Ophelia. When the first night came, I did not play the part well,
although the critics and the public were pleased. To myself I _failed_.
I had not rehearsed enough. I can remember one occasion when I played
Ophelia really well. It was in Chicago some ten years later. At Drury
Lane, in 1896, when I played the mad scene for Nelly Farren's benefit,
and took farewell of the part for ever, I was just _damnable_!
Ophelia only _pervades_ the scenes in which she is concerned until the
mad scene. This was a tremendous thing for me, who am not capable of
_sustained_ effort, but can perhaps manage a _cumulative_ effort better
than most actresses. I have been told that Ophelia has "nothing to do"
at first. I found so much to do! Little bits of business which, slight
in themselves, contributed to a definite result, and kept me always in
the picture.
Like all Ophelias before (and after) me, I went to the madhouse to study
wits astray. I was disheartened at first. There was no beauty, no
nature, no pity in most of the lunatics. Strange as it may sound, they
were too _theatrical_ to teach me anything. Then, just as I was going
away, I noticed a young girl gazing at the wall. I went between her and
the wall to see her face. It was quite vacant, but the body expressed
that she was waiting, waiting. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sped
across the room like a swallow. I never forgot it. She was very thin,
very pathetic, very young, and the movement was as poignant as it was
beautiful.
I saw another woman laugh with a face that had no gleam of laughter
anywhere--a face of pathetic and resigned grief.
My experiences convinced me that the actor must imagine first and
observe afterwards. It is no good observing life and bringing the result
to the stage without selection, without a definite idea. The idea must
come first, the realism afterwards.
Perhaps because I was nervous and irritable about my own part from
insufficient rehearsal, perhaps because his responsibility as lessee
weighed upon him, Henry Irving's Hamlet on the first night at the Lyceum
seemed to me less wonderful than it had been at Birmingham. At
rehearsals he had been the perfection of grace. On the night itself, he
dragged his leg and seemed stiff from self-consciousness. He asked me
later on if I thought the ill-natured criticism of his walk was in any
way justified, and if he really said "Gud" for "God," and the rest of
it. I said straight out that he _did_ say his vowels in a peculiar way,
and that he _did_ drag his leg.
I begged him to give up that dreadful, paralyzing waiting at the side
for his cue, and after a time he took my advice. He was never obstinate
in such matters. His one object was to _find out_, to _test_ suggestion,
and follow it if it stood his test.
He was very diplomatic when he meant to have his own way. He never
blustered or enforced or threatened. My first acquaintance with this
side of him was made over my dresser for Ophelia. He had heard that I
intended to wear black in the mad scene, and he intended me to wear
white. When he first mentioned the subject, I had no idea that there
would be any opposition. He spoke of my dresses, and I told him that as
I was very anxious not to be worried about them at the last minute, they
had been got on with early and were now finished.
"Finished! That's very interesting! Very interesting. And what--er--what
colors are they?"
"In the first scene I wear a pinkish dress. It's all rose-colored with
her. Her father and brother love her. The Prince loves her--and so she
wears pink."
"Pink," repeated Henry thoughtfully.
"In the nunnery scene I have a pale, gold, amber dress--the most
beautiful color. The material is a church brocade. It will 'tone down'
the color of my hair. In the last scene I wear a transparent, black
dress."
Henry did not wag an eyelid.
"I see. In mourning for her father."
"No, not exactly that. I think _red_ was the mourning color of the
period. But black seems to me _right_--like the character, like the
situation."
"Would you put the dresses on?" said Henry gravely.
At that minute Walter Lacy came up, that very Walter Lacy who had been
with Charles Kean when I was a child, and who now acted as adviser to
Henry Irving in his Shakespearean productions.
"Ah, here's Lacy. Would you mind, Miss Terry, telling Mr. Lacy what you
are going to wear?"
Rather surprised, but still unsuspecting, I told Lacy all over again.
Pink in the first scene, yellow in the second, black--
You should have seen Lacy's face at the word "black." He was going to
burst out, but Henry stopped him. He was more diplomatic than that!
"They generally wear _white_, don't they?"
"I believe so," I answered, "but black is more interesting."
"I should have thought you would look much better in white."
"Oh, no!" I said.
And then they dropped the subject for that day. It _was_ clever of him!
