“Shakespeare!... Shakespeare!” he said, leering at me with a beastlike face, according to the part he was playing, and clawing himself with apelike hands. “I seem to have heard that name. Is there anything I can say about him? No, there is nothing. I’ve said all I know a thousand times, and more than I know more times than that.”
He could think of nothing to say about Shakespeare, but suggested that I should run away and write what I liked. I did, and it was at least a year before the article was published in a series of provincial papers, a long article in which I wrote all that I thought Tree ought to say, if he loved Shakespeare with anything like my own passion.
One evening I received a long telegram from him.
“Honor me by accepting two stalls any night at His Majesty’s and kindly call on me between the acts.”
I accepted the invitation, wondering at its effusiveness. When I called on him, he was playing Brutus, and clasped my hand as though he loved me.
“Little do you know the service you have done me,” he said. “My secretary told me the other night that I was booked for a lecture on Shakespeare at the Regent Street Polytechnic. I had forgotten it. I had nothing prepared. It was a dreadful nuisance. I said ‘I won’t go.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid you must.’ ... Two minutes later a bundle of press cuttings was brought to me. It contained your interview with me on the subject of Shakespeare. I read it with delight. I had no idea I had said all those things. What a memory you must have! I took the paper to the Polytechnic, and delivered my lecture, by reading it word for word.”
After that I met Tree many times and he never forgot that little service. In return he invited me to the Garrick Club, or to his great room at the top of His Majesty’s, and told me innumerable anecdotes which were vastly entertaining. He had a rich store of them, and told them with a ripe humor and dramatic genius which revealed him at his best. His acting was marred by affectations that became exasperating, and sometimes by loss of memory and sheer carelessness. I have seen him actually asleep on the stage. It was when he played the part of Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” and in a scene where he had to sit crouched below a bridge, waiting for Bill Sikes, he dozed off, wakened with a start, and missed his cue.
Tree’s egotism was almost a disease, and in his last years his vanity and pretentiousness obscured his real genius. He was a great old showman, and at rehearsals it was remarkable how he could pull a crowd together and build up a big picture or intensify a dramatic moment by some touch of “business.” But he played to the gallery all the time, and made a pantomime of Shakespeare—to the horror of the Germans when he appeared in Berlin! They would not tolerate him, and were scandalized that such liberties should be taken with Shakespearian drama, which they have adopted as their own.
Another great figure of the stage whom I met behind the scenes was Sarah Bernhardt, when she appeared at the Coliseum in London. She took the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur, in which she was an unconscionable time a-dying, after storms of agony and mad passion. I had an appointment to meet her in her room after the play, and slipped round behind the scenes before she left the stage. Her exit was astonishing and touching. The whole company of the Coliseum and its variety show—acrobats, jugglers, “funny” men, dancing girls, “star turns”—had lined up in a double row to await this Queen of Tragedy, with homage. As she came off the stage, George Robey, with his red nose and ridiculous little hat, gravely offered his arm, with the air of Walter Raleigh in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. She leaned heavily on his arm, and almost collapsed in the chair to which he led her. She was panting after her prolonged display of agony before the footlights, and for a moment I thought she was really dying.
I bent over her and said in French that I regretted she was so much fatigued. My words angered her instantly, as though they reflected upon her age.