“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.”
Other Plays
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. But a time will come. 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. Everyone 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 watching.”
“The Medicine Man” was, in my opinion, our only quite unworthy production and I wrote in my diary: “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 everyone knows, when the Lyceum as a personal enterprise of Henry’s was no more, when the farcical Lyceum Syndicate took over the theatre. I played a wretched part in “Robespierre,” and refused £12,000 to go to America with Henry in “Dante.”
In these days Henry Irving was a changed man. He gave the whole thing up—as a producer, I mean. As an actor he worked as faithfully as ever. Henley’s stoical lines might have been written of him as he was in those last days:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.