Few people thought of this, I suppose.  I did, because I could imagine Henry Irving in America in the same situation—­accepting the hospitality of Booth.  Would not he too have been melancholy, quiet, unassertive, almost as uninteresting and uninterested as Booth was?

I saw him first at a benefit performance at Drury Lane.  I came to the door of the room where Henry was dressing, and Booth was sitting there with his back to me.

“Here’s Miss Terry,” said Henry as I came round the door.  Booth looked up at me swiftly.  I have never in any face, in any country, seen such wonderful eyes.  There was a mystery about his appearance and his manner—­a sort of pride which seemed to say:  “Don’t try to know me, for I am not what I have been.”  He seemed broken, and devoid of ambition.

At rehearsal he was very gentle and apathetic.  Accustomed to playing Othello with stock companies, he had few suggestions to make about the stage-management.  The part was to him more or less of a monologue.

“I shall never make you black,” he said one morning.  “When I take your hand I shall have a corner of my drapery in my hand.  That will protect you.”

I am bound to say that I thought of Mr. Booth’s “protection” with some yearning the next week when I played Desdemona to Henry’s Othello.  Before he had done with me I was nearly as black as he.

Booth was a melancholy, dignified Othello, but not great as Salvini was great.  Salvini’s Hamlet made me scream with mirth, but his Othello was the grandest, biggest, most glorious thing.  We often prate of “reserved force.”  Salvini had it, for the simple reason that his was the gigantic force which may be restrained because of its immensity.  Men have no need to dam up a little purling brook.  If they do it in acting, it is tame, absurd and pretentious.  But Salvini held himself in, and still his groan was like a tempest, his passion huge.

The fact is that, apart from Salvini’s personal genius, the foreign temperament is better fitted to deal with Othello than the English.  Shakespeare’s French and Italians, Greeks and Latins, medievals and barbarians, fancifuls and reals, all have a dash of Elizabethan English men in them, but not Othello.

Booth’s Othello was very helpful to my Desdemona.  It is difficult to preserve the simple, heroic blindness of Desdemona to the fact that her lord mistrusts her, if her lord is raving and stamping under her nose!  Booth was gentle in the scenes with Desdemona until the scene where Othello overwhelms her with the foul word and destroys her fool’s paradise.  Love does make fools of us all, surely, but I wanted to make Desdemona out the fool who is the victim of love and faith; not the simpleton, whose want of tact in continually pleading Cassio’s cause is sometimes irritating to the audience.