every note.
"_But_ you were nervous and uncomfortable in many parts for want of
sufficient rehearsal. These passages you will, no doubt, improve in
nightly. I would only urge on you the great importance of studying to be
quiet and composed, and not fidgeting. There was especially a trick of
constantly twiddling with and looking at your fingers which you should,
above all, be on your guard against.... I think, too, you showed too
evident feeling in the earlier scene with Evelyn. A blind man must have
read what you felt--your sentiment should be more masked.
"Laura (Mrs. Taylor) absolutely hates the play. We both
thought--detestable in his part, false in emphasis, violent and coarse.
Generally the fault of the performance was, strange to say for that
theater, overacting, want of repose, point, and finish. With you in
essentials I was quite satisfied, but _quiet_--not so much movement of
arms and hands. Bear this in mind for improvement; and go over your part
to yourself with a view to it.
"The Allinghams have been here to-day. They saw you twice as Portia, and
were charmed. Mrs. Allingham wants to paint you. Allingham tells me that
Spedding is going to write an article on your Portia, and will include
Clara Douglas. I am going to see Salvini in 'Hamlet' to-morrow morning,
but I would call in Charlotte Street between one and two, on the chance
of seeing you and talking it over, and amplifying what I have said.
"Ever your true old friend,
"TOM TAYLOR."
A true old friend indeed he was! I have already tried to convey how much
I owed to him--how he stood by me and helped me in difficulties, and
said generously and unequivocally, at the time of my separation from my
first husband, that "the poor child was not to blame."
I was very fond of my own father, but in many ways Tom Taylor was more
of a father to me than my father in blood. Father was charming, but
Irish and irresponsible. I think he loved my sister Floss and me most
because we were the lawless ones of the family! It was not in his
temperament to give wise advice and counsel. Having bequeathed to me
light-heartedness and a sanguine disposition, and trained me splendidly
for my profession in childhood, he became in after years a very
cormorant for adulation of me!
"Duchess, you might have been anything!" was his favorite comment, when
I was not living up to his ideas of my position and attainments. And I
used to answer: "I've played my cards for what I want."
Years afterwards, when he and mother used to come to first nights at the
Lyceum, the grossest flattery of me after the performance was not good
enough for them.
"How proud you must be of her!" someone would say. "How well this part
suits her!"
"Yes," father would answer, in a sort of "is-that-all-you-have-to-say"
tone. "But she ought to play Rosalind!"
To him I owe the gaiety of temperament which has enabled me to dance
through the most harsh and desert passages of my life, just as he used
to make Kate and me dance along the sordid London streets as we walked
home from the Princess's Theater. He would make us come under his cloak,
partly for warmth, partly to hide from us the stages of the journey
home. From the comfortable darkness one of us would cry out:
"Oh, I'm so tired! Aren't we nearly home? Where are we, father?"
"You know Schwab, the baker?"
"Yes, yes."
"Well, we're _not_ there yet!"
As I grew up, this teasing, jolly, insouciant Irish father of mine was
relieved of some of his paternal duties by Tom Taylor. It was not Nelly
alone whom Tom Taylor fathered. He adopted the whole family.
At Lavender Sweep, with the horse-chestnut blossoms strewing the drive
and making it look like a tessellated pavement, all of us were always
welcome, and Tom Taylor would often come to our house and ask mother to
grill him a bone! Such intimate friendships are seldom possible in our
busy profession, and there was never another Tom Taylor in my life.
When we were not in London and could not go to Lavender Sweep to see
him, he wrote almost daily to us. He was angry when other people
criticised me, but he did not spare criticism himself.
"Don't be Nelly Know-all," I remember his saying once. "_I_ saw you
floundering out of your depth to-night on the subject of butterflies!
The man to whom you were talking is one of the greatest entomologists in
Europe, and must have seen through you at once."
When William Black's "Madcap Violet" was published, common report said
that the heroine had been drawn for Ellen Terry, and some of the reviews
made Taylor furious.
"It's disgraceful! I shall deny it. Never will I let it be said of you
that you could conceive any vulgarity. I shall write and contradict it.
Indiscreet, high-spirited, full of surprises, you may be, but
vulgar--never! I shall write at once."
