and I never could answer sensibly. The strange thing is that I don't
know even now what was in my heart. Perhaps it was one of my chief joys
that I had not to say good-bye at any of the celebrations. I could still
speak to my profession as a fellow-comrade on the active list, and to
the public as one still in their service.
One of those little things almost too good to be true happened at the
close of the Drury Lane matinŽe. A four-wheeler was hailed for me by the
stage-door keeper, and my daughter and I drove off to Lady Bancroft's in
Berkeley Square to leave some flowers. Outside the house, the cabman
told my daughter that in old days he had often driven Charles Kean from
the Princess's Theater, and that sometimes the little Miss Terrys were
put inside the cab too and given a lift! My daughter thought it such an
extraordinary coincidence that the old man should have come to the
stage-door of Drury Lane by a mere chance on my jubilee day that she
took his address, and I was to send him a photograph and remuneration.
But I promptly lost the address, and was never able to trace the old
man.
APOLOGIA
I have now nearly finished the history of my fifty years upon the stage.
A good deal has been left out through want of skill in selection. Some
things have been included which perhaps it would have been wiser to
omit.
I have tried my best to tell "all things faithfully," and it is possible
that I have given offense where offense was not dreamed of; that some
people will think that I should not have said this, while others,
approving of "this," will be quite certain that I ought not to have said
"that."
"One said it thundered ... another that an angel spake."
It's the point of view, for I have "set down naught in malice."
During my struggles with my refractory, fragmentary, and unsatisfactory
memories, I have realized that life itself is a point of view: is, to
put it more clearly, imagination.
So if any one said to me at this point in my story: "And is this, then,
what you call your life?" I should not resent the question one little
bit.
"We have heard," continues my imaginary and disappointed interlocutor,
"a great deal about your life in the theater. You have told us of plays
and parts and rehearsals, of actors good and bad, of critics and of
playwrights, of success and failure, but after all, your whole life has
not been lived in the theater. Have you nothing to tell us about your
different homes, your family life, your social diversions, your friends
and acquaintances? During your life there have been great changes in
manners and customs; political parties have altered; a great Queen has
died; your country has been engaged in two or three serious wars. Did
all these things make no impression on you? Can you tell us nothing of
your life in the world?"
And I have to answer that I have lived very little in the world. After
all, the life of an actress belongs to the theater as the life of a
soldier belongs to the army, the life of a politician to the State, and
the life of a woman of fashion to society.
Certainly I have had many friends outside the theater, but I have had
very little time to see them.
I have had many homes, but I have had very little time to live in them!
When I am not acting, the best part of my time is taken up by the most
humdrum occupations. Dealing with my correspondence, even with the help
of a secretary, is no insignificant work. The letters, chiefly
consisting of requests for my autograph, or appeals to my charity, have
to be answered. I have often been advised to ignore them--surely a
course that would be both bad policy and bad taste on the part of a
servant of the public. It would be unkind, too, to those ignorant of my
busy life and the calls upon my time.
Still, I sometimes wish that the cost of a postage stamp were a
sovereign at least!
* * * * *
In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, I find that I wrote in my
diary:--"I am not yet forty, but am pretty well worn out."
It is twenty years since then, and I am still not worn out. Wonderful!
THE DEATH OF HENRY IRVING
It is commonly known, I think, that Henry Irving's health first began to
fail in 1896.
He went home to Grafton Street after the first night of the revival of
"Richard III." and slipped on the stairs, injuring his knee. With
characteristic fortitude, he struggled to his feet unassisted and walked
to his room. This made the consequences of the accident far more
serious, and he was not able to act for weeks.
It was a bad year at the Lyceum.
In 1898 when we were on tour he caught a chill. Inflammation of the
lungs, bronchitis, pneumonia followed. His heart was affected. He was
never really well again.
When I think of his work during the next seven years, I could weep!
Never was there a more admirable, extraordinary worker; never was any
one more splendid-couraged and patient.
The seriousness of his illness in 1898 was never really known. He nearly
died.
