The voluntary abdication of power in its zenith has always fascinated
and "intrigued" the imagination of mankind. We are so accustomed to
kings and other gifted persons holding on to their sceptres with a
desperate tenacity, even through those waning years when younger men,
beholding their present feebleness, wonder whether their previous might
was not a fancy of their fathers, whether, in fact, they were ever
really kings or gifted persons at all. In so many cases we have to rely
on a legend of past accomplishment to preserve our reverence. Therefore,
when a Sulla or a Charles V. or a Mary Anderson, leave their thrones at
the moment when their sway over us is most assured and brilliant, we
wonder--wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of
romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them,
but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in
all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They
remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the aureoles of
immortal promise.
Few artists have been wise in this respect; poets, for example, very
seldom. Thus we find the works of most of them encumbered with the
débris of their senility. Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet
who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words,
but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to
the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his
youth he had set before him. His readers, therefore, are not saddened by
any pathetic gleanings from a once-rich harvest-field, or the carefully
picked-up shakings of November boughs.
Forbes-Robertson is one of those artists who has chosen to bid farewell
to his art while he is still indisputably its master. One or two other
distinguished actors before him have thus chosen, and a greater number
have bade us, those professional "farewells" that remind one of that
dream of De Quincey in which he heard reverberated "Everlasting
farewells! and again and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!"
In Forbes-Robertson's case, however, apart from our courteous taking the
word of his management, we know that the news is sadly true. There is
a curious personal honour and sincerity breathing through all his
impersonations that make us feel, so to say, that not only would we take
the ghost's word for a thousand pounds, but that between him and his art
is such an austere compact that he would be incapable of humiliating it
by any mere advertising devices; and beyond that, those who have seen
him play this time (1914) in New York must have been aware that in the
very texture of all his performances was woven like a sigh the word
"farewell." His very art, as I shall have later to emphasize, is an art
of farewell; but, apart from that general quality, it seemed to me,
though, indeed, it may have been mere sympathetic fancy, that in these
last New York performances, as in the performances last spring in
London, I heard a personal valedictory note. Forbes-Robertson seemed to
be saying good-by at once to his audience and to his art.
In doing this, along with the inevitable sadness that must accompany
such a step, one cannot but think there will be a certain private
whimsical satisfaction for him in being able to go about the world in
after years with his great gift still his, hidden away, but still his to
use at any moment, and to know not only that he has been, but still is,
as it were, in secret, the supreme Hamlet of his time. Something
like that, one may imagine, must be the private fun of abdication.
Forbes-Robertson, as he himself has told us, lays down one art only to
take up another to which he has long been devoted, and of his early
affiliation to which the figure of Love Kissing Beatrice in Rossetti's
"Dante's Dream" bears illustrious and significant witness. As, one
recalls that he was the model for that figure one realizes that even
then he was the young lord Hamlet, born to be _par excellence_ the actor
of sorrow and renunciation.
It is not my province to write here of Forbes-Robertson from the point
of view of the reminiscent playgoer or of the technical critic of
acting. Others, obviously, are far better qualified to undertake those
offices for his fame. I would merely offer him the tribute of one to
whom for many years his acting has been something more than acting, as
usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the
spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last,
however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is
appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost
heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial
materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the modern world.
When I say "first," I am thinking of the first time I saw him, on the
first night of _The Profligate_ by Pinero, in its day one of the plays
that blazed the trail for that social, or, rather, I should say,
sociological, drama since become even more deadly in earnest, though
perhaps less deadly in skill. Incidentally, I remember that Miss Olga
Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil,
though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for
me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the
play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the
poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the
modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound
voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern
conscience" may seem unkind, but actually our modern conscience is
anything but prosaic, and combines within it something at once poetic
and prophetic, of which that something ghostly in Forbes-Robertson's
acting is peculiarly expressive. That quality of other-worldliness which
at once scared and fascinated the lodgers in _The Passing of the Third
Floor Back_ is present in all Forbes-Robertson's acting. It was that
which strangely stirred us, that first night of _The Profligate_. We
meet it again with the blind Dick Heldar in _The Light That Failed_, and
of course we meet it supremely in _Hamlet_. In fact, it is that quality
which, chief among others, makes Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet the classical
Hamlet of his time.
Forbes-Robertson has of course played innumerable parts. Years before
_The Profligate_, he had won distinction as the colleague of Irving and
Mary Anderson. He may be said to have played everything under the sun.
