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 ("Henry VIII.").
"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."
XIV
[LAST DAYS AT THE LYCEUM]
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. 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. Every one 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 watchings."
"The Medicine Man" was, in my opinion, our only quite unworthy production.
From my Diary.—"Poor Taber has such an awful part in the play, and mine is even worse. It is short enough, yet I feel I can't cut too much of it.... The gem of the whole play is my hair! Not waved at all, and very filmy and pale. Henry, I admit, is splendid; but oh, it is all such rubbish!... If 'Manfred' and a few such plays are to succeed this, I simply must do something else."
From my Diary.—"Poor Taber has such an awful part in the play, and mine is even worse. It is short enough, yet I feel I can't cut too much of it.... The gem of the whole play is my hair! Not waved at all, and very filmy and pale. Henry, I admit, is splendid; but oh, it is all such rubbish!... 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 every one knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry's was no more—when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theater. I played a wretched part in "[Robespierre]," and refused £12,000 to go to America with Henry in "[Dante]."