LAST YEARS WITH HENRY IRVING
BY
ELLEN TERRY
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Terry (Mrs. Carew)
Perhaps Henry Irving and I might have gone on with Shakespeare to the end of the chapter if he had not been in such a hurry to produce “Macbeth.”
We ought to have done “As You Like It” in 1888, or “The Tempest.” Henry thought of both these plays. He was much attracted by the part of Caliban in “The Tempest,” but, he said, “the young lovers are everything, and where are we going to find them?” He would have played Touchstone in “As You Like It,” not Jacques, because Touchstone is in the vital part of the play.
He might have delayed both “Macbeth” and “Henry VIII.” He ought to have added to his list of Shakespearian productions “Julius Cæsar,” “King John,” “As You Like It,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Richard II.,” and “Timon of Athens.” There were reasons “against,” of course. In “Julius Cæsar” he wanted to play Brutus. “That’s the part for the actor,” he said, “because it needs acting. But the actor-manager’s part is Antony. Antony scores all along the line. Now when the actor and actor-manager fight in a play, and when there is no part for you in it, I think it’s wiser to leave it alone.”
Every one knows when luck first began to turn against Henry Irving. It was in 1896, when he revived “Richard III.” On the first night he went home, slipped on the stairs in Grafton Street, broke a bone in his knee, aggravated the hurt by walking, and had to close the theatre. It was that year, too, that his general health began to fail. For the ten years preceding his death he carried on an indomitable struggle against ill-health. Lungs and heart alike were weak. Only the spirit in that frail body remained as strong as ever. Nothing could bend it, much less break it.
But I have not come to that sad time yet.
“Macbeth”
“We all know when we do our best,” said Henry once. “We are the only people who know.” Yet he thought he did better in “Macbeth” than in “Hamlet!”
Was he right, after all?
ELLEN TERRY AS KNIERTJE IN “THE GOOD HOPE”
TAKEN ON THE BEACH AT SWANSEA, WALES, IN 1906, BY EDWARD CRAIG
“WE HAVE TO PAY DEAR FOR THE FISH”
From the collection of H. McM. Painter
His view of Macbeth, though attacked and derided and put to shame in many quarters, is as clear to me as the sunlight itself. To me it seems as stupid to quarrel with the conception as to deny the nose on one’s face. But the carrying out of the conception was unequal. Henry’s imagination was sometimes his worst enemy. When I think of his Macbeth, I remember him most distinctly in the last act, after the battle, when he looked like a great famished wolf, weak with the weakness of a giant exhausted, spent as one whose exertions have been ten times as great as those of commoner men of rougher fibre and coarser strength.
“Of all men else I have avoided thee.”
Once more he suggested, as he only could suggest, 388 the power of fate. Destiny seemed to hang over him, and he knew that there was no hope, no mercy.
The “Macbeth” Rehearsals
JOHN SINGER SARGENT
FROM A PORTRAIT PAINTED BY HIMSELF IN 1892 AND PRESENTED BY HIM TO THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN
The rehearsals for “Macbeth” were very exhausting, but they were splendid to watch. In this play Henry brought his manipulation of crowds to perfection. My acting edition of the play is riddled with rough sketches by him of different groups. Artists to whom I have shown them have been astonished by the spirited impressionism of these sketches. For his “purpose” Henry seems to have been able to do anything, even to drawing and composing music. Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music at first did not quite please him. He walked up and down the stage humming and showing the composer what he was going to do at certain situations. Sullivan with wonderful quickness and open-mindedness caught his meaning at once.
“Much better than mine, Irving,—much better—I’ll rough it out at once!”
SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES
FROM THE PAINTING BY GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
By courtesy of G. P. Putnam’s Sons
When the orchestra played the new version based on that humming of Henry’s, it was exactly what he wanted!
Knowing what a task I had before me, I began to get anxious and worried about “Lady Mac.” Henry wrote me such a nice letter about this:
“To-night, if possible, the last act. I want to get these great multitudinous scenes over and then we can attack our scenes.... Your sensitiveness is so acute that you must suffer sometimes. You are not like anybody else—you see things with such lightning quickness and unerring instinct that dull fools like myself grow irritable and impatient sometimes. I feel confused when I’m thinking of one thing, and disturbed by another. That’s all. But I do feel very sorry afterwards when I don’t seem to heed what I so much value....
“I think things are going well, considering the time we’ve been at it, but I see so much that is wanting that it seems almost impossible to get through properly. ‘To-night commence Matthias. If you sleep, you are lost!’”[*]
A quotation from “The Bells.”
