Those first nights with the first favourites dissolved my American notions of the British character. I had heard, with the rest of the outer world, that the British were stolid, phlegmatic, cold, and what not, {197} that they repressed their emotions, that they would not and could not let themselves go. I was to find what everybody finds, sooner or later,--that the individual and the mass differ as chalk from cheese. The pit crowds were not icebergs; they had not the immobility of mountains. They laughed, they wept, they cheered; they unlocked their emotions. They were the most sentimental, the most enthusiastic, the most appreciative crowds I had ever seen. The individual was dissolved in the mass. He became natural man. The crowds always took fire from a spark. They received their favourites as if they were conquering heroes. Irving, their greatest favourite, they received like a reigning monarch. One has to learn this about the British; their hearts are big and near their skins, and that is why, as individuals, they armour them. If you know how to touch them, they respond with such demonstrations of devotion, of enthusiasm, of loyalty, as no other race ever equals in our time. Their loyalty to Irving they expressed with a zeal that was greater even than their appreciation of his powers, immense as that appreciation was. They loved the man. He embodied for them another lofty mark in the records of English achievement. He was great and would be greater by the integrity, the persistence, the elevation of his purpose. Such qualities win the English, and deep is the loyalty with which England rewards them. That, at all events, was true in the Victorian days. There was a blessed vision called Ellen Terry, in those far-away Lyceum nights. Her power was {198} charm. And she wielded her power almost to the end of King Henry's reign. In comedy she was alluring, audacious, delightful,--as Portia, for instance; as Beatrice; as any number of arch, graceful, incomparable creatures. In tragedy,--well, we forgave her the tragedies, her Lady Macbeth, for example. As Ophelia there was nothing to forgive; as Juliet--here was the exception to her tragic parts; she was a poet's dream, a fragile, loving, playful thing enmeshed by fate and borne down to death. Ellen Terry was the witching consort of Irving's reign. She won half his battle. "A star danced, and under that" she "was born." When Father Time told her that she could not play Portia and Beatrice and Juliet any more, half the attractiveness of the Lyceum was gone, and Irving had to carry the load alone.