Courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state;
the "sweet prince" of Horatio's "good-night"--the soldier for whose
passage Fortinbras commanded
The soldier's music and the rites of war.
We think of him, too, as the haunted son of a dear father murdered, a
philosophic spectator of the grotesque brutality of life, suddenly by a
ghostly summons called on to take part in it; a prince, a philosopher, a
lover, a soldier, a sad humourist.
Were one asked what aspects of Hamlet does Forbes-Robertson specially
embody, I should say, in the first place, his princeliness, his
ghostliness, then his cynical and occasionally madcap humour, as where,
at the end of the play-scene, he capers behind the throne in a terrible
boyish glee. No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly
irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play. His scene with
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the recorders is masterly: the silken
sternness of it, the fine hauteur, the half-appeal as of lost ideals
still pleading with the vulgarity of life, the fierce humour of its
disillusion, and behind, as always, the heartbreak--that side of which
comes of the recognition of what it is to be a gentleman in such a
world.
In this scene, too, as in others, Forbes-Robertson makes it clear that
that final tribute of Fortinbras was fairly won.
The soldier--if necessary, the fighter--is there as supple and strong as
a Damascus blade. One is always aware of the "something dangerous," for
all his princely manners and scholarly ways. One is never left in doubt
as to how this Hamlet will play the man. It is all too easy for him to
draw his sword and make an end of the whole fantastic business. Because
this philosophic swordsman holds the sword, let no one think that he
knows not how to wield it. All this gentleness--have a care!--is that of
an unusually masculine restraint.
In the scene with Ophelia, Forbes-Robertson's tenderness was almost
terrible. It came from such a height of pity upon that little
uncomprehending flower!
"I never gave you aught," as Forbes-Robertson said it, seemed to mean:
"I gave you all--all that you could not understand." "Yet are not you
and I in the toils of that destiny there that moves the arras. _Is_ it
your father?"
Along with Forbes-Robertson's spiritual interpretation of Shakespeare
goes pre-eminently, and doubtless as a contributive part of it, his
imaginative revitalization of the great old lines--lines worn like a
highway with the passage of the generations. As a friend of mine
graphically phrased it, "How he revives for us the splendour of the
text!"
The splendour of the text! It is a good phrase, and how splendid the
text is we, of course, all know--know so well that we take it for
granted, and so fall into forgetfulness of its significance; forgetting
what central fires of soul and intellect must have gone to the creation
of such a world of transcendent words.
Yet how living the lines still are, though the generations have almost
quoted the life out of them, no man who has spoken them on the stage in
our day, except Forbes-Robertson, has had the gift to show.
It is more than elocution, masterly elocution as it is, more than the
superbly modulated voice: the power comes of spiritual springs welling
up beneath the voice--springs fed from those infinite sources which "lie
beyond the reaches of our souls."
Merely to take the phrase I have just quoted, how few actors--or readers
of Shakespeare, or members of any Shakespearian audience, for that
matter--have any personal conception of what it means! They may make a
fine crescendo with it, but that is all. They have never stood,
shrinking and appalled, yet drawn with a divine temptation, upon the
brink of that vastness along the margin of which, it is evident, that
Hamlet often wandered. It is in vain they tell their audiences and
Horatio:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
We are quite sure that they know nothing of what they are saying; and
that, as a matter of fact, there are few things for them in heaven or
earth except the theatre they are playing in, their actors' club, and,
generally, their genial mundane lives; and, of course, one rather
congratulates them on the simplicity of their lives, congratulates them
on their ignorance of such haunted regions of the mind. Yet, all the
same, that simplicity seems to disqualify them from playing _Hamlet_.
Few Shakespearian actors seem to remember what they are
playing--Shakespeare. One would think that to be held a worthy
interpreter of so great a dramatist, so mysterious a mind, and so
golden a poet, were enough distinction. Oscar Wilde, in a fine
sonnet, addressed Henry Irving as
Thou trumpet set for Shakespeare's lips to blow,
and we may be sure that Irving appreciated the honour thus paid him, he
who so wonderfully interpreted so many of Shakespeare's moods, so well
understood the irony of his intellect, even the breadth of his humanity,
yet in _Hamlet_, at all events, so strangely missed his soul.
Most of us have seen many Hamlets die. We have watched them squirming
through those scientific contortions of dissolution, to copy which they
had very evidently walked the hospitals in a businesslike quest of
death-agonies, as certain histrionic connoisseurs of madness in France
lovingly haunt the Saltpétrière. As I look back, I wonder how we
tolerated their wriggling absurdity. I suppose it was that the hand of
tradition was still upon us, as upon them. And, let us not forget, the
words were there, the immortal words, and an atmosphere of tragic death
and immortality that only such words could create:
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in the harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To hear my story ...
The rest is silence....
How different it is when Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet dies! All my life I
seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who
valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest in our
strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die in
_Hamlet_. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat
upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant--death, life,
immortality, what you will--of a surpassing loveliness, something
transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a
beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior,
with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange
anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there
so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark.
Forbes-Robertson is not merely a great Shakespearian actor; he is a
great spiritual actor. The one doubtless implies the other, though the
implication has not always appeared to be obvious.
He is prophetic of what the stage will some day be, and what we can see
it here and there preparing to become. In all the welter of the dramatic
conditions of the moment there emerges one fact, that of the growing
importance of the stage as a vehicle for what one may term general
culture. The stage, with its half-sister, the cinema, is strangely,
by how long and circuitous a route, returning of course, with an
immeasurably developed equipment, to its starting-point, ending
curiously where it began as the handmaid of the church. As with the old
moralities or miracle-plays, it is becoming once more our teacher. The
lessons of truth and beauty, as those of plain gaiety and delight, are
relying more and more upon the actor for their expression, and less on
the accredited doctors of divinity or literature. Even the dancers are
doing much for our souls. Our duties as citizens are being taught us by
well-advertised plays, and if we wish to abolish Tammany or change our
police commissioner, we enforce our desire by the object-lesson of a
play. The great new plays may not yet be here, but the public once more
is going to the theatre, as it went long ago in Athens, to be delighted
and amused, of course, but also to be instructed in national and civic
affairs, and, most important of all, to be purified by pity and terror.