But let us not seem to require too much of a providence that vouchsafes so rarely an Ellen Terry. If criticism, when the final estimate is written, is forced to recognize in her a circumscribed talent, we who have seen her would not have had her otherwise than as she was. And if one says she was not truly a great artist, another may reply truthfully that with her art was second, life itself first. “In contrast to Irving, to whom his art was everything and his life nothing, she has found life itself more interesting than art,” says George Bernard Shaw. “And while she was associated with him in his long and brilliant management of the Lyceum Theatre she--the most modern of modern women--considered it a higher honor to be an economic, exemplary housewife than to be a self-conscious woman, whose highest aim was to play the heroine in the old-fashioned plays in which Irving shone.” Again, she lacked that all-sacrificing ambition that carries the artist to the topmost heights. During her two absences from the stage, and especially during the second, when she spent six years in the country, happy as housewife and mother, she had no regrets for the stage, no longing for its triumphs. And she was throughout her career content to be a “useful” actress. She constantly uses that word. She was content, first with private life, then with her ability to help the artistic cause of Henry Irving. Never has there been a better example than Ellen Terry of the blending of trained acting ability with untamed high spirits. Her acting was sure of its effects and yet shot through with gleams of her own radiant charm and exuberance. And off the stage as well she was this same blithe spirit. It was strange that she disliked the elder Sothern, for if he had his equal in practical joking, it was in Ellen Terry. She was thirty when she joined Irving. Yet one day when he came to the foot of the stairs leading to her dressing room, he looked up to see his new leading woman sliding down the banisters! The act was characteristic, and so is her comment: “I remember feeling as if I had laughed in church.... He smiled at me but didn’t seem able to get over it.” But sunny as she was, she could weep too. When playing Olivia, she generally wept, she says, for the part touched her more than any other. “I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later on 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.” She was occasionally oversensitive to adverse criticism. When a writer in _Blackwood’s_ said she showed plainly that Portia loves Bassanio before he has actually won her, Miss Terry was, she says, for years made uneasy and lacking in sureness at this moment in the play. “Any suggestion of indelicacy in my treatment of a part,” she wrote, “always blighted me.”