"I am still fearfully anxious about H.," I wrote to my daughter at
the time. "It will be a long time at the best before he gains
strength.... But now I do hope for the best. I'm fairly well so
far. All he wants is for me to keep my health, not my _head_. He
knows I'm doing that! Last night I did three acts of 'Sans-Gne'
and 'Nance Oldfield' thrown in! That is a bit too much--awful
work--and I can't risk it again."
"A telegram just come: 'Steadily improving....' You should have
seen Norman[1] as Shylock! It was not a bare 'get-through.' It
was--the first night--an admirable performance, as well as a plucky
one.... H. is more seriously ill than anyone dreams.... His look!
Like the last act of Louis XI."
[Footnote 1: Mr. Norman Forbes-Robertson.]
In 1902, on the last provincial tour that we ever went together, he was
ill again, but he did not give in. One night when his cough was rending
him, and he could hardly stand up from weakness, he acted so brilliantly
and strongly that it was easy to believe in the triumph of mind over
matter--in Christian Science, in fact!
Strange to say, a newspaper man noticed the splendid power of his
performance that night and wrote of it with uncommon discernment--a
_provincial_ critic, by the way.
In London at the time they were always urging Henry Irving to produce
new plays by new playwrights. But in the face of the failure of most of
the new work, and of his departing strength, and of the extraordinary
support given him in the old plays (during this 1902 tour we took £4,000
at Glasgow in one week!), Henry took the wiser course in doing nothing
but the old plays to the end of the chapter.
I realized how near, not only the end of the chapter but the end of the
book was, when he was taken ill at Wolverhampton in the spring of 1905.
We had not acted together for more than two years then, and times were
changed indeed.
I went down to Wolverhampton when the news of his illness reached
London. I arrived late and went to an hotel. It was not a good hotel,
nor could I find a very good florist when I got up early the next day
and went out with the intention of buying Henry some flowers. I wanted
some bright-colored ones for him--he had always liked bright
flowers--and this florist dealt chiefly in white flowers--_funeral_
flowers.
At last I found some daffodils--my favorite flower. I bought a bunch,
and the kind florist, whose heart was in the right place if his flowers
were not, found me a nice simple glass to put it in. I knew the sort of
vase that I should find at Henry's hotel.
I remembered, on my way to the doctor's--for I had decided to see the
doctor first--that in 1892 when my dear mother died, and I did not act
for a few nights, when I came back I found my room at the Lyceum filled
with daffodils. "To make it look like sunshine," Henry said.
The doctor talked to me quite frankly.
"His heart is dangerously weak," he said.
"Have you told him?" I asked.
"I had to, because the heart being in that condition he must be
careful."
"Did he understand _really_?"
"Oh, yes. He said he quite understood."
Yet a few minutes later when I saw Henry, and begged him to remember
what the doctor had said about his heart, he exclaimed: "Fiddle! It's
not my heart at all! It's my _breath_!" (Oh the ignorance of great men
about themselves!)
"I also told him," the Wolverhampton doctor went on, "that he must not
work so hard in future."
I said: "He will, though,--and he's stronger than any one."
Then I went round to the hotel.
I found him sitting up in bed, drinking his coffee.
He looked like some beautiful gray tree that I have seen in Savannah.
His old dressing-gown hung about his frail yet majestic figure like some
mysterious gray drapery.
We were both very much moved, and said little.
"I'm glad you've come. Two Queens have been kind to me this morning.
Queen Alexandra telegraphed to say how sorry she was I was ill, and now
you--"
He showed me the Queen's gracious message.
I told him he looked thin and ill, but _rested_.
"Rested! I should think so. I have plenty of time to rest. They tell me
I shall be here eight weeks. Of course I sha'n't, but still--It was that
rug in front of the door. I tripped over it. A commercial traveler
picked me up--a kind fellow, but d--n him, he wouldn't leave me
afterwards--wanted to talk to me all night."
I remembered his having said this, when I was told by his servant,
Walter Collinson, that on the night of his death at Bradford, he
stumbled over the rug when he walked into the hotel corridor.
