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.
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