The next day Lacy came up to me:
"You didn't really mean that you are going to wear black in the mad
scene?"
"Yes, I did. Why not?"
"_Why not!_ My God! Madam, there must be only one black figure in this
play, and that's Hamlet!"
I did feel a fool. What a blundering donkey I had been not to see it
before! I was very thrifty in those days, and the thought of having been
the cause of needless expense worried me. So instead of the _crpe de
Chine_ and miniver, which had been used for the black dress, I had for
the white dress Bolton sheeting and rabbit, and I believe it looked
better.
The incident, whether Henry was right or not, led me to see that,
although I knew more of art and archaeology in dress than he did, he had
a finer sense of what was right for the _scene_. After this he always
consulted me about the costumes, but if he said: "I want such and such a
scene to be kept dark and mysterious," I knew better than to try and
introduce pale-colored dresses into it.
Henry always had a fondness for "the old actor," and would engage him in
preference to the tyro any day. "I can trust them," he explained
briefly.
In the cast of "Hamlet" Mr. Forrester, Mr. Chippendale, and Tom Mead
worthily repaid the trust. Mead, in spite of a terrible excellence in
"Meadisms"--he substituted the most excruciatingly funny words for
Shakespeare's when his memory of the text failed--was a remarkable
actor. His voice as the Ghost was beautiful, and his appearance
splendid. With his deep-set eyes, hawklike nose, and clear brow, he
reminded me of the Rameses head in the British Museum.
We had young men in the cast, too. There was one very studious youth who
could never be caught loafing. He was always reading, or busy in the
greenroom studying by turns the pictures of past actor-humanity with
which the walls were peopled, or the present realities of actors who
came in and out of the room. Although he was so much younger then, Mr.
Pinero looked much as he does now. He played Rosencrantz very neatly.
Consummate care, precision, and brains characterized his work as an
actor always, but his chief ambition lay another way. Rosencrantz and
the rest were his school of stage-craft.
Kyrle Bellew, the Osric of the production, was another man of the
future, though we did not know it. He was very handsome, a tremendous
lady-killer! He wore his hair rather long, had a graceful figure, and a
good voice, as became the son of a preacher who had the reputation of
saying the Lord's Prayer so dramatically that his congregation sobbed.
Frank Cooper, a descendant of the Kembles, another actor who has risen
to eminence since, played Laertes. It was he who first led me onto the
Lyceum stage. Twenty years later he became my leading man on the first
tour I took independently of Henry Irving since my tours with my
husband, Charles Kelly.
VIII
WORK AT THE LYCEUM
When I am asked what I remember about the first ten years at the Lyceum,
I can answer in one word: _Work_. I was hardly ever out of the theater.
What with acting, rehearsing, and studying--twenty-five reference books
were a "simple coming-in" for one part--I sometimes thought I should go
blind and mad. It was not only for my parts at the Lyceum that I had to
rehearse. From August to October I was still touring in the provinces on
my own account. My brother George acted as my business manager. His
enthusiasm was not greater than his loyalty and industry. When we were
playing in small towns he used to rush into my dressing-room after the
curtain was up and say excitedly:
"We've got twenty-five more people in our gallery than the Blank Theater
opposite!"
Although he was very delicate, he worked for me like a slave. When my
tours with Mr. Kelly ended in 1880 and I promised Henry Irving that in
future I would go to the provincial towns with him, my brother was given
a position at the Lyceum, where, I fear, his scrupulous and
uncompromising honesty often got him into trouble. "Perks," as they are
called in domestic service, are one of the heaviest additions to a
manager's working expenses, and George tried to fight the system. He
hurt no one so much as himself.
One of my productions in the provinces was an English version of
"Frou-Frou," made for me by my dear friend Mrs. Comyns Carr, who for
many years designed the dresses that I wore in different Lyceum plays.
"Butterfly," as "Frou-Frou" was called when it was produced in English,
went well; indeed, the Scots of Edinburgh received it with overwhelming
favor, and it served my purpose at the time, but when I saw Sarah
Bernhardt play the part I wondered that I had had the presumption to
meddle with it. It was not a case of my having a different view of the
character and playing it according to my imagination, as it was, for
instance, when Duse played "La Dame aux CamŽlias," and gave a
performance that one could not say was _inferior_ to Bernhardt's,
although it was so utterly _different_. No people in their right senses
could have accepted my "Frou-Frou" instead of Sarah's. What I lacked
technically in it was _pace_.