We fell to talking about work. He said he hoped that I had a good
manager ... agreed very heartily with me about Frohman, saying he was
always so fair--more than fair.
"What a wonderful life you've had, haven't you?" I exclaimed, thinking
of it all in a flash.
"Oh, yes," he said quietly ... "a wonderful life--of work."
"And there's nothing better, after all, is there?"
"Nothing."
"What have you got out of it all.... You and I are 'getting on,' as
they say. Do you ever think, as I do sometimes, what you have got out of
life?"
"What have I got out of it?" said Henry, stroking his chin and smiling
slightly. "Let me see.... Well, a good cigar, a good glass of wine--good
friends." Here he kissed my hand with courtesy. Always he was so
courteous; always his actions, like this little one of kissing my hand,
were so beautifully timed. They came just before the spoken words, and
gave them peculiar value.
"That's not a bad summing-up of it all," I said. "And the end.... How
would you like that to come?"
"How would I like that to come?" He repeated my question lightly yet
meditatively too. Then he was silent for some thirty seconds before he
snapped his fingers--the action again before the words.
"Like that!"
I thought of the definition of inspiration--"A calculation rapidly
made." Perhaps he had never thought of the manner of his death before.
Now he had an inspiration as to how it would come.
We were silent a long time, I thinking how like some splendid Doge of
Venice he looked, sitting up in bed, his beautiful mobile hand stroking
his chin.
I agreed, when I could speak, that to be snuffed out like a candle would
save a lot of trouble.
After Henry Irving's sudden death in October of the same year, some of
his friends protested against the statement that it was the kind of
death that he desired--that they knew, on the contrary, that he thought
sudden death inexpressibly sad.
I can only say what he told me.
I stayed with him about three hours at Wolverhampton. Before I left I
went back to see the doctor again--a very nice man by the way, and
clever.
He told me that Henry ought never to play "The Bells" again, even if he
acted again, which he said ought not to be.
It was clever of the doctor to see what a terrible emotional strain "The
Bells" put upon Henry--how he never could play the part of Matthias with
ease as he could Louis XI., for example.
Every time he heard the sound of the bells, the throbbing of his heart
must have nearly killed him. He used always to turn quite white--there
was no trick about it. It was imagination acting physically on the body.
His death as Matthias--the death of a strong, robust man--was different
from all his other stage deaths. He did really almost die--he imagined
death with such horrible intensity. His eyes would disappear upwards,
his face grow gray, his limbs cold.
No wonder, then, that the first time that the Wolverhampton doctor's
warning was disregarded, and Henry played "The Bells" at Bradford, his
heart could not stand the strain. Within twenty-four hours of his last
death as Matthias, he was dead.
What a heroic thing was that last performance of Becket which came
between! I am told by those who were in the company at the time that he
was obviously suffering and dazed, this last night of life. But he went
through it all as usual. The courteous little speech to the audience,
the signing of a worrying boy's drawing at the stage-door--all that he
had done for years, he did faithfully for the last time.
Yes, I know it seems sad to the ordinary mind that he should have died
in the entrance to an hotel in a country-town with no friend, no
relation near him. Only his faithful and devoted servant Walter
Collinson (whom, as was not his usual custom, he had asked to drive back
to the hotel with him that night) was there. Do I not feel the tragedy
of the beautiful body, for so many years the house of a thousand souls,
being laid out in death by hands faithful and devoted enough, but not
the hands of his kindred either in blood or in sympathy!
I do feel it, yet I know it was more appropriate to such a man than the
deathbed where friends and relations weep.
Henry Irving belonged to England, not to a family. England showed that
she knew it when she buried him in Westminster Abbey.
Years before I had discussed, half in joke, the possibility of this
honor. I remember his saying to me with great simplicity, when I asked
him what he expected of the public after his death: "I should like them
to do their duty by me. And they will--they will!"
There was not a touch of arrogance in this, just as I hope there was no
touch of heartlessness in me because my chief thought during the funeral
in Westminster Abbey was: "How Henry would have liked it!" The right
note was struck, as I think was not the case at Tennyson's funeral
thirteen years earlier.
