In this little play, which is typical of her marvellous range of varied excellences, she runs the whole gamut of human emotion. The part where the great actress, wishing to disenchant her boy lover, exemplifies her art and then turns it into ridicule, could not be adequately played by any one not great in both tragedy and comedy. Her rendering here of Juliet’s great speech before taking the potion: “My dismal scene I needs must act alone,” is given with the full tragic force with which she played the real part—when she swept the whole audience—and yet, without the delay of a second she says to the emotional poet: “Now, that’s worth one and ninepence to me!” It is such moments as these that put an actor into history. Records are not troubled with mere excellence.
Happy, I say, should be the real dramatist who has the co-operation of Ellen Terry in a play she is to appear in—of a part she is to act.
XVIII
TENNYSON AND HIS PLAYS—I
I
Irving had been a friend of Tennyson before I had first met him in 1876. When during the Bateman rule Queen Mary had been produced, he had naturally much to do with the author, and the friendship thus begun lasted during the poet’s life. In my own young days Tennyson was a name of something more than reverence. Not only was his work on our tongue-tips, but the extraordinary isolation of his personal life threw a halo of mystery over him. It is a strange thing how few of the people of his own time—and all through his long life of such amazing worth and popularity, had ever seen him. Naturally a man who knew him was envied if only from this source alone. Whenever we met in early days Irving, knowing my love and reverence for the poet, used to talk about him—always with admiration. More than once when speaking of his personality as distinguished from his work he said:
“Tennyson is like a great Newfoundland dog. He is like an incarnate truth. A great creature!”
From some persons comparison with a dog might not have seemed flattery, but to Irving a dog was the embodiment of all the virtues. Often and often he compared the abstract dog to the abstract man, very much to the detriment of the latter. And certainly Tennyson had all that noble simplicity which is hard to find in sophisticated man—that simplicity which lies in the wide field of demarcation between naked brutal truth and an unconsciousness of self. That simplicity it is which puts man on an altitude where lesser as well as greater natures respect him. To him truth was a simple thing; it was to be exact. Irving told me of an incident illustrating this. He had heard a story that not long before Tennyson had been lunching with friends of his in his own neighbourhood not far from Haslemere. His hostess, who was a most gracious and charming woman whom later I had the honour to know, said to him as they went into the dining-room:
“I have made a dish specially for you myself; I hope you will try it and tell me exactly what you think of it.”
“Of course I shall,” he answered. After lunch she asked him what he thought of it and he said:
“If you really wish to know, I thought it was like an old shoe!”