Of course, it is partly the language. English cannot be phrased as
rapidly as French. But I have heard foreign actors, playing in the
English tongue, show us this rapidity, this warmth, this fury--call it
what you will--and have just wondered why we are, most of us, so
deficient in it.
Fechter had it, so had Edwin Forrest. When strongly moved, their
passions and their fervor made them swift. The more Henry Irving felt,
the more deliberate he became. I said to him once: "You seem to be
hampered in the vehemence of passion." "I _am_," he answered. This is
what crippled his Othello, and made his scene with Tubal in "The
Merchant of Venice" the least successful _to him_. What it was to the
audience is another matter. But he had to take refuge in speechless rage
when he would have liked to pour out his words like a torrent.
In the company which Charles Kelly and I took round the provinces in
1880 were Henry Kemble and Charles Brookfield. Young Brookfield was just
beginning life as an actor, and he was so brilliantly funny off the
stage that he was always a little disappointing _on_ it. My old
manageress, Mrs. Wigan, first brought him to my notice, writing in a
charming little note that she knew him "to have a power of _personation_
very rare in an unpracticed actor," and that if we could give him varied
practice, she would feel it a courtesy to her.
I had reason to admire Mr. Brookfield's "powers of personation" when I
was acting at Buxton. He and Kemble had no parts in one of our plays, so
they amused themselves during their "off" night by hiring bath-chairs
and pretending to be paralytics! We were acting in a hall, and the most
infirm of the invalids visiting the place to take the waters were
wheeled in at the back, and up the center aisle. In the middle of a very
pathetic scene I caught sight of Kemble and Brookfield in their
bath-chairs, and could not _speak_ for several minutes.
Mr. Brookfield does not tell this little story in his "Random
Reminiscences." It is about the only one that he has left out! To my
mind he is the prince of storytellers. All the cleverness that he should
have put into his acting and his play-writing (of which since those
early days he has done a great deal) he seems to have put into his life.
I remember him more clearly as a delightful companion than an actor, and
he won my heart at once by his kindness to my little daughter Edy, who
accompanied me on this tour. He has too great a sense of humor to resent
my inadequate recollection of him. Did he not in his own book quote
gleefully from an obituary notice published on a false report of his
death, the summary: "Never a great actor, he was invaluable in small
parts. But after all it is at his club that he will be most missed!"
In the last act of "Butterfly," as we called the English version of
"Frou-Frou," where the poor woman is dying, her husband shows her a
locket with a picture of her child in it. Night after night we used a
"property" locket, but on my birthday, when we happened to be playing
the piece, Charles Kelly bought a silver locket of Indian work and put
inside it two little colored photographs of my children, Edy and Teddy,
and gave it to me on the stage instead of the "property" one. When I
opened it, I burst into very real tears! I have often wondered since if
the audience that night knew that they were seeing _real_ instead of
assumed emotion! Probably the difference did not tell at all.
At Leeds we produced "Much Ado About Nothing." I never played Beatrice
as well again. When I began to "take soundings" from life for my idea of
her, I found in my friend Anne Codrington (now Lady Winchilsea) what I
wanted. There was before me a Beatrice--as fine a lady as ever lived, a
great-hearted woman--beautiful, accomplished, merry, tender. When Nan
Codrington came into a room it was as if the sun came out. She was the
daughter of an admiral, and always tried to make her room look as like a
cabin as she could. "An excellent musician," as Benedick hints Beatrice
was, Nan composed the little song that I sang at the Lyceum in "The
Cup," and very good it was, too.
When Henry Irving put on "Much Ado About Nothing"--a play which he may
be said to have done for me, as he never really liked the part of
Benedick--I was not the same Beatrice at all. A great actor can do
nothing badly, and there was so very much to admire in Henry Irving's
Benedick. But he gave me little help. Beatrice must be swift, swift,
swift! Owing to Henry's rather finicking, deliberate method as Benedick,
I could never put the right pace into my part. I was also feeling
unhappy about it, because I had been compelled to give way about a
traditional "gag" in the church scene, with which we ended the fourth
act. In my own production we had scorned this gag, and let the curtain
come down on Benedick's line: "Go, comfort your cousin; I must say she
is dead, and so farewell." When I was told that we were to descend to
the buffoonery of:
_Beatrice:_ Benedick, kill him--kill him if you can.
