Yet the success on the first night at the Lyceum in 1874 was not of that electrical, almost hysterical splendor which has greeted the momentous achievements of some actors.  The first two acts were received with indifference.  The people could not see how packed they were with superb acting—­perhaps because the new Hamlet was so simple, so quiet, so free from the exhibition of actors’ artifices which used to bring down the house in “Louis XI” and in “Richelieu,” but which were really the easy things in acting, and in “Richelieu” (in my opinion) not especially well done.  In “Hamlet” Henry Irving did not go to the audience.  He made them come to him.  Slowly but surely attention gave place to admiration, admiration to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to triumphant acclaim.

I have seen many Hamlets—­Fechter, Charles Kean, Rossi, Frederick Haas, Forbes-Robertson, and my own son, Gordon Craig, among them, but they were not in the same hemisphere!  I refuse to go and see Hamlets now.  I want to keep Henry Irving’s fresh and clear in my memory until I die.

When he engaged me to play Ophelia in 1878 he asked me to go down to Birmingham to see the play, and that night I saw what I shall always consider the perfection of acting.  It had been wonderful in 1874.  In 1878 it was far more wonderful.  It has been said that when he had the “advantage” of my Ophelia, his Hamlet “improved.”  I don’t think so.  He was always quite independent of the people with whom he acted.

The Birmingham night he knew I was there.  He played—­I say it without vanity—­for me.  We players are not above that weakness, if it be a weakness.  If ever anything inspires us to do our best it is the presence in the audience of some fellow-artist who must in the nature of things know more completely than any one what we intend, what we do, what we feel.  The response from such a member of the audience flies across the footlights to us like a flame.  I felt it once when I played Olivia before Eleonora Duse.  I felt that she felt it once when she played Marguerite Gauthier for me.

When I read “Hamlet” now, everything that Henry did in it seems to me more absolutely right, even than I thought at the time.  I would give much to be able to record it all in detail—­but it may be my fault—­writing is not the medium in which this can be done.  Sometimes I have thought of giving readings of “Hamlet,” for I can remember every tone of Henry’s voice, every emphasis, every shade of meaning that he saw in the lines and made manifest to the discerning.  Yes, I think I could give some pale idea of what his Hamlet was if I read the play.

“Words! words! words!” What is it to say, for instance, that the cardinal qualities of his Prince of Denmark were strength, delicacy, distinction?  There was never a touch of commonness.  Whatever he did or said, blood and breeding pervaded him.

His “make-up” was very pale, and this made his face beautiful when one was close to him, but at a distance it gave him a haggard look.  Some said he looked twice his age.