ELLEN TERRY AS LADY MACBETH
FROM THE PAINTING BY SARGENT, IN THE TATE GALLERY, LONDON
At this time we were able to be of the right use to each other. Henry could never have worked with a very strong woman. I should have deteriorated in partnership with a weaker man whose ends were less fine, whose motives were less pure. I had the taste and artistic knowledge that his upbringing had not developed in him. For years he did things to please 390 me. Later on I gave up asking him. In “King Lear” Mrs. Nettleship made him a most beautiful cloak, but he insisted on wearing a brilliant purple velvet cloak with “glits” all over it which spoiled his beautiful make-up and his beautiful acting. Poor Mrs. Nettle was almost in tears.
“I’ll never make you anything again,” she said. “Never!”
PEGGY
MADAME SANS-GENE
MADAME SANS-GENE
CORDELIA
Copyrighted by Window and Grove|From the collection of Miss
Sargent Paints Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth
One of Mrs. Nettle’s greatest triumphs was my Lady Macbeth dress, which she carried out from Mrs. Comyns Carr’s design. I am glad to think it is immortalized in Sargent’s picture. From the first I knew that picture was going to be splendid. In my diary for 1888 I was always writing about it:
“The picture of me is nearly finished and I think it magnificent. The green and blue of the dress is splendid, and the expression as Lady Macbeth holds the crown over her head is quite wonderful.”
“Sargent’s ‘Lady Macbeth’ in the New Gallery is a great success. The picture is the sensation of the year. Of course opinions differ about it, but there are dense crowds round it day after day. There is talk of putting it on an exhibition by itself.”
Since then it has gone over nearly the whole of Europe, and now is resting for life at the Tate Gallery. Sargent suggested by this picture all that I should have liked to be able to convey in my acting as Lady Macbeth. Of Sargent’s portrait of Henry Irving, I wrote in my dairy:
“Everybody hates Sargent’s head of Henry. Henry also. I like it, but not altogether. I think it perfectly wonderfully painted and like him, only not at his best by any means. There sat Henry and there by his side the picture, and I could scarce tell one from t’other. Henry looked white, with tired eyes, and holes in his cheeks, and bored to death! And there was the picture with white face, tired eyes, holes in the cheeks, and boredom in every line. Sargent tried to paint his smile and gave it up.”
IMOGEN
LUCY ASHTON
CATHERINE DUVAL
LUCY ASHTON
Copyrighted by Window and Grove
Sargent said to me, I remember, upon Henry 391 Irving’s first visit to the studio to see the “Macbeth” picture of me, “What a saint!” This to my mind promised well—that Sargent should see that side of Henry so swiftly. So then I never left off asking Henry Irving to sit to Sargent, who wanted to paint him into the bargain, and said to me continually, “What a head!”
CARDINAL WOLSEY
LADY MACBETH
GUINEVERE
THOMAS BECKET
Terry and Miss Frances Johnson
Copyrighted by Window and Grove and by W. & D. Downey
Again from my diary:
“Sargent’s picture is almost finished, and it is really splendid. Burne-Jones yesterday suggested two or three alterations about the colour, which Sargent immediately adopted, but Burne-Jones raves about the picture.
“It (Macbeth) is a most tremendous success, and the last three days’ advanced booking has been greater than ever was known, even at the Lyceum. Yes, it is a success, and I am a success, which amazes me, for never did I think I should be let down so easily. Some people hate me in it; some, Henry among them, think it my best part, and the critics differ, and discuss it hotly, which in itself is my best success of all! Those who don’t like me in it are those who don’t want and don’t like to read it fresh from Shakespeare, and who hold by the ‘fiend’ reading of the character.... One of the best things ever written on the subject, I think, is the essay of J. Comyns Carr. That is as hotly discussed as the new Lady Mac—all the best people agreeing with it. Oh dear! It is an exciting time!”
NANCY OLDFIELD
HERMIONE
ALICE-SIT-BY-THE-FIRE
WAYNEFLETE
Copyrighted by Window and Grove
From a letter I wrote to my daughter who was in Germany at the time:
“I wish you could see my dresses. They are superb, especially the first one: green beetles in it, and such a cloak! The photographs give no idea of it at all, for it is in colour that it is so splendid. The dark red hair is fine. The whole thing is Rossetti—rich stained-glass effects. I play some of it well, but of course I don’t do what I want to do yet. Meanwhile I shall not budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I know is right. Oh, it’s fun, but it’s precious hard work, for I by no means make her a gentle lovable woman’ as some of ’em say. That’s all pickles. She was nothing of the sort, although she was not a fiend, and did love her 392 husband. I have to what is vulgarly called ‘sweat at it,’ each night.”
