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.