We talk of progress, improvement, and advance; but when I think of Henry Irving’s Philip, I begin to wonder if Oscar Wilde was not profound as well as witty when he said that a great artist moves in a cycle of masterpieces, of which the last is no more perfect than the first.  Only Irving’s Petruchio stops me.  But, then, he had not found himself.  He was not an artist.

“Why did Whistler paint him as Philip?” some one once asked me.  How dangerous to “ask why” about anyone so freakish as Jimmy Whistler.  But I answered then, and would answer now, that it was because, as Philip, Henry, in his dress without much color (from the common point of view), his long, gray legs, and Velasquez-like attitudes, looked like the kind of thing which Whistler loved to paint.  Velasquez had painted a real Philip of the same race.  Whistler would paint the actor who had created the Philip of the stage.

I have a note from Whistler written to Henry at a later date which refers to the picture, and suggests portraying him in all his characters.  It is common knowledge that the sitter never cared much about the portrait.  Henry had a strange affection for the wrong picture of himself.  He disliked the Bastien Lepage, the Whistler, and the Sargent, which never even saw the light.  He adored the weak, handsome picture by Millais, which I must admit, all the same, held the mirror up to one of the characteristics of Henry’s face—­its extreme refinement.  Whistler’s Philip probably seemed to him not nearly showy enough.

Whistler I knew long before he painted the Philip.  He gave me the most lovely dinner-set of blue and white Nanking that any woman ever possessed, and a set of Venetian glass, too good for a world where glass is broken.  He sent my little girl a tiny Japanese kimono when Liberty was hardly a name.  Many of his friends were my friends.  He was with the dearest of those friends when he died.

The most remarkable men I have known were, without a doubt, Whistler and Oscar Wilde.  This does not imply that I liked them better or admired them more than the others, but there was something about both of them more instantaneously individual and audacious than it is possible to describe.

When I went with Coghlan to see Henry Irving’s Philip I was no stranger to his acting.  I had been present with Tom Taylor, then dramatic critic of The Times, at the famous first night at the Lyceum in 1874, when Henry Irving put his fortune, counted not in gold, but in years of scorned delights and laborious days—­years of constant study and reflection, of Spartan self-denial, and deep melancholy—­I was present when he put it all to the touch “to win or lose it all.”  This is no exaggeration.  Hamlet was by far the greatest part that he had ever played, or was ever to play.  If he had failed—­but why pursue it?  He could not fail.