"Don't do that," I said. "Can't you see that the author hasn't described
me, but only me in 'New Men and Old Acres'?" As this was Tom Taylor's
own play, his rage against "Madcap Violet" was very funny! "There am I,
just as you wrote it. My actions, manners, and clothes in the play are
all reproduced. You ought to feel pleased, not angry."
When his play "Victims" was being rehearsed at the Court Theater, an old
woman and old actress who had, I think, been in the preceding play was
not wanted. The day the management gave her her dismissal, she met
Taylor outside the theater, and poured out a long story of distress. She
had not a stocking to her foot, she owed her rent, she was starving.
Wouldn't Mr. Taylor tell the management what dismissal meant to her?
Wouldn't he get her taken back? Mr. Taylor would try, and Mr. Taylor
gave her fifteen pounds in the street then and there!
Mrs. Taylor wasn't surprised. She only wondered it wasn't thirty!
"Tom the Adapter" was the Terry dramatist for many years. Kate played in
many of the pieces which, some openly, some deviously, he brought into
the English stage from the French. When Kate married, my turn came, and
the interest that he had taken in my sister's talent he transferred in
part to me, although I don't think he ever thought me her equal. Floss
made her first appearance in the child's part in Taylor's play "A Sheep
in Wolf's Clothing," and Marion her first appearance as Ophelia in his
version of "Hamlet"--perhaps "perversion" would be an honester
description! Taylor introduced a "fool" who went about whacking people,
including the Prince, by way of brightening up the tragedy.
I never saw my sister's Ophelia, but I know it was a fine send-off for
her and that she must have looked lovely. Oh, what a pretty young girl
she was! Her golden-brown eyes exactly matched her hair, and she was the
winsomest thing imaginable! From the first she showed talent.
From Taylor's letters I find--and, indeed, without them I could not have
forgotten--that the good, kind friend never ceased to work in our
interests. "I have recommended Flossy to play Lady Betty in the
country." "I have written to the Bancrofts in favor of Forbes-Robertson
for Bassanio." (Evidently this was in answer to a request from me.
Naturally, the Bancrofts wanted someone of higher standing, but was I
wrong about J. Forbes-Robertson? I think not!) "The mother came to see
me the other day. I was extremely sorry to hear the bad news of Tom."
(Tom was the black sheep of our family, but a fascinating wretch, all
the same.) "I rejoice to think of your coming back," he writes another
time, "to show the stage what an actress should be." "A thousand thanks
for the photographs. I like the profile best. It is most Paolo
Veronesish and gives the right notion of your Portia, although the color
hardly suggests the golden gorgeousness of your dress and the blonde
glory of the hair and complexion.... I hope you have seen the quiet
little boxes at ----'s foolish article." (This refers to an article
which attacked my Portia in _Blackwood's Magazine_.) "Of course, if ----
found his ideal in ---- he must dislike you in Portia, or in anything
where it is a case of grace and spontaneity and Nature against
affectation, over-emphasis, stilt, and false idealism--in short, utter
lack of Nature. How _can_ the same critic admire both? However, the
public is with you, happily, as it is not always when the struggle is
between good art and bad."
I quote these dear letters from my friend, not in my praise, but in his.
Until his death in 1880, he never ceased to write to me sympathetically
and encouragingly; he rejoiced in my success the more because he had
felt himself in part responsible for my marriage and its unhappy ending,
and had perhaps feared that my life would suffer. Every little detail
about me and my children, or about any of my family, was of interest to
him. He was never too busy to give an attentive ear to my difficulties.
"'Think of you lovingly if I can'!" he writes to me at a time when I had
taken a course for which all blamed me, perhaps because they did not
know enough to pardon enough--_savoir tout c'est tout pardonner_. "Can
I think of you otherwise than lovingly? _Never_, if I know you and
myself!"
Tom Taylor got through an enormous amount of work. Dramatic critic and
art critic for the _Times_, he was also editor of _Punch_ and a busy
playwright. Everyone who wanted an address written or a play altered
came to him, and his house was a kind of Mecca for pilgrims from America
and from all parts of the world. Yet he all the time occupied a position
in a Government office--the Home Office, I think it was--and often
walked from Whitehall to Lavender Sweep when his day's work was done. He
was an enthusiastic amateur actor, his favorite part being Adam in "As
You Like It," perhaps because tradition says this was a part that
Shakespeare played; at any rate, he was very good in it. Gilbert and
Sullivan, in very far-off days, used to be concerned in these amateur
theatricals. Their names were not associated then, but Kate and I
established a prophetic link by carrying on a mild flirtation, I with
Arthur Sullivan, Kate with Mr. Gilbert!
