A true Bohemian in money matters, he made a great deal out of his plays—­and never had a farthing to bless himself with!

In the theater he was charming—­from an actor’s point of view.  He interfered very little with the stage management, and did not care to sit in the stalls and criticise.  But he would come quietly to me and tell me things which were most illuminating, and he paid me the compliment of weeping at the wing while I rehearsed “Olivia.”

I was generally weeping, too, for Olivia, more than any part, touched me to the heart.  I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later on in the Nunnery scene in “Hamlet,” and in the last act of “Charles I.”  My real tears on the stage have astonished some people, and have been the envy of others, but they have often been a hindrance to me.  I have had to work to restrain them.

Oddly enough, although “Olivia” was such a great success at the Court, it has never made much money since.  The play could pack a tiny theater; it could never appeal in a big way to the masses.  In itself it had a sure message—­the love story of an injured woman is one of the cards in the stage pack which it is always safe to play—­but against this there was a bad last act, one of the worst I have ever acted in.  It was always being tinkered with, but patching and alteration only seems to weaken it.

Mr. Hare produced “Olivia” perfectly.  Marcus Stone designed the clothes, and I found my dresses—­both faithful and charming as reproductions of the eighteenth century spirit—­stood the advance of time and the progress of ideas when I played the part later at the Lyceum.  I had not to alter anything.  Henry Irving discovered the same thing about the scenery and stage management.  They could not be improved upon.  There was very little scenery at the Court, but a great deal of taste and care in selection.

Every one was “Olivia” mad.  The Olivia cap shared public favor with the Langtry bonnet.  That most lovely and exquisite creature, Mrs. Langtry, could not go out anywhere, at the dawn of the ’eighties, without a crowd collecting to look at her!  It was no rare thing to see the crowd, to ask its cause, to receive the answer, “Mrs. Langtry!” and to look in vain for the object of the crowd’s admiring curiosity.

This was all the more remarkable, and honorable to public taste, too, because Mrs. Langtry’s was not a showy beauty.  Her hair was the color that it had pleased God to make it; her complexion was her own; in evening dress she did not display nearly as much of her neck and arms as was the vogue, yet they outshone all other necks and arms through their own perfection.

“No worker has a right to criticise publicly the work of another in the same field,” Henry Irving once said to me, and Heaven forbid that I should disregard advice so wise!  I am aware that the professional critics and the public did not transfer to Mrs. Langtry the actress the homage that they had paid to Mrs. Langtry the beauty, but I can only speak of the simplicity with which she approached her work, of her industry, and utter lack of vanity about her powers.  When she played Rosalind (which my daughter, the best critic of acting I know, tells me was in many respects admirable), she wrote to me: