Some said his Shylock was intellectual, and appealed more to the intellect of his audiences than to their emotions.  Surely this is talking for the sake of talking.  I recall so many things that touched people to the heart!  For absolute pathos, achieved by absolute simplicity of means, I never saw anything in the theater to compare with his Shylock’s return home over the bridge to his deserted house after Jessica’s flight.

A younger actor, producing “The Merchant of Venice” in recent years, asked Irving if he might borrow this bit of business.  “By all means,” said Henry.  “With great pleasure.”

“Then, why didn’t you do it?” inquired my daughter bluntly when the actor was telling us how kind and courteous Henry had been in allowing him to use his stroke of invention.

“What do you mean?” asked the astonished actor.

My daughter told him that Henry had dropped the curtain on a stage full of noise, and light, and revelry.  When it went up again the stage was empty, desolate, with no light but a pale moon, and all sounds of life at a great distance—­and then over the bridge came the wearied figure of the Jew.  This marked the passing of the time between Jessica’s elopement and Shylock’s return home.  It created an atmosphere of silence, and the middle of the night.

“You came back without dropping the curtain,” said my daughter, “and so it wasn’t a bit the same.”

“I couldn’t risk dropping the curtain for the business,” answered the actor, “because it needed applause to take it up again!”

Henry Irving never grew tired of a part, never ceased to work at it, just as he never gave up the fight against his limitations.  His diction, as the years went on, grew far clearer when he was depicting rage and passion.  His dragging leg dragged no more.  To this heroic perseverance he added an almost childlike eagerness in hearing any suggestion for the improvement of his interpretations which commended itself to his imagination and his judgment.  From a blind man came the most illuminating criticism of his Shylock.  The sensitive ear of the sightless hearer detected a fault in Henry Irving’s method of delivering the opening line of his part: 

“Three thousand ducats—­well!”

“I hear no sound of the usurer in that,” the blind man said at the end of the performance.  “It is said with the reflective air of a man to whom money means very little.”

The justice of the criticism appealed strongly to Henry.  He revised his reading not only of the first line, but of many other lines in which he saw now that he had not been enough of the money-lender.

In more recent years he made one change in his dress.  He asked my daughter—­whose cleverness in such things he fully recognized—­to put some stage jewels on to the scarf that he wore round his head when he supped with the Christians.

“I have an idea that, when he went to that supper, he’d like to flaunt his wealth in the Christian dogs’ faces.  It will look well, too—­’like the toad, ugly and venomous,’ wearing precious jewels on his head!”