incommode him.  His self was to him on a first night what the shell is to a lobster on dry land.  In “Hamlet,” when we first acted together after that long-ago Katherine and Petruchio period at the Queen’s, he used to discuss with me the secret of my freedom from self-consciousness; and I suggested a more swift entrance on the stage from the dressing-room.  I told him that, in spite of the advantage in ease which I had gained through having been on the stage when still a mere child, I should be paralyzed with fright from over-acute realization of the audience if I stood at the wing for ten minutes, as he was in the habit of doing.  He did not need me then, nor during the run of our next play, “The Lady of Lyons”; but when it came to Shylock, a quite new part to him, he tried the experiment, and, as he told me, with great comfort to himself and success with the audience.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor’s art infinite.  Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving.  He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do.  Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train—­always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute—­and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.

“I was thinking,” he answered slowly, “how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me—­with no equipment.  My legs, my voice—­everything has been against me.  For an actor who can’t walk, can’t talk, and has no face to speak of, I’ve done pretty well.”

And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, “Ah, you little know!”

PORTIA

1875

The brilliant story of the Bancroft management of the old Prince of Wales’s Theater was more familiar twenty years back than it is now.  I think that few of the youngest playgoers who point out, on the first nights of important productions, a remarkably striking figure of a man with erect carriage, white hair, and flashing dark eyes—­a man whose eye-glass, manners, and clothes all suggest Thackeray and Major Pendennis, in spite of his success in keeping abreast of everything modern—­few playgoers, I say, who point this man out as Sir Squire Bancroft could give any adequate account of what he did for the English theater in the ’seventies.  Nor do the public who see an elegant little lady starting for a drive from a certain house in Berkeley Square realize that this is Marie Wilton, afterward Mrs. Bancroft, now Lady Bancroft, the comedienne who created the heroines of Tom Robertson, and, with her husband, brought what is called the cup-and-saucer drama to absolute perfection.