I think that Irving looked his full age when he took it upon him to play Romeo; but to my mind he made a more romantic figure than most Romeos whom I have seen. But every one who joined in criticising the representation seemed unable to see more of him than his legs, and these were certainly fantastic. I maintained that such people began at the wrong end of the actor: they should have begun at the head. And this was the hope of Irving himself. He had the intellect, and I thought his legs extremely intellectual.
I wonder he did not do some padding to bring his calves into the market, and make—as he would have done—a handsome profit out of the play. In the old days of the Bateman Management of the Lyceum, he was never permitted to ignore the possibilities of making up for deficiencies of Nature. In the estimation of the majority of theatre-goers, the intellect of an actor will never make up for any neglect of the adventitious aid of “make-up.” When Eugene Aram was to be produced, it was thought advisable to do some padding to make Irving presentable. There was a clever expert at this form of expansion connected with the theatre; he was an Italian and, speaking no English, he was forced into an experiment in explanation in his own language. He wished to enforce the need for a solid shape to fit the body, rather than a patchwork of padding. In doing so he had to made constant use of the word corpo, and as none of his hearers understood Italian, they thought that he was giving a name to the contrivance he had in his mind; so when the thing passed out of the mental stage into the actor's dressing-room, it was alluded to as the corpo. The name seemed a happy one and it had a certain philological justification; for several people, including the dresser, thought that corpo was a contraction for corporation, and in the slang of the day, that meant an expansion of the chest a little lower down.
Mrs. Bateman, with whom and with whose family I was intimate, told me this long after the event, and, curiously enough, it arose out of a conversation going on among some visitors to the house in Ensleigh Street where Mrs. Bateman and her daughters were living. I said I thought the most expressive line ever written was that in the Inferno which ended the exquisite Francesca episode:—
“E caddi come un corpo morto cade.”
Mrs. Bateman and her daughter Kate (Mrs. Crowe) looked at each other and smiled. I thought that they had probably had the line quoted to them ad nauseam, and I said so.
“That is not what we were smiling at,” said Mrs. Bateman. “It was at the recollection of the word corpo.”
And then she told me the foregoing.
Only a short time afterwards in the same house she gave me a bit of information of a much more interesting sort.
I had been at the first performance of Wills' play Ninon at the Adelphi theatre, and was praising the acting of Miss Wallis and Mr. Fernandez. When I was describing one scene, Mrs. Bateman said,—
“I recollect that scene very well; Mr. Wills read that play to us when he was writing Charles I.; but there was no part in it strong enough for Mr. Irving, He heard it read, however, and was greatly taken with some lines in it—so greatly in fact that Mr. Wills found a place for them in Charles I. They are the lines of the King's upbraiding of the Scotch traitor, beginning, 'I saw a picture of a Judas once.' Some people thought them among the finest in the play.”