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.
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