We read it aloud on Christmas Day, and it seemed tremendous.  Not in my most wildly optimistic moments did I think Hiordis, the chief female character—­a primitive, fighting, free, open-air person—­suited to me, but I saw a way of playing her more brilliantly and less weightily than the text suggested, and anyhow I was not thinking so much of the play for me as for my son.  He had just produced Mr. Laurence Houseman’s Biblical play “Bethlehem” in the hall of the Imperial Institute, and every one had spoken highly of the beauty of his work.  He 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.