Burne-Jones at “Macbeth”
MISS ELLEN TERRY
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON HER LAST TOUR IN AMERICA
Copyrighted, 1907 by Helen Lohman
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 criticise—he can only remember.”
SIR HENRY IRVING
FROM A PORTRAIT GIVEN BY HIM TO MISS EVELYN SMALLEY IN 1896
But Burne-Jones by this time had become one of our most ardent admirers, and was prejudiced in my favour because my acting appealed to his eye. Still the drama is for the eye as well as for the ear and the mind.
“The Dead Heart”
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 my 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.” However, my son Teddy made his first appearance in it, and had such a big success that I soon forgot that for me the play was rather “small beer.”
It had been done before, of course, by Benjamin Webster and George Vining. Henry engaged Bancroft for the Abbé, a part of quite as much importance as his own. It was only a melodrama, but Henry could always invest a melodrama with life, beauty, interest, mystery, by his methods of production.
“I’m full of French Revolution,” he wrote to me when he was preparing the play for rehearsal, “and could pass an examination. In our play at the taking of the Bastille, we must have a starving crowd—hungry, eager, cadaverous 394 faces. If that can be well carried out, the effect will be very terrible, and the contrast to the other crowd (the red and fat crowd—the blood-gorged ones who look as if they’d been all drinking wine—red wine, as Dickens says) would be striking.... It’s tiresome stuff to read, because it depends so much on situations. I have been touching the book up, though, and improved it here and there, I think.
“A letter this morning from the illustrious —— offering me his prompt book to look at.... I think I shall borrow the treasure, why not? Of course he will say that he has produced the play and all that sort of thing, but what does 395 that matter, if one can only get one hint out of it?
“The longer we live, the more we see that if we only do our own work thoroughly well, we can be independent of everything else or anything that may be said....
“I see in Landry a great deal of Manette—that same vacant gaze into years gone by when he crouched in his dungeon nursing his wrongs....
“I shall send you another book soon to put any of your alterations and additions in—I’ve added a lot of little things with a few lines for you—very good, I think, though I say it as shouldn’t—I know you’ll laugh! They are perhaps not startlingly original, but better than the original, anyhow! Here they are—last act!
“‘Ah, Robert, pity me. By the recollections of our youth, I implore you to save my boy! (Now for ’em!)
“‘If my voice recalls a tone that ever fell sweetly upon your ear, have pity on me! If the past is not a blank, if you once loved, have pity on me!’ (Bravo!)
“Now I call that very good, and if the ‘If’ and the ‘pity’s’ don’t bring down the house, well it’s a pity! I pity the pittites.
“... I’ve just been copying out my part in an account book—a little more handy to put into one’s pocket. It’s really very short, but difficult to act, though, and so is yours. I like this ‘piling up’ sort of acting, and I am sure you will, when you play the part. It’s restful. ‘The Bells’ is that sort of thing.”
The crafty old Henry! All this was to put me in conceit with my part!
“ELLEN TERRY AS QUEEN KATHERINE IN HENRY VIII”
THE PART PLAYED BY HER AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON IN 1902
Copyrighted by Window and Grove
A Letter From Burne-Jones
Many people put me in conceit with my son, including dear Burne-Jones, with his splendid gift of impulsive enthusiasm:
“The Grange, West Kensington, W.
“Sunday.“Most dear Lady:
“I thought all went wonderfully last night—and no sign could I see of hitch or difficulty—and as for your boy, he looked a lovely little gentleman—and in his cups was perfect, not overdoing by the least touch a part always perilously easy to overdo. I too had the impertinence to be a bit nervous for you about him—but not when he appeared—so altogether I was quite happy.
“... Irving was very noble—I thought I had never seen his face so beatified before—no, that isn’t the word, and to hunt for the right one would be so like judicious criticism that I won’t—exalted and splendid it was—and you were you—YOU—and so all was well. I rather wanted more shouting and distant roar in the Bastille scene—since the walls fell, like Jericho, by noise, a good, dreadful growl always going on would have helped, I thought—and that was the only point where I missed anything.
“And I was very glad you got your boy back again and that Mr. Irving was ready to have his head cut off for you, so it had what I call a good ending, and I am in bright spirits to-day, and ever,
“Your real friend,
“E. B. J.
“I would come and growl gladly.”
There were terrible strikes all over England when we were playing “The Dead Heart.” I could not help sympathising with the strikers; yet reading all about the French Revolution as I did then, I can’t understand how the French nation can be proud of it when one remembers how they butchered their own great men, the leaders of the movement—Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, and the others. My man is Camille Desmoulins. I just love him.
