Lytton--"The House of Darnley." It was _not_ a good play, and I was
_not_ good in it, although the pleasant adulation of some of my friends
has made me out so. The play met with some success, and during its run
Mr. Hare commissioned Wills to write "Olivia."
I had known Wills before this through the Forbes-Robertsons. He was at
one time engaged to one of the girls, but it was a good thing it ended
in smoke. With all his charm, Wills was not cut out for a husband. He
was Irish all over--the strangest mixture of the aristocrat and the
sloven. He could eat a large raw onion every night like any peasant, yet
his ideas were magnificent and instinct with refinement.
A true Bohemian in money matters, he made a great deal out of his
plays--and never had a farthing to bless himself with!
In the theater he was charming--from an actor's point of view. He
interfered very little with the stage management, and did not care to
sit in the stalls and criticise. But he would come quietly to me and
tell me things which were most illuminating, and he paid me the
compliment of weeping at the wing while I rehearsed "Olivia."
_I_ was generally weeping, too, for Olivia, more than any part, touched
me to the heart. I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later
on in the Nunnery scene in "Hamlet," and in the last act of "Charles I."
My real tears on the stage have astonished some people, and have been
the envy of others, but they have often been a hindrance to me. I have
had to _work_ to restrain them.
Oddly enough, although "Olivia" was such a great success at the Court,
it has never made much money since. The play could pack a tiny theater;
it could never appeal in a big way to the masses. In itself it had a
sure message--the love story of an injured woman is one of the cards in
the stage pack which it is always safe to play--but against this there
was a bad last act, one of the worst I have ever acted in. It was always
being tinkered with, but patching and alteration only seems to weaken
it.
Mr. Hare produced "Olivia" perfectly. Marcus Stone designed the clothes,
and I found my dresses--both faithful and charming as reproductions of
the eighteenth century spirit--stood the advance of time and the
progress of ideas when I played the part later at the Lyceum. I had not
to alter anything. Henry Irving discovered the same thing about the
scenery and stage management. They could not be improved upon. There was
very little scenery at the Court, but a great deal of taste and care in
selection.
Every one was "Olivia" mad. The Olivia cap shared public favor with the
Langtry bonnet. That most lovely and exquisite creature, Mrs. Langtry,
could not go out anywhere, at the dawn of the 'eighties, without a crowd
collecting to look at her! It was no rare thing to see the crowd, to ask
its cause, to receive the answer, "Mrs. Langtry!" and to look in vain
for the object of the crowd's admiring curiosity.
This was all the more remarkable, and honorable to public taste, too,
because Mrs. Langtry's was not a showy beauty. Her hair was the color
that it had pleased God to make it; her complexion was her own; in
evening dress she did not display nearly as much of her neck and arms as
was the vogue, yet they outshone all other necks and arms through their
own perfection.
"No worker has a right to criticise _publicly_ the work of another in
the same field," Henry Irving once said to me, and Heaven forbid that I
should disregard advice so wise! I am aware that the professional
critics and the public did not transfer to Mrs. Langtry the actress the
homage that they had paid to Mrs. Langtry the beauty, but I can only
speak of the simplicity with which she approached her work, of her
industry, and utter lack of vanity about her powers. When she played
Rosalind (which my daughter, the best critic of acting _I_ know, tells
me was in many respects admirable), she wrote to me:
"Dear Nellie,--
"I bundled through my part somehow last night, a disgraceful
performance, and _no_ waist-padding! Oh, what an impudent wretch you
must think me to attempt such a part! I pinched my arm once or twice
last night to see if it was really me. It was so sweet of you to write
me such a nice letter, and then a telegram, too!
"Yours ever, dear Nell,
"LILLIE.
"P.S.--I am rehearsing, all day--'The Honeymoon' next week. I love the
hard work, and the thinking and study."
Just at this time there was a great dearth on the stage of people with
lovely diction, and Lillie Langtry had it. I can imagine that she spoke
Rosalind's lines beautifully, and that her clear gray eyes and frank
manner, too well-bred to be hoydenish, must have been of great value.
To go back to "Olivia." Like all Hare's plays, it was perfectly cast.
Where all were good, it will be admitted, I think, by every one who saw
the production, that Terriss was the best. "As you stand there, whipping
your boot, you look the very picture of vain indifference," Olivia says
to Squire Thornhill in the first act, and never did I say it without
thinking how absolutely _to the life_ Terriss realized that description!
