It is not usual, I think, to make much of the Rosaline episode.  Henry Irving chose with great care a tall dark girl to represent Rosaline at the ball.  Can I ever forget his face when suddenly in pursuit of her he saw me....  Once more I reflect that a face is the chiefest equipment of the actor.

I know they said he looked too old—­was too old for Romeo.  In some scenes he looked aged as only a very young man can look.  He was not boyish; but ought Romeo to be boyish?

I am not supporting the idea of an elderly Romeo.  When it came to the scenes where Romeo “poses” and is poetical but insincere, Henry did seem elderly.  He couldn’t catch the youthful pose of melancholy with its extravagant expression.  It was in the repressed scenes, where the melancholy was sincere, the feeling deeper, and the expression slighter, that he was at his best.

“He may be good, but he isn’t Romeo,” is a favorite type of criticism.  But I have seen Duse and Bernhardt in “La Dame aux Camelias,” and cannot say which is Marguerite Gauthier.  Each has her own view of the character, and each is it according to her imagination.

According to his imagination, Henry Irving was Romeo.

Again in this play he used his favorite “fate” tree.  It gloomed over the street along which Romeo went to the ball.  It was in the scene with the Apothecary.  Henry thought that it symbolized the destiny hanging over the lovers.

It is usual for Romeo to go in to the dead body of Juliet lying in Capulet’s monument through a gate on the level, as if the Capulets were buried but a few feet from the road.  At rehearsals Henry Irving kept on saying:  “I must go down to the vault.”  After a great deal of consideration he had an inspiration.  He had the exterior of the vault in one scene, the entrance to it down a flight of steps.  Then the scene changed to the interior of the vault, and the steps now led from a height above the stage.  At the close of the scene, when the Friar and the crowd came rushing down into the tomb, these steps were thronged with people, each one holding a torch, and the effect was magnificent.

At the opening of the Apothecary Scene, when Balthazar comes to tell Romeo of Juliet’s supposed death, Henry was marvelous.  His face grew whiter and whiter.

    “Then she is well and nothing can be ill;
    Her body sleeps in Capulet’s monument.”

It was during the silence after those two lines that Henry Irving as Romeo had one of those sublime moments which an actor only achieves once or twice in his life.  The only thing that I ever saw to compare with it was Duse’s moment when she took Kellner’s card in “Magda.”  There was absolutely no movement, but her face grew white, and the audience knew what was going on in her soul, as she read the name of the man who years before had seduced and deserted her.