Perhaps it is not true, but, as I believe it to be true, I may as well state it:  It was never any pleasure to him to see the acting of other actors and actresses. All the same, Salvini’s Othello I know he thought magnificent, but he would not speak of it.

How dangerous it is to write things that may not be understood!  What I have written I have written merely to indicate the qualities in Henry Irving’s nature, which were unintelligible to me, perhaps because I have always been more woman than artist.  He always put the theater first.  He lived in it, he died in it.  He had none of what I may call my bourgeois qualities—­the love of being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude.  I have always thought it hard to find my inferiors.  He was sure of his high place.  He was far simpler than I in some ways.  He would talk, for instance, in such an ingenuous way to painters and musicians that I blushed for him.  But I know now that my blush was far more unworthy than his freedom from all pretentiousness in matters of art.

He never pretended. One of his biographers has said that he posed as being a French scholar.  Such a thing, and all things like it, were impossible to his nature.  If it were necessary in one of his plays to say a few French words, he took infinite pains to learn them and said them beautifully.

Henry once told me that in the early part of his career, before I knew him, he had been hooted because of his thin legs.  The first service I did him was to tell him they were beautiful, and to make him give up padding them.

“What do you want with fat, podgy, prize-fighter legs!” I expostulated.

Praise to some people at certain stages of their career is more developing than blame.  I admired the very things in Henry for which other people criticized him.  I hope this helped him a little.

I brought help, too, in pictorial matters.  Henry Irving had had little training in such matters—­I had had a great deal.  Judgment about colors, clothes and lighting must be trained.  I had learned from Mr. Watts, from Mr. Godwin, and from other artists, until a sense of decorative effect had become second nature to me.

Before the rehearsals of “Hamlet” began at the Lyceum I went on a provincial tour with Charles Kelly, and played for the first time in “Dora,” and “Iris,” besides doing a steady round of old parts.  In Birmingham I went to see Henry’s Hamlet. (I have tried already, most inadequately, to say what it was to me.) I had also appeared for the first time as Lady Teazle—­a part which I wish I was not too old to play now, for I could play it better.  My performance in 1877 was not finished enough, not light enough.  I think I did the screen scene well.  When the screen was knocked over I did not stand still and rigid with eyes cast down.  That seemed to me an attitude of guilt.  Only a guilty woman, surely, in such a situation would assume an air of conscious virtue.  I shrank back, and tried to hide my face—­a natural movement, so it seemed to me, for a woman who had been craning forward, listening in increasing agitation to the conversation between Charles and Joseph Surface.