As I look back, I remember no figure in the theater more remarkable than
Terriss. He was one of those heaven-born actors who, like kings by
divine right, can, up to a certain point, do no wrong. Very often, like
Dr. Johnson's "inspired idiot," Mrs. Pritchard, he did not know what he
was talking about. Yet he "got there," while many cleverer men stayed
behind. He had unbounded impudence, yet so much charm that no one could
ever be angry with him. Sometimes he reminded me of a butcher-boy
flashing past, whistling, on the high seat of his cart, or of Phaethon
driving the chariot of the sun--pretty much the same thing, I imagine!
When he was "dressed up" Terriss was spoiled by fine feathers; when he
was in rough clothes, he looked a prince.
He always commanded the love of his intimates as well as that of the
outside public. To the end he was "Sailor Bill"--a sort of grown-up
midshipmite, whose weaknesses provoked no more condemnation than the
weaknesses of a child. In the theater he had the tidy habits of a
sailor. He folded up his clothes and kept them in beautiful condition;
and of a young man who had proposed for his daughter's hand he said:
"The man's a blackguard! Why, he throws his things all over the room!
The most untidy chap I ever saw!"
Terriss had had every sort of adventure by land and sea before I acted
with him at the Court. He had been midshipman, tea-planter, engineer,
sheep-farmer, and horse-breeder. He had, to use his own words,
"hobnobbed with every kind of queer folk, and found myself in extremely
queer predicaments." The adventurous, dare-devil spirit of the roamer,
the incarnate gipsy, always looked out of his insolent eyes. Yet,
audacious as he seemed, no man was ever more nervous on the stage. On a
first night he was shaking all over with fright, in spite of his
confident and dashing appearance.
His bluff was colossal. Once when he was a little boy and wanted money,
he said to his mother: "Give me £5 or I'll jump out of the window." And
she at once believed he meant it, and cried out: "Come back, come back!
and I'll give you anything."
He showed the same sort of "attack" with audiences. He made them
believe in him the moment he stepped on to the stage.
His conversation was extremely entertaining--and, let me add, ingenuous.
One of his favorite reflections was: "Tempus fugit! So make the most of
it. While you're alive, gather roses; for when you're dead, you're dead
a d----d long time."
He was a perfect rider, and loved to do cowboy "stunts" in Richmond Park
while riding to the "Star and Garter."
When he had presents from the front, which happened every night, he gave
them at once to the call-boy or the gas-man. To the women-folk,
especially the plainer ones, he was always delightful. Never was any man
more adored by the theater staff. And children, my own Edy included,
were simply _daft_ about him. A little American girl, daughter of
William Winter, the famous critic, when staying with me in England,
announced gravely when we were out driving:
"I've gone a mash on Terriss."
There was much laughter. When it had subsided, the child said gravely:
"Oh, you can laugh, but it's true. I wish I was hammered to him!"
Perhaps if he had lived longer, Terriss would have lost his throne. He
died as a beautiful youth, a kind of Adonis, although he was fifty years
old when he was stabbed at the stage-door of the Adelphi Theater.
Terriss had a beautiful mouth. That predisposed me in his favor at once!
I have always been "cracked" on pretty mouths! I remember that I used to
say "Naughty Teddy!" to my own little boy just for the pleasure of
seeing him put out his under-lip, when his mouth looked lovely!
At the Court Terriss was still under thirty, but doing the best work of
his life. He _never_ did anything finer than Squire Thornhill, although
he was clever as Henry VIII. His gravity as Flutter in "The Belle's
Stratagem" was very fetching; as Bucklaw in "Ravenswood" he looked
magnificent, and, of course, as the sailor hero in Adelphi melodrama he
was as good as could be. But it is as Thornhill that I like best to
remember him. He was precisely the handsome, reckless, unworthy creature
that good women are fools enough to love.
In the Court production of "Olivia," both my children walked on to the
stage for the first time. Teddy had such red cheeks that they made all
the _rouged_ cheeks look quite pale! Little Edy gave me a bunch of real
flowers that she had picked in the country the day before.
Young Norman Forbes-Robertson was the Moses of the original cast. He
played the part again at the Lyceum. How charming he was! And how very,
very young! He at once gave promise of being a good actor and of having
done the right thing in following his brother on to the stage. At the
present day I consider him the only actor on the stage who can play
Shakespeare's fools as they should be played.
Among the girls "walking on" was Kate Rorke. This made me take a special
interest in watching what she did later on. No one who saw her fine
performance in "The Profligate" could easily forget it, and I shall
never understand why the London public ever let her go.
It was during the run of "Olivia" that Henry Irving became sole lessee
of the Lyceum Theater. For a long time he had been contemplating the
step, but it was one of such magnitude that it could not be done in a
hurry. I daresay he found it difficult to separate from Mrs. Bateman and
from her daughter, who had for such a long time been his "leading lady."
He had to be a little cruel, not for the last time, in a career devoted
unremittingly and unrelentingly to his art and his ambition.