“Ravenswood”
Plays adapted from novels are always unsatisfactory. A whole story cannot be conveyed in three hours, and every reader of the story looks for something not in the play. Wills took from “The Vicar of Wakefield” an episode and did it right well, but there was no episode in “The Bride of Lammermoor” for Merivale to take. He tried to traverse the whole ground and failed. But he gave me some lovely things to do in Lucy Ashton. I had to lose my poor wits, as in Ophelia, in the last act, and with hardly a word to say I was able to make an effect. The love scene at the well I did nicely, too.
Seymour Lucas designed splendid dresses for this play. My “Ravenswood” riding dress set a fashion in ladies’ coats for quite a long time. Mine was copied by Mr. Lucas from a leather coat of Lord Mohun. He is said to have had it on when he was killed. At any rate there was a large stab in the back of the coat, and a blood-stain.
“Nance Oldfield”
This was my first speculation in play-buying! I saw it acted and thought I could do something with it. Henry would not buy it, so I did. He let me do it first in front of a revival of “The Corsican Brothers,” in 1891. It was a great success, although my son and I did not know a word on the first night and had our parts written out and pinned all over the furniture! Dear 396 old Mr. Howe wrote to me that Teddy’s performance was “more than creditable; it was exceedingly good and full of character, and with your own charming performance, the piece was a great success.” Since 1891 I must have played “Nance Oldfield” hundreds of times, but I never had an Alexander Oldworthy so good as my own son, although such talented young actors as Martin Harvey, Laurence Irving, and, more recently, Harcourt Williams, have all played it with me.
“Henry VIII.”
Henry’s pride as Cardinal Wolsey seemed to eat him. How wonderful he looked (though not fat and self-indulgent like the pictures of the real Wolsey) in his flame-coloured robes! He had the silk dyed specially by the dyers to the Cardinals’ College in Rome. Seymour Lucas designed the clothes. It was a magnificent production, but not very interesting to me. I played Katherine much better ten years later at Stratford-on-Avon at the Shakespeare Memorial Festival. I was stronger then, and more mature. This letter from Burne-Jones about “Henry VIII.” and Henry Irving is delightful. I will not keep it to myself any longer:
“My dear Lady,
“We went last night to the play (at my Theatre) to see ‘Henry VIII.’ Margaret and Mackail and I. It was delicious to go out again and see mankind, after such evil days. How kind they were to me no words can say—I went in at a private door and then into a cosy box and back the same way, swiftly, and am marvellously the better for the adventure. No you, alas!
“I have written to Mr. Irving just to thank him for his great kindness in making the path of pleasure so easy, for I go tremblingly at present. But I could not say to him what I thought of the Cardinal—a sort of shame keeps one from saying to an artist what one thinks of his work—but to you I can say how nobly he warmed up the story of the old religion to my exacting mind in that impersonation. I shall think always of dying monarchy in his Charles—and always of dying hierarchy in his Wolsey. How Protestant and dull all grew when that noble type had gone!
“I can’t go to Church till red cardinals come back (and may they be of exactly that red), nor to Court till trumpets and banners come back—nor to evening parties till the dances are like that dance. What a lovely young Queen has been found. But there was no you.... Perhaps it was as well. I couldn’t have you slighted even in a play, and put aside. When I go back to see you as I soon will, it will be easier. Mr. Irving let me know you would not act; and proposed that I should go later on—wasn’t that like him? So I sat with my children and was right happy, and as usual the streets looked dirty and all the people muddy and black as we came away. Please not to answer this stuff.
“Ever yours aff’ly,
“E. B. J.
“I wish that Cardinal could have been made Pope, and sat with his foot on the Earl of Surrey’s neck. Also I wish to be a Cardinal, but then I sometimes want to be a pirate. We can’t have all we want.
“Your boy was very kind—I thought the race of young men who are polite and attentive to old fading ones had passed away with antique pageants—but it isn’t so.”
When the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire gave the famous fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House, they attended it in the robes which had appealed so strongly to Burne-Jones’s imaginative eye. I was told by one who was present at this ball that, as the Cardinal swept up the staircase, his long train held magnificently over his arm, a sudden wave of reality seemed to sweep upstairs with him, and reduce to the pettiest make-believe all the aristocratic masquerade that surrounded him.
