When it comes to pointing out an example, Henry Irving is the monument, the great mark set up to show the genius of _will_. For years he worked to overcome the dragging leg, which seemed to attract more attention from some small-minded critics (sharp of eye, yet how dull of vision!) than all the mental splendor of his impersonations. He toiled, and he overcame this defect, just as he overcame his disregard of the vowels and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used to hamper and incommode him. His _self_ was to him on a first night what the shell is to a lobster on dry land. In "Hamlet," when we first acted together after that long-ago Katherine and Petruchio period at the Queen's, he used to discuss with me the secret of my freedom from self-consciousness; and I suggested a more swift entrance on the stage from the dressing-room. I told him that, in spite of the advantage in ease which I had gained through having been on the stage when still a mere child, I should be paralyzed with fright from over-acute realization of the audience if I stood at the wing for ten minutes, as he was in the habit of doing. He did not need me then, nor during the run of our next play, "The Lady of Lyons"; but when it came to Shylock, a quite new part to him, he tried the experiment, and, as he told me, with great comfort to himself and success with the audience. Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite. Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving, striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him one day in the train--always a delightful occupation, for his face provided many pictures a minute--and being struck by a curious look, half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about. "I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help me--with no equipment. My legs, my voice--everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well." And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!" PORTIA 1875