Of course, it is partly the language. English cannot be phrased as rapidly as French. But I have heard foreign actors, playing in the English tongue, show us this rapidity, this warmth, this fury—call it what you will—and have just wondered why we are, most of us, so deficient in it.
[Fechter] had it, so had [Edwin Forrest]. When strongly moved, their passions and their fervor made them swift. The more Henry Irving felt, the more deliberate he became. I said to him once: "You seem to be hampered in the vehemence of passion." "I am," he answered. This is what crippled his [Othello], and made his scene with Tubal in "The Merchant of Venice" the least successful to him. What it was to the audience is another matter. But he had to take refuge in speechless rage when he would have liked to pour out his words like a torrent.
In the company which [Charles Kelly] and I took round the provinces in 1880 were [Henry Kemble] and [Charles Brookfield]. Young Brookfield was just beginning life as an actor, and he was so brilliantly funny off the stage that he was always a little disappointing on it. My old manageress, [Mrs. Wigan], first brought him to my notice, writing in a charming little note that she knew him "to have a power of personation very rare in an unpracticed actor," and that if we could give him varied practice, she would feel it a courtesy to her.
I had reason to admire Mr. Brookfield's "powers of personation" when I was acting at Buxton. He and Kemble had no parts in one of our plays, so they amused themselves during their "off" night by hiring bath-chairs and pretending to be paralytics! We were acting in a hall, and the most infirm of the invalids visiting the place to take the waters were wheeled in at the back, and up the center aisle. In the middle of a very pathetic scene I caught sight of Kemble and Brookfield in their bath-chairs, and could not speak for several minutes.
Mr. Brookfield does not tell this little story in his "Random Reminiscences." It is about the only one that he has left out! To my mind he is the prince of storytellers. All the cleverness that he should have put into his acting and his play-writing (of which since those early days he has done a great deal) he seems to have put into his life. I remember him more clearly as a delightful companion than an actor, and he won my heart at once by his kindness to my little daughter [Edy], who accompanied me on this tour. He has too great a sense of humor to resent my inadequate recollection of him. Did he not in his own book quote gleefully from an obituary notice published on a false report of his death, the summary: "Never a great actor, he was invaluable in small parts. But after all it is at his club that he will be most missed!"
In the last act of "Butterfly," as we called the English version of "Frou-Frou," where the poor woman is dying, her husband shows her a locket with a picture of her child in it. Night after night we used a "property" locket, but on my birthday, when we happened to be playing the piece, [Charles Kelly] bought a silver locket of Indian work and put inside it two little colored photographs of my children, Edy and [Teddy], and gave it to me on the stage instead of the "property" one. When I opened it, I burst into very real tears! I have often wondered since if the audience that night knew that they were seeing real instead of assumed emotion! Probably the difference did not tell at all.
At Leeds we produced "[Much Ado About Nothing]." I never played Beatrice as well again. When I began to "take soundings" from life for my idea of her, I found in my friend Anne Codrington (now [Lady Winchilsea]) what I wanted. There was before me a Beatrice—as fine a lady as ever lived, a great-hearted woman—beautiful, accomplished, merry, tender. When Nan Codrington came into a room it was as if the sun came out. She was the daughter of an admiral, and always tried to make her room look as like a cabin as she could. "An excellent musician," as Benedick hints Beatrice was, Nan composed the little song that I sang at the Lyceum in "[The Cup]," and very good it was, too.
ELLEN TERRY AS BEATRICE
From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley