That's all pickles. She
was nothing of the sort, although she was _not_ a fiend, and _did_
love her husband. I have to what is vulgarly called 'sweat at it,'
each night."
The few people who liked my Lady Macbeth, liked it very much. I hope I
am not vain to quote this letter from Lady Pollock:
"... Burne-Jones has been with me this afternoon: he was at
'Macbeth' last night, and you filled his whole soul with your
beauty and your poetry.... He says you were a great Scandinavian
queen; that your presence, your voice, your movement made a
marvelously poetic harmony; that your dress was grandly imagined
and grandly worn--and that he cannot criticize--he can only
remember."
But Burne-Jones by this time had become one of our most ardent admirers,
and was prejudiced in my favor because my acting appealed to his _eye_.
Still, the drama is for the eye as well as for the ear and the mind.
Very early I learned that one had best be ambitious merely to please
oneself in one's work a little--quietly. I coupled with this the
reflection that one "gets nothing for nothing, and damned little for
sixpence!"
Here I was in the very noonday of life, fresh from Lady Macbeth and
still young enough to play Rosalind, suddenly called upon to play a
rather uninteresting mother in "The Dead Heart.
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