The incident impressed itself on my mind, inseparably associated with a picture of him as he looked at thirty—­a picture by no means pleasing.  He looked conceited, and almost savagely proud of the isolation in which he lived.  There was a touch of exaggeration in his appearance—­a dash of Werther, with a few flourishes of Jingle!  Nervously sensitive to ridicule, self-conscious, suffering deeply from his inability to express himself through his art, Henry Irving, in 1867, was a very different person from the Henry Irving who called on me at Longridge Road in 1878.

In ten years he had found himself, and so lost himself—­lost, I mean, much of that stiff, ugly, self-consciousness which had encased him as the shell encases the lobster.  His forehead had become more massive, and the very outline of his features had altered.  He was a man of the world, whose strenuous fighting now was to be done as a general—­not, as hitherto, in the ranks.  His manner was very quiet and gentle.  “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength,” says the Psalmist.  That was always like Henry Irving.

And here, perhaps, is the place to say that I, of all people, can perhaps appreciate Henry Irving least justly, although I was his associate on the stage for a quarter of a century, and was on the terms of the closest friendship with him for almost as long a time.  He had precisely the qualities that I never find likable.

He was an egotist—­an egotist of the great type, never “a mean egotist,” as he was once slanderously described—­and all his faults sprang from egotism, which is in one sense, after all, only another name for greatness.  So much absorbed was he in his own achievements that he was unable or unwilling to appreciate the achievements of others.  I never heard him speak in high terms of the great foreign actors and actresses who from time to time visited England.  It would be easy to attribute this to jealousy, but the easy explanation is not the true one.  He simply would not give himself up to appreciation.  Perhaps appreciation is a wasting though a generous quality of the mind and heart, and best left to lookers-on, who have plenty of time to develop it.

I was with him when he saw Sarah Bernhardt act for the first time.  The play was “Ruy Blas,” and it was one of Sarah’s bad days.  She was walking through the part listlessly, and I was angry that there should be any ground for Henry’s indifference.  The same thing happened years later, when I took him to see Eleonora Duse.  The play was “La Locandiera,” in which to my mind she is not at her very best.  He was surprised at my enthusiasm.  There was an element of justice in his attitude towards the performance which infuriated me, but I doubt if he would have shown more enthusiasm if he had seen her at her very best.

As the years went on he grew very much attached to Sarah Bernhardt, and admired her as a colleague whose managerial work in the theater was as dignified as his own, but of her superb powers as an actress, I don’t believe he ever had a glimmering notion!