SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM-TREE
From the drawing by Yoshio Markino
Edward Terry I first met at the Savage, where he was one of the most influential members, and afterwards at Barnes, where he had a dear old house near the church, which has been improved away to make room for a sweet-shop and a garage and an auctioneer’s lair. Though he was so capable in the chair, and such an excellent comedian, I don’t remember his ever saying anything worth remembering when we walked or “bussed” down Castelnau together.
Penley I never met in private life; I only met him at the Savage, where he never would do a turn, and where his dignity—not assumed—when he was in the chair was as funny as Charley’s Aunt, and proceedings were conducted in the voice of the curate in The Private Secretary.
I first met Mrs.—and Mr.—Patrick Campbell at a party at Oswald Crawfurd’s in the very early ’nineties. She had been enjoying triumphs in the provinces for some years, but London was for the first time being thrilled by that marvellously seductive voice, that languorous grace, and that panther-like personality, which is sleek till it springs. Of all actresses, Mrs. Campbell is most closely connected with Kensington, for she was born in the Forest House, Kensington Gardens, and lives no farther off than Kensington Square, where she occupies one of the old houses on the west side.
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray at one end of her career in London, and Bella-Donna at the other, established the fact that for parts in which the infidelity of a wife brings in passion and intrigue of tragic proportions, she has few equals on the stage of any country. It is the Italian side of her nature coming out—her mother was a Miss Romanini. Indeed, one can picture her at her very finest in an Italian mediæval play—such as the scene where his beautiful mother mourns over the body of the terrible young Griffonetto Baglioni.
Like Lena Ashwell and Julia Neilson, Mrs. Campbell (Mrs. George Cornwallis West) might have expected to make her name by music.
She supplies one more illustration of the siren voice of Africa, which never ceases to call to those who have once listened to it. For Patrick Campbell made his work in Africa, and died there in the Boer War, and now their daughter Stella, who had made her mark on the stage with her Princess Clementina in Mason’s play, has married and gone to live at Nairobi.