"Tennyson is buried to-day in Westminster Abbey," I wrote in my
diary, October 12, 1892. "His majestic life and death spoke of him
better than the service.... The music was poor and dull and weak,
while he was _strong_. The triumphant should have been the
sentiment expressed.... Faces one knew everywhere. Lord Salisbury
looked fine. His massive head and sad eyes were remarkable. No face
there, however, looked anything by the side of Henry's.... He
looked very pale and slim and wonderful!"
How terribly I missed that face at Henry's own funeral! I kept on
expecting to see it, for indeed it seemed to me that he was directing
the whole most moving and impressive ceremony. I could almost hear him
saying, "Get on! get on!" in the parts of the service that dragged. When
the sun--such a splendid, tawny sun--burst across the solemn misty gray
of the Abbey, at the very moment when the coffin, under its superb pall
of laurel leaves,[1] was carried up the choir, I felt that it was an
effect which he would have loved.
[Footnote 1: Every lover of beauty and every lover of Henry Irving must
have breathed a silent thanksgiving that day to the friends who had that
inspiration and made the pall with their own hands.]
I can understand any one who was present at Henry Irving's funeral
thinking that this was his best memorial, and that any attempt to honor
him afterwards would be superfluous and inadequate.
Yet when some further memorial was discussed, it was not always easy to
sympathize with those who said: "We got him buried in Westminster Abbey.
What more do you want?"
After all it was Henry Irving's commanding genius, and his devotion of
it to high objects, his personal influence on the English people, which
secured him burial among England's great dead. The petition for the
burial presented to the Dean and Chapter, and signed, on the initiative
of Henry Irving's leading fellow-actors, by representative personages of
influence, succeeded only because of Henry's unique position.
"We worked very hard to get it done," I heard said--more than once. And
I often longed to answer: "Yes, and all honor to your efforts, but you
worked for it between Henry's death and his funeral. _He_ worked for it
all his life!"
I have always desired some other memorial to Henry Irving than his
honored grave, not so much for _his_ sake as for the sake of those who
loved him and would gladly welcome the opportunity of some great test of
their devotion.
Henry Irving's profession decided last year, after much belated
discussion, to put up a statue to him in the streets of London. I
believe that it is to take the form of a portrait statue in academic
robes. A statue can never at any time be a very happy memorial to an
actor, who does not do his work in his own person, but through his
imagination of many different persons. If statue it had to be, the work
should have had a symbolic character. My dear friend Alfred Gilbert, one
of the most gifted sculptors of this or any age, expressed a similar
opinion to the committee of the memorial, and later on wrote to me as
follows:
"I should never have attempted the representation of Irving as a
mummer, nor literally as Irving disguised as this one or that one,
but as _Irving_--the artistic exponent of other great artists'
conceptions--_Irving_, the greatest illustrator of the greatest
men's creations--he himself being a creator.
"I had no idea of making use of Irving's facial and physical
peculiarities as a means to perpetuate his life's work. The spirit
of this work was worship of an ideal, and it was no fault of his
that his strong personality dominated the honest conviction of his
critics. These judged Irving as the man masquerading, not as the
Artist interpreting, for the single reason that they were
themselves overcome by the magic personality of a man above their
comprehension.
"I am convinced that Irving, when playing the r™le of whatever
character he undertook to represent, lived in that character, and
not as the actor playing the part for the applause of those in
front--Charles I. was a masterpiece of conception as to the
representation of a great gentleman. His Cardinal Wolsey was the
most perfect presentation of greatness, of self-abnegation, and of
power to suffer I can realize.... Jingle and Matthias were in
Comedy and Tragedy combined, masterpieces of histrionic art. I
could write volumes upon Irving as an actor, but to write of him as
a _man_, and as a very great Artist, I should require more time
than is still allotted to me of man's brief span of life and far,
far more power than that which was given to those who wrote of him
in a hurry during his lifetime.... Do you wonder, then, that I
should rather elect to regard Irving in the abstract, when called
upon to suggest a fitting monument, than to promise a faithful
portrait?... Let us be grateful, however, that a great artist is to
be commemorated at all, side by side with the effigies of great
Butchers of mankind, and ephemeral statesmen, the instigators of
useless bloodshed...."