It was said by an idle tongue in later years that rich ladies financed
Henry Irving's ventures. The only shadow of foundation for this
statement is that at the beginning of his tenancy of the Lyceum, the
Baroness Burdett-Coutts lent him a certain sum of money, every farthing
of which was repaid during the first few months of his management.
The first letter that I ever received from Henry Irving was written on
July 20, 1878, from 15A, Grafton Street, the house in which he lived
during the entire period of his Lyceum management.
"Dear Miss Terry,--
"I look forward to the pleasure of calling upon you on Tuesday next at
two o'clock.
"With every good wish, believe me, sincerely,
"HENRY IRVING."
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" was talking of my Olivia; that I had acted well in Shakespeare
with the Bancrofts; that I should bring to the Lyceum Theater 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 first 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 almost ordinary
looking--with a mustache, 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 greenroom at the Queen's Theater, 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 the terms
of the closest friendship with him for almost as long a time. He had
precisely the qualities that I never find likable.
He was an egotist--an egotist of the great type, _never_ "a mean
egotist," as he was once slanderously described--and all his faults
sprang from egotism, which is in one sense, after all, only another name
for greatness. So much absorbed was he in his own achievements that he
was unable or unwilling to appreciate the achievements of others. I
never heard him speak in high terms of the great foreign actors and
actresses who from time to time visited England. It would be easy to
attribute this to jealousy, but the easy explanation is not the true
one. He simply would not give himself up to appreciation. Perhaps
appreciation is a _wasting_ though a generous quality of the mind and
heart, and best left to lookers-on, who have plenty of time to develop
it.
I was with him when he saw Sarah Bernhardt act for the first time. The
play was "Ruy Blas," and it was one of Sarah's bad days. She was
walking through the part listlessly, and I was angry that there should
be any ground for Henry's indifference. The same thing happened years
later, when I took him to see Eleonora Duse. The play was "La
Locandiera," in which to my mind she is not at her very best. He was
surprised at my enthusiasm. There was an element of justice in his
attitude towards the performance which infuriated me, but I doubt if he
would have shown more enthusiasm if he had seen her at her very best.
As the years went on he grew very much attached to Sarah Bernhardt, and
admired her as a colleague whose managerial work in the theater was as
dignified as his own, but of her superb powers as an actress, I don't
believe he ever had a glimmering notion!
Perhaps it is not true, but, as I believe it to be true, I may as well
state it: _It was never any pleasure to him to see the acting of other
actors and actresses._ All the same, Salvini's Othello I know he thought
magnificent, but he would not speak of it.
How dangerous it is to write things that may not be understood! What I
have written I have written merely to indicate the qualities in Henry
Irving's nature, which were unintelligible to me, perhaps because I have
always been more woman than artist. He always put the theater first. He
lived in it, he died in it. He had none of what I may call my
_bourgeois_ qualities--the love of being in love, the love of a home,
the dislike of solitude. I have always thought it hard to find my
inferiors. He was sure of his high place. He was far simpler than I in
some ways. He would talk, for instance, in such an ingenuous way to
painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But I know now that my
blush was far more unworthy than his freedom from all pretentiousness in
matters of art.
_He never pretended._ One of his biographers has said that he posed as
being a French scholar. Such a thing, and all things like it, were
impossible to his nature. If it were necessary in one of his plays to
say a few French words, he took infinite pains to learn them and said
them beautifully.
Henry once told me that in the early part of his career, before I knew
him, he had been hooted because of his thin legs. The first service I
did him was to tell him they were beautiful, and to make him give up
padding them.
"What do you want with fat, podgy, prize-fighter legs!" I expostulated.
Praise to some people at certain stages of their career is more
developing than blame. I admired the very things in Henry for which
other people criticized him. I hope this helped him a little.
I brought help, too, in pictorial matters. Henry Irving had had little
training in such matters--I had had a great deal. Judgment about colors,
clothes and lighting must be _trained_. I had learned from Mr. Watts,
from Mr. Godwin, and from other artists, until a sense of decorative
effect had become second nature to me.
Before the rehearsals of "Hamlet" began at the Lyceum I went on a
provincial tour with Charles Kelly, and played for the first time in
"Dora," and "Iris," besides doing a steady round of old parts. In
Birmingham I went to see Henry's Hamlet. (I have tried already, most
inadequately, to say what it was to me.) I had also appeared for the
first time as Lady Teazle--a part which I wish I was not too old to play
now, for I could play it better. My performance in 1877 was not finished
enough, not light enough. I think I did the screen scene well. When the
screen was knocked over I did not stand still and rigid with eyes cast
down. That seemed to me an attitude of guilt. Only a _guilty_ woman,
surely, in such a situation would assume an air of conscious virtue. I
shrank back, and tried to hide my face--a natural movement, so it seemed
to me, for a woman who had been craning forward, listening in increasing
agitation to the conversation between Charles and Joseph Surface.
