On the 19th of July, 1902, I acted at the Lyceum for the very last time, although I did not know it then. These last Lyceum days were very sad. The reception given by Henry to the Indian Princes, who were in England for the Coronation, was the last flash of the splendid hospitality which had for so many years been one of the glories of the theater.
During my provincial tour with Henry Irving in the autumn of this year I thought long and anxiously over the proposition that I should play in "Dante." I heard the play read, and saw no possible part for me in it. I refused a large sum of money to go to America with Henry Irving because I could not consent to play a part even worse than the one that I had played in "Robespierre." As things turned out, although "Dante" did fairly well at Drury Lane, the Americans would have none of it and Henry had to fall back upon his répertoire.
Having made the decision against "Dante," I began to wonder what I should do. My partnership with Henry Irving was definitely broken, most inevitably and naturally "dissolved." There were many roads open to me. I chose one which was, from a financial point of view, madness.
Instead of going to America, and earning £12,000, I decided to take a theater with [my son], and produce plays in conjunction with him.
I had several plays in view—an English translation of a French play about the patient Griselda, and a comedy by Miss Clo Graves among them. Finally, I settled upon Ibsen's "[Vikings]."
We read it aloud on Christmas Day, and it seemed tremendous. Not in my most wildly optimistic moments did I think Hiordis, the chief female character—a primitive, fighting, free, open-air person—suited to me, but I saw a way of playing her more brilliantly and less weightily than the text suggested, and anyhow I was not thinking so much of the play for me as for my son. He had just produced Mr. [Laurence Houseman]'s Biblical play "[Bethlehem]" in the hall of the Imperial Institute, and every one had spoken highly of the beauty of his work. He had previously applied the same principles to the mounting of operas by Handel and Purcell.
It had been a great grief to me when I lost my son as an actor. I have never known any one with so much natural gift for the stage. Unconsciously he did everything right—I mean all the technical things over which some of us have to labor for years. The first part that he played at the Lyceum, Arthur St. Valery in "[The Dead Heart]," was good, and he went on steadily improving. The last part that he played at the Lyceum—Edward IV. in "[Richard III]."—was, maternal prejudice quite apart, a most remarkable performance.
His record for 1891, when he was still a mere boy, was: Claudio (in "Much Ado about Nothing"), Mercutio, Modus, Charles Surface, Alexander Oldworthy, Moses (in "Olivia"), Lorenzo, Malcolm, Beauchamp; Meynard, and the Second Grave-Digger!
Later on he played Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo on a small provincial tour. His future as an actor seemed assured, but it wasn't! One day when he was with [William Nicholson], the clever artist and one of the Beggarstaff Brothers of poster fame, he began chipping at a woodblock in imitation of Nicholson, and produced in a few hours an admirable wood-cut of Walt Whitman, then and always his particular hero. From that moment he had the "black and white" fever badly. Acting for a time seemed hardly to interest him at all. When his interest in the theater revived, it was not as an actor but as a stage director that he wanted to work.
What more natural than that his mother should give him the chance of exploiting his ideas in London? Ideas he had in plenty—"unpractical" ideas people called them; but what else should ideas be?