Who Was Dracula? Read Online Free PDF Page A

associations were the professional friendships formed backstage at the Lyceum, entertaining Irving’s royal guests over cigars in a lounge, or at dinner after a sparkling performance. Somehow Stoker’s family, marriage, son, and even the publication of his greatest work,
Dracula
, register as no more than shrugs in his brief autobiographical accounts.
    After Irving’s death, Stoker filled two volumes with his sincere recollections,
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving
, filled with his accounts of the great man: “When a man with his full share of ambition is willing to yield it up to work with a friend whom he loves and honors, it is perhaps as well that in due season he may set out his reasons for so doing.”
    At this point, a reader hopes to interpret the sentence ambiguously. Our estimation of Bram Stoker would rise if we could believe that their sacrifice, their teamwork and devotion, were mutual. But no, his point is clear. Stoker gave up everything out of love and honor for Henry Irving.
    Such is but just; and I now place it on record for the sake of Irving as well as myself, and for the friends of us both. For twenty-seven years I worked with Henry Irving, helping him in all honest ways in which one man may aid another—and there were no ways with Irving other than honorable. Looking back I cannot honestly find any moment in my life when I failed him, or when I put myself forward in any way when the most scrupulous good taste could have enjoined or even suggested a larger measure of reticence. By my dealing with him I am quite content to be judged, now and hereafter. In my own speaking to the dead man I can find an analog in the words of heartbreaking sincerity:
    Stand up on the jasper sea,
    And be witness I have given
    All the gifts required of me!
    Despite Stoker’s contention, these lines are not particularly heartbreaking. The verses are from “Bertha in the Lane” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a poem of a dying maiden’s loneliness. Although Stoker omitted them, Browning’s verses continued:
    Hope that blessed me, bliss that crowned,
    Love that left me with a wound,
    Life itself that turneth round!
    Personal Reminiscences
presents a grand portrait of Irving, and a painful portrait of the author eternally in service, reticent in his own views, and apologetic to use ink and paper for anything but praise for the great actor. For example, when Stoker recounts their first meeting—Irving gave a dramatic recitation of a poem in a hotel drawing room—the performance so drained the actor that he concluded and “collapsed, half-fainting.” Witnessing the performance so moved Stoker that he confessed, “I burst into something like hysterics.” Presumably, this was a fit of uncontrollable tears.
    And then, in his account, Stoker included a brief note of autobiography.
    Let me say, not in my own vindication, but to bring new tribute to Irving’s splendid power, that I was no hysterical subject. I was no green youth; no weak individual, yielding to a superior emotional force. . . . I was a very strong man. It is true that I had known weakness. In my babyhood I used, I understand, to be often at the point of death. Certainly ’till I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright. . . . This early weakness, however, passed in time and I grew into a strong boy and in time enlarged to the biggest member of my family.
    Stoker’s point was not to share personal recollections of his childhood but simply to endorse the actor one more time, proving to the reader that his “hysterics” were no mere triviality. Bram Stoker was habitually in service to Irving.
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    Stoker’s early illness is a mystery, but those years of invalidism did not seem to burden his later childhood. If he was coddled and pampered, he may have had extra time to hear his mother and father’s recitations by his bedside. His