Taylor never wasted a moment. He pottered, but thought deeply all the
time; and when I used to watch him plucking at his gray beard, I
realized that he was just as busy as if his pen had been plucking at his
paper. Many would-be writers complain that the necessity of earning a
living in some other and more secure profession hinders them from
achieving anything. What about Taylor at the Home Office, Charles Lamb
at East India House, and Rousseau copying music for bread? It all
depends on the point of view. A young lady in Chicago, who has written
some charming short stories, told me how eagerly she was looking
forward to the time when she would be able to give up teaching and
devote herself entirely to a literary career. I wondered, and said I was
never sure whether absolute freedom in such a matter was desirable.
Perhaps Charles Lamb was all the better for being a slave at the desk
for so many years.
"Ah, but then, Charles Lamb wrote so little!" was the remarkable answer.
Taylor did not write "so little." He wrote perhaps too much, and I think
his heart was too strong for his brain. He was far too simple and
lovable a being to be great. The atmosphere of gaiety which pervaded
Lavender Sweep arose from his generous, kindly nature, which insisted
that it was possible for everyone to have a good time.
Once, when we were rushing to catch a train with him, Kate hanging onto
one arm and I onto the other, we all three fell down the station steps.
"Now, then, none of your jokes!" said a cross man behind us, who seemed
to attribute our descent to rowdyism. Taylor stood up with his soft felt
hat bashed over one eye, his spectacles broken, and laughed, and
laughed, and laughed!
Lavender Sweep was a sort of house of call for everyone of note. Mazzini
stayed there some time, and Steele Mackaye, the American actor who
played that odd version of "Hamlet" at the Crystal Palace with Polly as
Ophelia. Perhaps a man with more acute literary conscience than Taylor
would not have condescended to "write up" Shakespeare; perhaps a man of
more independence and ambition would not have wasted his really fine
accomplishment as a playwright for ever on adaptations. That was his
weakness--if it was a weakness. He lived entirely for his age, and so
was more prominent in it than Charles Reade, for instance, whose name,
no doubt, will live longer.
He put himself at the mercy of Whistler, once, in some Velasquez
controversy of which I forget the details, but they are all set out, for
those who like mordant ridicule, in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies."
When Tom Taylor criticised acting he wrote as an expert, and he often
said illuminating things to me about actors and actresses which I could
apply over again to some of the players with whom I have been associated
since. "She is a curious example," he said once of an actress of great
conscientiousness, "of how far seriousness, sincerity, and weight will
supply the place of almost all the other qualities of an actress." When
a famous classic actress reappeared as Rosalind, he described her
performance as "all minute-guns and _minauderies_, ... a foot between
every word, and the intensity of the emphasis entirely destroying all
the spontaneity and flow of spirits which alone excuse and explain; ...
as unlike Shakespeare's Rosalind, I will stake my head, as human
personation could be!"
There was some talk at that time (the early 'seventies) of my playing
Rosalind at Manchester for Mr. Charles Calvert, and Tom Taylor urged me
to do it. "Then," he said charmingly, "I can sing my stage Nunc
Dimittis." The whole plan fell through, including a project for me to
star as Juliet to the Romeo of a lady!
I have already said that the Taylors' home was one of the most softening
and culturing influences of my early life. Would that I could give an
impression of the dear host at the head of his dinner-table, dressed in
black silk knee-breeches and velvet cutaway coat--a survival of a
politer time, not an affectation of it--beaming on his guests with his
_very_ brown eyes!
Lavender is still associated in my mind with everything that is lovely
and refined. My mother nearly always wore the color, and the Taylors
lived at Lavender Sweep! This may not be an excellent reason for my
feelings on the subject, but it is reason good enough.
"Nature repairs her ravages," it is said, but not all. New things come
into one's life--new loves, new joys, new interests, new friends--but
they cannot replace the old. When Tom Taylor died, I lost a friend the
like of whom I never had again.