_Benedick:_ As sure as I'm alive, I will!
I protested, and implored Henry not to do it. He said that it was
necessary: otherwise the "curtain" would be received in dead silence. I
assured him that we had often had seven and eight calls without it. I
used every argument, artistic and otherwise. Henry, according to his
custom, was gentle, would not discuss it much, but remained obdurate.
After holding out for a week, I gave in. "It's my duty to obey your
orders, and do it," I said, "but I do it under protest." Then I burst
into tears. It was really for his sake just as much as for mine. I
thought it must bring such disgrace on him! Looking back on the
incident, I find that the most humorous thing in connection with it was
that the critics, never reluctant to accuse Henry of "monkeying" with
Shakespeare if they could find cause, never noticed the gag at all!
Such disagreements occurred very seldom. In "The Merchant of Venice" I
found that Henry Irving's Shylock necessitated an entire revision of my
conception of Portia, especially in the trial scene, but here there was
no point of honor involved. I had considered, and still am of the same
mind, that Portia in the trial scene ought to be very _quiet_. I saw an
extraordinary effect in this quietness. But as Henry's Shylock was
quiet, I had to give it up. His heroic saint was splendid, but it wasn't
good for Portia.
Of course, there were always injudicious friends to say that I had not
"chances" enough at the Lyceum. Even my father said to me after
"Othello":
"We must have no more of these Ophelias and Desdemonas!"
"_Father!_" I cried out, really shocked.
"They're second fiddle parts--not the parts for you, Duchess."
"Father!" I gasped out again, for really I thought Ophelia a pretty good
part, and was delighted at my success with it.
But granting these _were_ "second fiddle" parts, I want to make quite
clear that I had my turn of "first fiddle" ones. "Romeo and Juliet,"
"Much Ado About Nothing," "Olivia," and "The Cup" all gave me finer
opportunities than they gave Henry. In "The Merchant of Venice" and
"Charles I." they were at least equal to his.
I have sometimes wondered what I should have accomplished without Henry
Irving. I might have had "bigger" parts, but it doesn't follow that they
would have been better ones, and if they had been written by
contemporary dramatists my success would have been less durable. "No
actor or actress who doesn't play in the 'classics'--in Shakespeare or
old comedy--will be heard of long," was one of Henry Irving's sayings,
by the way, and he was right.
It was a long time before we had much talk with each other. In the
"Hamlet" days, Henry Irving's melancholy was appalling. I remember
feeling as if I had laughed in church when he came to the foot of the
stairs leading to my dressing-room, and caught me sliding down the
banisters! He smiled at me, but didn't seem able to get over it.
"Lacy," he said some days later, "what do you think! I found her the
other day sliding down the banisters!"
Some one says--I think it is Keats, in a letter--that the poet lives not
in one, but in a thousand worlds, and the actor has not one, but a
hundred natures. What was the real Henry Irving? I used to speculate!
His religious upbringing always left its mark on him, though no one
could be more "raffish" and mischievous than he when entertaining
friends at supper in the Beefsteak Room, or chaffing his valued
adjutants, Bram Stoker and Loveday. H.J. Loveday, our dear stage
manager, was, I think, as absolutely devoted to Henry as anyone except
his fox-terrier, Fussie. Loveday's loyalty made him agree with everything
that Henry said, however preposterous, and didn't Henry trade on it
sometimes!
Once while he was talking to me, when he was making up, he absently took
a white lily out of a bowl on the table and began to stripe and dot the
petals with the stick of grease-paint in his hand. He pulled off one or
two of the petals, and held it out to me.
"Pretty flower, isn't it?"
"Oh, don't be ridiculous, Henry!" I said.
"You wait!" he said mischievously. "We'll show it to Loveday."
Loveday was sent for on some business connected with the evening's
performance. Henry held out the flower obtrusively, but Loveday wouldn't
notice it.
"Pretty, isn't it?" said Henry carelessly.