ALFRED GILBERT AND OTHERS
Alfred Gilbert was one of Henry's sincere admirers in the old Lyceum
days, and now if you want to hear any one talk of those days
brilliantly, delightfully, and whimsically, if you want to live first
nights and Beefsteak Room suppers over again--if you want to have Henry
Irving at the Garrick Club recreated before your eyes, it is only Alfred
Gilbert who can do it for you!
He lives now in Bruges, that beautiful dead city of canals and Hans
Memlings, and when I was there a few years ago I saw him. I shall never
forget his welcome! I let him know of my arrival, and within a few hours
he sent a carriage to my hotel to bring me to his house. The seats of
the _fiacre_ were hidden by flowers! He had not long been in his house,
and there were packing-cases still lying about in the spacious, desolate
rooms looking into an old walled garden. But on the wall of the room in
which we dined was a sketch by Raffaele, and the dinner, chiefly cooked
by Mr. Gilbert himself,--the Savoy at its best!
Some people regret that he has "buried" himself in Bruges, and that
England has practically lost her best sculptor. I think that he will do
some of the finest work of his life there, and meanwhile England should
be proud of Alfred Gilbert.
In a city which can boast of some of the ugliest and weakest statues in
the world, he has, in the fountain erected to the memory of the good
Lord Shaftesbury in Piccadilly Circus, created a thing of beauty which
will be a joy to future generations of Londoners.
The other day Mr. Frampton, one of the leaders of the younger school of
English sculptors, said of the Gilbert fountain that it could hold its
own with the finest work of the same kind done by the masters of the
past. "They tell me," he said, "that it is inappropriate to its
surroundings. It is. That's the fault of the surroundings. In a more
enlightened age than this, Piccadilly Circus will be destroyed and
rebuilt merely as a setting for Gilbert's jewel."
"The name of Gilbert is honored in this house," went on Mr. Frampton. We
were at the time looking at Henry Irving's death-mask which Mr. Frampton
had taken, and a replica of which he had just given me. I thought of
Henry's living face, alive with raffish humor and mischief, presiding at
a supper in the Beefsteak Room--and of Alfred Gilbert's Beethoven-like
head with its splendid lion-like mane of tawny hair. Those days were
dead indeed.
Now it seems to me that I did not appreciate them half enough--that I
did not observe enough. Yet players should observe, if only for their
work's sake. The trouble is that only certain types of men and
women--the expressive types which are useful to us--appeal to our
observation.
I remember one supper very well at which Bastien-Lepage was present, and
"Miss Sarah" too. The artist was lost in admiration of Henry's face, and
expressed a strong desire to paint him. The Bastien-Lepage portrait
originated that evening, and is certainly a Beefsteak Room portrait,
although Henry gave two sittings for it afterwards at Grafton Street. At
the supper itself Bastien-Lepage drew on a half-sheet of paper for me
two little sketches, one of Sarah Bernhardt and the other of Henry,
which are among my most precious relics.
My portrait as Lady Macbeth by Sargent used to hang in the alcove in the
Beefsteak Room when it was not away at some exhibition, and the artist
and I have often supped under it--to me no infliction, for I have
always loved the picture, and think it is far more like me than any
other. Mr. Sargent first of all thought that he would paint me at the
moment when Lady Macbeth comes out of the castle to welcome Duncan. He
liked the swirl of the dress, and the torches and the women bowing down
on either side. He used to make me walk up and down his studio until I
nearly dropped in my heavy dress, saying suddenly as I got the
swirl:--"That's it, that's it!" and rushing off to his canvas to throw
on some paint in his wonderful inimitable fashion!
But he had to give up _that_ idea of the Lady Macbeth picture all the
same. I was the gainer, for he gave me the unfinished sketch, and it is
certainly very beautiful.