VI
A YEAR WITH THE BANCROFTS
My engagement with the Bancrofts lasted a little over a year. After
Portia there was nothing momentous about it. I found Clara Douglas
difficult, but I enjoyed playing her. I found Mabel Vane easy, and I
enjoyed playing her, too, although there was less to be proud of in my
success here. Almost anyone could have "walked in" to victory on such
very simple womanly emotion as the part demanded. At this time friends
who had fallen in love with Portia used to gather at the Prince of
Wales's and applaud me in a manner more vigorous than judicious. It was
their fault that it got about that I had hired a claque to clap me! Now,
it seems funny, but at the time I was deeply hurt at the insinuation,
and it cast a shadow over what would otherwise have been a very happy
time.
It is the way of the public sometimes, to keep all their enthusiasm for
an actress who is doing well in a minor part, and to withhold it from
the actress who is playing the leading part. I don't say for a minute
that Mrs. Bancroft's Peg Woffington in "Masks and Faces" was not
appreciated and applauded, but I know that my Mabel Vane was received
with a warmth out of all proportion to the merits of my performance, and
that this angered some of Mrs. Bancroft's admirers, and made them the
bearers of ill-natured stories. Any unpleasantness that it caused
between us personally was of the briefest duration. It would have been
odd indeed if I had been jealous of her, or she of me. Apart from all
else, I had met with my little bit of success in such a different field,
and she was almost another Madame Vestris in popular esteem.
When I was playing Blanche Hayes in "Ours," I nearly killed Mrs.
Bancroft with the bayonet which it was part of the business of the play
for me to "fool" with. I charged as usual; either she made a mistake and
moved to the right instead of to the left, or _I_ made a mistake.
Anyhow, I wounded her in the arm. She had to wear it in a sling, and I
felt very badly about it, all the more because of the ill-natured
stories of its being no accident.
Miss Marie Tempest is perhaps the actress of the present day who reminds
me a little of what Mrs. Bancroft was at the Prince of Wales's, but
neither nature nor art succeed in producing two actresses exactly alike.
At her best Mrs. Bancroft was unapproachable. I think that the best
thing I ever saw her do was the farewell to the boy in "Sweethearts." It
was exquisite!
In "Masks and Faces" Taylor and Reade had collaborated, and the exact
share of each in the result was left to one's own discernment. I
remember saying to Taylor one night at dinner when Reade was sitting
opposite me, that I wished he (Taylor) would write me a part like that.
"If only I could have an original part like Peg!"
Charles Reade, after fixing me with his amused and _very_ glittering
eye, said across the table: "I have something for your private ear,
Madam, after this repast!" And he came up _with_ the ladies, sat by me,
and, calling me "an artful toad"--a favorite expression of his for
me!--told me that _he_, Charles Reade and no other, had written every
line of Peg, and that I ought to have known it. I _didn't_ know, as a
matter of fact, but perhaps it was stupid of me. There was more of Tom
Taylor in Mabel Vane.
I played five parts in all at the Prince of Wales's, and I think I may
claim that the Bancrofts found me a _useful_ actress--ever the dull
height of my ambition! They wanted Byron--the author of "Our Boys"--to
write me a part in the new play, which they had ordered from him, but
when "Wrinkles" turned up there was no part which they felt they could
offer me, and I think Coghlan was also not included in the cast. At any
rate, he was free to take me to see Henry Irving act. Coghlan was always
raving about Irving at this time. He said that one evening spent in
watching him act was the best education an actor could have. Seeing
other people act, even if they are not Irvings, is always an education
to us. I have never been to a theater yet without learning something. It
must have been in the spring of 1876 that I received this note:
"Will you come in our box on Tuesday for Queen Mary? Ever yours,
"CHARLES T. COGHLAN.
"P.S.--I am afraid that they will soon have to smooth their wrinkled
front of the P. of W. Alas! HŽlas! Ah, me!"
This postscript, I think, must have referred to the approaching
withdrawal of "Wrinkles" from the Prince of Wales's, and the return of
Coghlan and myself to the cast.
Meanwhile, we went to see Irving's King Philip.
