ery gentle and apathetic. Accustomed to playing
Othello with stock companies, he had few suggestions to make about the
stage-management. The part was to him more or less of a monologue.

"I shall never make you black," he said one morning. "When I take your
hand I shall have a corner of my drapery in my hand. That will protect
you."

I am bound to say that I thought of Mr. Booth's "protection" with some
yearning the next week when I played Desdemona to _Henry's_ Othello.
Before he had done with me I was nearly as black as he.

Booth was a melancholy, dignified Othello, but not great as Salvini was
great. Salvini's Hamlet made me scream with mirth, but his Othello was
the grandest, biggest, most glorious thing. We often prate of "reserved
force." Salvini had it, for the simple reason that his was the gigantic
force which may be restrained because of its immensity. Men have no need
to dam up a little purling brook. If they do it in acting, it is tame,
absurd and pretentious. But Salvini held himself in, and still his groan
was like a tempest, his passion huge.

The fact is that, apart from Salvini's personal genius, the foreign
temperament is better fitted to deal with Othello than the English.
Shakespeare's French and Italians, Greeks and Latins, medievals and
barbarians, fancifuls and reals, all have a dash of Elizabethan English
men in them, but not Othello.

Booth's Othello was very helpful to my Desdemona. It is difficult to
preserve the simple, heroic blindness of Desdemona to the fact that her
lord mistrusts her, if her lord is raving and stamping under her nose!
Booth was gentle in the scenes with Desdemona until _the_ scene where
Othello overwhelms her with the foul word and destroys her fool's
paradise. Love _does_ make fools of us all, surely, but I wanted to make
Desdemona out the fool who is the victim of love and faith; not the
simpleton, whose want of tact in continually pleading Cassio's cause is
sometimes irritating to the audience.

My greatest triumph as Desdemona was not gained with the audience but
with Henry Irving! He found my endeavors to accept comfort from Iago so
pathetic that they brought the tears to his eyes. It was the oddest
sensation when I said "Oh, good Iago, what shall I do to win my lord
again?" to look up--my own eyes dry, for Desdemona is past crying
then--and see Henry's eyes at their biggest, luminous, soft and full of
tears! He was, in spite of Iago and in spite of his power