had previously
applied the same principles to the mounting of operas by Handel and
Purcell.

It had been a great grief to me when I lost my son as an actor. I have
never known any one with so much natural gift for the stage.
Unconsciously he did everything right--I mean all the technical things
over which some of us have to labor for years. The first part that he
played at the Lyceum, Arthur St. Valery in "The Dead Heart," was good,
and he went on steadily improving. The last part that he played at the
Lyceum--Edward IV. in "Richard III."--was, maternal prejudice quite
apart, a most remarkable performance.

His record for 1891, when he was still a mere boy, was: Claudio (in
"Much Ado about Nothing"), Mercutio, Modus, Charles Surface, Alexander
Oldworthy, Moses (in "Olivia"), Lorenzo, Malcolm, Beauchamp; Meynard,
and the Second Grave-Digger!

Later on he played Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo on a small provincial
tour. His future as an actor seemed assured, but it wasn't! One day when
he was with William Nicholson, the clever artist and one of the
Beggarstaff Brothers of poster fame, he began chipping at a woodblock in
imitation of Nicholson, and produced in a few hours an admirable
wood-cut of Walt Whitman, then and always his particular hero. From that
moment he had the "black and white" fever badly. Acting for a time
seemed hardly to interest him at all. When his interest in the theater
revived, it was not as an actor but as a stage director that he wanted
to work.

What more natural than that his mother should give him the chance of
exploiting his ideas in London? Ideas he had in plenty--"unpractical"
ideas people called them; but what else should _ideas_ be?

At the Imperial Theater, where I spent my financially unfortunate season
in April 1903, I gave my son a free hand. I hope it will be remembered,
when I am spoken of by the youngest critics after my death as a
"Victorian" actress, lacking in enterprise, an actress belonging to the
"old school," that I produced a spectacular play of Ibsen's in a manner
which possibly anticipated the scenic ideas of the future by a century,
of which at any rate the orthodox theater managers of the present age
would not have dreamed.

Naturally I am not inclined to criticize my son's methods. I think there
is a great deal to be said for the views that he has expressed in his
pamphlet on "The Art of the Theater," and when I worked with him I found
him far from unpractical. It wa