But I have not come to that sad time yet.

“We all know when we do our best,” said Henry once.  “We are the only people who know.”  Yet he thought he did better in “Macbeth” than in “Hamlet”!

Was he right after all?

His view of “Macbeth,” though attacked and derided and put to shame in many quarters, is as clear to me as the sunlight itself.  To me it seems as stupid to quarrel with the conception as to deny the nose on one’s face.  But the carrying out of the conception was unequal.  Henry’s imagination was sometimes his worst enemy.

When I think of his “Macbeth,” I remember him most distinctly in the last act after the battle when he looked like a great famished wolf, weak with the weakness of a giant exhausted, spent as one whose exertions have been ten times as great as those of commoner men of rougher fiber and coarser strength.

     “Of all men else I have avoided thee.”

Once more he suggested, as he only could suggest, the power of Fate.  Destiny seemed to hang over him, and he knew that there was no hope, no mercy.

The rehearsals for “Macbeth” were very exhausting, but they were splendid to watch.  In this play Henry brought his manipulation of crowds to perfection.  My acting edition of the play is riddled with rough sketches by him of different groups.  Artists to whom I have shown them have been astonished by the spirited impressionism of these sketches.  For his “purpose” Henry seems to have been able to do anything, even to drawing, and composing music!  Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music at first did not quite please him.  He walked up and down the stage humming, and showing the composer what he was going to do at certain situations.  Sullivan, with wonderful quickness and open-mindedness, caught his meaning at once.

“Much better than mine, Irving—­much better—­I’ll rough it out at once!”

When the orchestra played the new version, based on that humming of Henry’s, it was exactly what he wanted!

Knowing what a task I had before me, I began to get anxious and worried about “Lady Mac.”  Henry wrote me such a nice letter about this: 

“To-night, if possible, the last act.  I want to get these great multitudinous scenes over and then we can attack our scenes....  Your sensitiveness is so acute that you must suffer sometimes.  You are not like anybody else—­see things with such lightning quickness and unerring instinct that dull fools like myself grow irritable and impatient sometimes.  I feel confused when I’m thinking of one thing, and disturbed by another.  That’s all.  But I do feel very sorry afterwards when I don’t seem to heed what I so much value....

“I think things are going well, considering the time we’ve been at it, but I see so much that is wanting that it seems almost impossible to get through properly.  ’To-night commence, Matthias.  If you sleep, you are lost!’"[1]

[Footnote 1:  A quotation from “The Bells.”]