Well, I can only say that he never did anything better to the day of his
death. Never shall I forget his expression and manner when Miss Bateman,
as Queen Mary (she was _very_ good, by the way), was pouring out her
heart to him. The horrid, dead look, the cruel unresponsiveness, the
indifference of the creature! While the poor woman protested and wept,
he went on polishing up his ring! Then the tone in which he asked:
"Is dinner ready?"
It was the perfection of quiet malignity and cruelty.
The extraordinary advance that he had made since the days when we had
acted together at the Queen's Theater did not occur to me. I was just
spellbound by a study in cruelty, which seemed to me a triumphant
assertion of the power of the actor to create as well as to interpret,
for Tennyson never suggested half what Henry Irving did.
We talk of progress, improvement, and advance; but when I think of Henry
Irving's Philip, I begin to wonder if Oscar Wilde was not profound as
well as witty when he said that a great artist moves in a cycle of
masterpieces, of which the last is no more perfect than the first. Only
Irving's Petruchio stops me. But, then, he had not found himself. He was
not an artist.
"Why did Whistler paint him as Philip?" some one once asked me. How
dangerous to "ask why" about anyone so freakish as Jimmy Whistler. But I
answered then, and would answer now, that it was because, as Philip,
Henry, in his dress without much color (from the common point of view),
his long, gray legs, and Velasquez-like attitudes, looked like the kind
of thing which Whistler loved to paint. Velasquez had painted a real
Philip of the same race. Whistler would paint the actor who had created
the Philip of the stage.
I have a note from Whistler written to Henry at a later date which
refers to the picture, and suggests portraying him in all his
characters. It is common knowledge that the sitter never cared much
about the portrait. Henry had a strange affection for the wrong picture
of himself. He disliked the Bastien Lepage, the Whistler, and the
Sargent, which never even saw the light. He adored the weak, handsome
picture by Millais, which I must admit, all the same, held the mirror up
to one of the characteristics of Henry's face--its extreme refinement.
Whistler's Philip probably seemed to him not nearly showy enough.
Whistler I knew long before he painted the Philip. He gave me the most
lovely dinner-set of blue and white Nanking that any woman ever
possessed, and a set of Venetian glass, too good for a world where glass
is broken. He sent my little girl a tiny Japanese kimono when Liberty
was hardly a name. Many of his friends were my friends. He was with the
dearest of those friends when he died.
The most remarkable men I have known were, without a doubt, Whistler and
Oscar Wilde. This does not imply that I liked them better or admired
them more than the others, but there was something about both of them
more instantaneously individual and audacious than it is possible to
describe.
When I went with Coghlan to see Henry Irving's Philip I was no stranger
to his acting. I had been present with Tom Taylor, then dramatic critic
of _The Times_, at the famous first night at the Lyceum in 1874, when
Henry Irving put his fortune, counted not in gold, but in years of
scorned delights and laborious days--years of constant study and
reflection, of Spartan self-denial, and deep melancholy--I was present
when he put it all to the touch "to win or lose it all." This is no
exaggeration. Hamlet was by far the greatest part that he had ever
played, or was ever to play. If he had failed--but why pursue it? He
could not fail.
Yet the success on the first night at the Lyceum in 1874 was not of that
electrical, almost hysterical splendor which has greeted the momentous
achievements of some actors. The first two acts were received with
indifference. The people could not see how packed they were with superb
acting--perhaps because the new Hamlet was so simple, so quiet, so free
from the exhibition of actors' artifices which used to bring down the
house in "Louis XI" and in "Richelieu," but which were really the _easy_
things in acting, and in "Richelieu" (in my opinion) not especially well
done. In "Hamlet" Henry Irving did not go to the audience. He made them
come to him. Slowly but surely attention gave place to admiration,
admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim.
I have seen many Hamlets--Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Frederick Haas,
Forbes-Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they
were not in the same hemisphere! I refuse to go and see Hamlets now. I
want to keep Henry Irving's fresh and clear in my memory until I die.
When he engaged me to play Ophelia in 1878 he asked me to go down to
Birmingham to see the play, and that night I saw what I shall always
consider the _perfection_ of acting. It had been wonderful in 1874. In
1878 it was far more wonderful. It has been said that when he had the
"advantage" of my Ophelia, his Hamlet "improved." I don't think so. He
was always quite independent of the people with whom he acted.