One of my productions in the provinces was an English version of “Frou-Frou,” made for me by my dear friend Mrs. Comyns Carr, who for many years designed the dresses that I wore in different Lyceum plays.  “Butterfly,” as “Frou-Frou” was called when it was produced in English, went well; indeed, the Scots of Edinburgh received it with overwhelming favor, and it served my purpose at the time, but when I saw Sarah Bernhardt play the part I wondered that I had had the presumption to meddle with it.  It was not a case of my having a different view of the character and playing it according to my imagination, as it was, for instance, when Duse played “La Dame aux Camelias,” and gave a performance that one could not say was inferior to Bernhardt’s, although it was so utterly different.  No people in their right senses could have accepted my “Frou-Frou” instead of Sarah’s.  What I lacked technically in it was pace.

Of course, it is partly the language.  English cannot be phrased as rapidly as French.  But I have heard foreign actors, playing in the English tongue, show us this rapidity, this warmth, this fury—­call it what you will—­and have just wondered why we are, most of us, so deficient in it.

Fechter had it, so had Edwin Forrest.  When strongly moved, their passions and their fervor made them swift.  The more Henry Irving felt, the more deliberate he became.  I said to him once:  “You seem to be hampered in the vehemence of passion.”  “I am,” he answered.  This is what crippled his Othello, and made his scene with Tubal in “The Merchant of Venice” the least successful to him.  What it was to the audience is another matter.  But he had to take refuge in speechless rage when he would have liked to pour out his words like a torrent.

In the company which Charles Kelly and I took round the provinces in 1880 were Henry Kemble and Charles Brookfield.  Young Brookfield was just beginning life as an actor, and he was so brilliantly funny off the stage that he was always a little disappointing on it.  My old manageress, Mrs. Wigan, first brought him to my notice, writing in a charming little note that she knew him “to have a power of personation very rare in an unpracticed actor,” and that if we could give him varied practice, she would feel it a courtesy to her.

I had reason to admire Mr. Brookfield’s “powers of personation” when I was acting at Buxton.  He and Kemble had no parts in one of our plays, so they amused themselves during their “off” night by hiring bath-chairs and pretending to be paralytics!  We were acting in a hall, and the most infirm of the invalids visiting the place to take the waters were wheeled in at the back, and up the center aisle.  In the middle of a very pathetic scene I caught sight of Kemble and Brookfield in their bath-chairs, and could not speak for several minutes.