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.
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