It was about this time that I came to know Beerbohm Tree, in many ways the greatest, and in more ways the worst, of our English actors. He was playing Caliban in “The Tempest” when I sought an interview with him on the subject of Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare!... Shakespeare!” he said, leering at me with a beastlike face, according to the part he was playing, and clawing himself with apelike hands. “I seem to have heard that name. Is there anything I can say about him? No, there is nothing. I’ve said all I know a thousand times, and more than I know more times than that.”
He could think of nothing to say about Shakespeare, but suggested that I should run away and write what I liked. I did, and it was at least a year before the article was published in a series of provincial papers, a long article in which I wrote all that I thought Tree ought to say, if he loved Shakespeare with anything like my own passion.
One evening I received a long telegram from him.
“Honor me by accepting two stalls any night at His Majesty’s and kindly call on me between the acts.”
I accepted the invitation, wondering at its effusiveness. When I called on him, he was playing Brutus, and clasped my hand as though he loved me.
“Little do you know the service you have done me,” he said. “My secretary told me the other night that I was booked for a lecture on Shakespeare at the Regent Street Polytechnic. I had forgotten it. I had nothing prepared. It was a dreadful nuisance. I said ‘I won’t go.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid you must.’ ... Two minutes later a bundle of press cuttings was brought to me. It contained your interview with me on the subject of Shakespeare. I read it with delight. I had no idea I had said all those things. What a memory you must have! I took the paper to the Polytechnic, and delivered my lecture, by reading it word for word.”
After that I met Tree many times and he never forgot that little service. In return he invited me to the Garrick Club, or to his great room at the top of His Majesty’s, and told me innumerable anecdotes which were vastly entertaining. He had a rich store of them, and told them with a ripe humor and dramatic genius which revealed him at his best. His acting was marred by affectations that became exasperating, and sometimes by loss of memory and sheer carelessness. I have seen him actually asleep on the stage. It was when he played the part of Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” and in a scene where he had to sit crouched below a bridge, waiting for Bill Sikes, he dozed off, wakened with a start, and missed his cue.