Irving's maltreatment of vowels gave much offence to trained ears. I do not know when I ceased, if ever I did cease, to wince at some of his pronunciations, but with time they ceased to present themselves as crimes for scourging, and came to be regarded as misfortunes, as penalties that must be endured for seeing him and enjoying him. When all is said, this thought remains,--the Lyceum productions were immensely satisfying; the beauty of them, the appeal to the eye, the appropriateness of everything that was painted, or woven, or said, or done; the groupings, the general and particular movement, whether of principals or supernumeraries, the tone of the thing, the atmosphere of it. When was the like known before? When since? Seeing through the fog of mannerism took me a year. After that, as I have said, I grew gradually to appreciate him, to admire him. When I made {201} his acquaintance, ten years after first seeing his Hamlet, I had long passed from the benches of opposition. But even then the wonder grew. First it had been: how did this man of many mannerisms ever become an actor and one of the most distinguished actors of his time? And then it was: how does he escape from carrying his mannerisms into private life? For he did not carry them there. He was a natural, unaffected gentleman, distinguished in bearing, courteous, fine in dignity, without pose. He walked and talked like a human being accustomed to the best of intellectual society, accustomed, indeed, to the ruling of men. He was then neither tone-bound nor muscle-bound. He moved with a certain ease, spoke with exquisite courtesy and quiet, and did not speak too much. He preferred to listen rather than to talk. He could--and did--make excellent speeches after dinner, or before the curtain. They would always have a touch of humour and a touch of pathos. They would always be in earnest. He never spent himself on trivial things; he never trifled about anything. He had a certain air of authority; he had, at any rate, earned the right to breathe it. Besides, it protected him from bores. It made him, as a listener, the more gracious by just the suggestion of deference to an opinion, especially when he had invited the opinion. He preferred flattering to being flattered. Perhaps discreet flattery was an instrument that he knew how to employ better than most men. It may have been on that account that {202} when it came his way he did not care for it. In all things he preferred giving to receiving. Next to his work he enjoyed hospitality, that is, the exercise of hospitality. He did not like going out, and very seldom went out to dinners and receptions, those affairs of which one grows weary in London, because there are so many of them, and the celebrity is so often a sacrifice. He enjoyed being the host. This gave him the right of selection, with the minimum of sacrifice.