I renewed my acquaintance with “Henry VIII” in 1902, when I played Queen Katherine for Mr. Benson during the Shakespeare Memorial performances in April. I was pretty miserable at the time—the Lyceum reign was dying, and taking an unconscionably long time about it, which made the position all the more difficult. Henry Irving was reviving “Faust”—a wise step, as it had been his biggest “money-maker”—and it was a question whether I could play Margaret. There are some young parts that the actress can still play when she is no longer young: Beatrice, Portia, and many others come to mind. But I think that when the character is that of a young girl, the betrayal of whose innocence is the main theme of the play, no amount of skill on the part of the actress can make up for the loss of youth.
Suggestions were thrown out to me (not by Henry Irving, but by others concerned) that, although I was too old for Margaret, I might play Martha! Well! well! I didn’t quite see that. So I redeemed a promise given in jest at the Lyceum to Frank Benson twenty years earlier, and went off to Stratford-upon-Avon to play in “Henry VIII.”
I played Katherine on Shakespeare’s Birthday—such a lovely day, bright and sunny and warm. The performance went finely—and I 397 made a little speech afterwards which was quite a success.
During these pleasant days at Stratford, I went about in between the performances of “Henry VIII,” which was, I think, given three times a week for three weeks, seeing the lovely country and lovely friends who live there. A visit to Broadway and to beautiful Madame de Navarro (Mary Anderson), was particularly delightful. To see her looking so handsome, robust, fresh, so happy in her beautiful home, gave me the keenest pleasure. I also went to Stanways, the Elchos’ home—a fascinating place. Lady Elcho showed me all over it, and she was not the least lovely thing in it.
In Stratford I was rebuked by the permanent inhabitants for being kind to a little boy in professionally ragged clothing who made me, as he has made hundreds of others, listen to a long made-up history of Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” “Julius Cæsar,” and other things—the most hopeless mix! The inhabitants assured me that the boy was a little rascal, who begged and extorted money from visitors by worrying them with his recitation until they paid him to leave them alone.
Long before I knew that the child was such a reprobate, I had given him a pass to the gallery and a Temple Shakespeare! I derived such pleasure from his version of the “Mercy” speech from the “Merchant of Venice” that I still think he was ill-paid!
The quality of mercy is not strange
It droppeth as the gentle rain from ’Eaven
Upon the place beneath; it is twicet bless.
It blesseth in that gives and in that takes
It is in the mightiest—in the mightiest
It becomes the throned monuk better than its crownd.
It’s an appribute to God inself
It is in the thorny ’earts of Kings
But not in the fit and dread of kings.
I asked the boy what he meant to be when he was a man. He answered with decision: “A reciterer.”
I also asked him what he liked best in the play.
“When the blind went up and down and you smiled,” he replied—surely a naïve compliment to my way of “taking a call!” Further pressed, he volunteered: “When you lay on the bed and died to please the angels.”
Other Plays
I had exactly ten years more with Henry Irving after “Henry VIII.” During that time we did “King Lear,” “Becket,” “King Arthur,” “Cymbeline,” “Madame Sans-Gêne,” “Peter the Great,” and “The Medicine Man,” I feel too near to these productions to write about them. But a time will come. The first night of “Cymbeline” I felt almost dead. Nothing seemed right. “Everything is so slow, so slow,” I wrote in my diary. “I don’t feel a bit inspired, only dull and hide-bound.” Yet Imogen was, I think, the only inspired performance of these later years. On the first night of “Sans-Gêne” I acted courageously and fairly well. Everyone seemed to be delighted. The old Duke of Cambridge patted, or rather, thumped me on the shoulder and said kindly: “Ah, my dear, you can act!” Henry quite effaced me in his wonderful sketch of Napoleon. “It seems to me some nights,” I wrote in my diary at the time, “as if I were watching Napoleon trying to imitate H. I., and I find myself immensely interested and amused in the watching.”
“The Medicine Man” was, in my opinion, our only quite unworthy production and I wrote in my diary: “If ‘Manfred’ and a few such plays are to succeed this, I simply must do something else.”
But I did not! I stayed on, as everyone knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry’s was no more, when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theatre. I played a wretched part in “Robespierre,” and refused £12,000 to go to America with Henry in “Dante.”
In these days Henry Irving was a changed man. He gave the whole thing up—as a producer, I mean. As an actor he worked as faithfully as ever. Henley’s stoical lines might have been written of him as he was in those last days:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbow’d.
Henry Irving did not treat me badly. I did not treat him badly. He revived “Faust” and produced “Dante.” I would have liked to stay with him to the end of the chapter, but I could not act in either of these plays. But we never quarrelled. Our long partnership dissolved naturally. It was all very sad, but it could not be helped.