"Very," said Loveday. "I always like those lilies. A friend of mine has
his garden full of them, and he says they're not so difficult to grow if
only you give 'em enough water."
Henry's delight at having "taken in" Loveday was childish. But sometimes
I think Loveday must have seen through these innocent jokes, only he
wouldn't have spoiled "the Guv'nor's" bit of fun for the world.
When Henry first met him he was conducting an orchestra. I forget the
precise details, but I know that he gave up this position to follow
Henry, that he was with him during the Bateman rŽgime at the Lyceum, and
that when the Lyceum became a thing of the past, he still kept the post
of stage manager. He was literally "faithful unto death," for it was
only at Henry's death that his service ended.
Bram Stoker, whose recently published "Reminiscences of Irving" have
told, as well as it ever _can_ be told, the history of the Lyceum
Theater under Irving's direction, was as good a servant in the front of
the theater as Loveday was on the stage. Like a true Irishman, he has
given me some lovely blarney in his book. He has also told _all_ the
stories that I might have told, and described every one connected with
the Lyceum except himself. I can fill _that_ deficiency to a certain
extent by saying that he is one of the most kind and tender-hearted of
men. He filled a difficult position with great tact, and was not so
universally abused as most business managers, because he was always
straight with the company, and never took a mean advantage of them.
Stoker and Loveday were daily, nay, hourly, associated for many years
with Henry Irving; but, after all, did they or any one else _really_
know him? And what was Henry Irving's attitude. I believe myself that he
never wholly trusted his friends, and never admitted them to his
intimacy, although they thought he did, which was the same thing to
_them_.
From his childhood up, Henry was lonely. His chief companions in youth
were the Bible and Shakespeare. He used to study "Hamlet" in the Cornish
fields, when he was sent out by his aunt, Mrs. Penberthy, to call in the
cows. One day, when he was in one of the deep, narrow lanes common in
that part of England, he looked up and saw the face of a sweet little
lamb gazing at him from the top of the bank. The symbol of the lamb in
the Bible had always attracted him, and his heart went out to the dear
little creature. With some difficulty he scrambled up the bank,
slipping often in the damp, red earth, threw his arms round the lamb's
neck and kissed it.
_The lamb bit him!_
Did this set-back in early childhood influence him? I wonder! He had
another such set-back when he first went on the stage, and for some six
weeks in Dublin was subjected every night to groans, hoots, hisses, and
cat-calls from audiences who resented him because he had taken the place
of a dismissed favorite. In such a situation an actor is not likely to
take stock of _reasons_. Henry Irving only knew that the Dublin people
made him the object of violent personal antipathy. "I played my parts
not badly for me," he said simply, "in spite of the howls of execration
with which I was received."
The bitterness of this Dublin episode was never quite forgotten. It
colored Henry Irving's attitude towards the public. When he made his
humble little speeches of thanks to them before the curtain, there was
always a touch of pride in the humility. Perhaps he would not have
received adulation in quite the same dignified way if he had never known
what it was to wear the martyr's "shirt of flame."
This is the worst of my trying to give a consecutive narrative of my
first years at the Lyceum. Henry Irving looms across them, reducing all
events, all feelings, all that happened, and all that was suggested, to
pigmy size.
Let me speak _generally_ of his method of procedure in producing a play.
First he studied it for three months himself, and nothing in that play
would escape him. Some one once asked him a question about "Titus
Andronicus." "God bless my soul!" he said. "I never read it, so how
should I know!" The Shakespearean scholar who had questioned him was a
little shocked--a fact which Henry Irving, the closest observer of men,
did not fail to notice.
"When I am going to do 'Titus Andronicus,' or any other play," he said
to me afterwards, "I shall know more about it than A---- or any other
student."
There was no conceit in this. It was just a statement of fact. And it
may not have been an admirable quality of Henry Irving's, but all his
life he only took an interest in the things which concerned the work
that he had in hand. When there was a question of his playing Napoleon,
his room at Grafton Street was filled with Napoleonic literature. Busts
of Napoleon, pictures of Napoleon, relics of Napoleon were everywhere.
Then, when another play was being prepared, the busts, however fine,
would probably go down to the cellar. It was not _Napoleon_ who
interested Henry Irving, but _Napoleon for his purpose_--two very
different things.