From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley
"OLIVIA"
DRAWN BY SIR EDWIN HENRY FOR MISS HENRY'S JUBILEE PROGRAMME
Of course, I was pleased that others thought it necessary. I enjoyed all the celebrations. Even the speeches that I had to make did not spoil my enjoyment. The difficulty was to thank people as they deserved.
I can never forget that London's youngest newspaper first conceived the idea of celebrating my stage Jubilee. Of course, the old-established journals didn't like it, but I suppose no scheme of this kind is ever organized without some people not liking something!
The matinée given in my honour at Drury Lane by the theatrical profession was a wonderful sight. The two things about it which touched me most deeply were my visit the night before to the crowd who were waiting to get into the gallery, and the presence of Eleonora Duse, who came all the way from Florence just to honour me. I appreciated very much, too, the kindness of Signor Caruso in singing for me. I did not know him at all, and the gift of his service was essentially the impersonal desire of an artist to honour another artist.
When the details of my Jubilee performance at Drury Lane were being arranged, the committee decided to ask certain distinguished artists to contribute to the programme. They were all delighted about it, and such busy men as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Mr. Abbey, Mr. Byam Shaw, Mr. Walter Crane, Mr. Bernard Partridge, Mr. James Pryde, Mr. Orpen, and Mr. William Nicholson all gave some of their work to me. Mr. Sargent was asked if he would allow the first Lady Macbeth sketch to be reproduced. He found that it would not reproduce well, so in the height of the season and of his work with fashionable sitters, he did an entirely new sketch, in black and white, of the same subject! This act of kind friendship I could never forget, even if the picture were not in front of me at this minute to remind me of it! "You must think of me as one of the people bowing down to you in the picture," he wrote to me when he sent the new version for the programme. Nothing during my Jubilee celebrations touched me more than this wonderful kindness of Mr. Sargent's.
Burne-Jones would have done something for my Jubilee programme too, I think, had he lived. He was one of my kindest friends, and his letters—he was a heaven-born letter-writer—were like no one else's, full of charm and humour and feeling. Once, when I sent him a trifle for some charity, he wrote me this particularly charming letter:
"Dear Lady,
"This morning came the delightful crinkly paper that always means you! If anybody else ever used it, I think I should assault them! I certainly wouldn't read their letter or answer it.
"And I know the cheque will be very useful. If I thought much about those wretched homes, or saw them often, I should do no more work, I know. There is but one thing to do—to help with a little money if you can manage it, and then try hard to forget. Yes, I am certain that I should never paint again if I saw much of those hopeless lives that have no remedy....
From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley Copyright by Window & Grove
ELLEN TERRY AS HERMIONE IN "THE WINTER'S TALE"
THE PART PLAYED BY MISS TERRY AT HIS MAJESTY'S THEATRE IN 1906
"You would always have been lovely and made some beauty about you if you had been born there—but I should have got drunk and beaten my family and been altogether horrible! When everything goes just as I like, and painting prospers a bit, and the air is warm, and friends well, and everything perfectly comfortable, I can just manage to behave decently, and a spoilt fool I am—that's the truth. But wherever you were, some garden would grow.
"Yes, I know Winchelsea and Rye and Lynn and Hythe—all bonny places, and Hythe has a church it may be proud of. Under the sea is another Winchelsea, a poor drowned city—about a mile out at sea, I think, always marked in old maps as 'Winchelsea Dround.' If ever the sea goes back on that changing coast, there may be great fun when the spires and towers come up again. It's a pretty land to drive in.
"I am growing downright stupid—I can't work at all, nor think of anything. Will my wits ever come back to me?
"And when are you coming back—when will the Lyceum be in its rightful hands again? I refuse to go there till you come back...."