His merely theatric experience has thus enriched and equipped his
temperament with a superb technique. It would probably be impossible for
him to play any part badly, and of the various successes he has made, to
which his present repertoire bears insufficient witness, others, as I
have said, can point out the excellences. My concern here is with his
art in its fullest and finest expression, in its essence; and therefore
it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon any other of his impersonations
than that of Hamlet. When a man can play _Hamlet_ so supremely, it may
be taken for granted, I presume, that he can play _Mice and Men_, or
even that masterpiece of all masterpieces, _Caesar and Cleopatra_. I
trust that it is no disrespect to the distinguished authors of these two
plays to say that such plays in a great actor's repertoire represent
less his versatility than his responsibilities, that pot-boiling
necessity which hampers every art, and that of the actor, perhaps, most
of all.
To my thinking, the chief interest of all Forbes-Robertson's other parts
is that they have "fed" his Hamlet; and, indeed, many of his best parts
may be said to be studies for various sides of Hamlet, his fine _Romeo_,
for example, which, unfortunately, he no longer plays. In _Hamlet_ all
his qualities converge, and in him the tradition of the stage that all
an ambitious actor's experience is only to fit him to play Hamlet is for
once justified. But, of course, the chief reason of that success is that
nature meant Forbes-Robertson to play Hamlet. Temperament, personality,
experience, and training have so worked together that he does not merely
play, but _is_, Hamlet. Such, at all events, is the complete illusion he
is able to produce.
Of course, one has heard from them of old time that an actor's
personality must have nothing to do with the part he is playing; that he
only is an actor who can most successfully play the exact opposite of
himself. That is the academic theory of "character-acting," and of
course the half-truth of it is obvious. It represents the weariness
induced in audiences by handsome persons who merely, in the stage
phrase, "bring their bodies on"; yet it would go hard with some of our
most delightful comedians were it the whole truth about acting. As a
matter of fact, of course, a great actor includes a multiplicity of
selves, so that he may play many parts, yet always be playing himself.
Beyond himself no artist, whatever his art, has ever gone.
What reduplication of personality is necessary for the man who plays
Hamlet need hardly be said, what wide range of humanity and variety of
accomplishment; for, as Anatole France has finely said of Hamlet, "He is
a man, he is man, he is the whole of man."
Time was when _Hamlet_ was little more than an opportunity for some
robustious periwig-pated fellow, or it gave the semi-learned actor the
chance to conceal his imaginative incapacity by a display of "new
readings." For example, instead of saying:
The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,
you diverted attention from your acting by an appeal to the literary
antiquarianism of your audience, and, out of one or other of the
quartos, read the line:
The air bites shrewdly; _is_ it very cold?
with the implication that there was a whole world of suggestion in the
difference.
One has known actors, far from unillustrious, who staked their whole
performance on some such learned triviality or some trifling novelty of
business, when, for example, in Hamlet's scene with his mother, the
prince comes to:
Look here upon this picture, and on this.
An actor who deserves better than he has yet received in the tradition
of the acted _Hamlet_--I mean Wilson Barrett--used to make much of
taking a miniature of his father from his bosom to point the contrast.
But all such things in the end are of no account. New readings, new
business, avail less and less. Nor does painstaking archaeology of
scenery or dresses any longer throw dust in our eyes. We are for the
play, the living soul of the play. Give us that, and your properties may
be no more elaborate than those of a _guignol_ in the Champs-Elysées.
Forbes-Robertson's acting is so imaginative, creating the scene about
him as he plays, that one almost resents any stage-settings for him at
all, however learnedly accurate and beautifully painted.
His soul seems to do so much for us that we almost wish it could be
left to do it all, and he act for us as they acted in Elizabeth's day,
with only a curtain for scenery, and a placard at the side of the stage
saying, "This is Elsinore."
One could hardly say more for one's sense of the reality of
Forbes-Robertson's acting, as, naturally, one is not unaware that
distressing experiments have been made to reproduce the Elizabethan
theatre by actors who, on the other hand, were sadly in need of all
that scenery, archaeology, or orchestra could do for them.
With a world overcrowded with treatises on the theme, from, and before,
Gervinus, with the commentary of _Wilhelm Meister_ in our minds, not to
speak of the starlit text ever there for our reading, there is surely no
need to traverse the character of Hamlet. He has meant so much to our
fathers--though he can never have meant so much to them as he does to us
of today--that he is, so to say, in our blood. He is strangely near to
our hearts by sheer inheritance. And perhaps the most beautiful thing
Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet does for us is that it commands our love for a
great gentleman doing his gentlest and bravest and noblest with a sad
smile and a gay humour, in not merely a complicated, wicked, absurd, and
tiresome, but, also, a ghostly world.
When we think of Hamlet, we think of him as two who knew him very well
thought of him,--Ophelia and Horatio,--and as one who saw him only as he
sat at last on his throne, dead, with the crown of Denmark on his
knees.