“I say, E.T., why is Irving playing Romeo?”

I looked at his distraught.  “You should ask me why I am playing Juliet!  Why are we any of us doing what we have to do?”

“Oh, you’re all right.  But Irving!”

“I don’t agree with you,” I said.  I was growing a little angry by this time.  “Besides, who would you have play Romeo?”

“Well, it’s so obvious.  You’ve got Terriss in the cast.”

“Terriss!”

“Yes.  I don’t doubt Irving’s intellectuality, you know.  As Romeo he reminds me of a pig who has been taught to play the fiddle.  He does it cleverly, but he would be better employed in squealing.  He cannot shine in the part like the fiddler.  Terriss in this case is the fiddler.”

I was furious.  “I am sorry you don’t realize,” I said, “that the worst thing Henry Irving could do would be better than the best of any one else.”

When dear Terris did play Romeo at the Lyceum two or three years later to the Juliet of Mary Anderson, he attacked the part with a good deal of fire.  He was young, truly, and stamped his foot a great deal, was vehement and passionate.  But it was so obvious that there was no intelligence behind his reading.  He did not know what the part was about, and all the finer shades of meaning in it he missed.  Yet the majority, with my political friend, would always prefer a Terriss as Romeo to a Henry Irving.

I am not going to say that Henry’s Romeo was good.  What I do say is that some bits of it were as good as anything he ever did.  In the big emotional scene (in the Friar’s cell), he came to grief precisely as he had done in Othello.  He screamed, grew slower and slower, and looked older and older.  When I begin to think it over I see that he often failed in such scenes through his very genius for impersonation.  An actor of commoner mould takes such scenes rhetorically—­recites them, and gets through them with some success.  But the actor who impersonates, feels, and lives such anguish or passion or tempestuous grief, does for the moment in imagination nearly die.  Imagination impeded Henry Irving in what are known as “strong” scenes.

He was a perfect Hamlet, a perfect Richard III., a perfect Shylock, except in the scene with Tubal, where I think his voice failed him.  He was an imperfect Romeo; yet, as I have said, he did things in the part which were equal to the best of his perfect Hamlet.

His whole attitude before he met Juliet was beautiful.  He came on from the very back of the stage and walked over a little bridge with a book in his hand, sighing and dying for Rosaline.  In Iago he had been Italian.  Then it was the Italy of Venice.  As Romeo it was the Italy of Tuscany.  His clothes were as Florentine as his bearing.  He ignored the silly tradition that Romeo must wear a feather in his cap.  In the course of his study of the part he had found that the youthful fops and gallants of the period put in their hats anything that they had been given—­some souvenir “dallying with the innocence of love.”  And he wore in his hat a sprig of crimson oleander.