I shall always regret that we never did "The School for Scandal," or any
of the other classic comedies, at the Lyceum. There came a time when
Henry was anxious for me to play Lady Teazle, but I opposed him, as I
thought that I was too old. It should have been one of my best parts.
"Star" performances, for the benefit of veteran actors retiring from the
stage, were as common in my youth as now. About this time I played in
"Money" for the benefit of Henry Compton, a fine comedian who had
delighted audiences at the Haymarket for many years. On this occasion I
did not play Clara Douglas as I had done during the revival at the
Prince of Wales's, but the comedy part, Georgina Vesey. John Hare, Mr.
and Mrs. Kendal, Henry Neville, Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft, and, last but not
least, Benjamin Webster, who came out of his retirement to play
Graves--"his original part"--were in the cast.
I don't think that Webster ever appeared on the stage again, although
he lived on for many years in an old-fashioned house near Kennington
Church, and died at a great age. He has a descendant on the stage in Mr.
Ben Webster, who acted with us at the Lyceum, and is now well known both
in England and America.
Henry Compton's son, Edward, was in this performance of "Money." He was
engaged to the beautiful Adelaide Neilson, an actress whose brilliant
career was cut off suddenly when she was riding in the Bois. She drank a
glass of milk when she was overheated, was taken ill, and died. I am
told that she commanded £700 a week in America, and in England people
went wild over her Juliet. She looked like a child of the warm South,
although she was born, I think, in Manchester, and her looks were much
in her favor as Juliet. She belonged to the ripe, luscious, pomegranate
type of woman. The only living actress with the same kind of beauty is
Maxine Elliott.
Adelaide Neilson had a short reign, but a most triumphant one. It was
easy to understand it when one saw her. She was so gracious, so
feminine, so lovely. She did things well, but more from instinct than
anything else. She had no science. Edward Compton now takes his own
company round the provinces in an excellent rŽpertoire of old comedies.
He has done as much to make country audiences familiar with them as Mr.
Benson has done to make them familiar with Shakespeare.
I come now to the Lyceum rehearsals of November, 1878. Although Henry
Irving had played Hamlet for over two hundred nights in London, and for
I don't know how many nights in the provinces, he always rehearsed in
cloak and rapier. This careful attention to detail came back to my mind
years afterwards, when he gave readings of Macbeth. He never gave a
public reading without first going through the entire play at home--at
home, that is to say, in a miserably uncomfortable hotel.
During the first rehearsal he read every one's part except mine, which
he skipped, and the power that he put into each part was extraordinary.
He threw himself so thoroughly into it that his skin contracted and his
eyes shone. His lips grew whiter and whiter, and his skin more and more
drawn as the time went on, until he looked like a livid thing, but
beautiful.
He never got at anything _easily_, and often I felt angry that he would
waste so much of his strength in trying to teach people to do things in
the right way. Very often it only ended in his producing actors who gave
colorless, feeble and unintelligent imitations of him. There were
exceptions, of course.
When it came to the last ten days before the date named for the
production of "Hamlet," and my scenes with him were still unrehearsed, I
grew very anxious and miserable. I was still a stranger in the theater,
and in awe of Henry Irving personally; but I plucked up courage, and
said:
"I am very nervous about my first appearance with you. Couldn't we
rehearse _our_ scenes?"
"_We_ shall be all right!" he answered, "but we are not going to run the
risk of being bottled up by a gas-man or a fiddler."
When I spoke, I think he was conducting a band rehearsal. Although he
did not understand a note of music, he felt, through intuition, what the
music ought to be, and would pull it about and have alterations made. No
one was cleverer than Hamilton Clarke, Henry's first musical director,
and a most gifted composer, at carrying out his instructions. Hamilton
Clarke often grew angry and flung out of the theater, saying that it was
quite impossible to do what Mr. Irving required.
"Patch it together, indeed!" he used to say to me indignantly, when I
was told off to smooth him down. "Mr. Irving knows nothing about music,
or he couldn't ask me to do such a thing."
But the next day he would return with the score altered on the lines
suggested by Henry, and would confess that the music was improved. "Upon
my soul, it's better! The 'Guv'nor' was perfectly right."
His Danish march in "Hamlet," his Brocken music in "Faust," and his
music for "The Merchant of Venice" were all, to my mind, exactly
_right_. The brilliant gifts of Clarke, before many years had passed,
"o'er-leaped" themselves, and he ended his days in a lunatic asylum.